The employers were
organized on a nation-wide scale everywhere throughout the country,
and the workers with their feeble craft unions were like men using
bows and arrows against machine-guns. There must be One Big Union--
that was the slogan, and if you preached it, you went every hour in
peril of such a fate that you counted fourteen years in jail as
comparatively a happy ending.
Said Carpenter: "It is not such a bad thing for a cause to have its
preachers go to jail."
"Well," said the lad of the blue eyes and the freckled face, "we try
to keep a few outside, to tell what the rest are in for!"
Later on, I remember, John Colver told a funny story about this pal
of his. The story had to do with grape juice instead of with
propaganda, but it appealed to me because it showed the gay spirit
of these lads. The two of them had sought refuge from a storm in a
barn, and there, lying buried in the hay with the rain pouring down
on the roof, they had heard the farmer coming to milk his cows. The
man had evidently just parted from his wife, and there had been a
quarrel; but the farmer hadn't dared to say what he wanted to, so
now he took it out on the cows! "Na! na! na!" he shouted, with
furious vehemence.
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