The first speakers at the company podium were three highly respected and actually irreproachable men who comprised an investigatory committee: the president of a fine local college, an attorney from Minneapolis, and a businessman from Saint Paul. All of them happened to own stock in the Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company, but that was not at issue. What was at issue was the trouble that the yellow union buttons were causing. Fights were breaking out in cars and at stops, rider rates were slipping, and the consensus was that the yellow buttons had to go bye-bye. The committee was going to issue recommendations, they said, that went something like this: the buttons come off immediately, and in return, the company will reinstate those who have lost their jobs because of the button. Did the good people of Minnesota follow them so far? Recommendation was the key word. The committee recommended, and the company and the union agreed: no buttons, no union solicitation for the duration of the war. Right now the understanding was that the union was going along with it, and they had put it to a vote, to make it look all right with the membership, who were very attached, as anyone could plainly see, despite the heavy snowfall, to their buttons.
A union speaker on the other side of the little park, however, shouted that on the twenty-sixth of the month, the company, which had already posted signs ordering the removal of the buttons and the ceasing of union organizing efforts — implying, citizens, implying a legal binding they actually lacked — on the day before it went to the vote, the company went around and immediately booted every bastard with a yellow button. The committee and the commission will back up the company, saying that the union has failed to bargain in good faith by allowing their men to keep on wearing their buttons when they were asked not to. It’s flimsy as hell, as we are sure you can see, but they don’t need much!
Charles and Vera watched from the library steps through curtains of snow. Unable to make out features, they saw arms raised, hands waving and shaking, a little white face turned their way, then a black back as the speaker turned toward another part of his audience. There was a steady flow of torches from one side of the park to the other, great brilliant masses of them now, like bonfires, before the platforms, and dark masses of men floating like islands in a polar sea. A number of men had materialized around them. They stood with their hands shoved deep in their pockets, their faces tucked into collars like nesting birds.
“What a lot of shit this is.”
“Filthy cowards.”
“Lying, cheating, stealing, murdering sonsabitches. I guess they’ll murder us too, if they feel like it.”
The steps were slippery with snow. They held the lunchbox closed and made their way across the park to the company platform. Speakers and company officials sat huddled around coal braziers while speaker after speaker said things like, “Now, you men, you listen to me because you know I’m talking sense. This country is at war and we’re asking you to set aside your grievances for the duration and pitch in like the good goddamn men we know you to be.”
And there was McGee, in the middle of one of the semicircles. His face looked dark and raw and red, bulging out from a fur cap, the flaps of which covered his ears and were tied under his chin, so that his side-whiskers curled out girlishly. But for the dark hatred on his chapped face, he might have been some strange overgrown baby girl. He was standing with the Ramsey County Sheriff. Charles and Vera drew near: “Do not buckle under!” McGee was shouting. “We do not want the extra policemen here!”
Charles had no idea if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Was McGee trying to defuse a disaster? Or was he trying to make a bigger one.
Better to be a good man than to darken the hills with your ponies, he thought. That was what Crazy Horse’s father had said, or was said to have said — according to Father, who revered the wisdom almost as much as he did Montaigne’s. Well, Charles thought, but what was a good man? How did one describe him, what did he do? Truth excludes the use of violence because man is not capable of knowing the absolute truth and is therefore not competent to punish in its name. Someone else had said that. According to Father. I am all wrong, wrong wrong wrong, I am a dangerous fool, I have no idea what I am doing but I am flying into it like I am walking onto a stage. OH YES! I WAS BORN TO ACT! But no: If I attempt to punish McGee, then, as a proxy for other bad men, I will have to consider myself a bad man. Can I live with such a consideration? Very likely I can; many men evidently do. It was perhaps a basic human condition, badness. But more practically, could I withstand the counter-punishment of the state? Did it not make more sense, as some revolutionaries held, to do the deed and then escape, to “lie close and keep yourself for another go”? To surrender when there was no other way out, claim the act and pay the price? Violence was innate to human nature: ACT! One could see it in the daily lives of the calmest, most reasonable people. One could see it in the happiest and most secure children. It came from having one part or feature or function of a person, character, mind, opposed to another part or feature or function. It was there and that was all there was to it. It was the source of drama; the only question was one of expression, of art. The undivided self was the illusion! The undivided self — was shouting this aloud now? Vera was looking at him like she was listening and growing afraid of what she was hearing — the undivided self is the Pure Form, the Pure Idea, a Platonic Ideal, which is the source of our desire for it. We can only look back to it, worship it, and hold fast to our current stage of degeneration lest we degenerate further. It came from God and is steadily degenerating: soon we will no longer be able to recognize ourselves as human, and the world will end. These things go in cycles! Charles shouted to Vera. This isn’t reality! This world! Our bodies! That’s what Plato took from Pythagoras! You see? And from Parmenides he understood that REALITY, REAL REALITY, IS ETERNAL! ALL THE LITTLE CHANGES WE IGNITE AND ENDURE: PURE ILLUSION! STRONGER AND STRONGER ILLUSION THE LONGER WE SURVIVE! AND THEN THERE’S HERACLITUS! CAN YOU GUESS? THE SENSES ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED! INTELLECT, DIVINE EDUCATION, ALONE CAN KEEP US SAFE FROM OUR ENEMIES AND WELL FED!
Some of the carmen were hooting in derision and throwing snowballs at the company speakers.
“Next,” Charles said, ceasing abruptly to philosophize, “they will build little igloo forts.”
A man came very close to them and whispered fiercely that they were to go to the other goddamn side of the park. They went straight across the park to the union platform, where they recognized men from the NPL, the IWW, and an attorney for the Equity Cooperative Exchange — all of whom would be arrested, that night or the next day — and the mayor of Minneapolis. “We are all patriotic men,” one of them was saying. “We love our country as we love our families, and that is precisely why the demand for a union is a good one, an honest one, a reasonable one, one that cannot be denied by men of equal conscience and patriotism.”