I was speaking in Mingo. There was a big crowd there. Most of them were foreigners but they would stand for hours listening to the speakers, trying to fit the English words to the feelings in their hearts. Their patient faces looked up into mine. Slag, the finely powdered dust of the steel mills, was ground into the furrows of their foreheads, into the lines about their mouths. The mark of steel was indelibly stamped upon them. They belonged to steel, branded as are cattle on the plains by their owners.
I said to them, “Steel stock has gone up. Steel profits are enormous. Steel dividends are making men rich over night. The war—your war—has made the steel lords richer than the emperors of old Rome. And their profits are not from steel alone but from your bodies with their innumerable burns; their profits are your early old age, your swollen feet, your wearied muscles. You go without warm winter clothes that Gary and his gang may go to Florida to warm their blood. You puddle steel twelve hours a day! Your children play in the muck of mud puddles while the children of the Forty Thieves take their French and dancing lessons, and have their fingernails manicured!”
As I was about to step down from the little platform I saw the crowd in one part of the hall milling around. Some one was trying to pass out leaflets and an organizer was trying to stop him. I heard the organizer say, “No sir, that’s all right but you can’t do it here! What do you want to get us in for!”
The fellow who had the leaflets insisted on distributing them. I pushed my way over to where the disturbance was.
“Lad,” said I, “let me see one of those leaflets.”
“It’s about Russia, Mother,” said the organizer, “and you know we can’t have that!”
I took a leaflet. It asked the assistance of everyone in getting the government to lift the blockade against Russia, as hundreds of thousands of women and little children were starving for food, and thousands were dying for want of medicine and hospital necessities.
“What is the matter with these leaflets!” I asked the organizer.
“Nothing, Mother, only if we allow them to be distributed the story will go out that the strike is engineered from Moscow. We can’t mix issues. I’m afraid to let these dodgers circulate.”
“Women and children blockaded and starving! Men, women and children dying for lack of hospital necessities! This strike will not be won by turning a deaf ear to suffering wherever it occurs. There’s only one thing to be afraid of ... of not being a man!”