California, Southern -- Fiction; Motion picture industry -- Fiction; Petroleum industry and trade -- Fiction; Political fiction
Poor Bunny, he was making such earnest and devoted efforts to ride on
two horses at once! And the horses kept getting farther and farther
apart, until he was all but split in the middle! Here was this strike of
the clothing workers, breaking in upon the peace of America’s premier
“open shop” city. It was the climax of a series of disorders—first a
walk-out of the street railwaymen, and then of the carpenters; it was
evident that the program of the reds, “boring from within,” was having a
terrifying success, and the thing had to be stopped, once for all. The
city council passed an anti-picketing ordinance, which forbade anyone to
even make an ugly face in front of a place where there was a strike.
Since not all the clothing workers had faces of natural beauty, there
was much infringement of this law, and very soon the papers were full of
accounts of riots, valiantly put down by the police. A part of Bunny’s
curriculum at the university consisted of having Rachel Menzies describe
to him and the rest of the “red bunch” how girls who were doing nothing
but walking up and down the street in pairs, were being seized by the
police and having their arms twisted out of joint.
Then one morning Rachel did not show up in class; next day came a note
for Bunny telling him that Jacob Menzies had been clubbed almost
insensible on the picket-line. Jacob was the “right wing” brother, the
pale, stoop-shouldered one who had been earning his education by
pressing students’ pants; and Bunny had so far departed from the safe
rule of dodging other people’s troubles that he felt it his duty to
drive over to the Menzies’ home, and have his feelings harrowed by the
sight of Jacob Menzies in bed, pale as the sheets, and with a Hindoo
turban wound about his head. There was Mamma Menzies, with tears
streaming down her cheeks, wailing over and over one Yiddish word that
Bunny could understand—“Oi! Oi! Oi!” Chaim Menzies, the father, was
nowhere to be seen, because he had torn his coat-tails loose from his
wife’s fingers, and was over at strike headquarters, doing his duty.
The next afternoon, coming out from his classes, Bunny saw on a
newsstand the familiar green color of the “Evening Booster,” and his eye
was caught—as it was meant to be caught—by flaring headlines:
POLICE RAID RED CENTER
So Bunny purchased a paper—as it was meant that he should do—and read
how that morning a squad from police headquarters had invaded the rooms
of the clothing workers’ union, and taken off nearly a truck-load of
documents which were expected to prove that the disturbance in the
city’s industry was being directed and financed by the red
revolutionists of Moscow. The officials of the union were under arrest,
one of those apprehended being Chaim Menzies, “self-confessed
socialistic agitator.”
IX
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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