mashed mudguards busted springs old spades and shovels entrenching tools twisted hospital cots a mountain of nuts and bolts of all sizes four million miles of barbedwire chickenwire rabbitfence acres of tin roofing square miles of parked trucks long parades of locomotives strung along the yellow rails of the sidings
KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO up in the office the grumpy sergeants doing the paperwork dont know where home is lost our outfits our service records our aluminum numberplates no spika de Engliss no entiendo comprend pas no capisco nyeh panimayoo
day after day the shadows of the poplars point west northwest north northeast east When they desoit they always heads south the corporal said Pretty tough but if he aint got a soivice record how can we make out his discharge KEEP OUR BOYS FIT for whatthehell the war’s over
scrap
Newsreel XLII
it was a gala day for Seattle. Enormous crowds not only filled the streets on the line of march from the pier but finally later in the evening machineguns were placed in position, the guardsmen withstanding a shower of missles until their inaction so endangered them the officers gave the order to fire. WOULD CUT OFF LIGHT. President Lowell of Harvard University has urged the students to serve as strikebreakers. “In accordance with its tradition of public service, the university desires at this time of crisis to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth.”
THREE ARMIES FIGHT FOR KIEW
Calls Situation a Crime against Civilization
TO MAKE US INVULNERABLE
during the funeral services of Horace Traubel, literary executor and biographer of Walt Whitman, this afternoon, a fire broke out in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah. Periodicals, tugboats and shipyards were effected. 2000 passengers held up at Havre from which Mr. Wilson embarked to review the Pacific fleet, but thousands were massed on each side of the street seemingly satisfied merely to get a glimpse of the President. As the George Washington steamed slowly to her berth in Hoboken through the crowded lower bay, every craft afloat gave welcome to King Albert and Queen Elizabeth by hoarse blasts of their whistles
CRUCIBLE STEEL CONTINUES TO LEAD MARKET
My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of libertee
Of thee I sing
Paul Bunyan
When Wesley Everest came home from overseas and got his discharge from the army he went back to his old job of logging. His folks were of the old Kentucky and Tennessee stock of woodsmen and squirrelhunters who followed the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark into the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope. In the army Everest was a sharpshooter, won a medal for a crack shot.
(Since the days of the homesteaders the western promoters and the politicians and lobbyists in Washington had been busy with the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope, with the result that:
ten monopoly groups aggregating only one thousand eight hundred and two holders, monopolized one thousand two hundred and eight billion, eight hundred million,
[1,208,800,000,000]
square feet of standing timber…. enough standing timber… to yield the planks necessary [over and above the manufacturing wastage] to make a floating bridge more than two feet thick and more than five miles wide from New York to Liverpool;—
wood for scaffolding, wood for jerrybuilding residential suburbs, billboards, wood for shacks and ships and shantytowns, pulp for tabloids, yellow journals, editorial pages, advertising copy, mail-order catalogues, filingcards, army paperwork, handbills, flimsy.)
Wesley Everest was a logger like Paul Bunyan.
The lumberjacks, loggers, shingleweavers, sawmill workers were the helots of the timber empire; the I.W.W. put the idea of industrial democracy in Paul Bunyan’s head; wobbly organizers said the forests ought to belong to the whole people, said Paul Bunyan ought to be paid in real money instead of in company scrip, ought to have a decent place to dry his clothes, wet from the sweat of a day’s work in zero weather and snow, an eight hour day, clean bunkhouses, wholesome grub; when Paul Bunyan came back from making Europe safe for the democracy of the Big Four, he joined the lumberjack’s local to help make the Pacific slope safe for the workingstiffs. The wobblies were reds. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of.
(To be a red in the summer of 1919 was worse than being a hun or a pacifist in the summer of 1917.)
The timber owners, the sawmill and shinglekings were patriots; they’d won the war (in the course of which the price of lumber had gone up from $16 a thousand feet to $116; there are even cases where the government paid as high as $1200 a thousand for spruce); they set out to clean the reds out of the logging camps;
free American institutions must be preserved at any cost;
so they formed the Employers Association and the Legion of Loyal Loggers, they made it worth their while for bunches of ex-soldiers to raid I.W.W. halls, lynch and beat up organizers, burn subversive literature.
On Memorial Day 1918 the boys of the American Legion in Centralia led by a group from the Chamber of Commerce wrecked the I.W.W. hall, beat up everybody they found in it, jailed some and piled the rest of the boys in a truck and dumped them over the county line, burned the papers and pamphlets and auctioned off the fittings for the Red Cross; the wobblies’ desk still stands in the Chamber of Commerce.
The loggers hired a new hall and the union kept on growing. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of.
Before Armistice Day, 1919, the town was full of rumors that on that day the hall would be raided for keeps. A young man of good family and pleasant manners, Warren O. Grimm, had been an officer with the American force in Siberia; that made him an authority on labor and Bolsheviks, so he was chosen by the business men to lead the 100 % forces in the Citizens Protective League to put the fear of God into Paul Bunyan.
The first thing the brave patriots did was pick up a blind newsdealer and thrash him and drop him in a ditch across the county line.
The loggers consulted counsel and decided they had a right to defend their hall and themselves in case of a raid. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of.
Wesley Everest was a crack shot; Armistice Day he put on his uniform and filled his pockets with cartridges. Wesley Everest was not much of talker; at a meeting in the Union Hall the Sunday before the raid, there’d been talk of the chance of a lynching bee; Wesley Everest had been walking up and down the aisle with his O.D. coat on over a suit of overalls, distributing literature and pamphlets; when the boys said they wouldn’t stand for another raid, he stopped in his tracks with the papers under his arm, rolled himself a brownpaper cigarette and smiled a funny quiet smile.
Armistice Day was raw and cold; the mist rolled in from Puget Sound and dripped from the dark boughs of the spruces and the shiny storefronts of the town. Warren O. Grimm commanded the Centralia section of the parade. The exsoldiers were in their uniforms. When the parade passed by the union hall without halting, the loggers inside breathed easier, but on the way back the parade halted in front of the hall. Somebody whistled through his fingers. Somebody yelled, “Let’s go… at ’em, boys.” They ran towards the wobbly hall. Three men crashed through the door. A rifle spoke. Rifles crackled on the hills back of the town, roared in the back of the hall.
Grimm and an exsoldier were hit.