menu_book Chapter 19

100% The Story of a Patriot by Upton Sinclair. Sections 67 to 69. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section 67. So there it was.

When Peter had heard this letter he understood that there was no more to be said, and he said it. His own weight had suddenly become more than he could support, and he saw a chair nearby and slipped into it and sat with eyes of abject misery roaming from Guffey to McGivney, from McGivney to Hammett, and then back to Guffey again.

The head detective, for all his anger, was a practical man. He could not have managed the very important and confidential work of the Traction Trust if he had not been. So now he proceeded to get down to business. Peter would please tell him everything about that dynamite frame-up.

And Peter, also being a practical man, knew that there was no use trying to hide anything. He told the story from beginning to end, taking particular pains to make clear that he and Nell alone were in the secret, except that beyond doubt, Nell had told her lover Ted Crothers. It was probably Crothers that got the dynamite.

From the conversation that ensued, Peter gathered that this young man with the face of a bulldog was one of the very fanciest safe-packers in the country, and no doubt he was the real brains of the conspiracy. He had put Nell up to it and managed every step. Suddenly Peter remembered all the kisses which Nell had given him in the park, and he found

a blush of shame stealing over him. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He was a boob where women were concerned. Peter began to plead for himself. Apparently it wasn't his fault, because Nell had got a hold of him.

In the temple of Jim Jambow, when he was only a kid, he had been desperately in love with her. She was not only beautiful, she was so smart. She was the smartest woman he had ever known. McGivney remarked that she had been playing with Peter even then.

She had been in Guffey's pay all that time, collecting evidence to put Pastian El Calandra in jail and break up the cult of Eletherian exoticism. She had done many such jobs for the Secret Service of the Traction Trust, while Peter was still travelling around with Pericles Priam selling patent medicine. Nell had been used by Guffey to seduce a prominent labour leader in American City.

She had got him caught in a hotel room with her, and thus had broken the back of the biggest labour strike ever known in the city's history. Peter felt suddenly that he had a good defence. Of course a woman like that had been too much for him. It was Guffey's own fault if he hired people like that and turned them loose.

It suddenly dawned on Peter. Nell must have found out that he, Peter, was going to meet young Lackman in the Hotel De Soto, and she must have gone there deliberately to ensnare him. When McGivney admitted that this was possibly true, Peter felt that he had a case and proceeded to urge it with eloquence.

He had been a fool, of course, every kind of fool there was, and he hadn't a word to say for himself, but he had learned his lesson and learned it thoroughly. No more women for him and no more high life, if Mr. Guffey would give him another chance. Guffey of course snorted at him. He wouldn't have a pudding head like Peter Gudge within ten miles of his office, but

Peter only pleaded the more objectively. He really did know the Reds thoroughly, and where could Mr. Guffey find anybody that knew them as well? The Reds all trusted him. He was a real martyr.

Look at the plasters all over him now. And he had just added another Red Laurel to his brow. He had been to see Mrs. Gawd, and had had the seat of his trousers kicked by Mr. Gawd, and of course he could tell that story, and maybe he could catch some Reds in a conspiracy against Mr. Gawd.

Anyhow, they had that perfectly good case against McCormick and the rest of the IWWs. And now that things had gone so far, surely they couldn't back down on that case. All that was necessary was to explain matters to Mr. Ackerman. Peter realized that this was an unfortunate remark. Guffey was on his feet again, pacing up and down the room, calling Peter the names of

all the barnyard animals, and incidentally revealing that he had already had an interview with Mr. Ackerman, and that Mr. Ackerman was not disposed to receive amicably the news that the Secret Service Bureau which he had been financing, and which was supposed to be protecting him, had been the means of introducing into his home a couple of high class criminals who had cracked his safe and made off with jewels that they guessed were worth $50,000,

but that Mr. Ackerman claimed were worth $85,000. Peter was informed that he might thank his lucky stars that Guffey didn't shut him in the hole for the balance of his life, or take him into a dungeon and pull him to pieces inch by inch. As it was, all he had to do was get himself out of Guffey's office and take himself to

hell by the quickest route he could find. Go on, said Guffey, I mean it, get out! And so Peter got to his feet and started unsteadily toward the door. He was thinking to himself, shall I threaten them? Shall I say I'll go over to the Reds and tell what I know?

No, he had better not do that. The least hint of that might cause Guffey to put him in the hole. But then, how was it possible for Guffey to let him go, to take a chance of his telling? Right now, Guffey must be thinking to himself that Peter might go away, and in a fit of rage or of despair, might let out the truth to one of the Reds, and then everything would

be ruined forever. No, surely Guffey would not take such a chance. Peter walked very slowly to the door. He opened the door reluctantly. He stood there, holding on as if he were too weak to keep his balance.

He waited. Waited. And sure enough, Guffey spoke, come back here you mutt! And Peter turned and started towards the head detective, stretching out his hands in a gesture of submission.

If it had been in an eastern country, he would have fallen on his knees and struck his forehead three times in the dust. Please, please Mr. Guffey, he wailed, give me another chance. If I put you to work again, snalt Guffey, will you do what I tell you and not what you want to do yourself?

Yes, yes Mr. Guffey. You'll do no more frame-ups but my frame-ups? Yes, yes Mr. Guffey. All right then, I'll give you one more chance, but by God, if I find you so much as winking at another girl, I'll pull your eye-teeth out.

And Peter's heart leaped with relief. Oh, thank you, thank you Mr. Guffey. I'll pay you twenty dollars a week and no more, said Guffey. You're worth more, but I can't trust you with money, and you can take it or leave it. That'll be perfectly satisfactory, Mr. Guffey, said Peter.

Section 68 So, there was the end of high life for Peter Gudge. He moved no more in the celestial circles of Mount Olympus. He never again saw the Chinese butler of Mr. Ackerman, nor the French parlourmaid of Mrs. Gaud.

He would no more be smiled at by the two hundred and twenty-four boy angels of the ceiling of the Hotel De Soto lobby. Peter would eat his meals now, seated on a stool in front of a lunch counter. He would really be the humble proletariat, the Jimmy Higgins of his role. He put behind him the bright dreams of an accumulated competence and settled down to

the hard day's work of cultivating the acquaintance of agitators, visiting their homes and watching their activities, getting samples of the literature they were circulating, stealing their letters and address books and notebooks, and taking all these to room 427 of the American House. These were busy times just now. In spite of the whippings and the lynchings and the jailings, or perhaps because of these

very things, the radical movement was seething. The IWWs had reorganized secretly and were accumulating a defense fund for their prisoners. Also, the socialists of all shades of red and pink were busy, and the labor men had never ceased their agitation over the Guba case. Just now they were redoubling their activities because Mrs. Guba was being tried for her life.

Over in Russia, a mob of anarchists had made a demonstration in front of the American legation because of the mistreatment of a man they called Guba, G-U-B-A. At any rate, that was the way the news came over the cables, and the news distributing associations of the country had been so successful in keeping the Guba case from becoming known that the editors of the New York papers really did not know any better and printed the name

as it came, Guba, which of course gave the radicals a fine chance to laugh at them and say how much they cared about labor. The extreme reds seemed to have everything their own way in Russia. Late in the fall they overthrew the Russian government and took control of the country and proceeded to make peace with Germany, which put the Allies in a frightful predicament

and introduced a new word into the popular vocabulary, the dread word, Bolshevik. After that, if a man suggested municipal ownership of ice wagons, all you had to do was to call him a Bolshevik, and he was done for. However, the extremists replied to this campaign of abuse by taking up the name and wearing it as a badge.

The socialist local of American City adopted amid a storm of applause a resolution to call itself the Bolshevik Local, and the left-wingers had everything their own way for a time. The leader in this wing was a man named Herbert Ashton, editor of the American City Clarion, the party's paper. A newspaper man, lean, sallow and incredibly bitter, Ashton had apparently spent all his

life studying the intrigues of international capital, and one never heard an argument advance that he was not ready with an answer. He saw the war as a struggle between the old established commercialism of Great Britain, whose government he described as a gigantic trading corporation, and the newly arisen and more aggressive commercialism of Germany.

Ashton would take the formulas of the war propagandists and treat them as a terrier treats a rat. So this was a war for democracy. The bankers of Paris had for the last twenty years been subsidizing the Russian Tsars, who had shipped a hundred thousand exiles to Siberia to make the world safe for democracy.

The British Empire had also gone to war for democracy, first in Ireland, then in India and Egypt, then in the Whitechapel slums. No, said Ashton, the workers were not to be fooled with such bunk. Wall Street had loaned some billions of dollars to the allied bankers, and now the American people were being asked to shed their blood to make the world safe for those loans.

Peter had been urging McGivney to put an end to this sort of agitation, and now the rat-faced man told him that the time for action had come. There was to be a big mass meeting to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution, and McGivney warned Peter to keep out of sight at that meeting, because there might be some clubbing. Peter left off his red badge and the button with the clasped hands, and went up into the

gallery and lost himself in the crowd. He saw a great many bulls, whom he knew, scattered through the audience, and also he saw the chief of police and the head of the city's detective bureau. When Herbert Ashton was halfway through his tirade, the chief strode up to the platform and ordered him under arrest, and a score of policemen put themselves between the prisoner

and the howling audience. Altogether they arrested seven people, and next morning, when they saw how much enthusiasm their action had awakened in the newspapers, they decided to go farther yet. A dozen of Guffey's men, with another dozen from the district attorney's office, raided the office of Ashton's paper, the Clarion, kicked the editorial staff downstairs or threw

them out of the windows, and proceeded to smash the typewriters and printing presses, and to carry off the subscription lists and burn a ton or two of literature in the backyard. Also they raided the headquarters of the Bolshevik local, and placed the seven members of the executive committee under arrest, and the judge fixed the bail of each of them at $25,000, and every day for a week or two, the American City Times would send a man around to Guffey's

office and Guffey would furnish him with a massive material which Peter had prepared, showing that the socialist program was one of terrorism and murder. Almost every day now Peter rendered some such surface to his country. He discovered where the IWW had hidden a printing press with which they were getting out circulars and leaflets, and this place was raided, and the press confiscated, and a half dozen more

agitators thrown into jail. These men declared a hunger strike and tried to starve themselves to death as a protest against the beatings they got, and then some hysterical women met in the house of Ada Ruth and drew up a circular of protest, and Peter kept track of the mailing of this circular, and all the copies were confiscated in the post office, and so one more conspiracy was

foiled. They now had several men at work in the post office, secretly opening the mail of the agitators, and every now and then they would issue an order forbidding mail to be delivered to persons whose ideas were not sound. Also the post office department cancelled the second class mailing privileges of the

clarion, and later it barred the paper from the mails entirely. A couple of comrades with automobiles then took up the work of delivering the paper in the nearby towns, so Peter was sent to get acquainted with these fellows, and in the nighttime some of Guffey's men entered the garage, fixed one of the cars so that its steering gear went wrong, and very nearly broke the driver's neck.

So yet another conspiracy was foiled. Section 69 Peter was really happy now because the authorities were thoroughly roused, and when he brought them new facts he had the satisfaction of seeing something done about it. Ostensibly the action was taken by the federal agents, or by the district attorney's office,

or by the city police and detectives, but Peter knew that it was always himself and the rest of Guffey's agents pulling the wires behind the scenes. Guffey had the money, he was working for the men who really counted in American city. Guffey was the real boss, and all over the country it was the same. The Reds were being put out of business by the secret agents of the chambers of commerce

and the merchants and manufacturers associations, and the improve America league, and such like camouflaged organizations. They had everything their own way because the country was at war, the war excitement was blazing like a prairie fire all over the land, and all you had to do was call a man a pro-German or a Bolshevik, and to be sufficiently excited about it, and you could get a mob

together to go to his home and horse whip him, or tar and feather him, or lynch him. For years the big businessmen had been hating the agitators, and now at last they had their chance, and in every town, in every shop and mill and mine, they had some Peter Gudget work, a Jimmy Higgins of the whites, engaged in spying and snooping upon the Jimmy Higgins of the Reds.

Everywhere they had Guffey's and McGivney's to direct these activities, and they had strong-armed men with guns on their hips, and deputy sheriffs and other badgers inside their coats, giving them unlimited right to protect the country from traitors. There were three or four million men in the training camps, and every week great convoys were sent out from the eastern ports loaded with troops for over there.

Billions of dollars worth of munitions and supplies were going, and all the yearnings and patriotic ververs of the country were likewise going over there. Peter read more speeches and sermons and editorials, and was proud and glad knowing that he was taking his humble part in the great adventure. When he read that the biggest captains of industry and finance were selling their services

to the government for the sum of one dollar a year, how could he complain who was getting twenty dollars every week? When some of the Reds in their meetings or in their literature declared that these captains of industry and finance were the heads of companies which were charging the government enormous prices and making anywhere from three to ten times the profits they had made before

the war, then Peter would know that he was listening to an extremely dangerous Bolshevik. He would take the name of the man to McGivney, and McGivney would pull his secret wires, and the man would suddenly find himself out of a job, or maybe being prosecuted by the health department of the city for having set out a garbage can without a cover. After persistent agitation, the Radicals had succeeded in persuading a judge to let out

McCormick and the rest of the conspirators on fifty thousand dollars bail apiece. That was most exasperating to Peter because it was obvious that when you put a Red into jail you made him a martyr to the rest of the Reds, you made him conspicuous to the whole community, and then if you let him out again, his speaking and agitating were ten times as effective as before.

Either you ought to keep an agitator in jail for good, or else you ought not to put him in jail at all. But the judges didn't see that. Their heads were full of a lot of legal bunk, and they let David Andrews and the other Red lawyers hoodwink them.

Herbert Ashton and his socialist crowd also got out on bail, and the Clarion was still published and openly sold on the newsstands. While it didn't dare oppose the war anymore, it printed every impolite thing it could possibly collect about the gigantic trading corporation known as the British government, and also about the French bankers and the Italian imperialists.

It clamoured for democracy for Ireland and Egypt and India, and shamelessly defended the Bolsheviki, those pro-German conspirators and nationalizers of women. So Peter proceeded to collect more evidence against the Clarion staff and against the IWWs. Presently, he read the good news that the government had arrested a couple of hundred

of the IWW leaders all over the country, and also the national leaders of the socialists, and was going to try them all for conspiracy. Then came the trial of McCormick and Henderson and Guss and the rest, and Peter picked up his times one morning and read on the front page some news that caused him to gasp. Joe Angel, one of the leaders in the dynamite conspiracy, had turned state's evidence.

He had revealed to the district attorney not only the part which he himself had played in the plan to dynamite Nelson Ackerman's home, but he had told everything that the others had done, just how the dynamite had been got and prepared, and the names of all the leading citizens of the community who were to share Nelson Ackerman's fate. Peter read on and on, breathless with wonder, and when he got through with the story he

rolled back on his bed and laughed out loud. By heck, that was the limit. Peter had framed a frame-up on Guffey's man, and of course Guffey couldn't send this man to prison, so he had had him turn state's evidence and was letting him go free as his reward for telling on the others.

The court calendars were now crowded with espionage cases, pacifist clergymen who had tried to preach sermons, and labor leaders who had tried to call strikes, members of the anti-conscription league and their pupils, the draft dodgers and slackers, anarchists and communists, and Quakers, IWWs, socialists and Russellites. There were several trials going on all the time, and in almost every case Peter had a

finger. Peter was called on to get this bit of evidence, or to investigate that juror, or to prepare some little job against a witness for the defense. Peter was wrapped up in the fate of each case, and each conviction was a personal triumph. As there was always a conviction, Peter began to swell up again with patriotic fervor, and

the memory of Nell Doolan and Ted Crothers slipped far into the background. When Mack and his fellow dynamiters were sentenced to twenty years apiece, Peter felt that he had atoned for all his sins, and he ventured timidly to point out to McGivney that the cost of living was going up all the time, and that he had kept his promise not to wink at a woman for six months.

McGivney said all right, they would raise him to thirty dollars a week.