A moment passed and then he said, as if a little remorseful at having turned thus on me:
“Comrade, I tell you, the iron entered my soul—them days.”
It seems that the leaders of the strike were mostly old employees like Bill Hahn, and the company had conceived the idea that if these men could be eliminated the organization would collapse, and the strikers be forced back to work. One day Bill Hahn found that proceedings had been started to turn him out of his home, upon which he had not been able to keep up his payments, and at the same time the merchant, of whom he had been a respected customer for years, refused to give him any further credit.
“But we lived somehow,” he said, “we lived and we fought.”
It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant. He said he made a great discovery: that the “black people” against whom they had struck in 1894 were not to blame!
“I tell you,” said he, “we found when we got started that them black people—we used to call 'em dagoes—were just workin' people like us—and in hell with us. They were good soldiers, them Eyetalians and Poles and Syrians, they fought with us to the end.”
I shall not soon forget the intensely dramatic but perfectly simple way in which he told me how he came, as he said, “to see the true light.” Holding up his maimed right hand (that trembled a little), he pointed one finger upward.
“I seen the big hand in the sky,” he said, “I seen it as clear as daylight.”
He said he saw at last what Socialism meant. One day he went home from a strikers' meeting—one of the last, for the men were worn out with their long struggle. It was a bitter cold day, and he was completely discouraged. When he reached his own street he saw a pile of household goods on the sidewalk in front of his home. He saw his wife there wringing her hands and crying. He said he could not take a step further, but sat down on a neighbour's porch and looked and looked. “It was curious,” he said, “but the only thing I could see or think about was our old family clock which they had stuck on top of the pile, half tipped over. It looked odd and I wanted to set it up straight. It was the clock we bought when we were married, and we'd had it about twenty years on the mantel in the livin'-room. It was a good clock,” he said.
He paused and then smiled a little.