Chapter 42
Section 83. Among the first load to be brought in was Miriam Yankovitch. Miriam had joined the Communist Party, and she had been born in Russia, so that was all there was to her case. Peter knew, of course, that it was Miriam who had set Rosie Stern after him and brought
about his downfall. Still, he could not help but be moved by her appearance. She looked haggard and old, and she had a cough, and her eyes were wild and crazy. Peter remembered her as proud and hot-tempered, but now her pride was all gone. She flung herself on her knees before him and caught hold of his coat, sobbing hysterically.
It appeared that she had a mother and five young brothers and sisters who were dependent upon her earnings. All her money had been consumed by hospital expenses, and now she was to be deported to Russia and what would become of her loved ones. Peter answered, What could he do?
She had violated the law, they had her membership card in the Communist Party, and she had admitted that she was alien-born. He tried to draw away, but she clung to him and went on sobbing and pleading. At least she ought to have a chance to talk with her old mother, to tell her what to do, where to go for help, how to communicate with Miriam in future.
They were sending her away without allowing her to have a word with her loved ones, without even a chance to get her clothing. Peter, as we know, had always been soft-hearted towards women, so now he was embarrassed. In the handling of these cattle he was carrying out the orders of his superiors. He had no power to grant favors to anyone, and he told Miriam this again and again, but
she would not listen to him. Please, Peter, please, for God's sake, Peter, you know you were once a little in love with me, Peter, you told me so. Yes, that was true, but it hadn't done Peter much good. Miriam had been interested in Mac, in Mac, that most dangerous devil who had given Peter
so many anxious hours. She had brushed Peter to one side, she had hardly been willing to listen to what he said, and now she was trying to use that love she had spurned. She had got hold of his hand, and he could not get it away from her without violence. If you ever felt a spark of love for a woman, she cried, surely you cannot deny such a favor,
such a little favor. Please, Peter, for the sake of old times. Suddenly Peter started, and Miriam too. There came a voice from the doorway. So this is one of your lady friends, is it?
And there stood Gladys, staring, rigid with anger, her little hands clenched. So this is one of your red sweethearts, one of your nationalized women? And she stamped her foot. Get up, you hussy, get up, you slut. And as Miriam continued to kneel, motionless with surprise, Gladys rushed at her and clutched
two handfuls of heavy black hair and pulled so that Miriam fell prone on the floor. I'll teach you, you free lover, she screamed. I'll teach you to make love to my husband. And she dragged Miriam about by that mop of black hair, kicking her and clawing her, until finally several of the bulls had to interfere to save the girl's life.
As a matter of fact, Gladys had been told about Peter's shameful past before she married him. Guffy had told her. And she told Peter that Guffy had told her. She had reminded Peter of it many, many times, but the actual sight of one of these nationalized
women had driven her into a frenzy, and it was a week before peace was restored in the Gudge family. Meantime, poor Peter was buffeted by storms of emotion both at home and in his office. They were getting ready the first red train, and it seemed as if every foreign red that Peter had ever known was besieging him, trying to get at him and harrow his soul and his
conscience. Sadie Todd's cousin, who had been born in England, was shipped out on this first train and also a Finnish lumberman whom Peter had known in the IWW, and a Bohemian cigar worker at whose home he had several times eaten, and finally Michael Dubin, the Jewish boy with whom he had spent fifteen days in jail, and who had been one of the victims of the
black snake whippings. Michael made no end of wailing, because he had a wife and three babies, and he set up the claim that when the bulls had raided his home they had stolen all his savings, two or three hundred dollars. Peter, of course, insisted that he could do nothing.
Dubin was a red and an alien and he must go. When they were loading them on the train, there was Dubin's wife and half a hundred other women, shrieking and wringing their hands and trying to break through the guards to get near their loved ones. The police had to punch them in the stomachs with their clubs to hold them back, and in
spite of all these blows, the hysterical Mrs. Dubin succeeded in breaking through the guards, and she threw herself under the wheels of the train, and they were barely able to drag her away in time to save her life. Scenes like this would, of course, have a bad effect upon the public, and so Guffey called up the editors of all the newspapers and obtained a gentleman's agreement that
none of them would print any details. Section 84 All over the country the red trains were moving eastward, loaded with Wobblies and Communists, Classifists and Anarchists, and a hundred other varieties of Bolsheviks. They got a shipload together and started them off for Russia, the Red Arc it was called,
and the Red Soapboxers said to a terrific uproar, and one Red clergyman compared the Red Arc to the Mayflower. Also, there was some Red official in Washington who made a fuss and cancelled a whole block of deportation orders, including some of Peter's own cases. This naturally was exasperating to Peter and his wife, and on top of it came another
incident that was still more humiliating. There was a pink mass meeting held in American City to protest against the deportations. Guffey said they would quite probably raid the meeting and Peter must go along so as to point out the Reds to the Bulls. The work was in charge of a police detective by the name of Garrity, head of what was called
the Bomb Squad, but this man didn't know very much, so he had the habit of coming to Peter for advice. Now he had the whole responsibility of this meeting, and he asked Peter to come up on the platform with him, and Peter went. Here was a vast audience, all the Red Fury which had been pent up for many months, breaking
loose in a whirlwind of excitement. Here were orators, well dressed and apparently respectable men, not in any way to be distinguished from the born rulers of the country, coming forward on the platform and uttering the most reasonable sentences, denouncing the government, denouncing the blockade against Russia, praising the Bolshevik government of Russia, declaring that the people who went away in the Soviet
arc were fortunate because they were escaping from a land of tyranny into a land of freedom. At every few sentences the orator would be stopped by a storm of applause that broke from the audience. And what was a poor Irish Catholic police detective to make of a proposition like that? Here stood an orator declaring,
And Garrity turned to Peter. What do you think of that? He said, his good-natured Irish face blank with dismay. Peter thought it was the limit. Peter knew that thousands of men all over America had been sent to prison for saying
things less dangerous than that. Peter had read many sets of instructions from the Office of the Attorney General of the United States, and knew officially that that was precisely the thing you were never under any circumstances permitted to say or to write or even to think. So Peter said to Garrity,
That fellow's gone far enough. You better arrest him. Garrity spoke to his men, and they sprang forward on the platform and stopped the orator and placed him and all his fellow orators under arrest, and ordered the audience out of the building.
There were a couple of hundred policemen and detectives on hand to carry out Garrity's commands, and they formed a line with their clubs and drove the crowd before them and carted the speakers off in a patrol wagon. Then Peter went back to Guffey's office and told what he had done, and got a reception that reminded him of the time Guffey had confronted him with the letter from Nell Doolan.
Who do you think that was, you pinched? cried Guffey. He's the brother of a United States Senator. And what do you think he was saying? That was a sentence from the Declaration of Independence.
Peter couldn't get it. Peter was utterly lost. Could a man go ahead and break the law just because he happened to be a brother of a United States Senator? And what difference did it make whether a thing was in the Declaration of Independence
if it was seditious, if it wasn't allowed to be said? This incident brought Guffey and the police authorities of the city so much ridicule that Guffey got all his men together and read them a lecture, explaining to them just what were the limits of the anti-red activities, just who it was they mustn't arrest, and just what it was they couldn't keep people from saying.
For example, a man couldn't be arrested for quoting the Bible. But Jesus Christ, Guffey, broke in one of the men. Have all of us got to know the Bible by heart? There was a laugh all around. No, Guffey admitted, but at least be careful, and don't arrest anybody for saying anything
that sounds as if it came from the Bible. But hell, put in another of the men, who happened to be an ex-preacher. That'll tie us up tighter than a jail sentence. Look what's in the Bible. And he proceeded to quote some of the things, and Peter knew that he had never heard any
Bolshevik talk more outrageous than that. It made one realize more than ever how complicated was this red problem, for Guffey insisted, in spite of everything, that every word out of the Bible was immune. Up in Winnipeg, said he, they indicted a clergyman for quoting two passages from the prophet Isaiah, but they couldn't face it and had to let the fellow go.
And the same thing was true of the Declaration of Independence. Anybody might read it, no matter how seditious it was. And the same thing was true of the Constitution, even though the part called the Bill of Rights declared that everybody in America might do all the things that Guffey's office was sending them to jail for doing.
This seemed a plain, crazy proposition, but Guffey explained it as a matter of politics. If they went too far, these fellows would go out and capture the votes from them, and maybe take away the government from them, and where would they be then? Peter had never paid any attention to politics before this, but both he and Gladys realized after this lecture that they must broaden their viewpoint.
It was not enough to put the Reds in jail and crack their skulls. You had to keep public sympathy for what you were doing. You had to make the public understand that it was necessary. You had to carry on what was called propaganda, to keep the public aware of the odiousness of these cattle and the desperate nature of their purposes.
The man who perceived that most clearly was the Attorney General of the country, and Guffey in his lecture pointed out the double nature of his activities. Not merely was the Attorney General breaking up the Communist and the Communist labor parties and sending their members to jail. He was using the funds of his office to send out an endless stream of propaganda to keep
the country frightened about these Red plots. Right now he had men in American city working over the data which Guffey had collected, and every week or two he would make a speech somewhere, or would issue a statement to the newspapers, telling of new bomb plots and new conspiracies to overthrow the government. And how clever he was about it.
He would get the pictures of the very worst looking of the Reds, pictures taken after they had been kept in jail for weeks without a shave, and with the third degree to spoil their tempers. And these pictures would be spread on a sheet with the caption, Men like these would rule you.
This would be sent to 10,000 country newspapers all over the nation, and 99 hundred would publish it, and 99 million Americans would want to murder the Reds next morning. So successful had this plan proven that the Attorney General was expecting to be nominated for president by means of it, and all the agencies of his department were working to that end.
The same thing was being done by all the other agencies of big business all over the country. The Improve America League of American City was publishing full page advertisements in the Times, and the Home and Fireside Association of El Dorado was doing the same thing in the El Dorado Times, and the Patriots Defense Legion was doing the same thing in the Flagland banner.
They were investigating the records of all political candidates, and if any of them showed the faintest tinge of pink, Guffey's office would set to work to rake up their records and get up scandals on them, and the businessmen would contribute a big campaign fund, and these candidates would be snowed under at the polls. That was the kind of work they were doing, and all Guffey's operatives must bear in
mind the importance of it, and must never take any step that would hamper this political campaign, this propaganda on behalf of law and order.
