“Sure it’s here. But it’s the duty of intelligent men and women to break it.”
“So you’d have equal social rights for the nigger, as the nigger writers are advocating, would you? You’d have them marry and—”
“Don’t talk like a damn fool,” interrupted McCall. “Social equality is nothing that can be regulated. It is up to the individual. But you can insure social and economic justice, at least in a measure, and you can at least try to keep racial hatred from flaring up. Don’t you see what the Tribe is doing? It is simply magnifying all the narrow prejudices and hatreds. No man of intelligence could be reasoned into joining it because of its demands. He joins because his prejudices are aroused.”
“Why can’t he? Americanism. Pure womanhood—”
“Don’t talk like an ass. These terms don’t mean a blamed thing. Everybody is for Americanism, those niggers who chased you down the street as much as any one. Every one is for pure womanhood, except a few degenerates whom your prisons take care of. White supremacy is simply the Tribe’s way of saying black hatred. That’s what the Tribe stands for—hatred, hate of the black, of the Jew and of the Catholic, hate of the labor union—it wants to abolish needless strikes, with a Tribesman, I suppose, to decide which are needless. And then there are states’ rights and prohibition. If you appealed to a man’s reason, you couldn’t get any members, because those planks automatically cut off every one who is a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, an alien, a Republican, a radical, a believer in organized labor, a liberal or an intellectual. And their insinuations about Wilson—Democrats. Now, then, who’s left? What’s this junk?”
He stooped to pick up one of the folders of the Trick Track Tribe, which had fallen out of Robert’s pocket. It was headed “Knights of Columbus Oath, Fourth Degree.”
“What is this?”
As he read, McCall’s eyes blazed and the arteries of his neck swelled. Robert bit his lips. The time had come. He could no longer dissemble. It was a question of his friendship with McCall—McCall his buddy of the trenches—or loyalty to the Tribe. McCall’s voice was raised in anger: “What’s this blasphemy!”
He read:
“‘When opportunity presents, I shall make and wage relentless war, open and secretly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and burn alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.