The trouble arose first with the Grangers in the various states they had captured at the last election.  There were a dozen of these states, but the Grangers who had been elected were not permitted to take office.  The incumbents refused to get out.  It was very simple.  They merely charged illegality in the elections and wrapped up the whole situation in the interminable red tape of the law.  The Grangers were powerless.  The courts were in the hands of their enemies.

This was the moment of danger.  If the cheated Grangers became violent, all was lost.  How we socialists worked to hold them back!  There were days and nights when Ernest never closed his eyes in sleep.  The big leaders of the Grangers saw the peril and were with us to a man.  But it was all of no avail.  The Oligarchy wanted violence, and it set its agents-provocateurs to work.  Without discussion, it was the agents-provocateurs who caused the Peasant Revolt.

In a dozen states the revolt flared up.  The expropriated farmers took forcible possession of the state governments.  Of course this was unconstitutional, and of course the United States put its soldiers into the field.  Everywhere the agents-provocateurs urged the people on.  These emissaries of the Iron Heel disguised themselves as artisans, farmers, and farm laborers.  In Sacramento, the capital of California, the Grangers had succeeded in maintaining order.  Thousands of secret agents were rushed to the devoted city.  In mobs composed wholly of themselves, they fired and looted buildings and factories.  They worked the people up until they joined them in the pillage.  Liquor in large quantities was distributed among the slum classes further to inflame their minds.  And then, when all was ready, appeared upon the scene the soldiers of the United States, who were, in reality, the soldiers of the Iron Heel.  Eleven thousand men, women, and children were shot down on the streets of Sacramento or murdered in their houses.  The national government took possession of the state government, and all was over for California.

And as with California, so elsewhere.  Every Granger state was ravaged with violence and washed in blood.  First, disorder was precipitated by the secret agents and the Black Hundreds, then the troops were called out.  Rioting and mob-rule reigned throughout the rural districts.  Day and night the smoke of burning farms, warehouses, villages, and cities filled the sky.  Dynamite appeared.  Railroad bridges and tunnels were blown up and trains were wrecked.  The poor farmers were shot and hanged in great numbers.  Reprisals were bitter, and many plutocrats and army officers were murdered.  Blood and vengeance were in men’s hearts.  The regular troops fought the farmers as savagely as had they been Indians.  And the regular troops had cause.  Twenty-eight hundred of them had been annihilated in a tremendous series of dynamite explosions in Oregon, and in a similar manner, a number of train loads, at different times and places, had been destroyed.  So it was that the regular troops fought for their lives as well as did the farmers.