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!”