CHAPTER X
THE VORTEX
Following like thunder claps upon the Business Men's dinner,
occurred event after event of terrifying moment; and I, little I,
who had lived so placidly all my days in the quiet university town,
found myself and my personal affairs drawn into the vortex of the
great world-affairs. Whether it was my love for Ernest, or the
clear sight he had given me of the society in which I lived, that
made me a revolutionist, I know not; but a revolutionist I became,
and I was plunged into a whirl of happenings that would have been
inconceivable three short months before.
The crisis in my own fortunes came simultaneously with great crises
in society. First of all, father was discharged from the
university. Oh, he was not technically discharged. His
resignation was demanded, that was all. This, in itself, did not
amount to much. Father, in fact, was delighted. He was especially
delighted because his discharge had been precipitated by the
publication of his book, "Economics and Education." It clinched
his argument, he contended. What better evidence could be advanced
to prove that education was dominated by the capitalist class?
But this proof never got anywhere. Nobody knew he had been forced
to resign from the university. He was so eminent a scientist that
such an announcement, coupled with the reason for his enforced
resignation, would have created somewhat of a furor all over the
world. The newspapers showered him with praise and honor, and
commended him for having given up the drudgery of the lecture room
in order to devote his whole time to scientific research.
At first father laughed. Then he became angry--tonic angry. Then
came the suppression of his book. This suppression was performed
secretly, so secretly that at first we could not comprehend. The
publication of the book had immediately caused a bit of excitement
in the country. Father had been politely abused in the capitalist
press, the tone of the abuse being to the effect that it was a pity
so great a scientist should leave his field and invade the realm of
sociology, about which he knew nothing and wherein he had promptly
become lost. This lasted for a week, while father chuckled and
said the book had touched a sore spot on capitalism. And then,
abruptly, the newspapers and the critical magazines ceased saying
anything about the book at all. Also, and with equal suddenness,
the book disappeared from the market. Not a copy was obtainable
from any bookseller. Father wrote to the publishers and was
informed that the plates had been accidentally injured. An
unsatisfactory correspondence followed. Driven finally to an
unequivocal stand, the publishers stated that they could not see
their way to putting the book into type again, but that they were
willing to relinquish their rights in it.
"And you won't find another publishing house in the country to
touch it," Ernest said. "And if I were you, I'd hunt cover right
now. You've merely got a foretaste of the Iron Heel."
But father was nothing if not a scientist. He never believed in
jumping to conclusions. A laboratory experiment was no experiment
if it were not carried through in all its details. So he patiently
went the round of the publishing houses. They gave a multitude of
excuses, but not one house would consider the book.
When father became convinced that the book had actually been
suppressed, he tried to get the fact into the newspapers; but his
communications were ignored. At a political meeting of the
socialists, where many reporters were present, father saw his
chance. He arose and related the history of the suppression of the
book. He laughed next day when he read the newspapers, and then he
grew angry to a degree that eliminated all tonic qualities. The
papers made no mention of the book, but they misreported him
beautifully. They twisted his words and phrases away from the
context, and turned his subdued and controlled remarks into a
howling anarchistic speech. It was done artfully. One instance,
in particular, I remember. He had used the phrase "social
revolution." The reporter merely dropped out "social." This was
sent out all over the country in an Associated Press despatch, and
from all over the country arose a cry of alarm. Father was branded
as a nihilist and an anarchist, and in one cartoon that was copied
widely he was portrayed waving a red flag at the head of a mob of
long-haired, wild-eyed men who bore in their hands torches, knives,
and dynamite bombs.
He was assailed terribly in the press, in long and abusive
editorials, for his anarchy, and hints were made of mental
breakdown on his part. This behavior, on the part of the
capitalist press, was nothing new, Ernest told us. It was the
custom, he said, to send reporters to all the socialist meetings
for the express purpose of misreporting and distorting what was
said, in order to frighten the middle class away from any possible
affiliation with the proletariat. And repeatedly Ernest warned
father to cease fighting and to take to cover.
The socialist press of the country took up the fight, however, and
throughout the reading portion of the working class it was known
that the book had been suppressed. But this knowledge stopped with
the working class. Next, the "Appeal to Reason," a big socialist
publishing house, arranged with father to bring out the book.
Father was jubilant, but Ernest was alarmed.
"I tell you we are on the verge of the unknown," he insisted. "Big
things are happening secretly all around us. We can feel them. We
do not know what they are, but they are there. The whole fabric of
society is a-tremble with them. Don't ask me. I don't know
myself. But out of this flux of society something is about to
crystallize. It is crystallizing now. The suppression of the book
is a precipitation. How many books have been suppressed? We
haven't the least idea. We are in the dark. We have no way of
learning. Watch out next for the suppression of the socialist
press and socialist publishing houses. I'm afraid it's coming. We
are going to be throttled."
Ernest had his hand on the pulse of events even more closely than
the rest of the socialists, and within two days the first blow was
struck. The Appeal to Reason was a weekly, and its regular
circulation amongst the proletariat was seven hundred and fifty
thousand. Also, it very frequently got out special editions of
from two to five millions. These great editions were paid for and
distributed by the small army of voluntary workers who had
marshalled around the Appeal. The first blow was aimed at these
special editions, and it was a crushing one. By an arbitrary
ruling of the Post Office, these editions were decided to be not
the regular circulation of the paper, and for that reason were
denied admission to the mails.
A week later the Post Office Department ruled that the paper was
seditious, and barred it entirely from the mails. This was a
fearful blow to the socialist propaganda. The Appeal was
desperate. It devised a plan of reaching its subscribers through
the express companies, but they declined to handle it. This was
the end of the Appeal. But not quite. It prepared to go on with
its book publishing. Twenty thousand copies of father's book were
in the bindery, and the presses were turning off more. And then,
without warning, a mob arose one night, and, under a waving
American flag, singing patriotic songs, set fire to the great plant
of the Appeal and totally destroyed it.
Now Girard, Kansas, was a quiet, peaceable town. There had never
been any labor troubles there. The Appeal paid union wages; and,
in fact, was the backbone of the town, giving employment to
hundreds of men and women. It was not the citizens of Girard that
composed the mob. This mob had risen up out of the earth
apparently, and to all intents and purposes, its work done, it had
gone back into the earth. Ernest saw in the affair the most
sinister import.
"The Black Hundreds* are being organized in the United States," he
said. "This is the beginning. There will be more of it. The Iron
Heel is getting bold."
* The Black Hundreds were reactionary mobs organized by the
perishing Autocracy in the Russian Revolution. These reactionary
groups attacked the revolutionary groups, and also, at needed
moments, rioted and destroyed property so as to afford the
Autocracy the pretext of calling out the Cossacks.
And so perished father's book. We were to see much of the Black
Hundreds as the days went by. Week by week more of the socialist
papers were barred from the mails, and in a number of instances the
Black Hundreds destroyed the socialist presses. Of course, the
newspapers of the land lived up to the reactionary policy of the
ruling class, and the destroyed socialist press was misrepresented
and vilified, while the Black Hundreds were represented as true
patriots and saviours of society. So convincing was all this
misrepresentation that even sincere ministers in the pulpit praised
the Black Hundreds while regretting the necessity of violence.
History was making fast. The fall elections were soon to occur,
and Ernest was nominated by the socialist party to run for
Congress. His chance for election was most favorable. The street-
car strike in San Francisco had been broken. And following upon it
the teamsters' strike had been broken. These two defeats had been
very disastrous to organized labor. The whole Water Front
Federation, along with its allies in the structural trades, had
backed up the teamsters, and all had smashed down ingloriously. It
had been a bloody strike. The police had broken countless heads
with their riot clubs; and the death list had been augmented by the
turning loose of a machine-gun on the strikers from the barns of
the Marsden Special Delivery Company.
In consequence, the men were sullen and vindictive. They wanted
blood, and revenge. Beaten on their chosen field, they were ripe
to seek revenge by means of political action. They still
maintained their labor organization, and this gave them strength in
the political struggle that was on. Ernest's chance for election
grew stronger and stronger. Day by day unions and more unions
voted their support to the socialists, until even Ernest laughed
when the Undertakers' Assistants and the Chicken Pickers fell into
line. Labor became mulish. While it packed the socialist meetings
with mad enthusiasm, it was impervious to the wiles of the old-
party politicians. The old-party orators were usually greeted with
empty halls, though occasionally they encountered full halls where
they were so roughly handled that more than once it was necessary
to call out the police reserves.
History was making fast. The air was vibrant with things happening
and impending. The country was on the verge of hard times,* caused
by a series of prosperous years wherein the difficulty of disposing
abroad of the unconsumed surplus had become increasingly difficult.
Industries were working short time; many great factories were
standing idle against the time when the surplus should be gone; and
wages were being cut right and left.
* Under the capitalist regime these periods of hard times were as
inevitable as they were absurd. Prosperity always brought
calamity. This, of course, was due to the excess of unconsumed
profits that was piled up.
Also, the great machinist strike had been broken. Two hundred
thousand machinists, along with their five hundred thousand allies
in the metalworking trades, had been defeated in as bloody a strike
as had ever marred the United States. Pitched battles had been
fought with the small armies of armed strike-breakers* put in the
field by the employers' associations; the Black Hundreds, appearing
in scores of wide-scattered places, had destroyed property; and, in
consequence, a hundred thousand regular soldiers of the United
States has been called out to put a frightful end to the whole
affair. A number of the labor leaders had been executed; many
others had been sentenced to prison, while thousands of the rank
and file of the strikers had been herded into bull-pens** and
abominably treated by the soldiers.
* Strike-breakers--these were, in purpose and practice and
everything except name, the private soldiers of the capitalists.
They were thoroughly organized and well armed, and they were held
in readiness to be hurled in special trains to any part of the
country where labor went on strike or was locked out by the
employers. Only those curious times could have given rise to the
amazing spectacle of one, Farley, a notorious commander of strike-
breakers, who, in 1906, swept across the United States in special
trains from New York to San Francisco with an army of twenty-five
hundred men, fully armed and equipped, to break a strike of the San
Francisco street-car men. Such an act was in direct violation of
the laws of the land. The fact that this act, and thousands of
similar acts, went unpunished, goes to show how completely the
judiciary was the creature of the Plutocracy.
** Bull-pen--in a miners' strike in Idaho, in the latter part of
the nineteenth century, it happened that many of the strikers were
confined in a bull-pen by the troops. The practice and the name
continued in the twentieth century.
The years of prosperity were now to be paid for. All markets were
glutted; all markets were falling; and amidst the general crumble
of prices the price of labor crumbled fastest of all. The land was
convulsed with industrial dissensions. Labor was striking here,
there, and everywhere; and where it was not striking, it was being
turned out by the capitalists. The papers were filled with tales
of violence and blood. And through it all the Black Hundreds
played their part. Riot, arson, and wanton destruction of property
was their function, and well they performed it. The whole regular
army was in the field, called there by the actions of the Black
Hundreds.* All cities and towns were like armed camps, and
laborers were shot down like dogs. Out of the vast army of the
unemployed the strike-breakers were recruited; and when the strike-
breakers were worsted by the labor unions, the troops always
appeared and crushed the unions. Then there was the militia. As
yet, it was not necessary to have recourse to the secret militia
law. Only the regularly organized militia was out, and it was out
everywhere. And in this time of terror, the regular army was
increased an additional hundred thousand by the government.
* The name only, and not the idea, was imported from Russia. The
Black Hundreds were a development out of the secret agents of the
capitalists, and their use arose in the labor struggles of the
nineteenth century. There is no discussion of this. No less an
authority of the times than Carroll D. Wright, United States
Commissioner of Labor, is responsible for the statement. From his
book, entitled "The Battles of Labor," is quoted the declaration
that "in some of the great historic strikes the employers
themselves have instigated acts of violence;" that manufacturers
have deliberately provoked strikes in order to get rid of surplus
stock; and that freight cars have been burned by employers' agents
during railroad strikes in order to increase disorder. It was out
of these secret agents of the employers that the Black Hundreds
arose; and it was they, in turn, that later became that terrible
weapon of the Oligarchy, the agents-provocateurs.
Never had labor received such an all-around beating. The great
captains of industry, the oligarchs, had for the first time thrown
their full weight into the breach the struggling employers'
associations had made. These associations were practically middle-
class affairs, and now, compelled by hard times and crashing
markets, and aided by the great captains of industry, they gave
organized labor an awful and decisive defeat. It was an all-
powerful alliance, but it was an alliance of the lion and the lamb,
as the middle class was soon to learn.
Labor was bloody and sullen, but crushed. Yet its defeat did not
put an end to the hard times. The banks, themselves constituting
one of the most important forces of the Oligarchy, continued to
call in credits. The Wall Street* group turned the stock market
into a maelstrom where the values of all the land crumbled away
almost to nothingness. And out of all the rack and ruin rose the
form of the nascent Oligarchy, imperturbable, indifferent, and
sure. Its serenity and certitude was terrifying. Not only did it
use its own vast power, but it used all the power of the United
States Treasury to carry out its plans.
* Wall Street--so named from a street in ancient New York, where
was situated the stock exchange, and where the irrational
organization of society permitted underhanded manipulation of all
the industries of the country.
The captains of industry had turned upon the middle class. The
employers' associations, that had helped the captains of industry
to tear and rend labor, were now torn and rent by their quondam
allies. Amidst the crashing of the middle men, the small business
men and manufacturers, the trusts stood firm. Nay, the trusts did
more than stand firm. They were active. They sowed wind, and
wind, and ever more wind; for they alone knew how to reap the
whirlwind and make a profit out of it. And such profits! Colossal
profits! Strong enough themselves to weather the storm that was
largely their own brewing, they turned loose and plundered the
wrecks that floated about them. Values were pitifully and
inconceivably shrunken, and the trusts added hugely to their
holdings, even extending their enterprises into many new fields--
and always at the expense of the middle class.
Thus the summer of 1912 witnessed the virtual death-thrust to the
middle class. Even Ernest was astounded at the quickness with
which it had been done. He shook his head ominously and looked
forward without hope to the fall elections.
"It's no use," he said. "We are beaten. The Iron Heel is here.
I had hoped for a peaceable victory at the ballot-box. I was wrong.
Wickson was right. We shall be robbed of our few remaining
liberties; the Iron Heel will walk upon our faces; nothing remains
but a bloody revolution of the working class. Of course we will
win, but I shudder to think of it."
And from then on Ernest pinned his faith in revolution. In this he
was in advance of his party. His fellow-socialists could not agree
with him. They still insisted that victory could be gained through
the elections. It was not that they were stunned. They were too
cool-headed and courageous for that. They were merely incredulous,
that was all. Ernest could not get them seriously to fear the
coming of the Oligarchy. They were stirred by him, but they were
too sure of their own strength. There was no room in their
theoretical social evolution for an oligarchy, therefore the
Oligarchy could not be.
"We'll send you to Congress and it will be all right," they told
him at one of our secret meetings.
"And when they take me out of Congress," Ernest replied coldly,
"and put me against a wall, and blow my brains out--what then?"
"Then we'll rise in our might," a dozen voices answered at once.
"Then you'll welter in your gore," was his retort. "I've heard
that song sung by the middle class, and where is it now in its
might?"
