So all the good, wise and noisy men of the nation were induced by diverse means to cry out against the strikers and their union.  The worst passions of the respectable people were appealed to.  The hoarse blood-cry of the mob was raised.  It was echoed and re-echoed from press and pulpit.  The very air quivered from its reverberations.  Lynching parties became “respectable.”  Indictments were flourished.  Hand-cuffs flashed.  The clinking feet of workers going to prison rivaled the sound of the soldiers marching to war.  And while all this was happening, a certain paunchy little English Jew with moth-eaten hair and blotchy jowls the accredited head of a great labor union glared through his thick spectacles and nodded his perverse approval.  But the lumber trust licked its fat lips and leered at its swollen dividends.  All was well and the world was being made “safe for democracy!”

[Illustration:  Britt Smith

American.  Logger. 35 years old.  Had followed the woods for twenty years.  Smith made his home in the hall that was raided and was secretary of the Union.  When the mob broke into the jail and seized Wesley Everest to torture and lynch him they cried, “We’ve got Britt Smith!” Smith was the man they wanted and it was to break his neck that ropes were carried in the “parade.”  Not until Everest’s body was brought back to the city jail was it discovered that the mob had lynched the wrong man.]

Autocracy vs.  Unionism

This unprecedented struggle was really a test of strength between industrial autocracy and militant unionism.  The former was determined to restore the palmy days of peonage for all time to come, the latter to fight to the last ditch in spite of hell and high water.  The lumber trust sought to break the strike of the loggers and destroy their organization.  In the ensuing fracas the lumber barons came out only second best—­and they were bad losers.  After the war-fever had died down—­one year after the signing of the Armistice—­they were still trying in Centralia to attain their ignoble ends by means of mob violence.

But at this time the ranks of the strikers were unbroken.  The heads of the loggers were “bloody but unbowed.”  Even at last, when compelled to yield to privation and brute force and return to work, they turned defeat to victory by “carrying the strike onto the job.”  As a body they refused to work more than eight hours.  Secretary of War Baker and President Wilson had both vainly urged the lumber interests to grant the eight hour day.  The determined industrialists gained this demand, after all else had failed, by simply blowing a whistle when the time was up.  Most of their other demands were won as well.  In spite of even the Disque despotism, mattresses, clean linen and shower baths were reluctantly granted as the fruits of victory.