menu_book Chapter 22

100% The Story of a Patriot by Upton Sinclair. Sections 77 to 80. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section 77. Peter was duly scolded and put to work as an office man at his old salary of twenty

dollars a week. It was his duty to consult with Guffey's many operatives to tell them everything he knew about this individual red or that organization of reds. He would use his inside knowledge of personalities and doctrines and movements to help in framing up testimony and in setting traps for too ardent agitators.

He could no longer pose as a red himself, but sometimes there were cases where he could do detective work without being recognized, when for example there was a question of fixing a juror or of investigating the members of a panel. The IWWs had been put out of business in American City, but the socialists were still active in spite of prosecutions and convictions.

Also there was a new peril looming up. The returned soldiers were coming back and a lot of them were dissatisfied, presuming to complain of their treatment in the army and of the lack of good jobs at home and even of the peace treaty which the president was arranging in Paris. They had fought to make the world safe for democracy and here, they said, it had been

made safe for the profiteers. This was plain Bolshevism and in its most dangerous form because these fellows had learned to use guns and couldn't very well be expected to become pacifists right off the bat. There had been a great labor shortage during the war and some of the more powerful unions had taken the general rise in prices as an excuse for demanding higher wages.

This naturally had made the members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association indignant and now they saw their chance to use these returned soldiers to smash strikes and to break the organizations of the labor men. They proceeded to organize the soldiers for this purpose. In American City, the Chamber of Commerce contributed $25,000 to furnish the club rooms

for them and when the trolleymen went on strike, the cars were run by returned soldiers in uniform. There was one veteran, a fellow by the name of Sidney, who objected to this program. He was publishing a paper, the veteran's friend, and began to use the paper to protest against his comrades acting as what he called scabs.

The Secretary of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association sent for him and gave him a straight talking to, but he went right ahead with his campaign and so Guffey's office was assigned the task of shutting him up. Peter, while he could not take an active part in the job, was the one who guided it behind the scenes.

They proceeded to plant spies in Sidney's office and they had so many that it was really a joke. They used to laugh and say that they trod on one another's toes. Sidney was poor and had not enough money to run his paper, so he accepted any volunteer labor that came along.

And Guffey sent him plenty of volunteers, no less than seven operatives, one keeping Sidney's books, another helping with his mailing, two more helping to raise funds among the labor unions, others dropping in every day or two to advise him. Nevertheless, Sidney went right ahead with his program of denouncing the Merchants and Manufacturers Association and denouncing the government for its failure to provide farms

and jobs for the veterans. One of Guffey's undercover operatives, that was the technical term for the Peter Gudges and Joe Angels, was a man by the name of Jonas. This Jonas called himself a philosophic anarchist and posed as the reddest red in American City.

It was his habit to rise up in radical meetings and question the speaker and try to tempt him to justify violence and insurrection and mass action. If he repudiated these ideas, then Jonas would denounce him as a mollycoddle, a pink-tea socialist, a labor faker. Other people in the audience would applaud, and so Guffey's men would find out who were

the real red sympathizers. Peter had long suspected Jonas, and now he was sent to meet him in room 427 of the American House and together they framed up a job on Sidney. Jonas wrote a letter, supposed to come from a German comrade, giving the names of some papers in Europe to which the editor should send sample copies of his magazine.

This letter was mailed to Sidney, and next morning Jonas wandered into the office and Sidney showed him the letter and Jonas told him that these were labor papers and the editors would no doubt be interested to know of the feelings of American soldiers since the war. Sidney sat down to write a letter, and Jonas stood by his side and told him what to write. To my erstwhile enemies in arms, I send fraternal greetings and welcome you as brothers in the

new cooperative commonwealth which is to be, and so on, the usual internationalist patter which all these agitators were spouting day and night, and which ran off the ends of their pens automatically. Sidney mailed these letters and the sample copies of the magazine, and Guffey's office tipped off the post office authorities who held up the letters.

The bookkeeper, one of Guffey's operatives, went to the federal attorney and made affidavit that Sidney had been carrying on a conspiracy with the enemy in wartime and a warrant was issued and the offices of the magazine were raided, the subscription lists confiscated and everything in the rooms dumped out into the middle of the floor. So there was a little job all Peter's own, except that Jonas, the scoundrel, claimed

it for his and tried to deprive Peter of the credit. So Peter was glad when the federal authorities looked the case over and said it was a bum job and they wouldn't monkey with it. However, the evidence was turned over to district attorney Burchard, who wasn't quite so fastidious, and his agents made another raid and smashed up the office again and threw the return soldier

into jail. The judge fixed the bail at $15,000 and the American City Times published a story with scare headlines all the way across the front page, how the editor of the Veteran's Friend had been caught conspiring with the enemy and here was a photographic copy of his reasonable letter and a copy of the letter of the mysterious German conspirator with whom he had been in

relations. They spent more than a year trying that editor and although he was out on bail, Guffey saw to it that he could not get a job anywhere in American City. His paper was smashed and his family near to starvation. 1978

Peter had now been working faithfully for six or eight months and all that time he religiously carried out his promise to Guffey and did not wink at a woman. But that is an unnatural life for a man and Peter was lonely. His dreams were haunted by the faces of Nell Doolan and Rosie Stern and even of little Jenny Todd.

One day another face came back to him, the face of Miss Frisbee, the little manicurist who had spurned him because he was a red. Now suddenly Peter realized that he was no longer a red. On the contrary, he was a hero. His picture had been published in the American City Times and no doubt Miss Frisbee had seen

it. Miss Frisbee was a good girl, a straight girl and surely all right for him to know. So Peter went to the manicure parlour and sure enough there was the little golden haired lady. And sure enough she had read all about him.

She had been dreaming that someday she might meet him again and so Peter invited her to go to a picture show. On the way home they became very chummy and before a week went by it was as if they had been friends for life. When Peter asked Miss Frisbee if he might kiss her, she answered coyly that he might,

but after he had kissed her a few times she explained to him that she was a self-supporting woman, alone and defenceless in the world and she had nobody to speak for her but herself. She must tell him that she had always been a respectable woman and she wanted him to know that before he kissed her any more. And Peter thought it over and decided that he had sowed his full share of wild oats in

his life, he was ready to settle down and the next time he saw Miss Frisbee he told her so and before the evening was by they were engaged. Then Peter went to see Guffy and seated himself on the edge of the chair alongside Guffy's desk and twisted his hat in his hands and flushed very red and began to stammer out his confession.

He expected to be received with a gale of ridicule. He was immensely relieved when Guffy said that if Peter had really found a good girl and wanted to marry her, he, Guffy, was for it. There was nothing like the influence of a good woman and Guffy much preferred his operatives should be married men living a settled and respectable life.

They could be trusted then and sometimes when a woman operative was needed they had a partner ready to hand. If Peter had got married long ago he might have had a good sum of money in the bank by now. Peter ventured to point out that $20 a week was not exactly a marrying salary in the face

of the present high cost of living. Guffy answered that that was true and he would raise Peter to $30 right away. Only first he demanded the right to talk to Peter's fiance and judge for himself whether she was worthy. Peter was delighted and Miss Frisbee had a private and confidential interview with Peter's

boss. But afterwards Peter wasn't quite so delighted for he realized what Guffy had done. Peter's future wife had been told all about Peter's weakness and how Peter's boss looked to her to take care of her husband and make him walk the chalk line. So a week after Peter had entered the holy bonds of matrimony when he and Mrs. Gudge

had their first little family tiff Peter suddenly discovered who was going to be top dog in that family. He was shown his place once for all and he took it. Alongside that husband who described his domestic arrangements by saying that he and his wife got along beautifully together.

They had come to an arrangement by which he was to have his way on all major issues and she was to have her way on all minor issues. And so far no major issues had arisen. But really it was a very good thing for Gladys Frisbee Gudge was an excellent manager and set to work making herself a nest as busily as any female beaver.

She still hung on to her manicurist job for she had figured it out that the red movement must be just about destroyed by now and pretty soon Peter might find himself without work. In the evenings she took to house hunting and during her noon hour without consulting Peter she selected the furniture and the wallpaper and pretty nearly bought out the stock of a five and ten cent store to equip the beaver's nest.

Gladys Frisbee Gudge was a diligent reader of the fashion magazines and kept herself right up to the minute with the styles. Also she had got herself a book on etiquette and learned it by heart from cover to cover and now she took Peter in hand and taught it to him. Why must he always be a Jimmy Higgins of the whites?

Why should he not acquire the vocabulary of an educated man, the arts and graces of the well to do? Gladys knew that it is these subtleties which determine your salary in the long run. So every Sunday morning she would dress him up with a new brown derby and a new pair of brown kid gloves and take him to the Church of the Divine Compassion and they would listen

to the patriotic sermon of the Reverend de Willeby Stutterbridge and Gladys would bow her head in prayer and out of the corner of her eye would get points on costumes from the lady in the next pew. And afterwards they would join the Sunday parade and Gladys would point out to Peter the marks of what she called gentility.

In the evenings they would go walking and she would stop in front of the big shop windows and take him into the hotel lobbies where the rich could be seen free of charge. Peter would be hungry and would want to go to a cheap restaurant and fill himself up with honest grub. But Gladys, who had the appetite of a bird, would insist on marching him into the dining

room of the Hotel de Soto and making a meal upon a cup of broth and some bread and butter, just in order that they might gaze upon a scene of elegance and see how genteel people ate their food. Section 79 And just as ardently as Gladys Frisbiegudge 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 be no 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 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 things 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 jaw. Gladys at first did not meet any reds face to face.

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' mind would be working over schemes to foil these fiends.

Sometimes her ideas were quite wonderful. 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 parlour. 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 organisations, 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 for 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 organisation. 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 hire 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 traders 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 Labour 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.

For 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 of 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 halfway 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 in 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 their way to becoming Bolsheviks, which was the same thing. So Guffeys organized a raid on this building, and some 200 Russians were clubbed or 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 full 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 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 77 to 80.