It was then that Smithfield’s students took matters into their own hands. They asked if he would meet with them for talks, and they started an open forum, renting some rooms above a drug store, and doing all the work themselves. They cut out smoking and drinking, and took to debating social problems. As one of them phrased it to me, “We let loose a spirit of real knowledge, and if we could have gone on, we should have changed the social order in ten years.” But, of course, that is exactly what the plutocracy of Michigan did not intend to have happen; they are going to keep the present social order—which means that we are going to have civil war in America, with the horrors we have seen in Russia and Ireland. Some boys came to Smithfield, saying they would like to meet on Sunday mornings and study religion. Smithfield thought he would like to know something about religion himself; so they got together and began to read the Bible. Of course they read it with their eyes open; they studied the class struggle in ancient Judea, the Hebrews enslaved by the plutocracy of Rome, the Hebrew proletariat enslaved by their own exploiters, with the help of priests and preachers of institutionalized religion. You can see the same thing in Ann Arbor and Detroit, so Professor Smithfield’s boys discovered the Bible to be “live stuff.” Presently came the Y. M. C. A. hand-shakers, seeking to introduce Bible study into the fraternity-houses. They would select some fraternity man to read the Bible between five and six o’clock in the afternoon; and then it was the Alpha Deltas, who boast themselves the toughest bunch in town, came to Smithfield and asked him to read to them. All the other classes petered out, and came to nothing; and naturally the “Y” people were sore, because a radical was able to hold his classes while they could not. Professor Smithfield’s attitude toward the war was about the same as my own; that is, he swallowed the allies’ propaganda sufficiently to think there might be a greater hope for democracy if the allies were to win. He made speeches, and sold Liberty Bonds, and his enemies could not get him on this issue. So the scandal bureau was put to work. Professor Smithfield’s wife was a teacher of swimming in the public schools of Detroit, and presently it began to be rumored that she had had a red-headed baby. One of the students told me the origin of this red-headed baby story, but I forget it; maybe the wife had been seen to pat a red-headed baby on the street, or maybe she had taken care of a red-headed baby for some friend—any little thing like that will do for the scandal bureau. It happens that the wife is likewise a Socialist, and in 1919 she answered some questions which students asked her about the Newberry case. As we have seen, the superintendent of schools in Detroit is a brother to Newberry’s leading henchman, so Mrs. Smithfield lost her position as a teacher of swimming.