NEWSREEL XXXVII 3 страница

On Friday evening there was an argument in front of

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the window where the construction boss was paying the
men off. That night, when Ben was getting into his bunk
in the back of the tarpaper shack the canteen was in, Nick
came, around and whispered in his ear that the bosses had
been gypping the men on time and that they were going on
strike tomorrow. Ben said if they went out he'd go out too.
Nick called him a brave comrade in Italian and hauled off
and kissed him on both cheeks. Next morning only a few of
the pick and shovel men turned out when the whistle blew.
Ben hung around the door of the colokshack not knowing
what to do with himself. Volle noticed him and told him
to hitch up the team to go down to the station after a box
of tobacco. Ben looked at his feet and said he couldn't be-
cause he was on strike. Volle burst out laughing and told
him to quit his kidding, funniest thing he'd ever heard of
a kike walking out with a lot of wops. Ben felt himself go
cold and stiff all over: "I'm not a kike any more'n you are.
. . . I'm an American born. . . and I'm goin' to stick
with my class, you dirty crook." Volle turned white and
stepped up and shook a big fist under Ben's nose and said
he was fired and that if he wasn't a little f -- g shrimp of
a foureyed kike he'd knock his goddam block off, anyway
his brother sure would give him a whaling when he heard
about it.

Ben went to his bunk and rolled his things into a bundle
and went off to find Nick. Nick was a little down the road
where the bunkhouses were, in the center of a bunch of
wops all yelling and waving their arms. The superintend-
ent and the gangbosses all turned out with revolvers in
black holsters strapped around their waists and one of
them made a speech in English and another one Sicilian
saying that this was a squareshooting concern that had al-
ways treated laborers square and if they didn't like it they
could get the hell out. They'd never had a strike and didn't
propose to begin now. There was big money involved in
this job and the company wasn't going to work and see it

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tied up by any goddam foolishness. Any man who wasn't
on his job next time the whistle blew was fired and would
have to get a move on and remember that the State of
Pennsylvania had vagrancy laws. When the whistle blew
again everybody went back to work except Ben and Nick.
They walked off down the road with their bundles. Nick
had tears in his eyes and was saying, "Too much gentle,
too much patient. . . we do not know our strength yet."

That night they found a brokendown schoolhouse a little
off the road on a hill above a river. They'd bought some
bread and peanut butter at a store and sat out in front eat-
ing it and talking about what they'd do. By the time they'd
finished eating it was dark. Ben had never been out in the
country alone like that at night. The wind rustled the
woods all around and the rapid river seethed down in the
valley. It was a chilly August night with a heavy dew.
They didn't have any covering so Nick showed Ben how to
take his jacket off and put it over his head and how to
sleep against the wall to keep from getting sore lying on
the bare boards. He'd hardly gotten to sleep when he woke
up icycold and shaking. There was a window broken; he
could see the frame and the jagged bits of glass against
the cloudy moonlight. He lay back, musta been dreaming.
Something banged on the roof and rolled down the shin-
gles over his head and dropped to the ground. "Hay, Ben,
for chrissake wassat?" came Nick's voice in a hoarse whis-
per. They both got up and stared out through the broken
windowframe.

"That was busted before," said Nick. He walked over
and opened the outside door. They both shivered in the
chilly wind up the valley that rustled the trees like rain,
the river down below made a creaking grinding noise like
a string of carts and wagons.

A stone hit the roof above them and rolled off. The next
one went between their heads and hit the cracked plaster
of the wall behind. Ben heard the click of the blade as

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Nick opened his pocketknife. He strained his eyes till the
tears came but he couldn't make out anything but the
leaves stirring in the wind.

"You come outa there . . . come up here . . . talk
. . . you son of a bitch," yelled Nick.

There was no answer.

"What you think?" whispered Nick over his shoulder
to Ben.

Ben didn't say anything; he was trying to keep his teeth
from chattering. Nick pushed him back in and pulled the
door to. They piled the dusty benches against the door
and blocked up the lower part of the window with boards
out of the floor.

"Break in. I keell one of him anyhow," said Nick.
"You don't believe in speerits?"

"Naw, no such thing," said Ben. They sat down side by
side on the floor with their backs to the cracked plaster and
listened. Nick had put the knife down between them. He
took Ben's fingers and made him feel the catch that held
the blade steady. "Good knife. . . sailor knife," he whis-
pered. Ben strained his ears. Only the spattering sound of
the wind in the trees and the steady grind of the river. No
more stones came.

Next morning they left the schoolhouse at first day.
Neither of them had had any sleep. Ben's eyes were sting-
ing. When the sun came up they found a man who was
patching up a broken spring on a truck. They helped him
jack it up with a block of wood and he gave them a lift
into Scranton where they got jobs washing dishes in a
hash joint run by a Greek.

. . . all fixed fastfrozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept

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away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. . . .

Pearldiving wasn't much to Ben's taste, so at the end of
a couple of weeks, as he'd saved up the price of the ticket,
he said he was going back home to see the old people. Nick
stayed on because a girl in a candystore had fallen for him.
Later he'd go up to Allentown, where a brother of his had
a job in a steelmill and was making big money. The last
thing he said when he went down and put Ben on the train
for New York was, "Benny, you learn and study . . . be
great man for workingclass and remember too much girls
bad business."

Ben hated leaving Nick but he had to get home to find
a job for the winter that would give him time to study. He
took the exams and matriculated at the College of the City
of New York. The old man borrowed a hundred dollars
from the Morris Plan to get him started and Sam sent him
twentyfive from Newark to buy books with. Then he made
a little money himself working in Kahn's drugstore eve-
nings. Sunday afternoons he went to the library and read
Marx Capital. He joined the Socialist Party and went to
lectures at the Rand School whenever he got a chance. He
was working to be a wellsharpened instrument.

The next spring he got sick with scarlet fever and was
ten weeks in the hospital. When he got out his eyes were
so bad it gave him a headache to read for an hour. The old
man owed the Morris Plan another hundred dollars be-
sides the first hundred dollars and the interest and the in-
vestigation fees.

Ben had met a girl at a lecture at Cooper Union who
had worked in a textile mill over in Jersey. She'd
been arrested during the Paterson strike and had been
blacklisted. Now she was a salesgirl at Wanamaker's, but
her folks still worked in the Botany Mill at Passaic. Her
name was Helen Mauer; she was five years older than
Ben, a pale blonde and already had lines in her face. She

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said there was nothing in the socialist movement; it was
the syndicalists had the right idea. After the lecture she
took him to the Cosmopolitan Café on 2nd Avenue to have
a glass of tea and introduced him to some people she said
were real rebels; when Ben told Gladys and the old people
about them the old man said, "Pfooy. . . radical jews,"
and made a spitting sound with his lips. He said Benny
ought to cut out these monkeyshines and get to work. He
was getting old and now he was in debt, and if he got sick
it would be up to Benny to support him and the old
woman. Ben said he was working all the time but that
your folks didn't count, it was the workingclass that he
was working for. The old man got red in the face and said
his family was sacred and next to that his own people.
Momma and Gladys cried. The old man got to his feet;
choking and coughing, he raised his hands above his head
and cursed Ben and Ben left the house.

He had no money on him and was still weak from the
scarlet fever. He walked across Brooklyn and across the
Manhattan Bridge and up through the East Side, all full
of ruddy lights and crowds and pushcarts with vegetables
that smelt of the spring, to the house where Helen lived
on East 6th Street. The landlady said he couldn't go up
to her room. Helen said it wasn't any of her business but
while they were arguing about it his ears began to ring and
he fainted on the hall settee. When he came to with water
running down his neck Helen helped him up the four
flights and made him lie down on her bed. She yelled
down to the landlady who was screaming about the police,
that she would leave first thing in the morning and noth-
ing in the world could make her leave sooner. She made
Ben some tea and they sat up all night talking on her bed.
They decided that they'd live in free union together and
spent the rest of the night packing her things. She had
mostly books and pamphlets.

Next morning they' went out at six o'clock, because she

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had to be at Wanamaker's at eight, to look for a room.
They didn't exactly tell the next landlady they weren't
married, but when she said, "So you're bride and groom?"
they nodded and smiled. Fortunately Helen had enough
money in her purse to pay the week in advance. Then she
had to run off to work. Ben didn't have any money to buy
anything to eat so he lay on the bed reading Progress and
Poverty all day. When she came back in the evening she
brought in some supper from a delicatessen. Eating the rye
bread and salami they were very happy. She had such large
breasts for such a slender little girl. He had to go out to
a drugstore to buy some safeties because she said how could
she have a baby just now when they had to give all their
strength to the movement. There were bedbugs in the bed
but they told each other that they were as happy as they
could be under the capitalist system, that some day they'd
have a free society where workers wouldn't have to huddle
in filthy lodginghouses full of bedbugs or row with land-
ladies and lovers could have babies if they wanted to.

A few days later Helen was laid off from Wanamaker's
because they were cutting down their personnel for the
slack summer season. They went over to Jersey where she
went to live with her folks and Ben got a job in the ship-
ping department of a worsted mill. They rented a room
together in Passaic. When a strike came he and Helen were
both on the committee. Ben got to be quite a speechmaker.
He was arrested several times and almost had his skull
cracked by a policeman's billy and got six months in jail
out of it. But he'd found out that when he got up on a
soapbox to talk he could make people listen to him, that
he could talk and say what he thought and get a laugh or
a cheer out of the massed upturned faces. When he stood
up in court to take his sentence he started to talk about
surplus value. The strikers in the audience cheered and the
judge had the attendants clear the courtroom. Ben could
see the reporters busily taking down what he said; he was

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glad to be a living example of the injustice and brutality
of the capitalist system. The judge shut him up by saying
he'd give him another six months for contempt of court if
he didn't keep quiet, and Ben was taken to the county jail
in an automobile full of special deputies with riot guns.
The papers spoke of him as a wellknown socialist agitator.

In jail Ben got to be friends with a wobbly named Bram
Hicks, a tall youngster from Frisco with light hair and
blue eyes who told him if he wanted to know the labor-
movement he ought to get him a red card and go out to
the Coast. Bram was a boilermaker by profession but had
shipped as a sailor for a change and landed in Perth Amboy
broke. He'd been working on the repairshift of one of the
mills and had gone out with the rest. He'd pushed a cop
in the face when they'd broken up a picketline and been
sent up for six months for assault and battery. Meeting
him once a day in the prison yard was the one thing kept
Ben going in jail.

They were both released on the same day. They walked
along the street together. The strike was over. The mills
were running. The streets where there'd been picketlines,
the hall where Ben had made speeches looked quiet and or-
dinary. He took Bram around to Helen's. She wasn't there,
but after a while she came in with a little redfaced ferret-
nosed Englishman whom she introduced as Billy, an Eng-
lish comrade. First thing Ben guessed that he was sleeping
with her. He left Bram in the room with the Englishman
and beckoned her outside. The narrow upper hall of the
old frame house smelt of vinegar. "You're through with
me?" he asked in a shaky voice.

"Oh, Ben, don't act so conventional."

"You mighta waited till I got outa jail."

"But can't you see that we're all comrades? You're a
brave fighter and oughtn't to be so conventional, Ben. . . .
Billy doesn't mean anything to me. He's a steward on a
liner. He'll be going away soon."

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"Then I don't mean anything to you either." He
grabbed Helen's wrist and squeezed it as hard as he could.
"I guess I'm all wrong, but I'm crazy about you. . . . I
thought you. . ."

"Ouch, Ben . . . you're talkin' silly, you know how
much I like you." They went back in the room and talked
about the movement. Ben said he was going west with
Bram Hicks.

. . . he becomes an appendage of the machine and it is
only the most simple, most monotonous, most easily re-
quired knack that is required of him. . . .

Bram knew all the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage
or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons
and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram
found a guy he knew who got them signed on as deckhands
on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. In Duluth they
joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an
outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy
for Ben and Bram was scared he'd cave in, but the four-
teen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious
grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to
toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweaty
clothes he'd still feel through his sleep the tingle of the
sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir
of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of
the thresher, the grind of gears of the trucks carrying the
red wheat to the elevators. He began to talk like a harvest
stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruitcannery on
the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job full of the sour
stench of rotting fruitpeelings. There they read in Soli-
darity about the shingleweavers' strike and the free speech
fight in Everett, and decided they'd go down and see what
they could do to help out. The last day they worked there

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Bram lost the forefinger of his right hand repairing the
slicing and peeling machinery. The company doctor said
he couldn't get any compensation because he'd already
given notice, and, besides, not being a Canadian. . . A
little shyster lawyer came around to the boarding house
where Bram was lying on the bed in a fever, with his hand
in a big wad of bandage, and tried to get him to sue, but
Bram yelled at the lawyer to get the hell out. Ben said he
was wrong, the working class ought to have its lawyers
too.

When the hand had healed a little they went down on
the boat from Vancouver to Seattle. I.W.W. headquarters
there was like a picnic ground, crowded with young men
coming in from every part of the U.S. and Canada. One
day a big bunch went down to Everett on the boat to try
to hold a meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt
Avenues. The dock was full of deputies with rifles, and re-
volvers. "The Commercial Club boys are waiting for us,"
some guy's voice tittered nervously. The deputies had
white handkerchiefs around their necks. "There's Sheriff
McRae," said somebody. Bram edged up to Ben. "We bet-
ter stick together. . . . Looks to me like we was goin' to
get tamped up some." The wobblies were arrested as fast
as they stepped off the boat and herded down to the end of
the dock. The deputies were drunk most of them, Ben
could smell the whiskey on the breath of the redfaced guy
who grabbed him by the arm. "Get a move on there, you
son of a bitch. . ." He got a blow from a riflebutt in the
small of the back. He could hear the crack of saps on men's
skulls. Anybody who resisted had his face beaten to a jelly
with a club. The wobblies were made to climb up into a
truck. With the dusk a cold drizzle had come on. "Boys,
we got to show 'em we got guts," a redhaired boy said. A
deputy who was holding on to the back of the truck aimed
a blow at him with his sap but lost his balance and fell off.
The wobblies laughed. The deputy climbed on again, pur-

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ple in the face. "You'll be laughin' outa the other side of
your dirty mugs when we get through with you," he
yelled.

Out in the woods where the county road crossed the
railroad track they were made to get out of the trucks.
The deputies stood around them with their guns leveled
while the sheriff who was reeling drunk, and two well-
dressed middleaged men talked over what they'd do. Ben
heard the word gauntlet. "Look here, sheriff," somebody
said, "we're not here to make any kind of disturbance. All
we want's our constitutional rights of free speech." The
sheriff turned towards them waving the butt of his revol-
ver, "Oh, you do, do you, you c----s. Well, this is Sno-
homish county and you ain't goin' to forget it . . . if you
come here again some of you fellers is goin' to die, that's
all there is about it. . . . All right, boys, let's go."

The deputies made two lines down towards the railroad
track. They grabbed the wobblies one by one and beat them
up. Three of them grabbed Ben. "You a wobbly?" "Sure I
am, you dirty yellow . . ." he began. The sheriff came up
and hauled off to hit him. "Look out, he's got glasses on."
A big hand pulled the glasses off. "We'll fix that." Then
the sheriff punched him in the nose with his fist. "Say you
ain't." Ben's mouth was full of blood. He set his jaw.
"He's a kike, hit him again for me." "Say, you ain't a wob-
bly." Somebody whacked a riflebarrel against his shins and
he fell forward. "Run for it," they were yelling. Blows
with clubs and riflebutts were splitting his ears.

He tried to walk forward without running. He tripped
on a rail and fell, cutting his arm on something sharp.
There was so much blood in his eyes he couldn't see. A
heavy boot was kicking him again and again in the side.
He was passing out. Somehow he staggered forward. Some-
body was holding him up under the arms and was drag-
ging him free of the cattleguard on the track. Another fel-
low began to wipe his face off with a handkerchief. He

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heard Bram's voice way off somewhere, "We're over the
county line, boys." What with losing his glasses and the
rain and the night and the shooting pain all up and down
his back Ben couldn't see anything. He heard shots behind
them and yells from where other guys were running the
gauntlet. He was the center of a little straggling group of
wobblies making their way down the railroad track. "Fel-
low workers," Bram was saying in his deep quiet voice, "we
must never forget this night."

At the interurban trolley station they took up a collec-
tion among the ragged and bloody group to buy tickets to
Seattle for the guys most hurt. Ben was so dazed and sick
he could hardly hold the ticket when somebody pushed it
into his hand. Bram and the rest of them set off to walk
the thirty miles back to Seattle.

Ben was in hospital three weeks. The kicks in the back
had affected his kidneys and he was in frightful pain most
of the time. The morphine they gave him made him so
dopey he barely knew what was happening when they
brought in the boys wounded in the shooting on the Ever-
ett dock on November 5th. When he was discharged he
could just walk. Everybody he knew was in jail. At Gen-
eral Delivery he found a letter from Gladys enclosing fifty
dollars and saying his father wanted him to come home.

The Defense Committee told him to go ahead; he was
just the man to raise funds for them in the east. An enor-
mous amount of money would be needed for the defense of
the seventyfour wobblies held in the Everett jail charged
with murder. Ben hung around Seattle for a couple of
weeks doing odd jobs for the Defense Committee, trying
to figure out a way to get home. A sympathizer who
worked in a shipping office finally got him a berth as super-
cargo on a freighter that was going to New York through
the Panama canal. The sea trip and the detailed clerical
work helped him to pull himself together. Still there wasn't
a night he didn't wake up with a nightmare scream in his

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throat sitting up in his bunk dreaming the deputies were
coming to get him to make him run the gauntlet. When
he got to sleep again he'd dream he was caught in the
cattleguard and the teeth were tearing his arms and heavy
boots were kicking him in the back. It got so it took all his
nerve to lie down in his bunk to go to sleep. The men on
the ship thought he was a hophead and steered clear of
him. It was a great day when he saw the tall buildings of
New York shining in the brown morning haze.

. . . when in the course of development class distinc-
tions have disappeared and all production has been concen-
trated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation,
the public power will lose its political character. . . .

Ben lived at home that winter because it was cheaper.
When he told Pop he was going to study law in the office
of a radical lawyer named Morris Stein whom he'd met in
connection with raising money for the Everett boys, the
old man was delighted. "A clever lawyer can protect the
workers and the poor Jews and make money too," he said,
rubbing his hands. "Benny, I always knew you were a
good boy." Momma nodded and smiled. "Because in this
country it's not like over there under the warlords, even a
lazy bum's got constitootional rights, that's why they wrote
the constitootion for." It made Ben feel sick talking to
them about it.

He worked as a clerk in Stein's office on lower Broad-
way and in the evenings addressed protest meetings about
the Everett massacre. Morris Stein's sister Fanya, who was
a thin dark wealthy woman about thirtyfive, was an ardent
pacifist and made him read Tolstoy and Kropotkin. She
believed that Wilson would keep the country out of the
European war and sent money to all the women's peace
organizations. She had a car and used to run him around

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town sometimes when he had several meetings in one eve-
ning. His heart would always be thumping when he went
into the hall where the meeting was and began to hear the
babble and rustle of the audience filing in, garment work-
ers on the East Side, waterfront workers in Brooklyn,
workers in chemical and metalproducts plants in Newark,
parlor socialists and pinks at the Rand School or on lower
Fifth Avenue, the vast anonymous mass of all classes,
races, trades in Madison Square Garden. His hands would
always be cold when he shook hands with the chairman
and other speakers on the platform. When his turn came
to speak there'd be a moment when all the faces looking
up at him would blur into a mass of pink, the hum of the
hall would deafen him, he'd be in a panic for fear he'd for-
gotten what he wanted to say. Then all at once he'd hear
his own voice enunciating clearly and firmly, feel its re-
verberance along the walls and ceiling, feel ears growing
tense, men and women leaning forward in their chairs, see
the rows of faces quite clearly, the groups of people who
couldn't find seats crowding at the doors. Phrases like pro-
test, massaction, united workingclass of this country and
the world, revolution, would light up the eyes and faces
under him like the glare of a bonfire.

After the speech he'd feel shaky, his glasses would be
so misted he'd have to wipe them, he'd feel all the awk-
wardness of his tall gangling frame. Fanya would get him
away as soon as she could, tell him with shining eyes that
he'd spoken magnificently, take him downtown, if the
meeting had been in Manhattan, to have some supper in
the Brevoort basement or at the Cosmopolitan Café before
he went home on the subway to Brooklyn. He knew that
she was in love with him, but they rarely talked about
anything outside of the movement.

When the Russian revolution came in February, Ben
and the Steins bought every edition of the papers for
weeks, read all the correspondents' reports with desperate

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intentness; it was the dawning of The Day. There was a
feeling of carnival all down the East Side and in the Jew-
ish sections of Brooklyn. The old people cried whenever
they spoke of it. "Next Austria, then the Reich, then Eng-
land . . . freed peoples everywhere," Pop would say.
"And last, Uncle Sam," Ben would add, grimly setting his
jaw.

The April day Woodrow Wilson declared war, Fanya
went to bed with a hysterical crying fit. Ben went up to see
her at the apartment Morris Stein and his wife had on
Riverside Drive. She'd come back from Washington the
day before. She'd been up there with a women's peace
delegation trying to see the President. The detectives had
run them off the White House lawn and several girls had
been arrested. "What did you expect?. . . of course the
capitalists want war. They'll think a little different when
they find what they're getting's a revolution." She begged
him to stay with her, but he left saying he had to go see
them down at The Call. As he left the house, he found
himself making a spitting noise with his lips like his father.
He told himself he'd never go there again.