“Then you don’t have in mind especially a secret agent of the Russian Government,” I said, “or a Socialist, or a Communist and a Syndicalist, or an I.W.W. You merely mean a fellow that hasn’t anything better to do than stir up friction and dissatisfaction with anything from the foreman to the way the track is laid in his room, is that it?”
“You’ve got it,” he said. “Hell, no; we don’t have many of those Socialists or funny ones up here. I heard there was a pair of I.W.W.’s up here during the war; they said the Department of Justice was watching them — but I never saw them.”
I interviewed my miner friends all over again; I traveled over a considerable portion of the mine field and checked up on this point everywhere I went. And everybody, from operator to miner, gave me the same definition of radicaclass="underline" a bully, a trouble-maker, a fellow who did a lot of talking: our same old friend, in brief, that was going to lick the teacher ’way back in school days. A person we have had with us always. But never a word about Bakunin, Marx, Lenin or Moscow.
Words, I confess, could not express my disappointment. Here the newspapers had been talking for five years about one kind of beast, and come to find out, they were simply mixed up on their terminology; it was an entirely different kind of beast that went by that name. They had been calling a rabbit by the name of a wildcat, and that was what the whole noise was about.
My grief, as I say, was intense. But I shall not linger with myself. I want to step down the voltage of the West Virginia discussion into plain language a Marylander can understand.
Returning to Baltimore, I told a lady my story. She is a lady who was reared on a large Eastern Shore farm.
“Certainly,” she said, “I get the picture. Over home my father and all the other farmers used to say they never had any trouble with their help until some big-mouth nigger came along. That’s what they used to call them — ‘big-mouth nigger.’ Everything would be going along fine, hands all contented, everybody happy, until maybe we would need an extra man and get a big-mouth nigger. Then, just like that, everything would go wrong. The hands wouldn’t work, and, first thing you know, here they would come and all want ‘Sa’d’y aft’noon off,’ or a horse to drive on Sunday. It’s the same old thing.”
This, then, is the picture, translated into plain Eastern Shore of Maryland talk. I am now ready to make certain substitutions in my equations, that is, in the admonitions concerning radicals, and get the following reductio ad absurdum:
If the bulldozers ever get in control of the American Federation of Labor, then good night — the country has gone to pot.
The trouble-maker 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 “big-mouth” 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.
Now by the shiny bald pate of Eugene V. Debs is this what kept Palmer pacing the floor, with drawn and haggard face, that fateful May 1, when the bombs didn’t go off? Is this the “Under-Man”? — he who “remains, multiplies, bides his time. And now and then his time comes. When a civilization falters beneath its own weight and by the decay of its human foundations; when its structure is shaken by the storms of war, dissension or calamity; then the long-repressed springs of atavistic revolt gather themselves together for the spring.” (I quote from “The Revolt Against Civilization,” by the Very Hon. Lothrop Stoddard, K.K.K.)
So this is revolution. O tempora, O morons!
(The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 3, 1923)
Cain’s West Virginia reporting led to his first national magazine articles (in The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation) as well as his first attempt to write a novel, which ended in discouragement and a conviction that he could not write fiction. His Blizzard trial reporting also caught the eye of H. L. Mencken, who worked on The Sun and was about to launch his new magazine, The American Mercury. Soon Cain was writing for The Mercury, and his early, iconoclastic articles written for Mencken continued to display the sardonic tone and style he had developed on The Sun.[1]
Then, in 1924, after being discharged from a TB sanitarium, he took a job writing editorials for Walter Lippmann on The New York World, and the next stage in the literary evolution took place: James M. Cain gradually emerged on The World as a humorist and human interest writer. He had hoped to be hired by Lippmann as an op-ed page editor, but Lippmann, forewarned by Mencken and Arthur Krock (who introduced Cain to Lippmann) that Cain was developing as a writer of exceptional ability, had other ideas. What Cain did not know when he went to see Lippmann was that Maxwell Anderson, who contributed the human interest pieces to Lippmann’s editorial page, was resigning, due to the success of his play What Price Glory? which was running on Broadway. Lippmann asked Cain to try his hand at some editorials, and Cain wrote two — one on a congressman who purposely had himself indicted for making home beer with a recipe he had gleaned from a government publication, and another inquiring why editorial writers always came out against the man-eating shark and for motherhood. “Leave us never forget,” Cain said, “the man-eating shark is viviparous — it brings forth its young alive. It’s kind to its young and it’s been doing it over 10 million years before the human race was ever heard of. The man-eating shark was the first mother and, in a very real sense, the man-eating shark is motherhood.”
These two early efforts at human interest editorial writing were significant because they (1) gave further evidence that Cain possessed a light sardonic touch and (2) revealed his fascination with living creatures other than humans, especially ones that have a special terror for humans (about which more will be said later).
Cain, however, had never written an editorial before, and he did not think his two efforts were very good. When he left Lippmann’s office that first afternoon, he was sure he had failed and went immediately to a bar to meet a friend and decide where he would look for a job next. But that evening he was surprised to see his editorial on the congressman in print. When he went to Lippmann’s office the next morning, the editor was all smiles and asked him whether he had any ideas for editorials that day. Lippmann also said, referring to Cain’s first efforts: “Those are very funny pieces. I was very glad to get them. I didn’t use the piece about the shark — a very funny piece, but I don’t like pieces about the newspaper business itself.”
So Cain was hired as an editorial writer for The New York World and everything went along fine for weeks, with Cain writing his little “japes,” as he called them, and Lippmann seemingly very pleased. But then something went wrong, and there was a distinct change in Lippmann’s response to Cain’s editorials. Without being aware of it, Cain had succumbed to the curse of all editorial writers: the compulsion to shoulder the burdens of the world and lecture his readers. He had, in short, turned serious, and it bothered Lippmann. Cain’s little japes on baseball, music, and the human comedy had now become studious and too-long treatises on such things as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation “Peace Award,” the proposal for a new Department of Air, rewriting the King James Version of the Bible, and the situation in the West Virginia coal mines. He also dabbled in world affairs, which probably annoyed Lippmann even more because he considered himself the resident international expert.
1
For the series of articles Cain did for Mencken and