Louis Adamic October 1930 American Mercury

VI.  “Well, anyhow, from Seattle Wilson went down to Portland, and from there on to California.

“In a couple of days the wobblies in Seattle began to discuss the newspaper reports and rumors which were to the effect that Wilson wasn’t well, that he was ‘fatigued,’ and so on.

“Of course, he was sick before he started West, but when two weeks after leaving Seattle he finally broke down altogether, and had to abandon his tour, the IWW’s around Pugent Sound developed the idea that our demonstration on September 13 was behind it all.

“We five men who had called on Wilson, of course, told about our visit.  I tried to be accurate, but the other four, I think exaggerated things a little.  By and by the story of our visit, as it went from mouth to mouth among the wobblies, was to the effect that Wilson had collapsed while talking with us.

“Very few IWW’s were willing to remember that Wilson was a sick man before coming to Seattle.  Almost everybody seemed to be convinced that we — the thousandas of wobblies who had lined the streets when he rode through Seattle — had ‘assassinated’ him.  That was the word they used.  And since I was the one who originated the idea, I was given the credit for the ‘assassination.’

“The idea persists to this day, and I don’t believe there is any way of killing it.  The wobblies argue that I finished Wilson a goddamn sight more thoroughly than if someone had shot him dead or blown him up with dynomite.  Had he been assassinated physically, they say, he would now be a rival for Lincoln as a national hero.  In 1919 he was going through the biggest crisis in his career.  A shot from an assassin’s gun would have saved him historically, whether his League of Nations went over or not, because such a death would have been dramatic and tragic.  Instead, on September 13, he shrvilled up before our numbers, and in the next two weeks he degenerated into complete ineffectiveness.  He has been of no consequence ever since.  Now he is a futile old man — dead, although still unburied.  That’s the wobbly idea about in on the Coast.”

I asked Kipps what he himself thought about it.

“Well,” he said, “I know that Wilson was sick before he came West in August, 1919.  To say that our demonstration assassinated him, of course, is an exaggeration, but there is no doubt in my mind that it hastened his breakdown.  It was, perhaps, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I’m called ‘the guy who assassinated Wilson.’  I guess I’ll be known as such the rest of my life, though in the last two years I’ve heard of two or three other men who claim to have suggested the demonstration on September 13.  But I don’t care.  They can have the credit.  As a matter of fact, I often wish I hadn’t had anything to do with it, though I know that as an IWW I oughtn’t feel that way.

“There is no doubt, however, that the demonstration had a powerful effect on Wilson.  Only the other day I picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly at the library and there was a little article by him called ‘Away From the Revolution!’ in which he appeals to the responsible capitalists of the country to lessen their resistance to the proletariat’s efforts to improve its lot.  The article is almost hysterical in tone; the hysteria of a senile old man just awakened from a nightmare.  Read and you’ll see.

“Wilson may live a few years longer and write a few more articles, but you can’t convince the wobblies on the Coast that hasn’t been dead ever since that Saturday afternoon in Seattle in 1919.”
……………………………………………………….

VII.  As I have mentioned, Jack Kpps told me this story some time in 1923.  Shortly afterward the IWW longshoremen’s union in San Pedro called a strike, tying up the harbor for two weeks, at the end of which time the strike was broken and then several of the leaders and agitators, including Kipps, were charged with criminal syndicalism, tried and sent to San Quentin.

Kipps was released late in 1927, and I ran into him one Sunday afternoon in Pershing Park in Los Angeles.  He had spent over three years in the prison jute mill.

I scarcely recognized him.  He looked definitely ill.  He was all skin and bone, and all his hair, what there was left of it, had turned gray.  Coughing dryly, he told me with a shrug of his shoulders that now he had T.B. for fair.  He grinned and said:  “I’m a short-timer.”

Woodrow Wilsonhad been dead then over two years.

Kipps was unwilling to discuss the Seattle incident any further.  We talked of other things.  He mentioned an article of mine that he had read in a magazine.  I asked would he mind if some day I wrote up the Seattle demonstration.  He thought a while, then he said:

“I’d prefer if you don’t.  I’m not exactly stuck up over the fact that the idea behind the affair was mine.  I never had any bad feelings toward Wilson.  He probably was all right in some ways.  He was prt of the System, helpless to do anything for the workers even if he wanted to.  He meant well.  The workers must help themselves; nobody else will or cal help them; and whether they can or not remains to be seen.  That stunt in Seattle was aimed more at Ole Hanson and that bunch of coyotes there than at Wilson.

“If you wrote a piece about me, I probably couldn’t resist looking it up:  and I don’t want to see it.  I can’t get the affair out of my mind as it is.  In San Quentin, when I couldn’t sleep nights, I thought about it for hours.  I haven’t a bad conscience about it, or anything like that; but everywhere I go they say I’m the guy who assassinated Wilson.  They called me that in San Quentin.  Lately I’ve started to deny having had any connection with the matter whatever.  I don’t like it.  Wilson is dead now, so why gloat over it?  After all, he was President of the United States.  I can’t help feeling that way, although, perhaps as a radical I oughtn’t to.”

He paused a minute, coughing.

“But of course,” he said then, “I don’t care what you do” — coughing — “afterward.  I mean in a year or two.  I probably won’t last that long.”

Soon after this someone induced a wealthy woman radical in Pasadena, a parlor pink, to send Kipps to a sanitarium at Sierra Madre.  He was there two years, a hopeless case, sitting in the sun, reading.

Last Spring he died.

This is about Liberals in general, you must be sick in the head, hate America is your motto, Socialism is your ideology, then you have Barak Obama the usurper in office, thats right, he’s not even a natural born citizen and you people are to stupid to realize what you have done to the country. Is your new salute, Seig Heil.

Posted by: A Patriot from Kansaas | February 14, 2009 12:09 PM

Posted here.  There isn’t too much to say about it, and it’s not really indicative of too much — surely I can dredge up something similarly uninsightful from the liberal/progressive sphere.  I think the “Conservapedia” post on the “Republican Party” is due for the “birth certificate” edit into this line:

In terms of winning presidential elections, the Republican Party has been the most successful political party in U.S. history. Since the American Civil War, Grover Cleveland is the only non-incumbent Democrat who has won the office of President of the United States under “ordinary” circumstances (meaning no third party, no Great Depression, no disputed count in Illinois, no assassination of the previous president, no Watergate).

It would fit right in there, right?  “No foreign birth”, such as that is.

I may also report here that I think the Conservative Pundit talk-radio type guy to watch for for in this Obama Era is Glen Beck.  Surely he was popping up here and there during the Bush Administration, saying such and such a silly thing, but since being consigned to the “Loyal Opposition”, he’s emerged as someone who’s words and antics stick out just a little bit bolder than his compatriots.  Between focusing viewer attention on his eyes and analyzing events in terms of finding the “Archduke Ferdinad Moment”, he appears to be the one to watch.

Louis Adamic October 1930 American Mercury

“That evening a messenger came to the IWW headquarters with a request from the President for our delegation to call on him at ten-thirty the next morning and, if we desired, to present our petition.

“Of course we informed the messenger that we’d be there.  Then we quickly made up a delegation of five men, including two ex-soldiers and myself.  The ex-service men wore overseas caps and others parts of the uniform; one had a wound stripe on his sleeve, and we made him Number One of the delegation.  He was to present the petition.  He name was Harry Link.  Each one of us was supposed to make a little speech, and we rehearsed half the night.

“At ten-twenty-five the next morning — Sunday — the five of us went to the swell hotel where Wilson was staying.  The place was all in flags.  A couple of sentries stood at the entrance of the lobby.

“A young Army officer in a snappy uniform — boots, spurs, Sam Brown belt and saber — met us in the doorway.  I guess he was waiting for us.  He gave us the once-over, especially the ex-soldiers.

“‘You are –?’ he began to ask.

“‘We are a delegation of the Industrial Workers of the World.’ said Harry Link.  ‘We have an appointment with the President.’

“Then newspaper men began to crowd around us, and the officer quickly ordered us to follow him.  We went up an elevator, and then through a corridor, which was banked with flowers, with a couple of soldiers hanging around.

“We entered a small room and the officer asked us to sit down.  His neat military appearance was in sharp contrast with our own.  He kept on eyeing us.

“We were in the presidential suite.  We sat there about ten or fifteen minutes.  Nobody said a word.  Somewhere we could hear the clicking of a typewriter.

“Then a door opened and a civilian secretary or Secret Service man advanced to us briskly.  He looked us over and took our names.  Then he said: ‘Come this way, please,’ in a crisp official tone of voice.  He looked like a floorwalker.

“He led us into a great big room.  Right near the door was a tremendous basket of flowers, and the rest of the delegation sort of crowded me against it.  The top of a fern leaf tickled me under the nose.

“‘Step this way please,’ said the floorwalker, and we all moved toward the center of the room.

“Wilson stood by a long heavy table, his left hand holding the edge of the table top.  I had a funny feeling that I can’t quite describe to you.  I was sort of mixed up, maybe because the fern had tickeled my nose and I had almost overturned the flower basket.

“Wilson looked small.  I had an idea he was taller.  His face was long and his head seemed to be heavy on his neck.  And he looked old — just old.

“Now he sort of took a step toward us and said: ‘Good morning.’  One of the delegation insisted afterward that he said:  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ but I think he said merely ‘Good morning.’

“He shook hands with us.  His hands felt dry and shaky in mine, like nothing much.  His voice sort of shook.  He evidentally was under a great strain.  He could scarcely look the two ex-soldiers in the face.  I believe he thought that I was an ex-soldier, too, because of my lame leg; he hardly looked at me either.

“After shaking our hands, he stepped back to the table and leaned on it with his left hand.

“I was sort of sorry for him.  I wondered if he was still under the effects of our demonstration on him the day before.  I almost wished we hadn’t pulled it.

“Well, we stood there before Wilson, the five of us, all of us, I guess, feeling pretty nervous.  Harry Link held the petition in his hand and shifted the wight of his body from one foot to the other.  He was a great big six-footer and built like an ox; had been wounded in the war.

“Wilson then nodded to the floorwalker, who stood to one side, and the floorwalker withdrew.

“I guess Wilson waited for us to speak, and there was a long and awkward silence.  Harry Link cleared his throat and was going to speak, but couldn’t.  Instead, he just handed Wilson the petition.  Wilson took it.  His hand shook pretty badly.  Harry cleared his throat again, but couldn’t get a word out.  It was awful.  I felt the blood rushing to my face.

“Wilson didn’t look at any of us, only at Harry Link for a second.  Then, when Harry said nothing, Wilson placed the petition on the table and said something to the effect that he would read it immediately.  I don’t remember his exact words.  I watched his face, which looked very bad — long and gray.  His long narrow jaw moved up and down, and his voice, while fairly clear, was sort of unnatural, or so it seemed to me.  Perhaps the acoustics of the big room made it sound the way.  I can’t quite describe it.  I remember it vaguely.  The whole experience was a little fantastic, unreal.

“According to the rehersals the night beore, each of us was supposed to make a speech, but I was the only one who managed to say anything.  There was another long silence, and then I said:  “Mr. President, attached to the petition are the signatures of over one thousand of our fellow workers, all of them citizens of the United States.  We could have secured ten thousand signatures, but until last night we thought we would not be allowed to present the petition to you.’

“Wilson looked at me for a moment.  Then he said that he was sorry that obstacles had been placed in our way when we had first planned to call on him.  He added that he had been displeased upon hearing of the local reception committee’s decision to bar us from him.  His voice shook.  His right hand shook, too, until he finally gripped the lapel of his coat.

“I almost wished I hadn’t come along with the delegation.  Man, but I felt lousy!  My own voice, when I spoke, sounded strange in that big room.  I was pretty well balled up, standing under that high ceiling, the thick, soft rug under my feet, feeling sorry for Wilson.  I barely heard what he said; later I had to check on his words with the other four men.  They were all mixed up too.

“I was supposed to have said: ‘. . . all of them citizens of the United States, and, Sir, many of them ex-soldiers and ex-sailors who have served in the war to make the world safe for democracy.’  But I forgot to say that last part.  I’m glad I did; there was no use rubbing it in about making the world safe for democracy, though, of course, at the time I wasn’t thinking of that.  I had spoken at hundreds of workers’ meetings, but now I was all mixed up.

“Wilson looked pretty bad, but perhaps he was the leasst flustered man in the room — that is, outwardly.  Inwardly, I’m sure he was worse off then all five of us put together.  I think it took all his self-control to keep his chin up.

“A couple of times during the interview he closed his eyes for a few moments and there was a little muscular movement on his face.  With his eyes closed he looked even worse than when he had them open.

“I don’t believe we were in there more than four or five minutes, and I was glad when it was over.  Towards the last I felt sort of weak all over and dizzy in my head.  It was the goddamnedest experience I ever had.

“Finally, the door opened and in came the floorwalker and stopped at the door, near the flower basket.

“Then Wilson again shook hands with us.  He said, “Thank you,’ and we went out.  I saw him take a few steps after us, then he stopped in the middle of the big carpet and bowed a little.  He looked like a ghost.

“The floorwalker and the Army officer got us out into the corridor, which was full of newspaper men.  They wanted to know our names.  What? … why? … when?  They fired questions at us.  But I said the other four not to talk; to hell with them.

“We got out in the street and jumped in a street car.  I almost missed it because, with my leg, I couldn’t walk as fast as the others.

“‘Christ almight!’ said Harry Link.  He was sweating, although it wasn’t hot at all.

“We couldn’t talk about it for an hour or more.  We had been before the President of the United States– and what a mess he was!  A pale old man standing in the middle of a big room, under a high ceiling, with a bowed head.

“Everything was a mess.  The whole country.  I thought to myself that Wilson, in his fine cutaway coat and striped pants, and we, in our working clothes, were just the opposite poles of the same mess.  Here in that luxurious hotel-room, we suddenly met for a few minutes and — well, I don’t know.  It was pretty queer, the whole thing, believe me.  I had no feeling against him.  I only thought what a mess he was.  A goddamn tragedy — the President of the United States, the most powerful ruler on earth, but unable to do anything for us — the workers — although I don’t doubt now that in his heart he was for us.  He couldn’t do anything about the biggest problem in the country, in the world — the problem of the distribution of wealth.  Helpless — the President of the United States.  Nobody could do anything.

“I felt like two cents for pulling that demonstration on him the day before.  I was my idea.  It was as unfair to him to pull a thing like that on him as it was for the capitalists to exploit us.

So Michael Phelps apologized to China, which I suppose will go a long way to repairing our frayed relations with China, repairing our special co-dependent relation with China.  China, you understand, was absolutely Apopletic over Michael Phelps’s Bong Use.

These are tense times to be sure.  We have yet to receive word on whether China will accept Michael Phelps’s apology.  If they don’t — well, you thought our Credit Crunch was bad now, just wait to see China when they feel that they’ve been pushed too far.  Pray, pray, pray that China forgives Michael Phelps, for all our sakes.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

“Well, by and by the bands began to play — there were several of them along the route — and Wilson was driven through the city.  The mob cheered him till you couldn’t hear the music.

“He was all dolled up as a great statesman should be and he waved his plug hat and bowed a little now and then, acknowledging the ovation of the people.  The President of the United States!  It was a great event in Seattle.

“Secret Service men moved along the crowd just a little ahead of the presidential car, which was surrounded by cops on motorcycles.  And behind it were other machines, carrying other great men — rolling slowly to give the mob a chance to cheer them a long time.  There were ten or twenty blocks of cheering maniacs.

“Then, all of a sudden, Wilson came to a block where everything was quiet.  Hundreds of grimy working men, interspersed with women, stood still and silent on both sides of the street.  Not a cheer, not a sound, not a move.  Most of the men didn’t even look at him; some of them, of course, couldn’t resist giving him the once-over, but everybody was instructed to look past him.  Only a couple of kids were pushing and yelling here and there, which made the wobblies’ silence and immobility even more terrible.

“I naturally had a personal interest in the thing.  I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, between two ex-soldiers in overseas caps, on the left-hand side of the street in the first wobbly block.  A policeman was planted right in front of me, but I could see Wilson over the cop’s shoulder.

“He stood in the machine.  He smiled as he came to our block.  Then the smile went off his face — like that,” snapping his fingers.  “He knew that we were IWW’s, I guess, but he didn’t know what to make of it.  He looked flabbergasted.  Back there the mob had cheered him till you couldn’t hear the music; here these dirty bums didn’t even move, but stood like statues, and among them were dozens of ex-soldiers.

“He continued to stand in the car, but it was obvious that he wanted to sit down.  He looked stern.  His frame looked sort of limp and hunched up.  The hand holding his tall hat hung by his side.  His face looked old and saggy.

“The music behind him now sounded clear and awful.  A second before it couldn’t be heard for the mob’s noise, now you heard nothing but music and the roar of the cops’ motorcycles.

“The car moved on — slowly.  Then there was another block of still, silent wobblies in denim overalls, their arms crossed on their chests, printed hatbands on their hats and caps, most of them not looking at Wilson, but straight ahead, past him.  Thousands of them.  Block after block — five blocks.

“It was dramatic as hell — believe me.

“At the third block Wilson sat down besid his wife.  I guess he had to because he couldn’t stand up any longer.  Those who saw him there said that he seemed to be crumpling up.  He put on his tall hat, a little to one side.  He had been told that the wobblies were out, but I guess he didn’t expect anything like this.  He was white as a sheet and hunched over.

“Beyond the wobby blocks there were more cheering people, but Wilson didn’t stand up again.  He merely waved his hand and smiled sort of weakly to the mob.

“Afterward we heard that the newspaper men who accompanied the presidential party were asked not to play up the demonstration too much; it might only fan the anti-Red hysteria; and most of them reported it with great restraint or ignored it altogether.  The New York Times man, for instance, saw fit to print only that the IWW had been ‘undemonstrative,’ which gave the reception a ‘sinster note.’  I happened to see the write-up and have the clipping somewhere.

What, you thought I had some more  elaborate system than that?  But methinks that the Larouche Organization has the phrase “New Dark Ages” keyed in a google search.  Someone at the AP, please post up something write the phrase “Dark Ages” so I can test my theory.

So the debate continues.  This man argues that  the field of Larouchian Economics is best  relegated to sidewalk ranting, said off-handedly as a means for a partisan attack.  This man believes that Larouche is “Possibly One of the best minds in economics today“, I believe relegated by the first man (and about everyone else) to the sidewalk, seeing as Larouche has never worked in the field of Economics Ever, or perhaps not to the sidewalk as to the comments sections of various paranoia-stokers.  Well – he is such a Thorn to the Powers that Be — after all monitored by the government of Sweden and all that.  I have to say, it’s unfair to lump the anti-Fluoridites into the picture, since Fluoridating the Water is indeed a Government Plot to anesticize the public into acceptance of the New World Order whilst Whitening its teeth.

I found a copy of the latest, unless they’ve been so good as to print up a new one, LPAC pamphlet.  The previous possessor of this item — I think it’s called “Doom, Fear, Fear, Doom” — showed the proper respect and correct level of reverence by scribbling a goofy beard and moustache on Lyndon’s face. 

Remind me to go through this pamphlet and comb through the dialouge, and report out the many unnamed luminaries who are said to be asking Lyndon questions.  It’s a silly exercise to be sure, and one that falls on the “Evergreen Pile”.  But, if memory serves, I can report that a functionary of the Confederated Tribes of the Europa section of Alpha Centura asked Larouche what the shape of the table for the proposed meeting between India, China, the US, and Russia was.  And Emperor Xenu asked what the best color to decorate the head of this table might be, where Larouche will sit and dictate Economic instructions for India, the US, Russia, and China to follow.  But these questions pale in importance next to a Phillipine LYM leader’s question on the importance of the Artist in the new Epoch and Renaissance, the answer being that they will furnish the world with the lavish portraits of Lyndon on every Meglev Train and Waterworks Projects.

Since, well, Superbowl Sunday and when last I checked in on this blog, Factnet has exploded in its productivity.  Sort through the last bunch of pages at your leisure.  There is a certain aminus toward Dennis King because of the fundamental difference of opinion that while King believes Larouche has hewed closer to the Adolf Hitler , its argured that this is completely wrong and, indeed, Larouche borrowed more thoroughly from Joseph Stalin.  The problem with the suggestion with Hitler, and reason for discontent, is that it was never a part of anyone in the org’s experience… well, except maybe for things like:

I stood in the elevator as Steinberg told the Jews in a Volkswagen “joke” and didn’t say anything. I knew it was a test. And to be honest I did not know at the time of the extent of my own family’s losses in German gas chambers.

Hm.  If it helps, Larouche’s real life exempliers of good governance, Saddam Hussein for instance, tend to be self-modelled after Stalin and not Hitler.  But really, after a while I begin to suspect a replay of the German — Soviet Pact was in play circa 1973 or thereabouts.

Other than that, I’ll simply link to this here and this here.  I know I posted Part One when “Earnest One”, son of a Luminary in the field of Mathematics, posted it (that would be “New Revelations of Terror Part One”, I assume).  In embryonic form the story was posted once upon a time to this blog, and while I did locate it, I’ll go ahead and pass on linking to it.  The story unspools from there, from about here.  To quote from here, “We now hold the gravest reservations about both the methods and motivation of this group.”

A bit surprisingly, someone emailed me responding to my posting from a 1968 book surveying the American Political Fringe.  “Larouche in it?”  No.  You’d have to wait a few years for him to pop through, and wait still a few more years for him to become the very dictionary definition and thus warranting a large part of a chapter.  Tim Wohlsforth is mentioned as “perhaps the most tedious” of Trotskyite leaders.  The names of various Free School class offerings are listed for minor comedic effect.  If you want to spot Larouche further than that, various ideological underpinninigs surface both right and left — what, him being a composite of a Hitlerite and a Stalinist, or perhaps to fit the “Contrarian” thesis, the ultimate Contrarian of a pro-Stalin Trotskyite.

Back in, well, two weeks probably?  Really, the weekly schedule is becoming bothersome because the googling is drying up.

The same conservapedia “In the News” sidebar that lombasted Bruce Springsteen as an overweight has-been lapping up Liberal dogma at the Superbowl also editorialized that Judd Gregg was pulling a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, a Quisling.  I can only assume that the articles on these men all ascribed them as big fat Liberals.

I can’t say that Judd Gregg’s decision to join the Obama administration didn’t make sense to me.  I assumed Gregg reached the decision that he was ready to pack up his partisan career and not run for another term (the first in a while that he would have had to sweat to keep the seat), and thought that a stint in the Obama Administration was a good use of his belief in “Public Service.”  It wasn’t to be — I assumed he also figured that Obama was somehow the right man at the right time and Gregg would be ready to bend his Republican politics.  Apparently not.  Gregg learned that he was a Republican and Obama was a Democrat, the differences were present, and thus he’s back to the Senate.

There is something in this article worth considering as we move forward.  I could immediately spot the reasons for strengthened partisan ties for the Democrats compared to the start of the Clinton Administration.  Clinton came into office winning with a smaller percentage of the vote than Dukakis received, as I see Dukakis point out whenever he is interviewed.  And the slow glacial Southern realignment that moved the South from having a bunch of conservative Democrats dangling away from the National Democratic Party to being the stronghold of the Republicans was not yet complete — the greatest break would come in 1994.  But beyond that, the most troubling part for Obama and his group of Democrats comes in the comparison to Clinton who passed his Economic Bill with… a Senate tie broken by Al Gore.  As opposed to Obama who needs to get to 60 votes.  The Filibuster has been strengthened as a tool of Minority Restruction under the arms of Mitch McConnell.  Really, someone needs to write a primer on the expanded role of the Filibuster as a matter of course — during the Democrats’ years in exile, it was used essentially to keep judges from being appointed, though even that was smashed at the behest of the handful of, um, “Conservative Democrats”.

I suspect Norm Coleman is tying Al Franken down in court as much to keep the Senate in behest of the Specter — Maine Senators Cabal, a team-up of 3 which serve just as well for this Stimulus Bill — actually this one probably is best served with some compromise — as impossible as that is with a Republican Party that apparently has a core 38 Senators not in on any a’dealing, but in the future the Democrats are going to have to actually force a Filibuster.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

“The idea caught on right away.  Everybody thought it was a great stunt.  It spread around in no time and all the wobblies in Seattle got excited about it, and they also heard about in in Tacoma, Spokane, Centralia, Walla Walla and as far down as Portland and Eureka.  They even heard about in the woods hundreds of miles inland.

“We only had about a week to organize the stunt, and it had to be done more or less in secret so that it would hit them as a surprise.  You see, we still weren’t thinking of playing a trick on Wilson, but merely of getting with Ole Hanson and his bunch.

“Days passed.  Monday or Tuesday somebody else, I don’t know who, improved on my idea by suggesting that we pring thousands of hatbands inscribed ‘Release Political Prisoners!’, which we did.  We would thus present our petition to Wilson anyhow; he could read it while he drove past us.

“Thursday and Friday nights we held special meetings all over town to instruct the wobbly mob where to assemble and how to act when Wilson came by.

“On those two nights I couldn’t sleep a wink.  As I have said, it was my idea.  I was as excited as hell about it.  I began to see now that this wouldn’t be merely getting even with Ole, but that we were pulling a stunt on the President of the United States.  I knew how susceptible Wilson was to public response.  How would our lack of response affect him?  And would it work?  You can imagine how a thing like this can flop at the last minute.  Would the public interfere when they saw us assemble?

“But it looked great.  All day Friday and on Saturday in the afternoon wobblies poured into Seattle from Tacoma, Spokane, Centralia and elsewhere, including the lumber camps in the woods — hundreds of them, from everywhere.

“Then Saturday afternoon came.  Wilson was in town.  He had been cheered in Tacoma; in fact, he had been cheered, more or less, wherever he had stopped and given the people a chance to see him.

“In Seattle everything was closed and tens of thousands turned out to see him and hail him.  The streets he was to pass along were jammed.

“The reception was scheduled for two o’clock, but we had our mob out long before one.  We occupied five long blocks near the end of the route, on both sides of the street.  There must have been five thousands of us; some say ten thousand, but that’s exaggerated; and we packed the sidewalks from the walls of the buildings to the curb.  The great unwashed; all of us wearing grimy working clothes, blue-denim over-alls and blue working shirts with sleeves rolled — outcasts, the scum — some of them six feet and a half, great big fellows, Bohunks and squareheads, with powerful arms and necks, chests like barrels.

“We had the five blocks that we had packed out all to ourselves.  The respectable mob naturally steered clear of us.  We were pariahs, the ugly big boil that Dr. Ole Hanson was trying to cut open and cure.

“At first the cops were sort of excited as we began to mass together, but they didn’t know what to do about it.  There were too many of us, and more were coming.  Thousands of us.  And some of the lumberjacks and dockwallopers looked as if they could eat five cops apiece for breakfast.  Beside, how would it look if they tried to chase off the streets when, so far as they knew at the moment, all we wanted was to see the President?

“The chief of police was all flustered.  He rode by us in his machine several times with a worried face, but finally — perhaps after a consultation with Ole — it was decided to let us alone.  I guess they figured it was for the best.  They didn’t want to have a riot in the city while the President was there.  Also, by being all together we would not contaminate the good people of the town further up the street.

“Most of us wore the hatbands: ‘Release Political Prisoners!’  We had many ex-soldiers in the movement; they wore their overseas caps and we put them out in front so that Wilson could see them.