I finished The Coal War, a story of the great strike through which I had lived in spirit if not in physical presence; but I never published it, for world war had come and no one was interested in labor problems any more. Mrs. Gartz was a pacifist. A federal agent came to investigate her, and Craig had the job of pacifying him. “What I want to know is,” he said, “is she pro-German, or is she just a fool?” Craig assured him that the latter was the case.
Craney became an Air Force officer and traveled around in a blimp looking for German submarines off the Atlantic coast. I resigned from the Socialist Party in order to support the war; and Mrs. Gartz, a pacifist on her son’s account, took a lot of persuading from Craig—who, being a Southerner, had less objection to fighting. At any rate, that was true when the fighting was against the German Kaiser.
My socialist comrades called me bad names for a while, and Craig and Mrs. Gartz argued every time they met. But by that time Craig’s influence had become strong enough to keep Mrs. Gartz from getting into jail. We had a lot of fun laughing over the idea of Kitty—as I had come to call her—misbehaving in a jail. I think even Mr. Gartz appreciated what I was doing, and he no longer growled when he saw me in his home.
In 1918 I started the publication of a little socialist magazine to support the American position in the world war. I called it Upton Sinclair’s: For a Clean Peace and the Internation. (Later the slogan became For Social Justice, by Peaceful Means if Possible.) For that, Craig felt justified in letting Mrs. Gartz hand her several government bonds. It was amusing the way the great lady argued with us about what was in the magazine, and at the same time helped to keep it going. Some of my socialist and other friends argued with me. They would write me letters of protest against my supporting the war, and I would put the letters in the magazine and reply to them. The more angry the letters were, the more my readers were entertained. All my life I have had fun in controversy.
My position was, of course, to the left of the government. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson was to the left of his own government, and many of his officials didn’t understand his ideas—or disapproved of them when they did understand. When the first issue of the magazine appeared, I applied to the Post Office Department for second-class entry—which was essential, for if I had to pay first-class postage I would be bankrupt at the outset. I had sent copies of the magazine to a number of persons in Washington whom I knew or knew about; and when I got notice that the second-class entry had been refused, I telegraphed to Colonel House. He told me that he was with the President when the telegram was delivered, and he had told the President what was in the magazine and the President approved of it.
As it happened, John Sharp Williams, United States Senator from Mississippi, was Craig’s cousin; in her girlhood she had driven him over the shell roads of the Gulf Coast and learned about politics from his humorous stories. I had sent the magazine to him, of course; and now he wrote that he had read it and had taken up the matter of the second-class entry with Postmaster General Burleson, who was also a Southerner. Burleson had a copy of the magazine with the passages that he considered “subversive” marked. Williams said, “I’ll undertake to read those passages to Woodrow Wilson, and I’ll agree to eat my hat if he doesn’t approve every word of them.”
So it all worked out very nicely. My little magazine got the second-class entry, and Senator Williams of Mississippi went on wearing his hat.
I published, in all, ten issues of that little magazine. The first issue was April 1918; then I had to skip a month because of the delay with second-class entry. The last issue was February 1920. In all, I built up a subscription list of ten thousand, paid for at one dollar per year. I had five secretaries and office girls wrapping and mailing. Mrs. Gartz would come down and argue with Craig and me—she being an out-and-out pacifist. Her attitude was summed up by James Russell Lowell in two lines of verse—
Ez fer war, I call it murder—
There you hev it plain an’ flat.
—although I don’t think Mrs. Gartz had ever heard of The Biglow Papers.