Social problems -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Jimmie was now in the seventh heaven, walking as if on air. A
proletarian government at last, the first in history! A government
of working-men like himself, running their own affairs, without the
help of politicians or bankers! Coming out before the world and
telling the truth about matters of state, in language that common
men could understand! Disbanding the armies, and sending the workers
home! Turning the masters out of the factories, and putting
shop-committees in control! Taking away the advertising from the
crooked capitalist papers, and so putting them out of business! Our
little friend would rush to the corner every morning to get the
paper and see what had happened next; he would go down the street so
excited that he forgot his breakfast.
Jimmie had made a new acquaintance in Ironton; the little tailor,
Rabin, whose name was Scholem, which means Peace, had given him a
letter to his brother, whose name was Deror, which means Freedom.
Each afternoon when the automobile factory let out, Jimmie would get
an evening paper and take it to Deror's tailor-shop and the two
would spell out the news. By God, look at this! Did you ever hear
the like? The man in charge of the Bolshevik foreign office was a
Marxian Jew who had helped edit the Novy Mir, the revolutionary
paper which Scholem had read to Jimmie! He had been a waiter in the
Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and now he was giving out the secret
treaties, and issuing propaganda manifestoes to the international
proletariat.
The American capitalist press was full of lies about the new
revolution, of course; but Jimmie could read pretty well between the
lines of the capitalist press, and the few Socialist papers that
were still in business, and which he read at the headquarters of the
local, gave him the rest of what he wanted. To Jimmie, of course,
everything the Bolsheviki did was right; if it wasn't right it was a
lie. The little machinist knew that the Bolsheviki had repudiated
the four-billion-dollar debt which the government of the Tsar had
contracted with the bankers of France, and Jimmie knew perfectly
well what was the lying power of four billion dollars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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