I
THE Good Citizens' League had spread through the country,
but nowhere was it so effective and well esteemed as in cities
of the type of Zenith, commercial cities of a few hundred thousand
inhabitants, most of which—though not all—lay inland,
against a background of cornfields and mines and of small
towns which depended upon them for mortgage-loans, table-manners,
art, social philosophy and millinery.
To the League belonged most of the prosperous citizens of
Zenith. They were not all of the kind who called themselves
"Regular Guys.'' Besides these hearty fellows, these salesmen
of prosperity, there were the aristocrats, that is, the men who
were richer or had been rich for more generations: the presidents
of banks and of factories, the land-owners, the corporation
lawyers, the fashionable doctors, and the few young-old
men who worked not at all but, reluctantly remaining in Zenith,
collected luster-ware and first editions as though they
were back in Paris. All of them agreed that the working-classes
must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived
that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth,
but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting,
morals, and vocabulary.
In this they were like the ruling-class of any other country,
particularly of Great Britain, but they differed in being more
vigorous and in actually trying to produce the accepted standards
which all classes, everywhere, desire, but usually despair
of realizing.
The longest struggle of the Good Citizens' League was
against the Open Shop—which was secretly a struggle against
all union labor. Accompanying it was an Americanization
Movement, with evening classes in English and history and
economics, and daily articles in the newspapers, so that newly
arrived foreigners might learn that the true-blue and one hundred
per cent. American way of settling labor-troubles was for
workmen to trust and love their employers.
The League was more than generous in approving other
organizations which agreed with its aims. It helped the Y.M.
C.A. to raise a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fund for a new
building. Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Sidney Finkelstein, and even
Charles McKelvey told the spectators at movie theaters how
great an influence for manly Christianity the "good old Y.'' had
been in their own lives; and the hoar and mighty Colonel Rutherford
Snow, owner of the Advocate-Times, was photographed
clasping the hand of Sheldon Smeeth of the Y.M.C.A. It is
true that afterward, when Smeeth lisped, "You must come to
one of our prayer-meetings,'' the ferocious Colonel bellowed,
"What the hell would I do that for? I've got a bar of my
own,'' but this did not appear in the public prints.
The League was of value to the American Legion at a time
when certain of the lesser and looser newspapers were criticizing
that organization of veterans of the Great War. One evening
a number of young men raided the Zenith Socialist Headquarters,
burned its records, beat the office staff, and agreeably
dumped desks out of the window. All of the newspapers save
the Advocate-Times and the Evening Advocate attributed this
valuable but perhaps hasty direct-action to the American Legion.
Then a flying squadron from the Good Citizens' League
called on the unfair papers and explained that no ex-soldier
could possibly do such a thing, and the editors saw the light,
and retained their advertising. When Zenith's lone Conscientious
Objector came home from prison and was righteously
run out of town, the newspapers referred to the perpetrators
as an "unidentified mob.''