“I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.
Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of his connection with the movement.
“She wants me to be respectable,” he said sadly, and added, “What’s the use trying to explain to a woman? I can’t get her to see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I’ve given up trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.”
He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.
The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths over his shoulder.
Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down with them before the grocery store.
“What are you doing to win?” he asked when they had told him of their grievances.
“We do what we can!” said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and spokesman among the strikers. “We walk up and down here and try to get a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns, when they go in and come out.”
Frank, the University man, spoke up. “We are putting up stickers everywhere,” he said. “I myself have put up hundreds of them.”
He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town. The thing was vilely written. “Down with the dirty scabs” was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.