The strike which turned Zenith into two belligerent camps; white and red, began late in September with a walk-out of telephone girls and linemen, in protest against a reduction of wages.  The newly formed union of dairy-products workers went out, partly in sympathy and partly in demand for a forty-four hour week.  They were followed by the truck-drivers’ union.  Industry was tied up, and the whole city was nervous with talk of a trolley strike, a printers’ strike, a general strike.  Furious citizens, trying to get telephone calls through strike-breaking girls, danced helplessly.  Every truck that made its way from the factories to the freight-stations was guarded by a policeman, trying to look stoical beside the scab driver.  A line of fifty trucks from the Zenith Steel and Machinery Company was attacked by strikers-rushing out from the sidewalk, pulling drivers from the seats, smashing carburetors and commutators, while telephone girls cheered from the walk, and small boys heaved bricks.

The National Guard was ordered out.  Colonel Nixon, who in private life was Mr. Caleb Nixon, secretary of the Pullmore Tractor Company, put on a long khaki coat and stalked through crowds, a .44 automatic in hand.  Even Babbitt’s friend, Clarence Drum the shoe merchant—­a round and merry man who told stories at the Athletic Club, and who strangely resembled a Victorian pug-dog—­was to be seen as a waddling but ferocious captain, with his belt tight about his comfortable little belly, and his round little mouth petulant as he piped to chattering groups on corners.  “Move on there now!  I can’t have any of this loitering!”

Every newspaper in the city, save one, was against the strikers.  When mobs raided the news-stands, at each was stationed a militiaman, a young, embarrassed citizen-soldier with eye-glasses, bookkeeper or grocery-clerk in private life, trying to look dangerous while small boys yelped, “Get onto de tin soldier!” and striking truck-drivers inquired tenderly, “Say, Joe, when I was fighting in France, was you in camp in the States or was you doing Swede exercises in the Y. M. C. A.?  Be careful of that bayonet, now, or you’ll cut yourself!”

There was no one in Zenith who talked of anything but the strike, and no one who did not take sides.  You were either a courageous friend of Labor, or you were a fearless supporter of the Rights of Property; and in either case you were belligerent, and ready to disown any friend who did not hate the enemy.

A condensed-milk plant was set afire—­each side charged it to the other—­and the city was hysterical.

And Babbitt chose this time to be publicly liberal.

He belonged to the sound, sane, right-thinking wing, and at first he agreed that the Crooked Agitators ought to be shot.  He was sorry when his friend, Seneca Doane, defended arrested strikers, and he thought of going to Doane and explaining about these agitators, but when he read a broadside alleging that even on their former wages the telephone girls had been hungry, he was troubled.  “All lies and fake figures,” he said, but in a doubtful croak.