“And that is enough to keep the newspapers from printing an article about conditions in Sippiac?” asked Banneker, deeply interested in this phase of the question. “Is that the fact?”
It was not the fact; The Sphere, for one, would have handled the strike on the basis of news interest, as Mr. Vanney well knew; wherefore he hated and pretended to despise The Sphere. But for his own purposes he answered:
“Not a paper in New York would touch it. Except,” he added negligently, “perhaps some lying, Socialist sheet. And let me warn you, Mr. Banneker,” he pursued in his suavest tone, “that you will find no place for your peculiar ideas on The Ledger. In fact, I doubt whether you will be doing well either by them or by yourself in going on their staff, holding such views as you do.”
“Do you? Then I’ll tell them beforehand.”
Mr. Vanney privately reflected that there was no need of this: he intended to call up the editor-in-chief and suggest the unsuitability of the candidate for a place, however humble, on the staff of a highly respectable and suitably respectful daily.
Which he did. The message was passed on to Mr. Gordon, and, in his large and tolerant soul, decently interred. One thing of which the managing editor of The Ledger was not tolerant was interference from without in his department.
Before allowing his man to leave, Mr. Vanney read him a long and well-meant homily, full of warning and wisdom, and was both annoyed and disheartened when, at the end of it, Banneker remarked:
“I’ll dare you to take a car and spend twenty-four hours going about Sippiac with me. If you stand for your system after that, I’ll pay for the car.”
To which the other replied sadly that Banneker had in some manner acquired a false and distorted view of industrial relations.
Therein, for once in an existence guided almost exclusively by prejudice, Horace Vanney was right. At the outset of a new career to which he was attuning his mind, Banneker had been injected into a situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be fairly representative. Had not Horace Vanney, doubtless genuine in his belief, told him as much?