Marching Men

by Sherwood Anderson

I remember that newspaper men used to sit in their little holes and write saying of him that the times made McGregor. I do not know about that. The city caught fire from the man at the time of that terrible speech of his in the court room when Polk Street Mary grew afraid and told the truth. There he stood, the raw untried red-haired miner from the mines and the Tenderloin, facing an angry court and a swarm of protesting lawyers and uttering that city-shaking philippic against the old rotten first ward and the creeping cowardice in men that lets vice and disease go on and pervade all modern life. It was in a way another “J'Accuse!” from the lips of another Zola. Men who heard it have told me that when he had finished in the whole court no man spoke and no man dared feel guiltless. “For the moment something—a section, a cell, a figment, of men's brains opened—and in that terrible illuminating instant they saw themselves as they were and what they had let life become.”

They saw something else, or thought they did, saw McGregor a new force for Chicago to reckon with. After the trial one young newspaper man returned to his office and running from desk to desk yelled in the faces of his brother reporters: “Hell's out for noon. We've got a big red-haired Scotch lawyer up here on Van Buren Street that is a kind of a new scourge of the world. Watch the First Ward get it.”

But McGregor never looked at the First Ward. That wasn't bothering him. From the court room he went to march with men in a new field.

Followed the time of waiting and of patient quiet work. In the evenings McGregor worked at the law cases in the bare room in Van Buren Street. That queer bird Henry Hunt still stayed with him, collecting tithes for the gang and going to his respectable home at night—a strange triumph of the small that had escaped the tongue of McGregor on that day in court when so many men had their names bruited to the world in McGregor's roll call—the roll call of the men who were but merchants, brothers of vice, the men who should have been masters in the city.

And then the movement of the Marching Men began to come to the surface. It got into the blood of men. That harsh drumming voice began to shake their hearts and their legs.

Everywhere men began to see and hear of the Marchers. From lip to lip ran the question, “What's going on?”

“What's going on?” How that cry ran over Chicago. Every newspaper man in town got assignments on the story. The papers were loaded with it every day. All over the city they appeared, everywhere—the Marching Men.

There were leaders enough! The Cuban War and the State Militia had taught too many men the swing of the march step for there not to be at least two or three competent drill masters in every little company of men.

And there was the marching song the Russian wrote for McGregor. Who could forget it? Its high pitched harsh feminine strain rang in the brain. How it went pitching and tumbling along in that wailing calling endless high note. It had strange breaks and intervals in the rendering. The men did not sing it. They chanted it. There was in it just the weird haunting something the Russians know how to put into their songs and into the books they write. It isn't the quality of the soil. Some of our own music has that. But in this Russian song there was something else, something world-wide and religious—a soul, a spirit. Perhaps it is just the spirit that broods over that strange land and people. There was something of Russia in McGregor himself.

Anyway the marching song was the most persistently penetrating thing Americans had ever heard. It was in the streets, the shops, the offices, the alleys and in the air overhead—the wail—half shout. No noise could drown it. It swung and pitched and rioted through the air.