1919
“I guess it’ll be the workers will get me out, if I’m gotten out,” said Ben.
Warner’s eyes were searching his face. Ben didn’t smile. Warner stood before him uneasily for a moment and then took his hand again. Ben didn’t return the pressure. “Good luck,” said Warner and walked out of the office.
“What’s that, one of these liberalminded college boys?” Ben asked of Stein. Stein nodded. He’d gotten interested in some papers on his desk. “Yes . . . great boy, Steve Warner . . . you’ll find some books or magazines in the library . . . I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Ben went into the library and took down a book on Torts. He read and read the fine print. When Stein came to get him he didn’t know what he’d been reading or how much time had passed. Walking up Broadway the going was slow on account of the crowds and the bands and the steady files of marching soldiers in khaki with tin hats on their heads. Stein nudged him to take his hat off as a regimental flag passed them in the middle of a fife and drum corps. He kept it in his hand so as not to have to take it off again. He took a deep breath of the dusty sunny air of the street, full of girls’ perfumerysmells and gasoline from the exhaust of the trucks hauling the big guns, full of laughing and shouting and shuffle and tramp of feet; then the dark doorway of the Federal Building gulped them.
It was a relief to have it all over, alone with the deputy on the train for Atlanta. The deputy was a big morose man with bluish sacks under his eyes. As the handcuffs cut Ben’s wrist he unlocked them except when the train was in a station. Ben remembered it was his birthday; he was twentythree years old.
Newsreel XLI
in British Colonial Office quarters it is believed that Australian irritation will diminish as soon as it is realized that the substance is more important than the shadow. It may be stated that press representatives who are expeditious in sending their telegrams at an early hour, suffer because their telegrams are thrown into baskets. Others which come later are heaped on top of them and in the end the messages on top of the basket are dealt with first. But this must not be taken as an insult. Count von Brochdorf-Ranzau was very weak and it was only his physical condition that kept him from rising
PRIVATES HOLD UP CABMAN
Hold the fort for we are coming
Union men be strong;
Side by side we battle onward,
Victory will come.
New York City Federation Says Evening Gowns Are Demoralizing Youth of the Land
SOLDIERS OVERSEAS FEAR LOSS OF GOLD V
CONSCRIPTION A PUZZLE
Is there hostile propaganda at work in Paris?
We meet today in Freedom’s cause
And raise our voices high
We’ll join our hands in union strong
To battle or to die
FRANCE YET THE FRONTIER OF FREEDOM
provision is made whereby the wellbeing and development of backward and colonial regions are regarded as the sacred trust of civilization over which the league of nations exercises supervising care
REDS WEAKENING WASHINGTON HEARS
Hold the fort for we are coming
Union men be strong
the marine workers affiliation meeting early last night at no. 26 Park Place voted to start a general walkout at 6 A.M. tomorrow
BURLESON ORDERS ALL POSTAL
TELEGRAPH NEWS SUPPRESSED
his reply was an order to his followers to hang these two lads on the spot. They were placed on chairs under trees, halters fastened on the boughs were placed around their necks, and then they were maltreated until they pushed the chair away from them with their feet in order to finish their torments
The Camera Eye (42)
four hours we casuals pile up scrapiron in the flatcars and four hours we drag the scrapiron off the flatcars and pile it on the side of the track KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO HOME is the slogan of the YMCA in the morning the shadows of the poplars point west and in the afternoon they point out east where Persia is the jagged bits of old iron cut into our hands through the canvas gloves a kind of grey slagdust plugs our noses and ears stings eyes four hunkies a couple of wops a bohunk dagoes guineas two little dark guys with blue chins nobody can talk to
spare parts no outfit wanted to use
mashed mudguards busted springs old spades and shovels entrenching tools twisted hospital cots a mountain of nuts and bolts of all sizes four million miles of barbedwire chickenwire rabbitfence acres of tin roofing square miles of parked trucks long parades of locomotives strung along the yellow rails of the sidings
KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO up in the office the grumpy sergeants doing the paperwork dont know where home is lost our outfits our service records our aluminum numberplates no spika de Engliss no entiendo comprend pas no capisco nyeh panimayoo
day after day the shadows of the poplars point west northwest north northeast east When they desoit they always heads south the corporal said Pretty tough but if he aint got a soivice record how can we make out his discharge KEEP OUR BOYS FIT for whatthehell the war’s over
scrap
Newsreel XLII
it was a gala day for Seattle. Enormous crowds not only filled the streets on the line of march from the pier but finally later in the evening machineguns were placed in position, the guardsmen withstanding a shower of missles until their inaction so endangered them the officers gave the order to fire. WOULD CUT OFF LIGHT. President Lowell of Harvard University has urged the students to serve as strikebreakers. “In accordance with its tradition of public service, the university desires at this time of crisis to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth.”
THREE ARMIES FIGHT FOR KIEW
Calls Situation a Crime against Civilization
TO MAKE US INVULNERABLE
during the funeral services of Horace Traubel, literary executor and biographer of Walt Whitman, this afternoon, a fire broke out in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah. Periodicals, tugboats and shipyards were effected. 2000 passengers held up at Havre from which Mr. Wilson embarked to review the Pacific fleet, but thousands were massed on each side of the street seemingly satisfied merely to get a glimpse of the President. As the George Washington steamed slowly to her berth in Hoboken through the crowded lower bay, every craft afloat gave welcome to King Albert and Queen Elizabeth by hoarse blasts of their whistles
CRUCIBLE STEEL CONTINUES TO LEAD MARKET
My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of libertee
Of thee I sing
Paul Bunyan
When Wesley Everest came home from overseas and got his discharge from the army he went back to his old job of logging. His folks were of the old Kentucky and Tennessee stock of woodsmen and squirrelhunters who followed the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark into the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope. In the army Everest was a sharpshooter, won a medal for a crack shot.
(Since the days of the homesteaders the western promoters and the politicians and lobbyists in Washington had been busy with the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope, with the result that:
ten monopoly groups aggregating only one thousand eight hundred and two holders, monopolized one thousand two hundred and eight billion, eight hundred million,
[1,208,800,000,000]
square feet of standing timber,. . . enough standing timber . . . to yield the planks necessary [over and above the manufacturing wastage] to make a floating bridge more than two feet thick and more than five miles wide from New York to Liverpool;—
wood for scaffolding, wood for jerrybuilding residential suburbs, billboards, wood for shacks and ships and shantytowns, pulp for tabloids, yellow journals, editorial pages, advertising copy, mail-order catalogues, filingcards, army paperwork, handbills, flimsy.)
Wesley Everest was a logger like Paul Bunyan.
The lumberjacks, loggers, shingleweavers, sawmill workers were the helots of the timber empire; the I.W.W. put the idea of industrial democracy in Paul Bunyan’s head; wobbly organizers said th
e forests ought to belong to the whole people, said Paul Bunyan ought to be paid in real money instead of in company scrip, ought to have a decent place to dry his clothes, wet from the sweat of a day’s work in zero weather and snow, an eight hour day, clean bunkhouses, wholesome grub; when Paul Bunyan came back from making Europe safe for the democracy of the Big Four, he joined the lumberjack’s local to help make the Pacific slope safe for the workingstiffs. The wobblies were reds. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of.
(To be a red in the summer of 1919 was worse than being a hun or a pacifist in the summer of 1917.)
The timber owners, the sawmill and shinglekings were patriots; they’d won the war (in the course of which the price of lumber had gone up from $16 a thousand feet to $116; there are even cases where the government paid as high as $1200 a thousand for spruce); they set out to clean the reds out of the logging camps;
free American institutions must be preserved at any cost;
so they formed the Employers Association and the Legion of Loyal Loggers, they made it worth their while for bunches of ex-soldiers to raid I.W.W. halls, lynch and beat up organizers, burn subversive literature.
On Memorial Day 1918 the boys of the American Legion in Centralia led by a group from the Chamber of Commerce wrecked the I.W.W. hall, beat up everybody they found in it, jailed some and piled the rest of the boys in a truck and dumped them over the county line, burned the papers and pamphlets and auctioned off the fittings for the Red Cross; the wobblies’ desk still stands in the Chamber of Commerce.
The loggers hired a new hall and the union kept on growing. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of.
Before Armistice Day, 1919, the town was full of rumors that on that day the hall would be raided for keeps. A young man of good family and pleasant manners, Warren O. Grimm, had been an officer with the American force in Siberia; that made him an authority on labor and Bolsheviks, so he was chosen by the business men to lead the 100% forces in the Citizens Protective League to put the fear of God into Paul Bunyan.
The first thing the brave patriots did was pick up a blind newsdealer and thrash him and drop him in a ditch across the county line.
The loggers consulted counsel and decided they had a right to defend their hall and themselves in case of a raid. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of.
Wesley Everest was a crack shot; Armistice Day he put on his uniform and filled his pockets with cartridges. Wesley Everest was not much of talker; at a meeting in the Union Hall the Sunday before the raid, there’d been talk of the chance of a lynching bee; Wesley Everest had been walking up and down the aisle with his O.D. coat on over a suit of overalls, distributing literature and pamphlets; when the boys said they wouldn’t stand for another raid, he stopped in his tracks with the papers under his arm, rolled himself a brownpaper cigarette and smiled a funny quiet smile.
Armistice Day was raw and cold; the mist rolled in from Puget Sound and dripped from the dark boughs of the spruces and the shiny storefronts of the town. Warren O. Grimm commanded the Centralia section of the parade. The exsoldiers were in their uniforms. When the parade passed by the union hall without halting, the loggers inside breathed easier, but on the way back the parade halted in front of the hall. Somebody whistled through his fingers. Somebody yelled, “Let’s go . . . at ’em, boys.” They ran towards the wobbly hall. Three men crashed through the door. A rifle spoke. Rifles crackled on the hills back of the town, roared in the back of the hall.
Grimm and an exsoldier were hit.
The parade broke in disorder but the men with rifles formed again and rushed the hall. They found a few unarmed men hiding in an old icebox, a boy in uniform at the head of the stairs with his arms over his head.
Wesley Everest shot the magazine of his rifle out, dropped it and ran for the woods. As he ran he broke through the crowd in the back of the hall, held them off with a blue automatic, scaled a fence, doubled down an alley and through the back street. The mob followed. They dropped the coils of rope they had with them to lynch Britt Smith the I.W.W. secretary. It was Wesley Everest’s drawing them off the kept them from lynching Britt Smith right there.
Stopping once or twice to hold the mob off with some scattered shots, Wesley Everest ran for the river, started to wade across. Up to his waist in water he stopped and turned.
Wesley Everest turned to face the mob with a funny quiet smile on his face. He’d lost his hat and his hair dripped with water and sweat. They started to rush him.
“Stand back,” he shouted, “if there’s bulls in the crowd I’ll submit to arrest.”
The mob was at him. He shot from the hip four times, then his gun jammed. He tugged at the trigger, and taking cool aim shot the foremost of them dead. It was Dale Hubbard, another exsoldier, nephew of one of the big lumber men of Centralia.
Then he threw his empty gun away and fought with his fists. The mob had him. A man bashed his teeth in with the butt of a shotgun. Somebody brought a rope and they started to hang him. A woman elbowed through the crowd and pulled the rope off his neck.
“You haven’t the guts to hang a man in the daytime,” was what Wesley Everest said.
They took him to the jail and threw him on the floor of a cell. Meanwhile they were putting the other loggers through the third degree.
That night the city lights were turned off. A mob smashed in the outer door of the jail. “Don’t shoot, boys, here’s your man,” said the guard. Wesley Everest met them on his feet, “Tell the boys I did my best,” He whispered to the men in the other cells.
They took him off in a limousine to the Chehalis River bridge. As Wesley Everest lay stunned in the bottom of the car a Centralia business man cut his penis and testicles off with a razor. Wesley Everest gave a great scream of pain. Somebody has remembered that after a while he whispered, “For God’s sake, men, shoot me . . . don’t make me suffer like this.” Then they hanged him from the bridge in the glare of the headlights.
The coroner at his inquest thought it was a great joke.
He reported that Wesley Everest had broken out of jail and run to the Chehalis River bridge and tied a rope around his neck and jumped off, finding the rope too short he’d climbed back and fashioned on a longer one, had jumped off again, broke his neck and shot himself full of holes.
They jammed the mangled wreckage into a packing box and buried it.
Nobody knows where they buried the body of Wesley Everest, but the six loggers they caught they buried in the Walla Walla Penitentiary.
Richard Ellsworth Savage
The pinnacles and buttresses of the apse of Nôtre Dâme looked crumbly as cigarash in the late afternoon sunshine. “But you’ve got to stay, Richard,” Eleanor was saying as she went about the room collecting the teathings on a tray for the maid to take out. “I had to do something about Eveline and her husband before they sailed . . . after all, she’s one of my oldest friends . . . and I’ve invited all her wildeyed hangerson to come in afterwards.” A fleet of big drays loaded with winebarrels rumbled along the quay outside. Dick was staring out into the grey ash of the afternoon. “Do close that window, Richard, the dust is pouring in. . . . Of course, I realize that you’ll have to leave early to go to J.W.’s meeting with the press. . . . If it hadn’t been for that he’d have had to come, poor dear, but you know how busy he is.” “Well, I don’t exactly find the time hanging on my hands . . . but I’ll stay and greet the happy pair. In the army I’d forgotten about work.” He got to his feet and walked back into the room to light a cigarette.
“Well, you needn’t be so mournful about it.”
“I don’t see you dancing in the streets yourself.”
“I think Eveline’s made a very grave mistake . . . Americans are just too incredibly frivolous about marriage.”
Dick’s throat got tight. He found himself noticing how stiffly he put the cigarette to his mouth, inhaled the smoke and blew it out. Eleanor’s eyes were on his face, cool and searching. Dick
didn’t say anything, he tried to keep his face stiff.
“Were you in love with that poor girl, Richard?”
Dick blushed and shook his head.
“Well, you needn’t pretend to be hard about it . . . it’s just young to pretend to be hard about things.”
“Jilted by army officer, Texas belle killed in a plane wreck . . . but most of the correspondents know me and did their best to kill that story. . . . What did you expect me to do, jump into the grave like Hamlet? The Hon. Mr. Barrow did all of that that was necessary. It was a frightfully tough break . . .” He let himself drop into a chair. “I wish I was hard enough so that I didn’t give a damn about anything. When history’s walking on all our faces is no time for pretty sentiments.” He made a funny face and started talking out of the corner of his mouth. “All I asked sister is to see de woild with Uncle Woodrow . . . le beau monde sans blague tu sais.” Eleanor was laughing her little shrill laugh when they heard Eveline’s and Paul Johnson’s voices outside on the landing.