In the Heart of a Fool

by William Allen White

Ahab nodded and listened. “Wait,” he said, putting his hand over the telephone receiver, and added in a low voice to those in the room: “He was just talking about that and thinks he will not proclaim martial law until there is actual violence–which he feels will follow the coming of the troops, when the men see he is determined. He said then that he expected Captain Calvin of the Harvey Company to take charge, and the Governor will speak to the other officers 549about it.” Ahab paused a moment for further orders. “Well,” said the elder Calvin, “I believe that’s all.”

“Will there be anything else to-day, Joe?” asked Ahab, unconsciously assuming his counter manner to young Joe Calvin, who replied without a smile:

“Well–no–not to-day, thank you,” and Ahab went back to the Governor and ended the parley.

The Times the next morning with flaring headlines announced that the Governor had decided to send troops to the Wahoo Valley to protect the property in the mines and mills for the rightful owners and to prevent any further incendiary speaking and rioting such as had disgraced Market Street the day before. In an editorial the Governor was advised to proclaim martial law, as only the strictest repression would prevent the rise of anarchy and open rebellion to the authorities.

The troops came on the early morning trains, and filed into the sheds occupied by the workmen before the strike. The young militiamen immediately began pervading South Harvey, Foley and Magnus, and when the strikers lined up before the gates and doors of their former working places at seven o’clock that morning they met a brown line of youths–devil-may-care young fellows out for a lark, who liked to prod the workmen with their bayonets and who laughingly ordered the strikers to stop trying to keep the strike-breakers from going to work. The strikers were bound by their pledges to the Trades Council not to touch the strike-breakers under any circumstances. The strikers–white-badged and earnest-faced–made their campaign by lining up five on each side of a walk or path through which the strike-breakers would have to pass to their work, and crying:

“Help us, and we’ll help you. Don’t scab on us–keep out of the works, and we’ll see that you are provided for. Join us–don’t turn your backs on your fellow workers.”

They would stretch out their arms in mute appeal when words failed, and they brought dozens of strike-breakers away from their work. And on the second morning of the strike not a wheel turned in the district.

All morning Grant Adams moved among the men. He 550was a marked figure–with his steel claw–and he realized that he was regarded by the militiamen as an ogre. A young militiaman had hurt a boy in Magnus–pricked him in the leg and cut an artery. Grant tried to see the Colonel of the company to protest. But the soldier had been to the officer with his story, and Grant was told that the boy attacked the militiaman–which, considering that the boy was a child in his early teens and the man was armed and in his twenties, was unlikely. But Grant saw that his protests would not avail. He issued a statement, gave it to the press correspondents who came flocking in with the troops, and sent it to the Governor, who naturally transferred it back to the militiamen.

In the afternoon the parade started again–the women and children in white, and the men in white coats and white working caps. It formed on a common between Harvey and South Harvey, and instead of going into Harvey turned down into the Valley where it marched silently around the quiet mills and shafts and to the few tenements where the strike-breakers were lodged. A number of them were sitting at the windows and on the steps and when the strikers saw the men in the tenements, they raised their arms in mute appeal, but spoke no word. Down the Valley the procession hurried and in every town repeated this performance. The troops had gathered in Harvey and were waiting, and it was not until after three o’clock that they started after the strikers. A troop of cavalry overtook the column in Foley, and rode through the line a few times, but no one spoke, and the cavalrymen rode along the line but did not try to break it. So the third day passed without a fire in a furnace in the district.

That night Grant Adams addressed the strikers in Belgian Hall in South Harvey, in Fraternity Hall in Magnus and on a common in Foley. The burden of his message was this: “Stick–stick to the strike and to our method. If we can demonstrate the fact that we have the brains to organize, to abandon force, to maintain ourselves financially, to put our cause before our fellow workers so clearly that they will join us–we can win, we can enter into the partnership in these mills that is ours by right. The Democracy of Labor is a 551Democracy of Peace–only in peace, only by using the higher arts of peace under great provocation may we establish that Democracy and come into our own. Stick–stick–stick to the strike and stick to the ways of peace. Let them rally to their Colonels and their tin soldiers–and we shall not fear–for we are gathered about the Prince of Peace.”