FROM CHILDHOOD, Hermann Baumann had the habit of using the back door to the house, always going in through the kitchen, for in Cologne, where his father’s bicycle repair shop was on the end of their lot, he was always running back to the shop—maybe Father would let him hold the wheel he was repairing—then running into the kitchen for a thick piece of warm bread, with butter and sugar on it. His mother used to laugh and say that he would be a stupid child, for he was such a big eater; but Hermann was clever enough with his hands.
He did not grow tall; he was broad-boned, and in his early-teens was buttery-fleshed, having an almost girlish appearance.
His father went to war in 1915, when Hermann, the oldest child, was fifteen. During the next year the boy was always embarrassed, for though he ate no more than the others his fat faded slowly; he was like a plant that persists green, while those all around shrivel in the dust of drought. But finally he became yellow-skinned and empty as a punctured bag; early in 1917, when Herr Baumann returned from the front with a wounded lung, he did not recognize his eldest son in the sunken-eyed youth working in the shop.
Then it became a matter of waiting to see whether the war would end before Hermann had to go into it; that same fall he left for training.
Hermann knew from his father what the war would be like; and through all the years of exhortation against the bestial enemy, who employed Negro savages to slaughter German Christians, he had nevertheless retained his horror-fright at having to kill.
Mostly, young Baumann contrived to sit huddled in a dugout, or to crouch well down below the trench parapet, scarcely aiming. Early in 1918, when it was learned that Americans had come in opposite his company, cold ferocious fighters, with Negroes among them, he allowed himself to be taken prisoner.
A guard named Nick Koscienko, from a city named Detroit, where automobiles were made, warmed to him, and even gave him an occasional cigarette. “Hey, why don’t you come to America when the war’s over?” Koscienko suggested. “Come to Detroit and look me up.” In Detroit, Nick said, he could earn big money as an automobile mechanic, he could own his own automobile.
Hermann could not always tell when the Americans were joking, “kidding” as they called it, but he was sure it was kidding that he could have his own auto. “Honest to Christ,” Nick insisted, and showed him a photograph of himself and a girl in a car. “Some baby, huh?” Nick demanded. “It’s a Dodge. When I get back I’m gonna get me a Studebaker. That’s a bigger car.”
After the war, there was nothing to do in Cologne. Everybody talked politics. His young brother was a Communist; Hermann too voted Communist in the elections. As his brother said: Why wait? He enrolled in the party.
The following year he went to Hamburg and found a job on a ship, as second carpenter. In 1923 Baumann was a carpenter on a vessel named the Wilhelmina, going to Boston. A shipmate offered to get him two dollars if he would carry some bottles of whisky off the boat; also, the shipmate said, he would take him to a place where there were Negro girls. Hermann Baumann had no desire for a Negro girl; a real American girl like in the movies, that would be wonderful. Viereck thrust some bottles at him just as they reached the plank and he had to slip them under his coat; later Viereck gave him two dollars, laughing, so that Hermann felt Viereck had made more money for himself.
He spent the evening in a movie, and roaming about the streets. The American girls were pretty.
Viereck said: “If you want to jump ship, they’ll never find you. Once I spent a year in America, went everywhere, New York, San Francisco, nobody bothered me or even asked where I came from. When I got sick of it I took ship again. You have to work, even in America.”
But Hermann Baumann said, if a man wanted to make a country his home, he should come in legally. Several trips later, he entered as an immigrant.
On a map, he saw that Detroit was far; and when he wandered about the city, among its anonymous millions, he felt the folly of that address of the prison camp guard, which he in boyish faith had kept by him all these years. Now he tore it up.
In 1926 Hermann Baumann was earning an average of thirty-five dollars a week as a machinist in a Detroit wheel factory, and of this he saved fifteen. Whenever there was a birthday or a holiday back home, he sent twenty-five dollars; but it hurt their pride to have him send money regularly. His landlady was always joking that he should get married; but Hermann could not overcome his fear of American girls; they wanted a man to say clever things, such as “the cat’s pajamas”; even if he were completely at ease with his English, he would not be able to think of such remarks. And sometimes the boys at the plant would take him along on drunken parties where the girls would get sick with gin and vomit; or else they would embrace their boys, in the midst of company, kissing with their tongues and allowing the men to handle their breasts and thighs. He also tried this, but when the final moment came, the girls would awaken as from stupor, and become offended, and fight away, clawing like cats.
That year Hermann Baumann’s mother wrote to him of a girl from Cologne who was now a housemaid in Chicago, as if Chicago were within bicycling distance of a Sunday.
He wrote to the girl; she replied with a very long letter telling him comical things about her employers; how the mistress spent three dollars a week on special food for her dog, and other crazy things. That summer he drove his second-hand Essex to Chicago.
“As I am the maid,” she had written, “you must come up the back stairs.” This made Hermann feel at ease at once. Marie Lichtenstein was not a beautiful girl, but she looked all fresh and smelled like new-made rolls in a German bakery, the firm, lightly browned round buns. He did not have to think of clever things to say, because she did all the talking.
The day he was to return to Detroit, Baumann looked at the ads in the Zeitung, and saw that lathe-hands were wanted in a furniture factory. The thoughts of a clean lathe and the smell of wood-shavings, the hum of the lathe instead of the clang of the wheel factory, were good to him. The job paid only thirty dollars to start with, but he stayed.
Hermann and Marie were married that summer; and by 1930 they had three babies: George, and Hermina, and Gerda. Hermann had grown fat again, and his cheeks were violently rosy. Though a bald patch was forming on his crown, he looked quite boyish when he wore a hat; he looked like a fat boy of twenty-four. Marie had grown creamy with weight, but she carried her flesh well; there was no blanket thickness on her as around Hermann. Often she folded his loose stomach flesh in her hand and threatened to melt it down like bacon. The child, George, had a game of butting his head into his father’s belly.
Baumann was then averaging over forty dollars weekly; they had saved five hundred dollars and invested it as down payment on a two-flat house on Newberry Avenue; in twelve years, by making payments slightly larger than rent, they would own the house. Coming home, Hermann always went up the back stairs because that way he could tell at once what there was for supper; besides, the baby was sometimes asleep in the parlor.
They had a little dog, and Marie, with the American ways she had learned while a housemaid, actually bought cans of dogfood for him; she defended herself, saying this was really more economical as they had no food to throw away. It was strange how, even though she was in the country less time than himself, it was she who made the feeling that they were Americans and theirs was an American home, where people fed dogs out of special cans, instead of leftovers from the table.
Once in the fall of 1932, when Hermann came up the back stairs, he saw a strange man sitting at the kitchen table, eating; the man was middle-aged, with a small head and thin, mottled onionlike skin; he wore a suit not yet threadbare. Hermann had seen such pinch-faced types around Boston, more than around Chicago. Marie, with her eyes, told him the man had asked for food; and suddenly Hermann felt acutely ashamed of being the one to give food to this respectable American. He noticed that Marie had given the man only some sausage and bread, while a large meal was on the stove. He felt ashamed of this, too.
The stranger explained that he was an accountant by profession, a bookkeeper that meant, and, having lost his job in Indianapolis, he had come to Chicago to seek a position.
“It’s a shame,” they said to each other, when the stranger had retreated down the stairs, refusing to go out the front way.
“There are lots more people coming to the kitchen door now,” Marie explained.
The little bookkeeper from Indianapolis, Wilson was his name, appeared several times that fall. He would wait a few weeks between visits, as though fearful of wearing out his welcome. As it grew cold, Marie gave him Hermann’s old coat; it engulfed him, making him look more shrunken and lost than ever.
One time Mr. Wilson came in the evening when Marie had gone to a movie with neighbors, leaving Hermann to mind the children. It was nearly nine o’clock when the kitchen doorbell rang, and Hermann, awakened out of a doze, opened it to find Mr. Wilson, whose haggard face, in the yellowish electric light, struck him suddenly with panic. The little man seemed unable to speak; for one instant Hermann suspected he was drunk. At that time, layoffs had begun in the furniture factory, and the sight of Mr. Wilson awakened all Hermann’s fears.
“Sit here, I will get you something to eat,” he said hastily, and Mr. Wilson, still strangely speechless, shuffled to a chair. It happened that a grocery order had been delivered and not yet unpacked; there was an entire carton filled with cans of dogfood which Marie had bought at a bargain.
Baumann found a cold chop and potatoes, which he offered to warm; but Mr. Wilson wolfed them down as they were, and refused to let him trouble to make coffee. He too seemed to feel the horrible embarrassment of the absence of the woman. He spoke only once; when Hermann asked whether he still stayed at the municipal free lodging. “I left the lodging,” he said.
Hermann asked: “Where are you sleeping?”
“Last night I slept in a hallway.”
That week, Hermann Baumann was cut down to twenty hours of work. The furniture manufacturer was trying to keep all the married men on the payroll.
One night a noise awakened Baumann; worry-ridden as he was, he awoke in dark shock, crying out. Marie was also awake. “My, you are nervous.” She touched his arm. “It’s the kitchen doorbell.” Hermann looked at his watch. Just after twelve. Both at the same moment knew it was Mr. Wilson at the door.
Hermann Baumann waded through the dark to the kitchen door; he didn’t want to startle himself with the light; this way the horror was in a dream. Through the glass of the storm-door he could make out Mr. Wilson’s shrunken form; he was not wearing the overcoat. In the bitter moonlight, snow-reflected, Baumann saw that ghostly face. “What do you want?” He feared the man was crazed, and only partly opened the door, though hating himself for his hesitation.
“I want—I just want to ask you one thing——”
“Listen, Mr. Wilson, are you hungry? Wait, I will find something——”
“One thing. Just give me one of those cans. One of those cans I saw you had for the dog.”
“No, Mr. Wilson, don’t say that!” Baumann pulled open the door, but Mr. Wilson refused to enter; he simply stood there repeating: “One of those cans. That’s all I ask. Just give me …” Baumann ran to the pantry, found the carton, and, still in the darkness, took out one of the cans. When he got back to the door, Mr. Wilson was slumped there, sitting in the doorway.
“Are you sick?” Baumann cried. Mr. Wilson seized the can and half crawled, half scuttled down the stairs. Baumann stumbled back to his bed. He lay weeping, his wife for a long time stroking his back.
By 1933, Baumann was worried by the succession of letters, each more terse and formal, in regard to his arrears on the house. He had already borrowed on his insurance. Marie even went to her former employers to try to get a loan.
All that time, Baumann was reading in the Zeitung about events in Germany. Sometimes he wished he were there, because in the coming crisis every arm might count. He did not understand this Hitler movement but he felt now was the time for a Communist government to take power. He wrote to his brother. In return he received a strange, vague letter. “For what you say, it is too late, and I beg you do not write to me of such things any more. I am not interested in such letters.” Hermann was puzzled. “How can he be uninterested? Martin could always talk all night about politics.”
“Perhaps he is afraid the letters are being opened,” Marie said.
In those days there was little with which Hermann could occupy himself. To work around improving the house, painting, putting in more electric outlets, required materials that cost money. In the evenings there was nothing to do but talk to people, or listen to the radio. It happened then that the fellow Viereck, once his shipmate, turned up in Chicago, living not far away, on Mozart Street; and as men will who feel no true bond for each other, but a kind of obligation to revive a fancied buddyship of the past, they fell to seeing each other.
Viereck belonged to one of the new German clubs, of the Hitler variety, and he talked much of how Hitler would bring the true socialism to the workingman. He is as we were, a soldier during the war, a worker too, a house-painter. He won’t forget us. A few times, Hermann Baumann went with Viereck to the meetings of his club. The members were ordinary fellows from around the neighborhood; they met in a half-basement that Siegfried Scharif had used as a speakeasy until the repeal of prohibition a few months before, when he had opened his tavern upstairs. They bought a keg of beer for each meeting; it came to little.
With the beer-drinking they sang a little, talked; when warmed up, they sang the “Horst Wessel” song; it was funny, about spouting Jewish blood. Hermann Baumann was not crazy about the Jews; Marie’s old boss, the Jew-lady, would not even lend her a penny to save their home. Rich pigs. No wonder Jews would not eat pigs—Viereck told the joke—it would be cannibalism.
At one meeting, Viereck arose and said, why dream of what was being done in the Reich over there? Why not get to work and do the same here? Why not bring the awakening and the strengthening force of the Nazi movement to America?
There was applause and yet there was a long argument over this. For some said their work must be only to help the mother country, to send money there, to help sell German goods here, things like that. Others said no, they must bring the new German spirit to the whole world—including America.
At first Baumann thought vaguely this was the same as when he was a Communist, believing Communism would come to all countries; in each the people would rule themselves. But, walking home, Viereck told him: “No, dumbhead. We will rule. We Germans will rule. God has chosen us! To every country we will bring order and strength. Look how even this rich America is floundering …”
After a certain point with Viereck, Hermann never listened to the words, but had a feeling as if he were doing his best to hold onto himself on a rollercoaster that swooped up and down and would whirl him away from himself. Viereck and the others let the words do that to them, he had noticed, at meetings; they became men possessed with this idea of strengthening, strengthening—and he could understand it, almost feel it in himself. For when a man is desperate, when a man feels himself being pressed down, stripped, every day deeper and closer to his barren self, there are moments when a kind of frenzy sweeps his blood and he clenches his fist and all his muscles tighten till they shake, and he can scarcely restrain himself from shouting aloud even if he is alone: No, no, I will not let this happen to me! Life cannot do this to me! I am a man, there is only one way for a man, to be strong! Strong! I will strengthen myself, by my own strength I will lift myself out of this nothingness….
There were such moments. But after them a man looked around and saw he was still alone, without a job, and the printed letter from the finance company threatened to put him out of his house. Then the fever of strengthening collapsed.
But in these meetings, Hermann saw how Viereck and his friends made the fever of strengthening together. And being together they could not let it fall, could not admit it was an empty strength. Perhaps when each was at home alone, the emptiness came, as it came to him.
In 1934 Hermann Baumann ran frantically from one relief agency to another, but everywhere the clerks told him the same story: “You have property, we cannot help you.” Not until he was no longer the owner of a house could they give him food.
For some months he had ceased going to the Nazi meetings, because, after that talk about Germany ruling the world, it had all smelled somewhat evil to him; those people were like religious maniacs. But now he even went to Viereck, asking, begging; perhaps the organization knew of some way to save his house.
Let them take this house, then you can go on home relief, Viereck advised him. Let the American government support you. We are not interested in these things here, let it get worse here, then Americans too will see our way is the only way.
“But the house, I will lose everything I put into it—four thousand dollars. I have paid every month, during all these years——”
Viereck snapped: “Now you come to us, when it is something you need. But where have you been these months when the organization needed you? Such comrades we have no use for. Go, go back to your Communists. Oh, I know you well, you are a Communist from the old days, on the boat. I know all about you, and your brother in Cologne.”
The expression in Viereck’s eyes was such as Hermann Baumann had not seen since wartime, when certain bestialities were committed. He left, remembering that after all he and Viereck had never truly had anything in common.
Another day, when he had gone to the relief office to show his eviction notice, and as he was going down the stairs, slowly, to delay the arrival home, a man began a conversation: “Gave you the runaround, huh?” and finally suggested that he go over to the Unemployed Council. “Maybe they can give you some advice.”
The council held meetings in a frame loft on Division Street. A fellow named Mike Burns discussed his troubles with him and said: “I’ll bring some friends over when they come to move you out. Don’t worry.”
On a Thursday morning the eviction was to take place. By nine o’clock Mike Burns and some people had appeared; they sat in the kitchen.
Two men came to move out the furniture, leaving a third in a car. The new friends would not budge from their chairs. The men moved out the loose things, the small tables, things like that. Then together they tried to lift a chair in which a woman sat, spilling her from it. “No, let there be no trouble, let them take everything!” Hermann Baumann cried, but it was no longer as though the cause were his; no one paid any attention to him. Name-calling, scuffling began. In a few moments police came. They arrested Mike Burns and Hermann Baumann and the noisiest woman. The rest of the friends had vanished.
Hermann was in the cell with Mike Burns overnight. It happened often this way, Mike Burns explained. Just now, this was the only tactic. To offer enough resistance to bring the condition to the attention of the people.
In the morning, a harried little lawyer from the I.L.D. put up bail for them and they were released.
Hermann Baumann found his family still in the house. After the police had gone, his wife explained, the friends had reassembled and carried the furniture back. A relief worker had come and said, since the house was no longer theirs, they could be placed on relief, and continue to live in it. The relief office would pay the finance company fifteen dollars a month rent.
“I will join the Communists again,” Hermann Baumann said. “This Mike Burns is a Communist.” But one thing made him hesitate. To the police, when they were arraigned, Burns had denied he was a member of the Communist Party. “It must be illegal here,” Baumann said to his wife.
“No. It is not illegal,” Marie said.
And this was something Hermann Baumann could never quite understand. In his unit meetings, he was always suggesting things to which the other comrades responded with whoops of laughter or shivers of fear. If he said: Well, let all the Communists go together to the main relief boss, they would silence him with shudders. If there was a parade against the invasion of Ethiopia, it must not be known as a Communist parade. “But in Germany,” he would begin, and they would silence him with laughter.
“In Germany,” Mike Burns, the section organizer, explained once when he attended their unit meeting, “you were hundreds of thousands, you had a third of the Reichstag. Here we have not a single Congressman, and if we did have, he could not declare himself openly.”
“But the party is legal?” Hermann Baumann persisted. “It is not underground——”
“Yes, but don’t you understand, in America …”
There was little party work he could do. When there were large meetings he would go and stand on the sidewalk outside the hall and sell Daily Workers. Often he went to distribute handbills in the neighborhoods where relief station protests were being called. His unit organizer, Joe Ablin, was eager for him to keep in touch with the Nazi Bund organizations, but this was difficult, as through Viereck he was known as a Communist. However, Baumann sometimes went into Scharff’s saloon for a beer, and picked up bits of gossip.
Thus, when the steel strike began the bartender told him: “Your friend Viereck is working these days.”
“Yah? Where? Perhaps I can get some work.”
“Up there in the Consolidated Steel mills, where they have the strike.” The bartender eyed him, teasingly.
“What does he do there?”
“What everyone does. Makes steel. Viereck is a machinist, no?”
At the unit meeting, Thursday, Joe Ablin spoke of the strike, explaining how it was truly a political test, as well as a labor struggle. Volunteers must go out there on the picket line, he said. There should be thousands picketing out there. He was very excited, having toured the strike region only that day. “Two plants are closed up tight; Midwest and Tri-State didn’t even try to operate. But the steel bosses are concentrating all their force on Consolidated. Don’t think that Big Steel isn’t in on this,” he said. “They are sitting by and watching, and even helping Otis Speer out by taking care of his rush orders in some of their plants. If he can break the S.W.O.C., the contract Standard Steel made with Lewis will be torn up.”
On Saturday, Joe Ablin stopped by the house; he had stacks of handbills in his car, and gave Hermann Baumann a few hundred to distribute in the neighborhood. The handbills advertised a great Fourth of July steelworkers’ mass meeting at Guzman’s Grove. Hermann agreed to sell Daily Workers at the mass meeting, and Joe Ablin arranged to pick him up, early.
Mike Burns was there, too, in the yard, listening to the speakers. When the line of march was forming, Hermann Baumann saw Mike Burns and Joe Ablin talking together; he walked over to them, as he liked to hear what was going on. Joe Ablin turned to him. “Look, Hermann, you too, when the march gets up there near the cops, some of the boys are going to spread out over the tracks.” He gestured toward the right. “You go over that way too. We want to spread out the cops. I’ll be there.”
Hermann nodded. He walked along the line trying to sell his papers. So many comrades had turned up selling literature that he could not get rid of many copies.
Just as Joe Ablin had said, when the column got near the police, it halted; some of the strikers began to spread out to the right, toward the tracks. The police sprinted parallel with them. Hermann walked over the tracks; he had lost sight of Joe, but he was way over, nearly to the boxcars. Between the cars he could see snatches of the high barbed-wire fence. He looked toward the police, and in that moment saw quite sharply the face of a Yank, like all the Yank soldiers he had seen, like the ones that had taken him prisoner, and that taut-muscled wartime look, exactly that look, was on the face of this Yank policeman. Hermann Baumann’s heart beat with sudden fear, as in the trench the moment before an expected barrage. The opening gun would sound, and then the chorus of guns.
Looking around for a way of escape, he glimpsed that barbed-wire fence again, and there, standing on a shed or some low building, behind the fence, he saw Viereck. He was certain he saw Viereck, and yet the whole scene was as unreal as the time he had seen Mr. Wilson at the door begging for dogfood. Sharp, and unreal. Viereck was in some kind of uniform pants and shirt, and he was standing together with a big tan-faced American, in army boots and pants, with a pistol belt around his waist. In that moment, Hermann Baumann saw Viereck recognize him and turn to his companion with some remark that pointed him out. Baumann looked back nervously for his column, and saw men waving their arms for the spread-out to return. He nodded as though they could see his obedience; he was going back when a shot sounded behind him, and he felt a punch in the middle of his spine.
MITCH WILNER was the logical person to address the delegates of the A. F. of L., George Price insisted. Every other member of the committee was either ticketed or unimpressive. And there was still time, if the A. F. of L. delegates instructed Adam Ryan to back up the mass meeting, for announcements to be made over the Federation’s radio station.
“My God!” Sylvia complained. “Have you got to do everything!” She drove him downtown, leaving the kids sulking at not being taken along, for it was Sunday. He’d have to bring something home for them. “Gosh,” Sylvia said, “do you realize this time only last week we were lying on the beach?” He nodded. Such things did not seem strange to him.
George Price met them in front of the musicians’ union building, on Randolph. The Loop was deserted. A few men gabbed on the sidewalk. Others came along, entered the building. Two girls whom Mitch recognized, I.L.D. volunteers, were handing out notices of the mass meeting. It made Mitch feel self-conscious that his name was on those circulars.
Carl Gaul and Barbara showed up. “You know who the cops arrested?” Carl waited for effect. “Art Nowis.”
“Art?” Mitch repeated. The dude, Emil’s friend.
“He’s not a comrade, is he?” George Price asked.
Carl stuck out his lower lip. “If he is, it’ll be a surprise to me.”
“What do they want with him?”
“Well, he’s financial secretary of the local.”
They were silent for a moment. Price glumly contributed: “Looks like the governor is going to send troops into Canton, so Otis Speer can reopen the plant there.”
“Be another Fourth of July,” Carl predicted.
“No. That’s why they had it here. To scare the guts out of everybody.”
“The Ohio boys don’t scare so easy,” said Carl.
Price reported that he had exhausted his last contact, a big-shot movie company lawyer, in an effort to get the newsreel released for the citizens’ meeting. But he had another idea: “Something as good as the movie. Maybe even better.” His eyes glittered, mysteriously.
Price and Carl outlined the immediate task for Mitch. He was to request the floor, before the A. F. of L. delegates, in behalf of the citizens’ investigating committee. “After all, one of their own members was killed out there. I don’t see how they can refuse to come in on this protest,” Barbara pointed out.
“Which one was A. F. of L.?” Sylvia wanted to know.
“Baumann, the good Communist,” Price said, not without his touch of bitter humor. “He was in good standing in the furniture workers’ local. The cops found his A. F. of L. card and his party card stuck together in his pocket.”
In Mitch Wilner’s mind, the question of the second Communist member—“Dombrowsky, Stanley, Communist, not properly identified as yet”—had become almost a testing-point for the truth in the whole issue. Now, half privately, he asked of Carl: “Listen, that other one they said was a Communist, Dombrowsky, what about him?”
“Dombrowsky. Oh, that big Slav they yanked out of Jock’s car.”
“Sylvia has an in-law, Captain Rosen, who works with the red squad. He claims Dombrowsky was signed up in the party, or someone of that name.”
Carl looked wise. “The red squad knows its stuff,” he said. And added: “There were plenty of Sobol’s boys out there.”
“But is there anything for sure, about Dombrowsky?”
“I can’t quite place him,” Carl said. “Except it seems to me I did see him at one of their fraction meetings. I once walked in by accident, when Sobol was holding a little meeting in headquarters. They tried to throw me out. Imagine excluding a member of the staff from strike headquarters! You had to be a Daily Worker correspondent to get into that place! And that’s why they get such a bum break in the papers,” he went on hotly. “They’d never let the reporters in. Only the Daily Worker man. And when I brought it up at a staff meeting, they jumped on me with all that junk about the capitalist press. Sure I know the press is against us, but if we were at least fair to the reporters——”
“Yah, that was a big mistake,” George Price agreed, as a newspaperman.
“Still,” Barbara said, “the Daily is the only paper that gives them a fair story, so why shouldn’t they favor the Worker reporter?”
“They ought to know—most of the boys covering the strike are Guildsmen,” Price said. “Of course we can’t do a hell of a lot, once the copy desk gets hold of the story. But we can do something, and there is no sense in antagonizing the boys.” He chuckled. “They threw me out, being a Hearst reporter!”
Mitch still wondered about Dombrowsky. Could Carl be sure? He remembered Sam Eisen’s advice not to be seen too much with Carl Gaul. Increasingly, he saw himself becoming confused by the partisanships among these people who were supposed to be working together. He sensed how it must be among the strikers themselves, in a struggle in which their very existence was at stake, knowing all the while that amongst themselves, perhaps their very friends beside them, were spies and betrayers. Suspecting everyone, fearing betrayal of every word they uttered.
Going inside, they met the rosy-faced Professor Rawley, whose name had appeared with Mitch Wilner’s on the proclamation. Carl drew Rawley aside, on the landing, and explained how Mitch Wilner was to try to address the delegates. “But if they don’t let him in, you bring the matter up from the floor.”
“I’ll request that he be invited in,” Rawley said, grinning at them all.
“I think there’ll be enough support. The typos will support us,” Carl speculated.
“Oh, I don’t see how they can refuse,” Barbara said. “They can’t make a C.I.O.–A. F. of L. issue out of this. Ryan wouldn’t be so stupid.”
“Don’t underestimate Ryan,” Professor Rawley bubble-laughed.
“Besides,” Price interpolated, “the A. F. of L. boys are not at all sorry this happened. We’re barking up the wrong tree here. For them, the massacre was the best thing that could have happened to destroy the C.I.O. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of their master minds put a little pressure on the state’s attorney to make sure the cops busted up that strike, but good. Maybe they even suggested a little firing-practice. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t go that far!” Barbara cried. “Besides, why should the state’s attorney listen to them?”
“The A. F. of L. put him in. If it wasn’t for the teamsters’ union, where would he be? And you can bank on another thing, he’ll go the limit on prosecuting the strikers that were arrested out there, to finish up on the C.I.O. for Adam Ryan. Oh, they’ve got this town tighter than a drum.”
They passed a heavy door with a grated peephole. “Looks like a relic of speakeasy days,” Sylvia commented.
Price explained it was the bomb-proof entrance to the office of the musicians’ union. “That’s how these boys do things.”
The door to the auditorium, however, was ordinary, and open. About a hundred delegates were scattered in groups, chinning. Against the rear wall was a haberdashery stand, with a sign: “Wear Union-Made Clothes.” Delegates were fingering neckties.
A bright-eyed old man circulated, selling some kind of newspaper. “That’s old Griffin,” George Price said. “Used to be the town’s official anarchist. Now he peddles the Townsend paper.” The A. F. of L. brethren seemed quite jolly about buying it.
A ponderous fellow approached and hoarsely inquired if they were delegates.
“No,” Mitch said, and explained his mission.
“I’ll see.” The sergeant-at-arms shuffled toward the dais; they watched him whisper to a triple-chinned official, who peered in their direction, then shook his head. The sergeant-at-arms shuffled back and reported: “Says no.” He raised one eyelid. “No C.I.O. committees.”
“This is a citizens’ committee, it has nothing to do with the C.I.O.!” Price cried indignantly. “How can he refuse when he doesn’t even know what we want?”
“Yah, he knows,” the sergeant said carelessly. “Said it was all taken up in the executive. All taken care of.” Somehow he had backed them to the door. But George Price would not give in. “You let me talk to Adam Ryan,” he insisted. “The church federation is behind this. He don’t want to make a mistake.”
The sergeant, suspicious, but perhaps impressed by the presence of the women, retraced his steps. This time he brought the triple-chinned official, Finney. “We sent you two special deliveries,” Price began aggressively.
“Yah, we took it up at the executive yesterday,” Finney said, bored. “We can’t do anything for you people.”
“Dr. Wilner came down here to announce the meeting before your delegates.”
“We took it up. That’s all there’s to it.” They had been backed into the hall. The sergeant-at-arms and fat Finney filled the doorway. Mitch shook his head to Price, to give up. It was too sickening, to have to beg.
“After all, I thought we were the ones who wanted to do them a favor,” Sylvia said. “Don’t the police bust up their picket lines, too?”
“The A. F. of L. doesn’t believe in picketing,” Carl Gaul remarked.
That was what he disliked about the fellow, Mitch decided. This kind of situation was nothing to joke about.
Barbara suggested they go up to the gallery and wait for Professor Rawley to make his motion from the floor, calling upon Mitch.
The U-shaped gallery was nearly full. “Must be something doing today,” Price observed. “The comrades have the joint packed.” Mitch recognized a few of the girls he had seen around the committee offices. Carl Gaul said there was going to be a fight about their office workers’ union, up for expulsion from the A. F. of L. because its members had refused to go through a C.I.O. picket line.
From the gallery Mitch looked down upon the assembled delegates, representatives of the old-line labor unions of Chicago. How ignorant he was, he felt, in not even having known that this body of men existed and met. But could one really be a citizen in a modern world? Did any man have time to know and to participate in all these things, and must he know and participate in order to fulfill his share in a democratic world?
There were nearly two hundred delegates below, gradually taking seats. The men were mainly of one type: burly, settled in appearance, not sloppy, but few with pressed suits—ordinary folk. Only two women were among them; he recognized Hattie Miller, the teachers’ delegate.
The chairman stepped to the rostrum; this must be Adam Ryan. Foreshortened by the balcony view, Ryan appeared wider than tall, with a square, massive head and immense jowls set neckless upon a boulder of a body. “Did you know Ryan was the leader of the 1919 steel strike?” Sylvia reminded Mitch.
“No.” He was startled at his own ignorance.
“Yep. Eat-’em-alive Adam Ryan, the big revolutionist of 1919,” George Price remarked.
As soon as order was called, the triple-chinned Finney arose and reported the death of “one of our loyal and beloved brothers, Hermann Baumann, of the Furniture Workers Local No. 147, is there a motion that we arise in his memory for one moment of silence?”
The motion was murmurously passed and the members shuffled to their feet while Brother Finney jerked out his watch. His eyes could be seen circling with the second-hand. He pocketed the watch, lifted his eyes; the membership sat down.
Now was the time, Mitch thought. How could the Federation refuse to participate in the people’s protest, after thus acknowledging one of the dead as their own? He saw Professor Rawley rise, but the chairman recognized another hand.
The first report was from the pressmen, on strike at the big Casey-Klingman plant. Police had three times broken the picket line, jailing their men. A delegate from the leather workers’ union arose with similar complaints. “We can’t put out more than two pickets or they throw them in the jug and don’t even book them. It costs us nearly fifty dollars every time.”
Suddenly there was a motion that the Gottschalk committee be asked to come and investigate the way the Chicago police handled strikes.
“Why, they’re right on the same track,” Mitch said.
Price patted his hand. “They mean only A. F. of L. strikes,” he said.
This time Professor Rawley got the floor. “While we are on the subject of police violence,” he said, “there is a big people’s protest being organized on this very question. When the citizens co-operate with us, we should certainly co-operate with them. I move we give ten minutes to Dr. Mitchell Wilner, of the citizens’ committee, to explain their plans, and that we send a speaker to their mass meeting at the Opera House tomorrow night.”
There was a wide clapping of hands. “Second!” several delegates cried, simultaneously. Adam Ryan brought down his gavel. “The motion is out of order,” he announced. “The executive committee has already considered a communication from this so-called citizens’ committee, and the matter is disposed of.”
A hostile murmur went around the gallery. Professor Rawley leaped to his feet. “Point of information,” he called, and the chairman with a show of patience recognized him again.
“Are we or are we not sending a speaker to this mass meeting? Certainly this is one issue upon which all labor should be united. One of our own people was killed. We have just passed a resolution on the very same issue of police violence. I understand this meeting of the citizens is to investigate——”
Ryan was pounding the rostrum. “You understand—you know all about this citizens’ meeting, don’t you?” he shouted. “Well, if anyone else wants to find out anything about that so-called citizens’ meeting, go on over down Wells Street to the C.I.O. office, that’s where the citizens are that are pulling off that meeting! We are not going to have any part of it!”
Mitch Wilner felt anger choking him. Why, the committee hadn’t been near the C.I.O. office! He wanted to leap to his feet and cry out: “That’s a lie!” Sylvia’s hand restrained him.
Hattie Miller was speaking, her deep voice out-booming even Adam Ryan’s roar. “I am on that citizens’ committee,” she declared, with the antagonism that only a woman can concentrate upon a group of men. “I can tell you there is positively no C.I.O. tie-up. Mr. Chairman, let’s not be blinded by our partisan quarrels. We have a common enemy. When the people of Chicago offer to help us fight that enemy, can we turn them down?”
“We’ll fight them in our own way,” Adam Ryan reiterated. “We don’t need any help from the C.I.O. Next order of business——”
Professor Rawley, in a low, penetrating voice, insisted: “I demand that my motion be put. I appeal from the chair.”
“Out of order!” Adam Ryan flung at him. Boos circled the gallery. There was a stamping of feet.
Delegates yelled motions; arguments started across the floor. Rawley stood firm; on his face there was still that gamy glow, but without comedy; his eye now held the cold gleam that sportsmen show when fair play is in question. “You cannot refuse an appeal from the chair,” he stated. Delegates leaped up to support him. Carl identified some of them. “Regan, the clerks—a Commy. And that’s Gerardi, the typos. Good man.”
The gallery noise increased. Suddenly, with a savage bull-toss of his head, the chairman pointed his gavel at the visitors. “We’re running this meeting, not you!” he shouted, slamming down the hammer. “I don’t recognize any appeal from the chair.”
The house was aghast. Then cries began to pierce the hubbub. “Parliamentary law!” “Constitution!” “What is this, Fascism?”
Adam Ryan stood there, set as a sea-captain in a storm, listening to the timbers of his vessel strain to the breaking-point. Then he headed right into the typhoon. “We don’t need any parliamentary law here!” he shouted, stunning them. “I don’t recognize any law but the law of self-preservation. This organization is in a fight for life, and you know it. I have my orders from the national offices. I will go down the line for the organization and so will you. There’s not a trick in the world will make me lift a finger to help the enemy that is trying to destroy us. And this is one of their tricks. I am an old hand at this game and I know all those parliamentary dodges. We are in a fight for our life, and that is more important than parliamentary law.”
The main body of delegates sat in stunned silence. Only a few stirred uneasily, whispered. But the gallery did not remain silent. “Dictator!” one voice shrieked, and on three sides the cry was taken up. “Dictator!” Then they began to chant: “Vote, vote, vote, put it to a vote, vote——”
Barbara joined enthusiastically. Mitch could not bring himself to participate. True, Adam Ryan’s speech was the pure appeal of the demagogue: we are in a crisis, set aside the law, and let me rule. But Mitch could not overcome the sense of intrusion which Ryan had raised in him. He supposed those men felt just as delegates to the medical society would feel if the public should invade their hall and attempt to influence their deliberations—rightful as the public, their patients, might be.
“Vote, vote, vote,” the chant gained volume, and down there Gerardi, the typographer, was on his feet demanding a vote.
Ignoring Gerardi and Professor Rawley, Adam Ryan again addressed himself to the gallery. “You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” he cried. “You are a disgrace to your mothers!”
A sputter of laughter arose, but died under his uncompromising glare. “Oh, I know who you are,” he continued. “I know who sent you here. But your tactics won’t work. You won’t run our organization from the gallery. If you can’t show the gentlemanly courtesy your mothers taught you, then get out.”
A delegate from the cluster to the left of the rostrum, “the stooge section,” Price called it, moved that the gallery be cleared. The entire hall became quiet. At least there would be a vote on this motion; in a sense, a test of confidence in Adam Ryan. There was no debate. It was impossible to tell how many voices sounded in the defiant chorus of ayes. Without calling for nays, the chairman declared: “So ordered.”
Delegates were on their feet shouting: “Division!” Many angrily stamped their heels, but Ryan stonily waited out the hubbub; it could be sensed that the meeting was again controlled, the dominant element perhaps felt that good old Adam should win on that last trick. They’d stick with him.
“Clear the gallery!” he commanded confidently.
The sergeant-at-arms appeared at the head of the gallery stairs. “You heard the order,” he said, and waved his arms as though to gather in the visitors. “Now leave peaceable.”
Girls looked at him and giggled. From behind, Mitch heard a whisper: “Sit down, sit down,” and Barbara, delighted, passed the whisper: “Sit down, sit down.” What a joke that would be! A sitdown strike in the gallery of the American Federation of Labor!
The heavy, truculent-looking men in the stooge section turned on their chairs, craning at the gallery. Mitch Wilner felt as he had that moment on the field when Captain Wiley had read the riot act.
Adam Ryan addressed the gallery with bitter calm. “I know what you’re after,” he said. “You want us to come up and throw you out. You want a free-for-all and the police called. Well, you won’t get the satisfaction.”
With that, it was plain he had won. He had called the trick. “Is there a motion that the gallery be permanently closed to the public hereafter?” he demanded.
This time it was obvious that the majority voted Aye. Ignoring the gallery, Ryan continued with the meeting. The issue for suspending the office workers’ union was avoided. The secretary read an interminable unfair list of magazines printed at the struck Casey-Klingman plant. As the session grew boresome, the gallery began to clear.
Price was the first to rise. They followed him, glumly, filing out, passing the confused-looking sergeant-at-arms, whose expression, Mitch noticed, was exactly that of the cops in the hospital corridor when Lindstrom lay dying—a pathetic truculence that said: “Don’t blame me, we had to do this, you know how it is, self-preservation is the first law of nature, we got our jobs to think of.”
Once outside, they didn’t even curse Adam Ryan, or the A. F. of L. They were too heavy-hearted.