§ 60
Now Peter was sitting in the back seat of his car, wearing the mask
which McGivney had given him, a piece of cloth with two holes for his
eyes and another hole for him to breathe thru. Peter hated these Reds,
and wanted them punished, but he was not used to bloody sights, and was
finding this endless thud, thud of the whip on human flesh rather more
than he could stand. Why had he come? This wasn't his part of the job
of saving his country from the Red menace. He had done his share in
pointing out the dangerous ones; he was a man of brains, not a man of
violence. Peter saw that the next victim was Tom Duggan with his broken
and bloody nose, and in spite of himself, Peter started with dismay. He
realized that without intending it he had become a little fond of Tom
Duggan. For all his queerness, Duggan was loyal, he was a good fellow
when you had got underneath his surly manners. He
had never done anything except just to grumble, and to put
his grumbles into verses; they were making a mistake in
whipping him, and for a moment Peter had a crazy impulse
to interfere and tell them so.
The poet never made a sound. Peter got one glimpse of his face in
the blazing white light, and in spite of the fact that it was smashed
and bloody, Peter read Tom Duggan's resolve — he would die before they
would get a moan out of him. Each time the lash fell you could see a
quiver all over his form; but there was never a sound, and he stood,
hugging the tree in a convulsive grip. They lashed him until the whip
was spattering blood all over them, until blood was running to the
ground. They had taken the precaution to bring along a doctor with a
little black case, and he now stepped up and whispered to the master of
ceremonies. They unfastened Duggan, and broke the grip of his arms about
the tree, and dumped him down beside Glikas.
Next came the turn of Donald Gordon, the Socialist
Quaker, which brought a bit of cheap drama. Donald
took his religion seriously; he was always shouting his
anti-war sentiments in the name of Jesus, which made him
especially obnoxious. Now he saw a chance to get off one
of his theatrical stunts; he raised his two manacled hands
into the air as if he were praying, and shouted in piercing
tones: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do!"
A murmur started in the crowd; you could hear it
mounting to a roar. "Blasphemy!" they cried. "Stop his
dirty mouth!" It was the same mouth that had been heard
on a hundred platforms, denouncing the war and those who made money out
of the war. They were here now, the men who had been denounced, the
younger members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association, the best people of the city, those who were
saving the country, and charging no more than the service was worth. So
they roared with fury at this sacreligious upstart. A man whose mask was
a joke, because he was so burly and hearty that everybody in the crowd
knew him, took up the bloody whip. It was Billy Nash, secretary of the
"Improve America League," and the crowd shouted, "Go to it, Billy! Good
eye, old boy!" Donald Gordon might tell God that Billy Nash didn't know
what he was doing, but Billy thought that he knew, and he meant before
he got thru to convince Donald that he knew. It didn't take very long,
because there was nothing much to the young Quaker but voice, and he
fainted at the fourth or fifth stroke, and after the twentieth stroke
the doctor interfered.
Then came the turn of Grady, secretary of the I. W. W., and here
a terrible thing happened. Grady, watching this scene from one of the
cars, had grown desperate, and when they loosed the handcuffs to get off
his coat, he gave a sudden wrench and broke free, striking down one man
after another. He had been brought up in the lumber country, and his
strength was amazing, and before the crowd quite realized it, he was
leaping between two of the cars. A dozen men sprang upon him from a
dozen directions, and he went down in the midst of a wild melee. They
pinned him with his face mashed into the dirt, and from the crowd there
rose a roar as from wild beasts in the night-time,
"String him up! String him up!" One man came running
with a rope, shouting, "Hang him!"
The master of ceremonies tried to protest thru his megaphone, but
the instrument was knocked out of his hands, and he was hauled to one
side, and presently there was a man climbing up the pine tree and
hanging the rope over a limb. You could not see Grady for the jostling
throng about him, but suddenly there was a yell from the crowd, and you
saw him quite plainly — he shot high up into the air, with the rope about
his neck and his feet kicking wildly. Underneath, men danced about and
yelled and waved their hats in the air, and one man leaped up and caught
one of the kicking feet and hung onto it.
Then, above all the din, a voice was heard thru the megaphone,
"Let him down a bit! Let me get at him!" And those who held the rope
gave way, and the body came down toward the ground, still kicking, and a
man took out a clasp-knife, and cut the clothing away from the body, and
cut off something from the body; there was another yell from the crowd,
and the men in the automobiles slapped their knees and shrieked with
satisfaction. Those in the car with Peter whispered that it was Ogden,
son of the president of the Chamber of Commerce; and all over town next
day and for weeks thereafter men would nudge one another, and whisper
about what Bob Ogden had done to the body of Shawn Grady, secretary of
the "damned wobblies." And every one who nudged and whispered about it
felt certain that by this means the Red Terror had been forever
suppressed, and 100% Americanism vindicated, and a peaceful solution of
the problem of capital and labor made certain.
Strange as it might seem, there was one member of the
I. W. W. who agreed with them. One of the victims of
that night had learned his lesson! When Tom Duggan
was able to sit up again, which was six weeks later, he
wrote an article about his experience, which was published
in an I. W. W. paper, and afterwards in pamphlet form
was read by many hundreds of thousands of workingmen.
In it the poet said:
"The preamble of the I. W. W. opens with the statement that the
employing class and the working class have nothing in common; but on
this occasion I learned that the preamble is mistaken. On this occasion
I saw one thing in common between the employing class and the working
class, and that thing was a black-snake whip. The butt end of the whip
was in the hands of the employing class, and the lash of the whip was on
the backs of the working class, and thus to all eternity was symbolized
the truth about the relationship of the classes!"
