“Is that what you were doing when the judge sent you to jail for a week?” laughed Bunny.
“No,” she answered, “that was a publicity stunt, the bright idea of my advertising man.”
XIV
The Star
I
Bunny went back to Angel City, and discovered that if he wanted to follow Vee Tracy’s program of dodging other people’s troubles, he had made a fatal mistake to get interested in a labor college! He went to see Mr. Irving, and found the young instructor up to his ears in the growing pains and disputes of the labor movement. All summer long his job had been interviewing leaders and sympathizers, and trying to get them together on a program. He had managed to get the college started, with three teachers and about fifty pupils, mostly coming at night; but it was all precarious—the difficulties seemed overwhelming.
There were a handful of progressive and clear-minded men and women in the labor movement; and then there was the great mass of the bureaucracy, dead from the ears up; also a little bunch of extreme radicals, who would rather have no bread at all than half a loaf. The old-line leaders would have nothing to do with the college if these “reds” got in; on the other hand, if you excluded the “reds,” they would set up a clamor, and a lot of genuine liberals would say, what was the use of a new college that was so much like the old ones?
The labor movement had its traditions, having to do with getting shorter hours and more pay for the workers; and the old officials were bound by that point of view. The average union official was a workingman who had escaped from day-labor by the help of a political machine inside the union. Anything new meant to him the danger of losing his desk job, and having to go back to hard work. He had learned to negotiate with the employers and smoke their cigars, and in a large percentage of cases he was spending more money than his salary. Here in Angel City, the unions had a weekly paper, that lived by soliciting advertising from business men—and what was that but a respectable form of graft? When you took any fighting news to an editor of that sort, he would say the dread word “Bolshevism,” and throw your copy into the trash basket.
And the same thing applied to the movement in its national aspects. The American Federation of Labor was maintaining a bureau in Washington, for the purpose of combatting the radicals, and this bureau was for practical purposes the same as any patriotic society; its function was to collect damaging news about Russia from all over the world, and feed it to the American labor press. And of course, if any labor man was defiant, and insisted upon telling the other side, he would incur the bitter enmity of this machine, and they would throw him to the wolves. There would be a scare story in the capitalist press, telling how the Communists had got possession of the plasterers’ union, or maybe the button workers, and the grand jury was preparing action against a nest of conspirators. The average labor leader, no matter how honest and sincere, shivered in his boots when such a club was swung over his head.
II
Also there was Harry Seager and his troubles. The Seager Business College had turned out a class of young men and women, thoroughly trained to typewrite, “All men are created free and equal,” and also, “Give me liberty or give me death.” And now these young people were going about in the business offices of Angel City, and discovering that nobody wanted employees to typewrite anything of that sort! In plain words these young people were being told that the Seager Business College was a Bolshevik institution, and the business men of the city had been warned not to employ its graduates. The boycott was illegal in Angel City, and if any labor men tried to apply it, they would be whisked into jail in a jiffy. But imagine Harry Seager asking, the district attorney to prosecute the heads of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, whose campaign contributions had put the district attorney into office!
Bunny went up to Paradise, and there was another bunch of grief. In preparation for the coming struggle over the wage-scale, the oil operators were weeding out the “troublemakers,” which meant the active union men. And now for the first time, Ross Consolidated was following the policy of the rest. Ben Riley, one of the fellows who met in the Rascum cabin, had been told that he was no longer needed. They had too many men, the foreman had said, but that was a plain lie, because he had taken on half a dozen new men since. No, Ben was a Socialist, and had talked at meetings in Paradise, and distributed Socialist papers that showed the monstrous wastes in the oil industry, and the world-rivalry for oil which was to cause the next great war.
It was Ruth who told Bunny about this; very seriously, with distress in her gentle eyes. “It’s a shame, Bunny, because Ben has got no place to go. And here he’s got a home, and a wife and two little girls.”
Bunny was worried too; Dad had promised this kind of thing should not happen!
“Can’t you do something about it?” pleaded Ruth.
“Well, but Ben was a pumper, and that’s in the department of operation, and Dad only has to do with the development work. He wouldn’t butt in on the superintendent of operation.”
“But then, ask him to give Ben a job on development.”
“I’ll ask him, Ruth, but I know what he’ll say.
