Now Girard, Kansas, was a quiet, peaceable town.  There had never been any labor troubles there.  The Appeal paid union wages; and, in fact, was the backbone of the town, giving employment to hundreds of men and women.  It was not the citizens of Girard that composed the mob.  This mob had risen up out of the earth apparently, and to all intents and purposes, its work done, it had gone back into the earth.  Ernest saw in the affair the most sinister import.

“The Black Hundreds* are being organized in the United States,” he said.  “This is the beginning.  There will be more of it.  The Iron Heel is getting bold.”

* The Black Hundreds were reactionary mobs organized by the perishing Autocracy in the Russian Revolution.  These reactionary groups attacked the revolutionary groups, and also, at needed moments, rioted and destroyed property so as to afford the Autocracy the pretext of calling out the Cossacks.

And so perished father’s book.  We were to see much of the Black Hundreds as the days went by.  Week by week more of the socialist papers were barred from the mails, and in a number of instances the Black Hundreds destroyed the socialist presses.  Of course, the newspapers of the land lived up to the reactionary policy of the ruling class, and the destroyed socialist press was misrepresented and vilified, while the Black Hundreds were represented as true patriots and saviours of society.  So convincing was all this misrepresentation that even sincere ministers in the pulpit praised the Black Hundreds while regretting the necessity of violence.

History was making fast.  The fall elections were soon to occur, and Ernest was nominated by the socialist party to run for Congress.  His chance for election was most favorable.  The street-car strike in San Francisco had been broken.  And following upon it the teamsters’ strike had been broken.  These two defeats had been very disastrous to organized labor.  The whole Water Front Federation, along with its allies in the structural trades, had backed up the teamsters, and all had smashed down ingloriously.  It had been a bloody strike.  The police had broken countless heads with their riot clubs; and the death list had been augmented by the turning loose of a machine-gun on the strikers from the barns of the Marsden Special Delivery Company.

In consequence, the men were sullen and vindictive.  They wanted blood, and revenge.  Beaten on their chosen field, they were ripe to seek revenge by means of political action.  They still maintained their labor organization, and this gave them strength in the political struggle that was on.  Ernest’s chance for election grew stronger and stronger.  Day by day unions and more unions voted their support to the socialists, until even Ernest laughed when the Undertakers’ Assistants and the Chicken Pickers fell into line.  Labor became mulish.  While it packed the socialist meetings with mad enthusiasm, it was impervious to the wiles of the old-party politicians.  The old-party orators were usually greeted with empty halls, though occasionally they encountered full halls where they were so roughly handled that more than once it was necessary to call out the police reserves.