Then, of course, the mob flew into a frenzy of fury. They beat the men in the hall, some of them into insensibility; they flung them into jail, and battered and tortured them, and took one of them out of jail and carried him away in an automobile, and after they had mutilated him as Shawn Grady had been mutilated, they hanged him from a bridge. Of course they saw to it that the newspaper stories which went out from Centralia that night were the right kind of stories; and next morning all America read how a group of “wobblies” had armed themselves with rifles, and concealed themselves on the roof of the I. W. W. headquarters, and deliberately and in cold blood had opened fire upon a peaceful parade of unarmed war veterans.
Of course the country went wild, and the Guffeys and McGivneys and Gudges all over the United States realized that their chance had come. Peter instructed the secretary of the I. W. W. local of American City to call a meeting for that evening, to adopt a resolution declaring the press stories from Centralia to be lies. At the same time another of Guffey’s men, an ex-army officer still wearing his, uniform, caused a meeting of the American Legion to be summoned; he made a furious address to the boys, and at nine o’clock that night some two-score of them set out, armed with big monkey-wrenches from their automobiles, and raided the I. W. W. headquarters, and battered the members over the head with the monkey-wrenches, causing several to leap from the window and break their legs. Next morning the incident was reported in the American City “Times” with shouts of glee, and District-attorney Burchard issued a public statement to the effect that no effort would be made to punish the soldier boys; the “wobblies” had wanted “direct action,” and they had got it, and it would be assumed that they were satisfied.
Then the members of the American Legion, encouraged by this applause, and instigated by Guffey’s ex-army officer, proceeded to invade and wreck every radical meeting-place in the city. They smashed the “Clarion” office and the Socialist Party headquarters again, and confiscated more tons of literature. They wrecked a couple of book-stores, and then, breaking up into small groups, they inspected all the news-stands in the city, and wherever they found Red magazines like the Nation or the New Republic, they tore up the copies and threatened the agents with arrest. They invaded the rooms of a literary society called the Ruskin Club, frequented mostly by amiable old ladies, and sent some of these elderly dames into hysterics. They discovered the “Russian Peoples’ Club,” which had hitherto been overlooked because it was an educational organization. But of course no Russian could be trusted these days—all of them were Bolsheviks, or on the way to becoming Bolsheviks, which was the same thing; so Guffey organized a raid on this building, and some two hundred Russians were clubbed and thrown downstairs or out of windows, and an elderly teacher of mathematics had his skull cracked, and a teacher of music had some teeth knocked out.
There were several million young Americans who had been put into military uniform, and had guns put into their hands, and been put thru target practice and bayonet drill, and then had not seen any fighting. These fellows were, as the phrase has it, “spoiling for a fight;” and here was their chance. It was just as much fun as trench warfare, and had the advantage of not being dangerous. When the raiding parties came back, there were no missing members, and no casualties to be telegraphed to heartbroken parents. Some fool women got together and tried to organize a procession to protest against the blockade of Russia; the raiders fell upon these women, and wrecked their banners, and tore their clothing to bits, and the police hustled what was left of them off to jail. It happened that a well-known “sporting man,” that is to say a race-track frequenter, came along wearing a red necktie, and the raiders, taking him for a Bolshevik, fell upon him and pretty nearly mauled the life out of him. After that there was protest from people who thought it unwise to break too many laws while defending law and order, so the district attorney’s office arranged to take on the young soldier boys as deputy sheriffs, and give them all badges, legal and proper.
Section 81
Peter Gudge often went along on these hunting parties. Peter, curiously enough, discovered in himself the same “complex” as the balked soldier boys. Peter had been reading war news for five years, but had missed the fighting; and now he discovered that he liked to fight. What had kept him from liking to fight in the past was the danger of getting hurt; but now that there was no such danger, he could enjoy it. In past times people had called him a coward, and he had heard it so often that he had come to believe it; but now he realized that it was not true, he was just as brave as anybody else in the crowd.
The truth was that Peter had not had a happy time in his youth, he had never learned, like the younger members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, to knock a little white ball about a field with various shapes and sizes of clubs. Peter was like a business man who has missed his boyhood, and then in later years finds the need of recreation, and takes up some form of sport by the orders of his physician. It became Peter’s, form of sport to stick an automatic revolver in his hip-pocket, and take a blackjack in his hand, and rush into a room where thirty or forty Russians or “Sheenies” of all ages and lengths of beard were struggling to learn the intricacies of English spelling. Peter would give a yell, and see this crowd leap and scurry hither and thither, and chase them about and take a whack at a head wherever he saw one, and jump into a crowd who were bunched together like sheep, trying to hide their heads, and pound them over the exposed parts of their anatomy until they scattered into the open again. He liked to get a lot of them started downstairs and send them tumbling heels over head; or if he could get them going out a window, that was more exhilarating yet, and he would yell and whoop at them. He learned some of their cries—outlandish gibberish it was—and he would curse them in their own language. He had a streak of the monkey in him, and as he got to know these people better he would imitate their antics and their gestures of horror, and set a whole room full of the “bulls” laughing to split their sides. There was a famous “movie” comedian with big feet, and Peter would imitate this man, and waddle up to some wretched sweat-shop worker and boot him in the trousers’ seat, or step on his toes, or maybe spit in his eye. So he became extremely popular among the “bulls,” and they would insist on his going everywhere with them.
Later on, when the government set to work to break up the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, Peter’s popularity and prestige increased still more. For now, instead of just raiding and smashing, the police and detectives would round up the prisoners and arrest them by hundreds, and carry them off and put them thru “examinations.” And Peter was always needed for this; his special knowledge made him indispensable, and he became practically the boss of the proceedings. It had been arranged thru “Shorty” Gunton and the other “under cover” men that the meetings of the Communist and Communist Labor parties should be held on the same night; and all over the country this same thing was done, and next morning the world was electrified by the news that all these meetings had been raided at the same hour, and thousands of Reds placed under arrest. In American City the Federal government had hired a suite of about a dozen rooms adjoining the offices of Guffey, and all night and next morning batches of prisoners were brought in, until there were about four hundred in all. They were crowded into these rooms with barely space to sit down; of course there was an awful uproar, moaning and screaming of people who had been battered, and a smell that beat the monkey cage at the zoological gardens.