(The steamdrill had thrown thousands of miners out of work; the steamdrill had thrown a scare into all the miners of the West.)
The W.F.M. was going conservative. Haywood worked with the I.W.W. building a new society in the shell of the old, campaigned for Debs for President in 1908 on the Red Special. He was in on all the big strikes in the East where revolutionary spirit was growing, Lawrence, Paterson, the strike of the Minnesota ironworkers.
They went over with the A.E.F. to save the Morgan loans, to save Wilsonian Democracy, they stood at Napoleon’s tomb and dreamed empire, they had champagne cocktails at the Ritz bar and slept with Russian countesses in Montmartre and dreamed empire, all over the country at American legion posts and business men’s luncheons it was worth money to make the eagle scream;
they lynched the pacifists and the proGermans and the wobblies and the reds and the bolsheviks.
Bill Haywood stood trial with the hundred and one at Chicago where Judge Landis the baseball czar
with the lack of formality of a traffic court
handed out his twenty year sentences and thirtythousand dollar fines.
After two years in Leavenworth they let them bail out Big Bill (he was fifty years old a heavy broken man), the war was over but they’d learned empire in the Hall of the Mirrors at Versailles;
the courts refused a new trial.
It was up to Haywood to jump his bail or to go back to prison for twenty years.
He was sick with diabetes, he had had a rough life, prison had broken down his health. Russia was a workers’ republic; he went to Russia and was in Moscow a couple of years but he wasn’t happy there, that world was too strange for him. He died there and they burned his big broken hulk of a body and buried the ashes under the Kremlin wall.
The Camera Eye (10)
the old major who used to take me to the Capitol when the Senate and the House of Representatives were in session had been in the commissary of the Confederate Army and had very beautiful manners so the attendants bowed to the old major except for the pages who were little boys not much older than your brother was a page in the Senate once and occasionally a Representative or a Senator would look at him with slit eyes may be somebody and bow or shake hearty or raise a hand
the old major dressed very well in a morningcoat and had muttonchop whiskers and we would walk very slowly through the flat sunlight in the Botanical Gardens and look at the little labels on the trees and shrubs and see the fat robins and the starlings hop across the grass and walk up the steps and through the flat air of the rotunda with the dead statues of different sizes and the Senate Chamber flat red and the committee room and the House flat green and the committee rooms and the Supreme Court I’ve forgotten what color the Supreme Court was and the committee rooms
and whispering behind the door of the visitors’ gallery and the dead air and a voice rattling under the glass skylights and desks slammed and the long corridors full of the dead air and our legs would get very tired and I thought of the starlings on the grass and the long streets full of dead air and my legs were tired and I had a pain between the eyes and the old men bowing with quick slit eyes
may be somebody and big slit unkind mouths and the dusty black felt and the smell of coatclosets and dead air and I wonder what the old major thought about and what I thought about maybe about that big picture at the Corcoran Art Gallery full of columns and steps and conspirators and Caesar in purple fallen flat called Caesar dead
Mac
Mac had hardly gotten off the train at Goldfield when a lanky man in khaki shirt and breeches, wearing canvas army leggins, went up to him. “If you don’t mind, what’s your business in this town, brother?” “I’m travelin’ in books.” “What kinda books?” “Schoolbooks and the like, for Truthseeker, Inc. of Chicago.” Mac rattled it off very fast, and the man seemed impressed. “I guess you’re all right,” he said. “Going up to the Eagle?” Mac nodded. “Plug’ll take ye up, the feller with the team… You see we’re looking out for these goddam agitators, the I Won’t Work outfit.”
Outside the Golden Eagle Hotel there were two soldiers on guard, toughlooking sawedoff men with their hats over their eyes. When Mac went in everybody at the bar turned and looked at him. He said “Good evening, gents,” as snappily as possible and went up to the proprietor to ask for a room. All the while he was wondering who the hell he dared ask where the office of the Nevada Workman was. “I guess I can fix you up with a bed. Travelin’ man?” “Yes,” said Mac. “In books.” Down at the end a big man with walrus whiskers was standing at the bar talking fast in a drunken whining voice, “If they’d only give me my head I’d run the bastards outa town soon enough. Too goddam many lawyers mixed up in this. Run the sonsobitches out. If they resists shoot ’em, that’s what I says to the Governor, but they’re all these sonsobitches a lawyers fussin’ everythin’ up all the time with warrants and habeas corpus and longwinded rigmarole. My ass to habeas corpus.” “All right, Joe, you tell ’em,” said the proprietor soothingly. Mac bought a cigar and sauntered out. As the door closed behind him the big man was yelling out again, “I said, My ass to habeas corpus.”
It was nearly dark. An icy wind blew through the ramshackle clapboard streets. His feet stumbling in the mud of the deep ruts, Mac walked round several blocks looking up at dark windows. He walked all over the town but no sign of a newspaper office. When he found himself passing the same Chink hashjoint for the third time, he slackened his steps and stood irresolutely on the curb. At the end of the street the great jagged shank of a hill hung over the town. Across the street a young man, his head and ears huddled into the collar of a mackinaw, was loafing against the dark window of a hardware store. Mac decided he was a squarelooking stiff and went over to speak to him.
“Say, bo, where’s the office of the Nevada Workman?” “What the hell d’you wanter know for?” Mac and the other man looked at each other. “I want to see Fred Hoff… I came on from San Fran to help in the printin’.” “Got a red card?” Mac pulled out his I.W.W. membership card. “I’ve got my union card, too, if you want to see that.”
“Hell, no… I guess you’re all right, but, as the feller said, suppose I’d been a dick, you’d be in the bullpen now, bo.”
“I told ’em I was a friggin’ bookagent to get into the damn town. Spent my last quarter on a cigar to keep up the burjwa look.”
The other man laughed. “All right, fellowworker. I’ll take you round.”
“What they got here, martial law?” asked Mac as he followed the man down an alley between two overgrown shanties.
“Every sonofabitchin’ yellerleg in the State of Nevada right here in town… Lucky if you don’t get run outa town with a bayonet in yer crotch, as the feller said.”
At the end of the alley was a small house like a shoebox with brightly lit windows. Young fellows in miners’ clothes or overalls filled up the end of the alley and sat three deep on the rickety steps. “What’s this, a poolroom?” asked Mac. “This is the Nevada Workman… Say, my name’s Ben Evans; I’ll introjuce you to the gang… Say, yous guys, this is fellowworker McCreary… he’s come on from Frisco to set up type.” “Put it there, Mac,” said a sixfooter who looked like a Swede lumberman, and gave Mac’s hand a wrench that made the bones crack.
Fred Hoff had on a green eyeshade and sat behind a desk piled with galleys. He got up and shook hands. “Oh, boy, you’re just in time. There’s hell to pay. They got the printer in the bullpen and we’ve got to get this sheet out.” Mac took off his coat and went back to look over the press. He was leaning over the typesetter’s “stone” when Fred Hoff came back and beckoned him into a corner.