There was one of the employers, indeed, who grew so alarmed that he
came one morning to the office predicting a riot at his plant, that
very afternoon at five o’clock, when the works were to shut down for
the day. This man was just then operating his factory with strike
breakers and he was concerned for their safety. Indeed his concern was
expressed in the form of a personal sympathy and love for them which
was far more sentimental than any I had ever been accused of showing
toward workingmen. He was concerned about their inalienable right
to work, and about their wives and little children, and about their
comfort and peace of mind; indeed it was such a concern, such a love,
that, had he but shown the moiety of it to his former employees, they
never could have gone out on strike at all.
At five o’clock that day then, with the Chief of Police, I visited
the plant to observe, and if possible to prevent the impending riot.
The works had not yet closed for the day, but in the street before
the black and haggard and ugly buildings where they had toiled, the
strikers were gathered, and with them their wives, with bare and brawny
forearms rolled in their aprons, and their children clinging timorously
about their skirts. It was a gray and somber afternoon in spring,
but there was in the crowd a kind of nervous excitement that might
have passed for gayety, a mood that strangely travestied the holiday
spirit; perhaps they regarded the strike as an opportunity for the
sensation lacking in their monotonous lives. There were several hulking
fellows loafing about whom the Chief of Police recognized as private
detectives, and as a first step in preventing disorder, he ordered
these away. Presently the whistle blew its long, lugubrious blast, the
crowd gathered in closer groups, and a silence fell. Sitting there with
the Chief in his official buggy, I waited; the great gates of the high
stockade swung slowly open, and then there issued forth a vehicle,
the like of which I had never seen before, a sort of huge van, made
of rough boards, that might have moved the impedimenta of an embassy.
In the rear there was a door, fastened with a padlock; the sides were
pierced with loop holes, and on the high seat beside the driver sat an
enormous guard, with a rifle across his knees. This van, this moving
arsenal containing within its mysterious interior the strike breakers,
and I was told other guards ready to thrust rifles through those loop
holes, moved slowly out of those high gates, lurched across the gutter
into the street, and rumbled away, and as it went it was followed by
a shout of such ridicule that even the guard on the front seat lost
his menacing gravity and smiled himself, perhaps with some dawning
recognition of the absurdity of the whole affair.
There was no riot, though when the employer came to see me the next day
I could assure him of my surprise that there had been none, since there
was an invitation to disorder almost irresistible in that solemn and
absurd vehicle, with its rifles and loop holes and guards and cowering
mystery within. And I could urge upon him too a belated recognition of
the immutable and unwritten law by which such an invitation to trouble
is sure to be accepted. I almost felt, I told him, like heaving a stone
after it myself to see what would happen. He finally agreed with me,
dismissed his guards, and dismantled his rolling arsenal, and not long
afterward was using its gear to haul the commodities they were soon
manufacturing in those shops again.
And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or
wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not
the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works,
until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two
hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together.
It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its
penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen
other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and
one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could
keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and
they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect
in the present status of productive industry in this world.
The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them,
and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the
other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was
not picketed by the strikers, they did not even visit it, so far as I
know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked
one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this
surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said,
as though he must exculpate himself: “Oh well, you know--Mayor Jones.
We haven’t forgotten him and what he was.”