I AWOKE fully an hour before my customary time. This in itself was
remarkable, and I lay very wide awake, pondering over it. Something was
the matter, something was wrong—I knew not what. I was oppressed by a
premonition of something terrible that had happened or was about to
happen. But what was it? I strove to orient myself. I remembered that
at the time of the Great Earthquake of 1906 many claimed they awakened
some moments before the first shock and that during these moments they
experienced strange feelings of dread. Was San Francisco again to be
visited by earthquake?
I lay for a full minute, numbly expectant, but there occurred no reeling
of walls nor shock and grind of falling masonry. All was quiet. That
was it! The silence! No wonder I had been perturbed. The hum of the
great live city was strangely absent. The surface cars passed along my
street, at that time of day, on an average of one every three minutes;
but in the ten succeeding minutes not a car passed. Perhaps it was a
street-railway strike, was my thought; or perhaps there had been an
accident and the power was shut off. But no, the silence was too
profound. I heard no jar and rattle of waggon wheels, nor stamp of
iron-shod hoofs straining up the steep cobble-stones.
Pressing the push-button beside my bed, I strove to hear the sound of the
bell, though I well knew it was impossible for the sound to rise three
stories to me even if the bell did ring. It rang all right, for a few
minutes later Brown entered with the tray and morning paper. Though his
features were impassive as ever, I noted a startled, apprehensive light
in his eyes. I noted, also, that there was no cream on the tray.
“The Creamery did not deliver this morning,” he explained; “nor did the
bakery.”
I glanced again at the tray. There were no fresh French rolls—only
slices of stale graham bread from yesterday, the most detestable of bread
so far as I was concerned.
“Nothing was delivered this morning, sir,” Brown started to explain
apologetically; but I interrupted him.
“The paper?”
“Yes, sir, it was delivered, but it was the only thing, and it is the
last time, too. There won’t be any paper to-morrow. The paper says so.
Can I send out and get you some condensed milk?”
I shook my head, accepted the coffee black, and spread open the paper.
The headlines explained everything—explained too much, in fact, for the
lengths of pessimism to which the journal went were ridiculous. A
general strike, it said, had been called all over the United States; and
most foreboding anxieties were expressed concerning the provisioning of
the great cities.
I read on hastily, skimming much and remembering much of labour troubles
in the past. For a generation the general strike had been the dream of
organized labour, which dream had arisen originally in the mind of Debs,
one of the great labour leaders of thirty years before. I recollected
that in my young college-settlement days I had even written an article on
the subject for one of the magazines and that I had entitled it “The
Dream of Debs.” And I must confess that I had treated the idea very
cavalierly and academically as a dream and nothing more. Time and the
world had rolled on, Gompers was gone, the American Federation of Labour
was gone, and gone was Debs with all his wild revolutionary ideas; but
the dream had persisted, and here it was at last realized in fact. But I
laughed, as I read, at the journal’s gloomy outlook. I knew better. I
had seen organized labour worsted in too many conflicts. It would be a
matter only of days when the thing would be settled. This was a national
strike, and it wouldn’t take the Government long to break it.
I threw the paper down and proceeded to dress. It would certainly be
interesting to be out in the streets of San Francisco when not a wheel
was turning and the whole city was taking an enforced vacation.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Brown said, as he handed me my cigar-case, “but
Mr. Harmmed has asked to see you before you go out.”
“Send him in right away,” I answered.
Harmmed was the butler. When he entered I could see he was labouring
under controlled excitement. He came at once to the point.
“What shall I do, sir? There will be needed provisions, and the delivery
drivers are on strike. And the electricity is shut off—I guess they’re
on strike, too.”
“Are the shops open?” I asked.
“Only the small ones, sir. The retail clerks are out, and the big ones
can’t open; but the owners and their families are running the little ones
themselves.”
“Then take the machine,” I said, “and go the rounds and make your
purchases. Buy plenty of everything you need or may need. Get a box of
candles—no, get half-a-dozen boxes. And, when you’re done, tell Harrison
to bring the machine around to the club for me—not later than eleven.”
Harmmed shook his head gravely. “Mr. Harrison has struck along with the
Chauffeurs’ Union, and I don’t know how to run the machine myself.”
“Oh, ho, he has, has he?” said I. “Well, when next Mister Harrison happens
around you tell him that he can look elsewhere for a position.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t happen to belong to a Butlers’ Union, do you, Harmmed?”
“No, sir,” was the answer. “And even if I did I’d not desert my employer
in a crisis like this. No, sir, I would—”
“All right, thank you,” I said. “Now you get ready to accompany me.
I’ll run the machine myself, and we’ll lay in a stock of provisions to
stand a siege.”
It was a beautiful first of May, even as May days go. The sky was
cloudless, there was no wind, and the air was warm—almost balmy. Many
autos were out, but the owners were driving them themselves. The streets
were crowded but quiet. The working class, dressed in its Sunday best,
was out taking the air and observing the effects of the strike. It was
all so unusual, and withal so peaceful, that I found myself enjoying it.
My nerves were tingling with mild excitement. It was a sort of placid
adventure. I passed Miss Chickering. She was at the helm of her little
runabout. She swung around and came after me, catching me at the corner.
“Oh, Mr. Corf!”’ she hailed. “Do you know where I can buy candles? I’ve
been to a dozen shops, and they’re all sold out. It’s dreadfully awful,
isn’t it?”
But her sparkling eyes gave the lie to her words. Like the rest of us,
she was enjoying it hugely. Quite an adventure it was, getting those
candles. It was not until we went across the city and down into the
working-class quarter south of Market Street that we found small corner
groceries that had not yet sold out. Miss Chickering thought one box was
sufficient, but I persuaded her into taking four. My car was large, and
I laid in a dozen boxes. There was no telling what delays might arise in
the settlement of the strike. Also, I filled the car with sacks of
flour, baking-powder, tinned goods, and all the ordinary necessaries of
life suggested by Harmmed, who fussed around and clucked over the
purchases like an anxious old hen.
The remarkable thing, that first day of the strike, was that no one
really apprehended anything serious. The announcement of organized
labour in the morning papers that it was prepared to stay out a month or
three months was laughed at. And yet that very first day we might have
guessed as much from the fact that the working class took practically no
part in the great rush to buy provisions. Of course not. For weeks and
months, craftily and secretly, the whole working class had been laying in
private stocks of provisions. That was why we were permitted to go down
and buy out the little groceries in the working-class neighbourhoods.
It was not until I arrived at the club that afternoon that I began to
feel the first alarm. Everything was in confusion. There were no olives
for the cocktails, and the service was by hitches and jerks. Most of the
men were angry, and all were worried. A babel of voices greeted me as I
entered. General Folsom, nursing his capacious paunch in a window-seat
in the smoking-room was defending himself against half-a-dozen excited
gentlemen who were demanding that he should do something.
“What can I do more than I have done?” he was saying. “There are no
orders from Washington. If you gentlemen will get a wire through I’ll do
anything I am commanded to do. But I don’t see what can be done. The
first thing I did this morning, as soon as I learned of the strike, was
to order in the troops from the Presidio—three thousand of them. They’re
guarding the banks, the Mint, the post office, and all the public
buildings. There is no disorder whatever. The strikers are keeping the
peace perfectly. You can’t expect me to shoot them down as they walk
along the streets with wives and children all in their best bib and
tucker.”
“I’d like to know what’s happening on Wall Street,” I heard Jimmy Wombold
say as I passed along. I could imagine his anxiety, for I knew that he
was deep in the big Consolidated-Western deal.
“Say, Corf,” Atkinson bustled up to me, “is your machine running?”
“Yes,” I answered, “but what’s the matter with your own?”
“Broken down, and the garages are all closed. And my wife’s somewhere
around Truckee, I think, stalled on the overland. Can’t get a wire to
her for love or money. She should have arrived this evening. She may be
starving. Lend me your machine.”
“Can’t get it across the bay,” Halstead spoke up. “The ferries aren’t
running. But I tell you what you can do. There’s Rollinson—oh,
Rollinson, come here a moment. Atkinson wants to get a machine across
the bay. His wife is stuck on the overland at Truckee. Can’t you bring
the _Lurlette_ across from Tiburon and carry the machine over for him?”
The _Lurlette_ was a two-hundred-ton, ocean-going schooner-yacht.
Rollinson shook his head. “You couldn’t get a longshoreman to land the
machine on board, even if I could get the _Lurlette_ over, which I can’t,
for the crew are members of the Coast Seamen’s Union, and they’re on
strike along with the rest.”
“But my wife may be starving,” I could hear Atkinson wailing as I moved
on.
At the other end of the smoking-room I ran into a group of men bunched
excitedly and angrily around Bertie Messener. And Bertie was stirring
them up and prodding them in his cool, cynical way. Bertie didn’t care
about the strike. He didn’t care much about anything. He was blasé—at
least in all the clean things of life; the nasty things had no attraction
for him. He was worth twenty millions, all of it in safe investments,
and he had never done a tap of productive work in his life—inherited it
all from his father and two uncles. He had been everywhere, seen
everything, and done everything but get married, and this last in the
face of the grim and determined attack of a few hundred ambitious mammas.
For years he had been the greatest catch, and as yet he had avoided being
caught. He was disgracefully eligible. On top of his wealth he was
young, handsome, and, as I said before, clean. He was a great athlete, a
young blond god that did everything perfectly and admirably with the
solitary exception of matrimony. And he didn’t care about anything, had
no ambitions, no passions, no desire to do the very things he did so much
better than other men.
“This is sedition!” one man in the group was crying. Another called it
revolt and revolution, and another called it anarchy.
“I can’t see it,” Bertie said. “I have been out in the streets all
morning. Perfect order reigns. I never saw a more law-abiding populace.
There’s no use calling it names. It’s not any of those things. It’s
just what it claims to be, a general strike, and it’s your turn to play,
gentlemen.”
“And we’ll play all right!” cried Garfield, one of the traction
millionaires. “We’ll show this dirt where its place is—the beasts! Wait
till the Government takes a hand.”
“But where is the Government?” Bertie interposed. “It might as well be
at the bottom of the sea so far as you’re concerned. You don’t know
what’s happening at Washington. You don’t know whether you’ve got a
Government or not.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Garfield blurted out.
“I assure you I’m not worrying,” Bertie smiled languidly. “But it seems
to me it’s what you fellows are doing. Look in the glass, Garfield.”
Garfield did not look, but had he looked he would have seen a very
excited gentleman with rumpled, iron-grey hair, a flushed face, mouth
sullen and vindictive, and eyes wildly gleaming.
“It’s not right, I tell you,” little Hanover said; and from his tone I
was sure that he had already said it a number of times.
“Now that’s going too far, Hanover,” Bertie replied. “You fellows make
me tired. You’re all open-shop men. You’ve eroded my eardrums with your
endless gabble for the open shop and the right of a man to work. You’ve
harangued along those lines for years. Labour is doing nothing wrong in
going out on this general strike. It is violating no law of God nor man.
Don’t you talk, Hanover. You’ve been ringing the changes too long on the
God-given right to work . . . or not to work; you can’t escape the
corollary. It’s a dirty little sordid scrap, that’s all the whole thing
is. You’ve got labour down and gouged it, and now labour’s got you down
and is gouging you, that’s all, and you’re squealing.”
Every man in the group broke out in indignant denials that labour had
ever been gouged.
“No, sir!” Garfield was shouting. “We’ve done the best for labour.
Instead of gouging it, we’ve given it a chance to live. We’ve made work
for it. Where would labour be if it hadn’t been for us?”
“A whole lot better off,” Bertie sneered. “You’ve got labour down and
gouged it every time you got a chance, and you went out of your way to
make chances.”
“No! No!” were the cries.
“There was the teamsters’ strike, right here in San Francisco,” Bertie
went on imperturbably. “The Employers’ Association precipitated that
strike. You know that. And you know I know it, too, for I’ve sat in
these very rooms and heard the inside talk and news of the fight. First
you precipitated the strike, then you bought the Mayor and the Chief of
Police and broke the strike. A pretty spectacle, you philanthropists
getting the teamsters down and gouging them.
“Hold on, I’m not through with you. It’s only last year that the labour
ticket of Colorado elected a governor. He was never seated. You know
why. You know how your brother philanthropists and capitalists of
Colorado worked it. It was a case of getting labour down and gouging it.
You kept the president of the South-western Amalgamated Association of
Miners in jail for three years on trumped-up murder charges, and with him
out of the way you broke up the association. That was gouging labour,
you’ll admit. The third time the graduated income tax was declared
unconstitutional was a gouge. So was the eight-hour Bill you killed in
the last Congress.
“And of all unmitigated immoral gouges, your destruction of the
closed-shop principle was the limit. You know how it was done. You
bought out Farburg, the last president of the old American Federation of
Labour. He was your creature—or the creature of all the trusts and
employers’ associations, which is the same thing. You precipitated the
big closed-shop strike. Farburg betrayed that strike. You won, and the
old American Federation of Labour crumbled to pieces. You fellows
destroyed it, and by so doing undid yourselves; for right on top of it
began the organization of the I.L.W.—the biggest and solidest
organization of labour the United States has ever seen, and you are
responsible for its existence and for the present general strike. You
smashed all the old federations and drove labour into the I.L.W., and the
I.L.W. called the general strike—still fighting for the closed shop. And
then you have the effrontery to stand here face to face and tell me that
you never got labour down and gouged it. Bah!”