The Daily Worker Newspaper, October 30, 1926, Page 11

ROY Abridged Reprint of the Famous Story . wo class had been laying in private stocks of pro- vis That was why we were permitted to go down and buy out the little groceries in the working class neighborhood. It was not until I arrived at the Club that afternoon that I began to feel the first alarm. Everything was tm confusion. There were no olives for the cockiails, and the service was by hitches and jerks. Most of the men were angry, and all were worried. woftMand months, craftily end secretly, the whole hi 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. “This is sedition!” one man in the group was crying. Another called tt revolt and revolution, and another ealled. it anarchy. ; ; “T 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. call- ing # names. | It’s not any of these things. It’s just what it claims to be, a general strike, and it’s your | say, gentlemen.” fellows make me tired. You've eroded my eardrums with your endless for the openshop and therigh,of man to work. You're all open-shop harangued along those lines for years. Labor nothing wrong in going out on this general It is violating mo law of God or man. Don’t Hanover. You've been ringing the changes on the God-given right to work... or not to you can’t escape the corollary. It’s a dirty little scrap, that’s all the whole thing ts, You've got and now labor's got you F elosed-shop principle was the limit. how it was done. You bought out Farburg, By Jack London the last president of the old’ Anterican Federation of Labor. He was your ereatgre—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 Labor crumbled to pieces, You fellows destroyed it, and by so doing un- did yourselves;, for right on ‘top if it began the organ- ization of the. I.‘“L, W.—the biggest and. solidest.or- ganization of labor the United States has ever seen, and you are résponsible for its existence and for the pres- ent general strike, You smashed all the old federations and drove labor into the I. L. W., and the I. L. W. called the genera] strike—still fighting for the élosed shop. And then you have the effrontery.to stand here face to face and tell me that you never got labor down and gouged it. Bah! A little later I met him in the cloak room, leaving, and gave him a lift home {n my machine. “Labor caught us napping and struck at our weakest place, the stofiach. I’m going to get out of San Fran- cisco, Cerf. Take my advice and get out, too. Soon there'll be nothing but starvationw in this city for such as “we.” : How correct Bertie Messner was, I never dreamed. The days came and went; and for a time it was a humdrum time. Nothing happened. The edge of ex- citement had become blunted. The streets were not s0 crowded. The working class did not come up town any more to see how we were taking the strike. San Francisco lay dead, and we did not know whatjwas happening over the rest of the country. But’ from the very fact that we did not know we could conclude only that the rest of the country lay as dead as San Fran- cisco. From time to time the city was placarded with the proclamations of organized labor—these had been print the I. L. W. had prepared for the strike. Every detail had been worked out long in advance. No violence had occurred as yet, with the exception of the shoot- ing of a few wire-cutters by the soldiers, but the people of the slums were starving and growing ominously restless, The business men, the millionaires; and the profes- sional class held meetings and passed proclamations, but there was no way of making the proclamations public. They could not even get them printed, But with the formation of the bread lines came new troubles. There was only so much. of a food reserve in San Francisco, and at the best it could not last long. Organized labor, we knew, had its private sup plies; nevertheless, the whole” worktig class joltied the bread lines. As a résult, the provisions General Folsom had taken possession of diminished with per- flous rapidity. How were the soldiers going to dis- tinguish between a shabby middle-class man, a member of the I. L. W., or a slum-dweller? To make matters worse, the government tugs that had been hauling food from the army depots on Mare Island to Angel Island found no more food-to haul. The soldiers now received their rations from the confiscated provisions, and they received them first, beginning of the end was in sight. Violence was begining to show its awful face. Law and order was passing away, and passing away, I must confess, among the slum people and the upper classes. Organized la bor still maintained perfect order. It could well af- ford to—it had plenty to eat, — It was about this time that the great panic occurred. The wealthy classes precipated the flight, and then the slum people caught the contagion and stampeded wildly out of the city. General Folsom was pleased. It was estimated that at least 200,000 had deserted San Fran- cisco, and by that much was his food problem solved. Well do I remember that day. In the morning I had eaten a crust of bread. Half of the afternoon I had stood in the bread-line; and after dark I returned home tired and miserable, carrying a quart of rice and a slice of bacon. HK was a gloomy handful of men that came together at the Club that morning. There was no service at all. The last servant was gone. Hanover, Collins and Dakon were just leaving. They were leaving the city, they said, on Dakon’s horses, and there was a spare one forme. Dakon had four magnificent carriage horses that he wanted to save, and General Folsom had given him the tip that next morning all the horses that remained in the city were to be confiscated for food. For that matter the killing of the army mules and horses for food had already begun. Here and there stood automobiles, abandoned where they had broken down or where the gasoline had given out. There was no sign of life, save for the occas- ional policeman and the soldiers, guarding the banks and public buildings. Once more we came upon an I. L. W. man pasting up the latest proclamation. We stopped to read. “We had maintained an orderly strike,” it ran; “and we shall maintain order to the end. The end will come when our demands are sat- isfied, and our demands will be satisfied when we have starved our employers into submission, as we ourselves in the past have often been starved into submission.” rode on, crossed Market street, and a little later were passing through the working class districts. Here the streets were not deserted. Leaning over months before and evidenced how thoroughly | gates or standing in groups, were the I. L. W. men. Happy, well-fed children were playing games, and stout housewives sat on the front steps gossiping. One and all cast amused glances at us. “Have you noticed, the last few days,” Hanover re- marked to me, “that there’s not been a stray dog in the streets?” I had noticed, but I had not thought about it before. It was‘high time to leave the unfortunate city. I had a country place near Menlé, and it was our objective. But soon, we began to-discover that the country was worse off and far more dangerous than the city, There, the soldiers and I. L. W. kept order; but the country had been turned over to anarchy. Two hundred thous- yagd people had fled south from San Francisco, and we had countless evidences that their fligh¥ had been like that of an army of locusts. They had swept every- thing clean. There had been robbery and . fighting. Here and there we passed bodies by the roadside and saw the blackened ruins of farmhouses. The fences were down, and the crops had been trampled by the feet of a multitude, p ‘ Early in the day Dakon’s horse had cast a shoe, The delicate hoof had split, and by noon the animal was limping. Dakon refused to ride it further, and refused to desert it. So, on his solicitation, we went on. He would lead the horse and join us at my Place. That was the last we saw of him; nor did we ever learn his end. But as we rode along we saw that the devastation was not confined to the main roads. The van of the flight had kept to the roads, sacking the smal] towns as it went; while those that followed had scattered out and swept the whole countryside, like a great broom. My place was built of concrete, masonry, and tiles, and so had escaped being burned, but it was gutted clean. There was not a bite for us. We spent the rest of the night vainly waiting for Dakon, and in the morning, with our revolvers, fought off half a dozen marauders. Then we kill one of Da- kon’s horses, hiding for the future what meat we did not immediately eat. In the afternoon Collings went out for a walk, but failed to return. This was the last straw to Hanover. He was for flight there and then, and I had great difficulty in persuading him to wait for daylight. As for myself, I was convinced that the end of the general strike was near, and I was resolved to return to San Francisco. So, in the morning we parted company, Hanoyer heading south, fifty pounds of horse meat strapped to hig saddle, while I, similarly loaded; headed north, Little Hanover pulled thru all right, and to the end of his life he will persist, I know, in boring everybody with the narrative of his subsequent adventures, | xhing far as Belmont, on the main road hack, \: when was robbed of my horse-meat by three niili- tiamen. I managed to get as far as Baden, when my horse was taken away from me by a dozen men. Two of them were San Francisco policemen, and the remain- der were regular soldiers. This was ominous. Th« situation was certainly extreme when the regulars were beginning to desert. As luck would have it, I sprained my ankle, and sux ceeded in getting no further than South San Francisco I lay there that night in an outhouse, shivering with the cold and at the same time burning with fever. Two days I lay there, too sick to” move, and on the third, reeling and giddy, supporting myself on an extempor- ized crutch I tottered on toward San Francisco, As I entered the city I remembered the workman's house at which I had traded the silver pitcher, and in that direction my hunger drove me. Twilight was fall- ing when I came to the place. I passed around by the alleyway and crawled up the back steps, on which | collapsed. I managed to reach out with the crutch and knocked at the door. Then I must have fainted, for I came to in the kitchen, my face wet with water and whiskey being poured down my throat. I choked and spluttered and tried to talk; I began by saying som¢ thing about not having any more silver pitchers, but that I would make it up to them afterward if the would only give me something to eat. But the house- wife interrupted me. “Why, you poor man!” she said. “Haven't heard? The strike was called off this afternoon. She hustled around, opening a tin of breakiast bacon and preparing to fry it. “Let me have some now, please,” I begged; and | ate tie raw bacon on a slice of bread, while her hus- band explained that the demands of the I, L. W. had been granted. The wires had been opened up in the early afternoon, and everywhere the employers’ asso- ciations had given in. There hadn’t been any em- ployers left in San Francsico, but General Folsom had spoken for them, The trains and steamers would start running in*the morning, and so would everything else just as soon as system could be established, And that was the end of the general strike. I never want to see another one. It was worse than a war. A general strike is a cruel and immoral] thing, and the brain of man should be capable of running industry in a more rational way. Harrison is still my chautf- feur, It was part of the conditions of the L L. W. that all of its old members should be reinstated in their old positions. Brown never came back, but the rest of the servants are with me. I hadn’t the heart to discharge them—poor creatures, they were pretty hard pressed when they deserted me with the food and silver. And now I can’t discharge them. They have you all been unionized by the L L, W. The tyranny of or- endurance. ganized labor ig getting beyond human Something must be done. ORE eee ee ae