"It's not right, I tell you," little Hanover said; and from his
tone I was sure that he had already said it a number of times.
"Now that's going too far, Hanover," Bertie replied. "You fellows
make me tired. You're all open-shop men. You've eroded my
eardrums with your endless gabble for the open shop and the right
of a man to work. You've harangued along those lines for years.
Labour is doing nothing wrong in going out on this general strike.
It is violating no law of God nor man. Don't you talk, Hanover.
You've been ringing the changes too long on the God-given right to
work . . . or not to work; you can't escape the corollary. It's a
dirty little
sordid scrap, that's all the whole thing is. You've
got labour down and gouged it, and now labour's got you down and is
gouging you, that's all, and you're
squealing."
Every man in the group broke out in
indignant denials that labour
had ever been gouged.
"No, sir!" Garfield was shouting. "We've done the best for labour.
Instead of gouging it, we've given it a chance to live. We've made
work for it. Where would labour be if it hadn't been for us?"
"A whole lot better off," Bertie sneered. "You've got labour down
and gouged it every time you got a chance, and you went out of your
way to make chances."
"No! No!" were the cries.
"There was the teamsters' strike, right here in San Francisco,"
Bertie went on imperturbably. "The Employers' Association
precipitated that strike. You know that. And you know I know it,
too, for I've sat in these very rooms and heard the inside talk and
news of the fight. First you precipitated the strike, then you
bought the Mayor and the Chief of Police and broke the strike. A
pretty
spectacle, you philanthropists getting the teamsters down
and gouging them.
"Hold on, I'm not through with you. It's only last year that the
labour ticket of Colorado elected a
governor. He was never seated.
You know why. You know how your brother philanthropists and
capitalists of Colorado worked it. It was a case of getting labour
down and gouging it. You kept the president of the South-western
Amalgamated Association of Miners in jail for three years on
trumped-up murder charges, and with him out of the way you broke up
the association. That was gouging labour, you'll admit. The third
time the graduated
income tax was declared unconstitutional was a
gouge. So was the eight-hour Bill you killed in the last Congress.
"And of all unmitigated immoral gouges, your
destruction of the
closed-shop principle was the limit. You know how it was done. You
bought out Farburg, the last president of the old American
Federation of Labour. He was your creature - or the creature of
all the trusts and employers' associations, which is the same
thing. You precipitated the big closed-shop strike. Farburg
betrayed that strike. You won, and the old American Federation of
Labour crumbled to pieces. You follows destroyed it, and by so
doing undid yourselves; for right on top of it began the
organization of the I.L.W. - the biggest and solidest organization
of labour the United States has ever seen, and you are responsible
for its
existence and for the present general strike. You smashed
all the old
federations and drove labour into the I.L.W., and the
I.L.W. called the general strike - still fighting for the closed
shop. And then you have the effrontery to stand here face to face
and tell me that you never got labour down and gouged it. Bah!"
This time there were no denials. Garfield broke out in self-
defence -
"We've done nothing we were not compelled to do, if we were to
win."
"I'm not
saying anything about that," Bertie answered. "What I am
complaining about is your
squealing now that you're getting a taste
of your own medicine. How many strikes have you won by starving
labour into
submission? Well, labour's worked out a
scheme whereby
to
starve you into
submission. It wants the closed shop, and, if
it can get it by starving you, why,
starve you shall."
"I notice that you have profited in the past by those very labour
gouges you mention,"
insinuated Brentwood, one of the wiliest and
most astute of our
corporation lawyers. "The
receiver is as bad as
the thief," he sneered. "You had no hand in the gouging, but you
took your whack out of the gouge."
"That is quite beside the question, Brentwood," Bertie drawled.
"You're as bad as Hanover, intruding the moral element. I haven't
said that anything is right or wrong. It's all a
rotten game, I
know; and my sole kick is that you fellows are
squealing now that
you're down and labour's
taking a gouge out of you. Of course I've
taken the profits from the gouging and, thanks to you, gentlemen,
without having
personally to do the dirty work. You did that for
me - oh, believe me, not because I am more
virtuous than you, but
because my good father and his various brothers left me a lot of
money with which to pay for the dirty work."
"If you mean to
insinuate - " Brentwood began hotly.
"Hold on, don't get all-ruffled up," Bertie interposed insolently.
"There's no use in playing hypocrites in this thieves' den. The
high and lofty is all right for the newspapers, boys' clubs, and
Sunday schools - that's part of the game; but for heaven's sake
don't let's play it on one another. You know, and you know that I
know just what jobbery was done in the building trades' strike last
fall, who put up the money, who did the work, and who profited by
it." (Brentwood flushed darkly.) "But we are all tarred with the
same brush, and the best thing for us to do is to leave morality
out of it. Again I repeat, play the game, play it to the last
finish, but for goodness' sake don't
squeal when you get hurt."
When I left the group Bertie was off on a new tack tormenting them
with the more serious aspects of the situation, pointing out the
shortage of supplies that was already making itself felt, and
asking them what they were going to do about it. A little later I
met him in the cloak-room, leaving, and gave him a lift home in my
machine.
"It's a great stroke, this general strike," he said, as we bowled
along through the
crowded but
orderly streets. "It's a smashing
body-blow. Labour caught us napping and struck at our weakest
place, the
stomach. I'm going to get out of San Francisco, Corf.
Take my advice and get out, too. Head for the country, anywhere.
You'll have more chance. Buy up a stock of supplies and get into a
tent or a cabin somewhere. Soon there'll be nothing but starvation
in this city for such as we."
How correct Bertie Messener was I never dreamed. I
decided that he
was an alarmist. As for myself, I was content to remain and watch
the fun. After I dropped him, instead of going directly home, I
went on in a hunt for more food. To my surprise, I
learned that
the small groceries where I had bought in the morning were sold
out. I
extended my search to the Potrero, and by good luck managed
to pick up another box of candles, two sacks of wheat flour, ten
pounds of
graham flour (which would do for the servants), a case of
tinned corn, and two cases of tinned tomatoes. It did look as
though there was going to be at least a
temporary food shortage,
and I hugged myself over the
goodly stock of provisions I had laid
in.
The next morning I had my coffee in bed as usual, and, more than
the cream, I missed the daily paper. It was this
absence of
knowledge of what was going on in the world that I found the chief
hardship. Down at the club there was little news. Rider had
crossed from Oakland in his
launch, and Halstead had been down to
San Jose and back in his machine. They reported the same
conditions in those places as in San Francisco. Everything was
tied up by the strike. All
grocery stocks had been bought out by
the upper classes. And perfect order reigned. But what was
happening over the rest of the country - in Chicago? New York?
Washington? Most probably the same things that were
happening with
us, we concluded; but the fact that we did not know with absolute
surety was irritating.
General Folsom had a bit of news. An attempt had been made to
place army
telegraphers in the
telegraph offices, but the wires had
been cut in every direction. This was, so far, the one unlawful
act committed by labour, and that it was a concerted act he was
fully convinced. He had communicated by wireless with the army
post at Benicia, the
telegraph lines were even then being patrolled
by soldiers all the way to Sacramento. Once, for one short
instant, they had got the Sacramento call, then the wires,
somewhere, were cut again. General Folsom reasoned that similar
attempts to open
communication were being made by the authorities
all the way across the
continent, but he was non-committal as to
whether or not he thought the attempt would succeed. What worried
him was the wire-cutting; he could not but believe that it was an
important part of the deep-laid labour
conspiracy. Also, he
regretted that the Government had not long since established its
projected chain of wireless stations.
The days came and went, and for a while it was a humdrum time.
Nothing happened. The edge of
excitement had become blunted. The
streets were not so
crowded. The
working class did not come uptown
any more to see how we were
taking the strike. And there were not
so many automobiles
running around. The repair-shops and garages
were closed, and
whenever a machine broke down it went out of
commission. The
clutch on mine broke, and neither love nor money
could get it repaired. Like the rest, I was now walking. San
Francisco lay dead, and we did not know what was
happening over the
rest of the country. But from the very fact that we did not know
we could conclude only that the rest of the country lay as dead as
San Francisco. From time to time the city was placarded with the
proclamations of organized labour - these had been printed months
before, and evidenced how
thoroughly the I.L.W. had prepared for
the strike. Every detail had been worked out long in advance. No
violence had occurred as yet, with the
exception of the shooting of
a few wire-cutters by the soldiers, but the people of the slums
were starving and growing ominously restless.
The business men, the millionaires, and the
professional class held
meetings and passed resolutions, but there was no way of making the
proclamations public. They could not even get them printed. One
result of these meetings, however, was that General Folsom was
persuaded into
taking military possession of the
wholesale houses
and of all the flour, grain, and food warehouses. It was high
time, for
suffering was becoming acute in the homes of the rich,
and bread-lines were necessary. I knew that my servants were
beginning to draw long faces, and it was
amazing - the hole they
made in my stock of provisions. In fact, as I afterward surmised,
each servant was stealing from me and secreting a private stock of
provisions for himself.
But with the
formation of the bread-lines came new troubles. There
was only so much of a food reserve in San Francisco, and at the
best it could not last long. Organized labour, we knew, had its
private supplies;
nevertheless, the whole
working class joined the
bread-lines. As a result, the provisions General Folsom had taken
possession of diminished with
perilousrapidity. How were the
soldiers to
distinguish between a
shabbymiddle-class man, a member
of the I.L.W., or a slum
dweller? The first and the last had to be
fed, but the soldiers did not know all the I.L.W. men in the city,
much less the wives and sons and daughters of the I.L.W. men. The
employers helping, a few of the known union men were flung out of
the bread-lines; but that amounted to nothing. To make matters
worse, the Government tugs that had been hauling food from the army
depots on Mare Island to Angel Island found no more food to haul.
The soldiers now received their rations from the confiscated
provisions, and they received them first.
The
beginning of the end was in sight. Violence was
beginning to
show its face. Law and order were passing away, and passing away,
I must
confess, among the slum people and the upper classes.
Organized labour still maintained perfect order. It could well
afford to - it had plenty to eat. I remember the afternoon at the
club when I caught Halstead and Brentwood whispering in a corner.
They took me in on the
venture. Brentwood's machine was still in