Chapter 30
Section 59 The motor purred softly, and the car sped as if upon wings through the suburbs of American City and to the country beyond. There were cars in front and other cars behind, a long stream of white lights flying out into the country.
They came to a grove of big pine trees which rose two or three feet thick, like church arches, and covered the ground beneath them with a soft brown carpet. It was a well-known picnic place, and here all the cars were gathering by appointment. Evidently, it had all been pre-arranged, with that efficiency which is the pride of 100 percent Americans.
A man with a black mask over his face stood in the center of the grove and shouted his directions through a megaphone, and each car as it swept in ranged itself alongside the next car in a broad circle more than 100 feet across. These cars of the younger members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association were well behaved.
They were accustomed to sliding precisely into place according to orders of a megaphone man when receptions were being given, or when the younger members and their wives and fiancés, clad in soft silks and satins, came rolling up to their dinner parties and dances. The cars came and came, until there was just room enough for the last one to slide in. Then at a shouted command, Number One! a group of men stepped out of one of the cars, dragging
a handcuffed prisoner. It was Michael Dubin, the young Jewish tailor who had spent 15 days in jail with Peter. Michael was a student and dreamer, and not used to scenes of violence. Also, he belonged to a race that expressed its emotions and consequently is offensive to 100% Americans.
He screamed and moaned while the masked men unhandcuffed him, and took off his coat and tore his shirt in the back. They dragged him to a tree in the center of the ring, a somewhat smaller tree, just right for his wrists to meet around and be handcuffed again. There he stood in the blinding glare of 30 or 40 cars, writhing and moaning, while one
of the black masked men stripped off his coat and got ready for action. He produced a long black snake whip, and stood poised for a moment. Then in a booming voice the man with the megaphone shouted, Go! And the whip whistled through the air, and was laid across the back of Michael, and tore into the flesh so that the blood leaped into sight.
There was a scream of anguish, and the victim began to twist and turn and kick about as if in his death throes. Again the whip whistled, and again you heard the thud as it tore into the flesh, and another red stripe leaped to view. Now the younger members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers
Association were in excellent condition for this evening's labor. They were not pale and thin, underfed and overworked as were their prisoners. They were sleek and rosy, and a shine with health. It was as if long years ago their fathers had foreseen the red menace and the steps that would have to be taken to preserve 100% Americanism.
The fathers had imported a game which consisted of knocking little white balls around a field with various styles and sizes of clubs. They had built magnificent club houses out there in the suburbs, and had many hundreds of acres of ground laid out for this game, and would leave their occupations of sales and manufacturing early in the afternoon in order to repair to these fields and keep their
muscles in condition. They would hold tournaments and vie with one another, and tell over the stories of the mighty strokes which they had made with their clubs, and of the hundreds of strokes they had made in a single afternoon. So the man with the black snake whip was fit and didn't need to stop for breath.
He took after stroke he laid on, with a splendid rhythmic motion. He kept it up easily, on and on. Had he forgotten? Did he think this was a little white ball he was swinging down upon? He kept on and on, until you could no longer count the welts, until the whole back of Michael
Dubin was a mass of raw and bleeding flesh. The screams of Michael Dubin died away, and his convulsive struggling ceased, and his head hung limp, and he sunk lower and lower upon the tree. At last the master of ceremonies stepped forward in order to halt, and the man with the whip wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve, and the other men unchained
the body of Michael Dubin, and dragged it a few feet to one side, and dumped it face downward in the pine leaves. Number two, called the master of ceremonies, in a clear, compelling voice, as if he were calling the figures of a quadrille. And from another car, another set of men emerged, dragging another prisoner.
It was Bert Gleekus, a blanket stiff, who was a member of the IWW's executive committee, and had had two teeth knocked out in a harvest strike only a couple of weeks previously. While they were getting off his coat, he managed to get one hand free, and he shook it at the spectators behind the white lights of the automobiles. God damn you! he yelled, and so they tied him up, and a fresh man stepped forward and
picked up the whip, and spit on his hands for good luck, and laid on with a double will, and at every stroke Gleekus yelled a fresh curse, first in English, and then, as if he were delirious, in some foreign language. But at last his curses died away, and he too sank insensible, and was unhitched and dragged away and dumped down beside the first man.
Number Three! called the Master of Ceremonies. Now Peter was sitting in the back seat of his car, wearing the mask which McGivney had given him, a piece of cloth with two holes for his eyes, and another hole for him to breathe through. Peter hated these reds, and wanted them punished, but he was not used to bloody sights, and
was finding this endless thud, thud of the whip on human flesh, rather more than he could stand. Why had he come? This wasn't his part of the job of saving his country from the Red Menace. He had done his share in pointing out the dangerous ones.
He was a man of brains, not a man of violence. Peter saw that the next victim was Tom Duggan, with his broken and bloody nose, and in spite of himself Peter started with dismay. He realized that without intending it he had become a little fond of Tom Duggan. For all his queerness, Duggan was loyal.
He was a good fellow when you had got underneath his surly manners. He had never done anything except just to grumble, and to put his grumbles into verses. They were making a mistake in whipping him, and for a moment Peter had a crazy impulse to interfere and tell them so. The poet never made a sound.
Peter got one glimpse of his face in the blazing white light, and in spite of the fact that it was smashed and bloody, Peter read Tom Duggan's resolve. He would die before they would get a moan out of him. Each time the lash fell you could see a quiver all over his form, but there was never a sound, and he stood hugging the tree in a convulsive grip.
They lashed him until the whip was spattering blood all over them, until blood was running to the ground. They had taken the precaution to bring along a doctor with a little black case, and he now stepped up and whispered to the master of ceremonies. They unfastened Duggan, and broke the grip of his arms about the tree, and dumped him
down beside Glicus. Next came the turn of Donald Gordon, the socialist Quaker, which brought a bit of cheap drama. Donald took his religion seriously. He was always shouting his anti-war sentiments in the name of Jesus, which made him especially obnoxious.
Now he saw a chance to get off one of his theatrical stunts. He raised his two manacled hands into the air as if he were praying, and shouted in piercing tones, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. A murmur started in the crowd.
You could hear it mounting to a roar. Blasphemy! they cried. Stop his dirty mouth! It was the same mouth that had been heard on a hundred platforms, denouncing the war and those who made money out of the war.
They were here now, the men who had been denounced, the younger members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, the best people of the city, those who were saving the country and charging no more than the service was worth. So they roared with fury at this sacrilegious upstart. A man whose mask was a joke because he was so burly and hearty that everybody in the
crowd knew him took up the bloody whip. It was Billy Nash, Secretary of the Improve American League, and the crowd shouted, Go to it, Billy! Good eye, old boy! Donald Gordon might tell God that Billy Nash didn't know what he was doing, but Billy thought
that he knew, and he meant, before he got through, to convince Donald that he knew. It didn't take very long, because there was nothing much to the young Quaker but voice, and he fainted at the fourth or fifth stroke, and after the twentieth stroke the doctor interfered. Then came the turn of Grady, Secretary of the IWW, and here a terrible thing happened.
Grady, watching this scene from one of the cars, had grown desperate, and when they loosed the handcuffs to get off his coat he gave a sudden wrench and broke free, striking down one man after another. He had been brought up in the lumber country, and his strength was amazing, and before the crowd quite realized it he was leaping between two of the cars.
A dozen men sprang upon him from a dozen directions, and he went down in the midst of a wild melee. They pinned him with his face mashed into the dirt, and from the crowd there rose a roar as from wild beasts in the night-time. String him up! String him up!
One man came running with a rope, shouting, Hang him! The master of ceremonies tried to protest through his megaphone, but the instrument was knocked out of his hands, and he was hauled to one side, and presently there was a man climbing up the pine tree and hanging the rope over a limb. You could not see Grady for the jostling throng about him, but suddenly there was a yell from
the crowd, and you saw him quite plainly. He shot high up into the air, with the rope about his neck and his feet kicking wildly. Underneath the men danced about and yelled and waved their hats in the air, and one man leaped up and caught one of the kicking feet and hung onto it. Then above all the din a voice was heard through the megaphone, Let him down a bit!
Let me get at him! And those who held the rope gave way, and the body came down toward the ground, still kicking, and a man took out a clasp knife and cut the clothing away from the body, and cut off something from the body. There was another yell from the crowd, and the men in the automobiles slapped their knees
and shrieked with satisfaction. Those in the car with Peter whispered that it was Ogden, son of the President of the Chamber of Commerce, and all over town next day and for weeks thereafter men would nudge one another and whisper about what Bob Ogden had done to the body of Sean Grady, Secretary of the damned Wobblies.
And everyone who nudged and whispered about it felt certain that by this means the Red Terror had been forever suppressed and 100% Americanism vindicated and a peaceful solution of the problem of capital and labor made certain. Strange as it might seem, there was one member of the IWW who agreed with them. One of the victims of that night had learned his lesson.
When Tom Duggan was able to sit up again, which was six weeks later, he wrote an article about his experience, which was published in an IWW paper, and afterwards in pamphlet form was read by many hundreds of thousands of working men. In it the poet said, The preamble of the IWW opens with the statement that the employing class and the working class
have nothing in common, but on this occasion I learned that the preamble is mistaken. On this occasion I saw one thing in common between the employing class and the working class, and that thing was a black snake whip. The butt end of the whip was in the hands of the employing class, and the lash of the whip was on the backs of the working class.
And thus to all eternity was symbolized the truth about the relationship of the classes. End of sections 59 and 60.
