This little piece is written in a competent short-story format and an intriguing, sardonic style. Its prophecies, at least in two cases, were quite good: Mary Clough, his girlfriend and later first wife, did go on to get her Ph.D.; and the narrator, James M. Cain, was almost run over by an automobile in New York, but was saved by his boss, an editor named Walter Lippmann. Cain never did learn what actually happened to most of his classmates, a fact which he immortalized in one of the two light verses he wrote 20 years later for The New Yorker.
Cain made his decision to be a writer while sitting on a park bench in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, in 1914. He went back to Chestertown, took a job teaching English in the prep school at the college, and spent his spare time writing short stories, which came back from the magazines as fast as they were sent out. Unfortunately, these unpublished stories were not saved, so there is no evidence to show how the 23-year-old Cain was developing as a writer. Discouraged, he went up to Baltimore and took a job as a reporter, first for The American and then The Sun. But this career was aborted by World War I and the year and a half he spent in France with the American Expeditionary Force.
He returned to his old job on The Sun in 1920, and now we begin to see young Cain developing as a very talented and sardonic writer with an excellent eye — and ear — for the human comedy as well as tragedy. His first major assignment was to cover the trial of William Blizzard, a young West Virginia coal miner who had been charged with treason. Blizzard had led a band of 600 coal miners against the “deputies” hired by the coal miners to resist the efforts of the unions to organize the miners. In carrying out their orders, the deputies attacked and killed some of the miners, and Blizzard’s mob was essentially responding to the brutalities of the deputies. Cain did not think this amounted to treason, and he also thought the miners were being falsely labeled as “radical” and “revolutionaries” by the establishment press. His viewpoint came out in his reporting, which not only was accurate, fair, and objective but also underscored the comic-opera nature of the war between the miners and the coal company deputies.
Cain’s coverage of the trial was featured prominently by The Sun, not only in first-page stories but in several feature pieces for the editorial page. One of these gives us our first revealing glimpse of Cain’s sardonic twist of mind in the early 1920s. It was titled “Hunting the Radical” and is reprinted below.
Hunting the Radical
Ever since the war times we have had a prodigious pother about radicalism. The radicals were going to sell us out to the Germans; the radicals were going to sell us out to Russia; the radicals were going to have a revolution and put the White House to the torch. The newspaper writers devoted unlimited space to them; a real spectre haunted many other estimable persons. One gathered that the duty of all patriotic citizens was to scotch the head of the monster ’neath the heel of the Americanization movement.
The discussion still goes on unabated, and I summarize the main points brought forward as follows:
If the radicals ever get in control of the American Federation of Labor, then good night! — the country has gone to pot.
The radical preaches a doctrine of hate and class consciousness, whereas our Government is founded on the principle of fair play and equal opportunity to all.
The radical proposes to accomplish his ends by violence, whereas our Government is founded on the principle of respect for the law and the will of the majority.
These, I believe, are the main points alleged against the radicals.
The subject, I confess, has interested me since it was first broached. I am naturally superstitious, being easily frightened by ghost stories, and possibly that accounts for it. Anyhow, I read with rapt attention all the newspaper print about it; I have gone so far as to read up on the past history of it. I have read biographies of Lauvelle, Bakunin, Proudhon and Lenin; I have even read Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. Reading about the Chicago bomb outrage back in the eighties afforded me a memorable thrill; the I.W.W. is my special meat.
As a result of my researches, I got the impression that the radical was a person adept at plots too devious for the ordinary mind to comprehend; that he was steeped in philosophy that was a triple distillate of Marx, Proudhon and Lenin; that he was a secret agent of the Moscow regime, and if we didn’t watch him, would have a Soviet in the Capitol at Washington before we knew it. I think this was the common impression.
Well, as I say, the subject fascinates me. So I set out to hunt the radical in his lair; I wanted to see the beast, stroke his fur and hear him purr. I had been impressed by Henry M. Hyde’s statement, in an article last summer, that the West Virginia mine fields were infested with Reds, so off to West Virginia I went and got me a job in a union mine, where, according to the best information, I could hardly move without stepping on the toe of a radical.
And, praise God, I found him! I had hardly stowed my dunnage in the miners’ boarding house before I began hearing about him. I give you a brief digest of some of the things I heard:
A foreman: “Oh, we get along with our men all right. You see, there’s not generally any trouble between a coal company and his men: It’s only when these radicals get them stirred up that we have trouble.”
An operator: “The main trouble we have is with this radical element. Our men, most of them, are good men — steady, good workers, never give any trouble. But you know how it is: when some of these radicals get up on their ear about something, then’s when we have our hands full.”
A miner: “Tell you how it is: this here’s a good comp’ny, best comp’ny I ever work for. An’ they’s good men in this mine, good men’s ’yever see; they don’t have to have no foreman over’m to git the work out of ’m. But when these yere dam radicals gits started, ’ats when we have what you call trouble. Seems like ther’s always an element that want’s t’ start sum’m. You know how it is.”
A miner’s wife: “It’s jes’ like I tell my husban’. You men don’t never have no trouble ontil you start listenin’ to some of them radicals, we calls ’m.”
And so forth. I had several radicals pointed out to me: rowdy-looking fellows, certainly. I even screwed up my courage to talk to them; they offered me carbide for my lamp and cigarettes. I declined, of course.
But this point gradually became apparent to me: that these radicals seemed to be a different breed from those I had read so much about in the newspapers. I cleverly interrogated one, without revealing my design, and found he had never heard of Russia. I found out that nobody in the whole camp had ever heard of the numerous self-anointed apostles of the labor movement — the “Cause” — who get out the magazines in New York. I questioned other certified radicals and found they had no theories concerning government whatever and didn’t know what a Soviet was. Hold on, I thought, there’s something wrong here.
So I went to an operator friend and I explained to him my difficulty. I told him I thought what he meant by radical were two different things. “Tell me,” I said, “precisely what do you imply by radical?”
“Oh, that’s a new word we have,” he said. “I don’t remember just how we got to calling them that. I mean a trouble-maker; a fellow that wants to run things — a bully, I guess you would call him.”