Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/21

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE SOCIALIST INVASION
9

Massachusetts towns. If it is the express object to multiply the agitators' power over labor, not twice or thrice but twenty times, it is easily done. Let an irritated citizenship itself play the anarchist, as in San Diego and in several Eastern communities; let it act in heat and with suspicious disregard for justice and at once a hundred new avenues of influence are opened to men like Ettor and Giovannitti. If they had gone to the electric chair, the incensed imagination of millions of workingmen and women would have crowned them martyrs. Solemn hours would have been set apart to do them honor and the place of their burial would have been a shrine. Even now, as they leave jail, audiences that no hall can hold will greet them rapturously in every industrial center of the United States. It matters little what they say; the sympathy that has been created in their favor supplies all deficiencies. Their lightest word has significance and carrying power that make the jail the shortest, quickest way to influence. A lawyer, himself doubting the justice of their jailing, tells me, "But severity might have worked best, as it did in hanging the Chicago anarchists in '87. There was little enough justice there, but the thing worked. You haven't heard of anarchists in that town since." Even if there were truth in this risky analogy, it is very fatal not to recognize the changes since 1887. Labor has many avenues of expression and influence now which it did not then possess. It has literary organs constantly read by at least four million of men and women. It has its first strategic hold upon our political life. It has a new and deepened sense