The Thunders of Silence

by Irvin S. Cobb

Afterward Captain Bull Hargis said that never in his recollection of New York crowds had there been a crowd so hard to contend against or one so difficult to penetrate; he said this between gasps for breath while nursing a badly sprained thumb. The men under him agreed with him. The thing overpassed anything in their professional experiences. Several of them were veterans of the force too.

It was a dramatic entrance which Congressman Mallard made before his audience within the hall, packed as the hall was, with its air all hot and sticky with the animal heat of thousands of closely bestowed human bodies. Hardly could it have been a more dramatic entrance. From somewhere in the back he suddenly came out upon the stage. He was bareheaded and bare-throated. Outside in that living whirlpool his soft black hat had been plucked from his head and was gone. His collar, tie and all, had been torn from about his neck, and the same rudely affectionate hand that wrested the collar away had ripped his linen shirt open so that the white flesh of his chest showed through the gap of the tear. His great disorderly mop of bright red hair stood erect on his scalp like an oriflamme. His overcoat was half on and half off his back.

At sight of him the place rose at him, howling out its devotion. He flung off his overcoat, letting it fall upon the floor, and he strode forward almost to the trough of the footlights; and then for a space he stood there on the rounded apron of the platform, staring out into the troubled, tossing pool of contorted faces and tossing arms below him and about him. Demagogue he may have been; demigod he looked in that, his moment of supreme triumph, biding his time to play upon the passions and the prejudices of this multitude as a master organist would play upon the pipes of an organ. Here was clay, plastic to his supple fingers—here in this seething conglomerate of half-baked intellectuals, of emotional rebels against constituted authority, of alien enemies of malcontents and malingerers, of parlour anarchists from the studios of Bohemianism and authentic anarchists from the slums.

Ten blaring, exultant minutes passed before the ex-clergyman, who acted as chairman, could secure a measure of comparative quiet. At length there came a lull in the panting tumult. Then the chair made an announcement which brought forth in fuller volume than ever a responsive roar of approval. He announced that on the following night and on the night after, Congressman Mallard would speak at Madison Square Garden, under the largest roof on Manhattan Island. The committee in charge had been emboldened by the size of this present outpouring to engage the garden; the money to pay the rent for those two nights had already been subscribed; admission would be free; all would be welcome to come and—quoting the chairman—"to hear the truth about the war into which the Government, at the bidding of the capitalistic classes, had plunged the people of the nation." Then in ten words he introduced the speaker, and as the speaker raised his arms above his head invoking quiet, there fell, magically, a quick, deep, breathless hush upon the palpitant gathering.

"And this"—he began without preamble in that great resonant voice of his, that was like a blast of a trumpet—"and this, my countrymen, is the answer which the plain people of this great city make to the corrupted and misguided press that would crucify any man who dares defy it."

He spoke for more than an hour, and when he was done his hearers were as madmen and madwomen. And yet so skilfully had he phrased his utterances, so craftily had he injected the hot poison, so deftly had he avoided counselling outright disobedience to the law, that sundry secret-service men who had been detailed to attend the meeting and to arrest the speaker, United States representative though he be, in case he preached a single sentence of what might be interpreted as open treason, were completely circumvented.

It is said that on this night Congressman Mallard made the best speech he ever made in his whole life. But as to that we cannot be sure, and for this reason:

On Monday morning, as has twice been stated in this account, Congressman Mallard's name was in every paper, nearly, in America. On Tuesday morning not a line concerning him or concerning his speech or the remarkable demonstration of the night before—not a line of news, not a line of editorial comment, not a paragraph—appeared in any newspaper printed in the English language on this continent. The silent war had started.

Tuesday evening at eight-fifteen Congressman Mallard came to Madison Square Garden, accompanied by the honour guard of his sponsors. The police department, taking warning by what had happened on Monday night down on the West Side, had sent the police reserves of four precincts—six hundred uniformed men, under an inspector and three captains—to handle the expected congestion inside and outside the building. These six hundred men had little to do after they formed their lines and lanes except to twiddle their night sticks and to stamp their chilled feet.

For a strange thing befell. Thousands had participated in the affair of the night before. By word of mouth these thousands most surely must have spread the word among many times their own number of sympathetic individuals. And yet—this was the strange part—by actual count less than fifteen hundred persons, exclusive of the policemen, who were there because their duty sent them there, attended Tuesday night's meeting. To be exact there were fourteen hundred and seventy-five of them. In the vast oval of the interior they made a ridiculously small clump set midway of the area, directly in front of the platform that had been put up. All about them were wide reaches of seating space—empty. The place was a huge vaulted cavern, cheerless as a cave, full of cold drafts and strange echoes. Congressman Mallard spoke less than an hour, and this time he did not make the speech of his life.