Chapter 40
Section 79 And just as ardently as Gladys Frisbee Gudge adored the rich, so ardently did she object to the poor. If you pinned her down to it she would admit that there had to be poor, there could not be gentility, except on the basis of a large class of un-gentility. The poor were all right in their place. What Gladys objected to was their presuming to try to get out of their place or to criticize their
betters. She had a word by which she summed up everything that she despised in the world, and that word was common. She used it to describe the sort of people she declined to meet, and she used it in correcting Peter's manners and his taste in hats. To be common was to be damned. And when Gladys saw people who were indubitably and inescapably common, presuming to set themselves up and form standards of their own, she took it as a personal affront.
She became vindictive and implacable towards them. Each and every one of them became to her a personal enemy, an enemy to something far more precious than her person, an enemy to the thing she aspired to become, to her ideal. Peter had once been like that himself, but now he was so comfortable he had a tendency to become lazy and easy-going. It was well, therefore, that he had Gladys to jack him up and keep him on his job. Gladys at first did not meet any reds face to face,
and she knew them only by the stories that Peter brought home to her when his day's work was done. But each new group that he was hounding became to Gladys an assemblage of incarnate fiends, and while she sat polishing the fingernails of stout society ladies who were too sleepy to talk, Gladys's mind would be working over schemes to foil these fiends. Sometimes her ideas were quite wonderful. She had a woman's intuition, the knowledge of human foibles, all the intricate
subtleties of the emotional life. She would bring to Peter a program for the undoing of some young radical, as complete as if she had known the man or woman all her life. Peter took her ideas to McGivney and then to Guffy, and the result was that her talents were recognized and by the lever of a generous salary she was pried loose from the manicure parlor. Guffy sent her to make the acquaintance of the servants in the household of a certain rich man who was continually making
contributions to the direct primary association and other semi-red organizations, and who was believed to have a scandal in his private life. So successful was Gladys at this job that presently Guffy set her at the still more delicate task of visiting rich ladies and impressing upon them the seriousness of the Red Peril and persuading them to meet the continually increasing expenses of Guffy's office. Just now was a busy time in the anti-red campaign. For nearly two years,
ever since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, there had been gradually developing a split in the socialist movement, and the undercover operatives of the Traction Trust, as well as those of the district attorney's office and of the federal government, had been working diligently to widen this split and develop dissensions in the organization. There were some socialists who believed in politics and were prepared to devote their lives to the slow and tedious job of building
up a party. There were others who were impatient, looking for a shortcut, a general strike, or a mass insurrection of the workers which would put an end to the slavery of capitalism. The whole game of politics was rotten, these would argue. A politician could find more ways to fool the workers in a minute than the workers could thwart in a year. They pointed to the German socialists, those betrayers of internationalism. There were people who called themselves socialists right here
in American city who wanted to draw the movement into the same kind of trap. This debate was not conducted in the realm of abstractions. The two wings of the movement would attack one another with bitterness. The politicians would denounce the impossibilists, calling them anarchists, and the other side, thus goaded, would accuse their enemies of being in the higher of the government. Peter would supply McGivney with bits of scandal which the undercover men would start
going among the left-wingers, and in the course of the long wrangles in the local these accusations would come out. Herbert Ashton would mention them with his biting sarcasm, or Shorty Gunton would shout them in one of his tirades, hurling them into his opponent's teeth as he phrased it. Shorty Gunton was a tramp printer, a wandering agitator who was all for direct action and didn't care a hang who knew it. Violence, he would say, how many thousand years shall we submit to the
violence of capitalist governments and never have the right to reply? And then again he would say, violence? Yes, of course we must repudiate violence until we get enough of it. Peter had listened to Shorty's railings at the compromisers and the political traitors, and had thought him one of the most dangerous men in American City. But later on, after the episode of Joe Angel had opened Peter's eyes, he decided that Shorty must also be a secret agent like
himself. Peter was never told definitely, but he picked up a fact here and there and fitted them together, and before long his suspicion had become certainty. The left-wing socialists split off from the party and called a convention of their own, and this convention in turn split up, one part forming the Communist Party and another part forming the Communist Labor Party. While these two conventions were in session, McGivney came to Peter and said that the federal government had a
man on the platform committee of the Communist Party and they wanted to write in some phrases that would make membership in that party in itself a crime, so that everybody who held a membership card could be sent to prison without further evidence. These phrases must be in the orthodox Communist lingo, and this was where Peter's specialized knowledge was needed. So Peter wrote the phrases, and a couple of days later he read in the newspapers an account of the convention
proceedings. The platform committee had reported, and Shorty Gunton had submitted a minority report and had made a fiery speech in the convention with the result that his minority report was carried by a narrow margin. This minority report contained all the phrases that Peter had written. A couple of months later, when the government had its case ready and the wholesale raids upon the Communists took place, Shorty Gunton was arrested, but a few days later he made a dramatic escape by sawing his
way through the roof of the jail. Section 80. The IWW had bobbed up again in American City and had ventured to open another headquarters. Peter did not dare to go to the place himself, but he coached a couple of young fellows whom McGivney brought to him, teaching them the red lingo and how to worm their way into the movement. Before long, one of them was secretary of the local, and Peter, directing their activities, received reports twice a week of everything the Wobblies were planning
and doing. Peter and Gladys were figuring out another bomb conspiracy to direct attention to these dangerous men, when one day Peter picked up the morning paper and discovered that a kind Providence had delivered the enemy into his hands. Up in the lumber country of the far northwest, in a little town called Centralia, the Wobblies had had their headquarters raided and smashed, just as in American City. They had got themselves another meeting place, and again the members of
the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association had held a secret meeting and resolved to wipe them out. The Wobblies had appealed to the authorities for protection, and when protection was refused they had printed a leaflet appealing to the public. But the businessmen went ahead with their plans. They arranged for a parade of returned soldiers on the anniversary of Armistice Day, and they diverted this parade out of its path so that it
would pass in front of the IWW headquarters. Some of the more ardent members carried ropes, symbolic of what they meant to do, and they brought the parade to a halt in front of the headquarters and set up a yell and started to rush the hall. They battered in the door and had pushed their way half through it when the Wobblies opened fire from inside, killing several of the paraders. Then, of course, the mob flew into a frenzy of fury. They beat the men in the hall, some of them
into insensibility. They flung them into jail and battered and tortured them, and took one of them out of jail and carried him away in an automobile, and after they had mutilated him as Sean Grady had been mutilated, they hanged him from a bridge. Of course they saw to it that the newspaper stories which went out from Centralia that night were the right kind of stories. And next morning all America read how a group of Wobblies had armed themselves with rifles and concealed themselves on the roof
of the IWW headquarters, and deliberately and in cold blood had opened fire upon a peaceful parade of unarmed war veterans. Of course the country went wild, and the Guffeys and McGivneys and Gudges all over the United States realized that their chance had come. Peter instructed the secretary of the IWW Local of American City to call a meeting for that evening to adopt a resolution declaring the press stories from Centralia to be lies. At the same time, another of Guffeys men,
an ex-army officer still wearing his uniform, caused a meeting of the American Legion to be summoned. He made a furious address to the boys, and at nine o'clock that night some two score of them set out armed with big monkey wrenches from their automobiles and raided the IWW headquarters and battered the members over the head with the monkey wrenches, causing several to leap from the window and break their legs. Next morning the incident was reported in the American City Times
with shouts of glee, and District Attorney Burchard issued a public statement to the effect that no effort would be made to punish the soldier boys. The Wobblies had wanted direct action and they had got it, and it would be assumed that they were satisfied. Then the members of the American Legion, encouraged by this applause and instigated by Guffeys ex-army officer, proceeded to invade and wreck every radical meeting place in the city. They smashed the Clarion Office and the
Socialist Party headquarters again and confiscated more tons of literature. They wrecked a couple of bookstores and then, breaking up into small groups, they inspected all the newsstands in the city and wherever they found red magazines like The Nation or The New Republic, they tore up the copies and threatened the agents with arrest. They invaded the rooms of a literary society called the Ruskin Club, frequented mostly by amiable old ladies and sent some of these elderly dames into hysterics.
They discovered the Russian People's Club, which had hitherto been overlooked because it was an educational organization. But of course no Russian could be trusted these days, all of them were Bolsheviks, or on the way to becoming Bolsheviks, which was the same thing. So Guffe organized a raid on this building and some 200 Russians were clubbed and thrown downstairs or out of windows and an elderly teacher of mathematics had his skull cracked and a teacher of music had some teeth
knocked out. There were several million young Americans who had been put into military uniform and had guns put into their hands and been put through target practice and bayonet drill and then had not seen any fighting. These fellows were, as the phrase has it, spoiling for a fight and here was their chance. It was just as much fun as trench warfare and had the advantage of not being dangerous. When the raiding parties came back there were no missing members and no casualties
to be telegraphed to heartbroken parents. Some fool women got together and tried to organize a procession to protest against the blockade of Russia. The raiders fell upon these women and wrecked their banners and tore their clothing to bits and the police hustled what was left of them off to jail. It happened that a well-known sporting man, that is to say a racetrack frequenter, came along wearing a red necktie and the raiders, taking him for a Bolshevik, fell upon him and pretty nearly
mauled the life out of him. After that there was a protest from people who thought it unwise to break too many laws while defending law and order, so the district attorney's office arranged to take on the young soldier boys as deputy sheriffs and give them all badges, legal and proper. End of sections 79 and 80.
