Little cared East St. Louis for all this bandying of human problems, so long as its grocers and saloon-keepers flourished and its industries steamed and screamed and smoked and its bankers grew rich.  Stupidity, license, and graft sat enthroned in the City Hall.  The new black folk were exploited as cheerfully as white Polacks and Italians; the rent of shacks mounted merrily, the street car lines counted gleeful gains, and the crimes of white men and black men flourished in the dark.  The high and skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harder the mass of laborers strove to unionize their fellows and to bargain with employers.

Nor were the new blacks fools.  They had no love for nothings in labor; they had no wish to make their fellows’ wage envelopes smaller, but they were determined to make their own larger.  They, too, were willing to join in the new union movement.  But the unions did not want them.  Just as employers monopolized meat and steel, so they sought to monopolize labor and beat a giant’s bargain.  In the higher trades they succeeded.  The best electrician in the city was refused admittance to the union and driven from the town because he was black.  No black builder, printer, or machinist could join a union or work in East St. Louis, no matter what his skill or character.  But out of the stink of the stockyards and the dust of the aluminum works and the sweat of the lumber yards the willing blacks could not be kept.

They were invited to join unions of the laborers here and they joined.  White workers and black workers struck at the aluminum works in the fall and won higher wages and better hours; then again in the spring they struck to make bargaining compulsory for the employer, but this time they fronted new things.  The conflagration of war had spread to America; government and court stepped in and ordered no hesitation, no strikes; the work must go on.

Deeper was the call for workers.  Black men poured in and red anger flamed in the hearts of the white workers.  The anger was against the wielders of the thunderbolts, but here it was impotent because employers stood with the hand of the government before their faces; it was against entrenched union labor, which had risen on the backs of the unskilled and unintelligent and on the backs of those whom for any reason of race or prejudice or chicane they could beat beyond the bars of competition; and finally the anger of the mass of white workers was turned toward these new black interlopers, who seemed to come to spoil their last dream of a great monopoly of common labor.