The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 20

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The second night in the sweatbox, a Wobbly named Brazier organized the cell. He had them fashion a crude ceiling with their shirts to block the steam, and with so many in the infirmary, there was a little room, and he had two men sit at a time and rest. He spoke with the cadence of a preacher: “Listen, my Fellow Workers, I want to tell you about the three stars. Not the three stars of Bethlehem. The stars of Bethlehem lead only to heaven, which nobody knows about. These are the three IWW stars, of education, organization, and emancipation. They lead to pork chops, which everybody wants.”

Later, Brazier had them sing, and they kept it up all night long—“Up with the masses”—songs from the IWW Songbook—“Down with the classes”—in every flat accent—“Death to the traitor who money can buy”—to piss off the jailers—“Cooperation is the hope of the nation”—and raise their own spirits—“Strike for it now or your liberties die.” Finally, the jailers offered to take them out to use the toilet if they would just stop.

News traveled through the cell: After a hundred were arrested the first day and fifty the second, cops began taking new prisoners to the brig at Fort George Wright. The next morning, Chief Sullivan set up a special rock pile overlooking downtown, and in daylight, lines of shackled prisoners were marched over the bridge to swing sledges for no purpose, the chief wanting both sides to see the hardship, to show the mining bosses he was being tough on the union, and to discourage new men from agitating. But some people on the street called out support to the chain gang, and three suffragists tried to give them food and water and were hauled off to the women’s jail for it. A dozen more Wobblies were arrested downtown, and it might have been three times that number, but Sullivan had firemen open the hoses on anyone who tried to speak while he figured out where to put the extra prisoners.

Sullivan had separated out the union leaders to keep them from organizing, but word came down that they should refuse to work the rock pile to protest their treatment. So the next day the sledges sat idle, men’s arms at their sides, or they picked up the sledges and laid them down gently on the rock pile, as if patting the stones to sleep. Rye saw Jules on the rock pile that day, coughing like he might have pneumonia, but he winked when he saw Rye. The Italian tenor was there, too, his face stitched like a baseball glove.

Brazier spread news between songs—“You’ve heard this all before, it’s off to the chain gang to hammer rocks some more”—every day new hobos railing in to sing and to give speeches, one man arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence in front of city hall, another for asking a street cop if the free speech protests were still happening.

Sullivan countered their moves with his own, and after the spectacle at the rock pile, he put the prisoners on bread and water rations, and the next morning they were taken to the courtyard and “bathed” with a fire hose. The union leaders responded with a hunger strike to demand humane treatment for people they said were political prisoners. Fine, said Chief Sullivan, if three hundred singing bums wanted to starve themselves, less trouble for him. “Man don’t work,” Sullivan said, “he don’t deserve to eat.”

That particular line was read to them by a jailer who stood outside their cell each day reading from the establishment newspapers, the Chronicle and the Spokesman-Review, to show how public support was against them: “ ‘The petty acts of the men in jail, such as throwing their food upon the floor, breaking the dishes, screaming out silly songs and pouring torrents of abuse upon the law and police department are what sane and orderly minds look for from incorrigible children and men in insane asylums.’ ”

Rye would have shaken his head if he’d had room to do it: crammed into a double-barred cell beneath an open steam vent, beaten with sticks and sprayed with fire hoses—and the prisoners were the ones “pouring abuse” on their captors? Then, on the fifth morning, with the three hundredth protestor arrested, the jail full and the courts backlogged, Rye discovered the latest torture they had devised for him.

He was being sent to school.

There was a vacant boarded-up building on Front Street, the old Franklin School, which had been replaced by a high school on the South Hill, and the city was using it as a temporary jail to house the slop-over prisoners until this crisis ended.

It had been three years since Rye stepped foot inside a school. He’d always felt trapped there, saddled and reined, writing numbers on a slate board or reading Bible verses and hearing what an idiot he was for getting both wrong.

At dawn, Rye and the hardier of the men from the sweatbox were marched along with twenty others down Front Street, the first flakes of snow swirling in the gray sky. They trudged to a dark and imposing three-story brick building, a clock tower rising from the center, the hands stuck at midnight. On the steps, four civilians held rifles, paper stars marking them as deputized emergency jailors.

As the prisoners were