Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
There were no bells in the belfry. Neither were there cafés and shops around the plaza below. The architect had justified the plaza on strictly utilitarian grounds. It provided any amount of room for wagons and buggies and horse-drawn streetcars as they came and went. The architect had also been matter-of-fact about the virtues of the factory as a fort. Any mob meaning to storm the front gate would first have to cross all that open ground.
A single newspaper reporter, from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, now a RAMJAC publication, retreated across the plaza with the women. He asked Ma Jarvis what she planned to do next.
There was nothing much that she could do next, of course. The strikers weren’t even strikers anymore, but simply unemployed persons being turned out of their homes.
She gave a brave answer anyway: “We will be back,” she said. What else could she say?
He asked her when they would be back.
Her answer was probably no more than the poetry of hopelessness in Christendom, with winter setting in. “On Christmas morning,” she said.
• • •
This was printed in the paper, whose editors felt that a threatening promise had been made. And the fame of this coming Christmas in Cleveland spread far and wide. Sympathizers with the strikers—preachers, writers, union organizers, populist politicians, and on and on—began to filter into the city as though expecting a miracle of some kind. They were frankly enemies of the economic order as it was constructed then.
A company of National Guard infantrymen was mobilized by Edwin Kincaid, the governor of Ohio, to protect the factory. They were farm boys from the southern part of the state, selected because they had no friends or relatives among the strikers, no reason to see them as anything but unreasonable disturbers of the peace. They represented an American ideal: healthy, cheerful citizen soldiers, who went about their ordinary business until their country suddenly needed an awesome display of weapons and discipline. They were supposed to appear as though from nowhere, to the consternation of America’s enemies. When the trouble was over, they would vanish again.
The regular army of the country, which had fought the Indians until the Indians could fight no more, was down to about thirty thousand men. As for the Utopian militias throughout the country: They almost all consisted of farm boys, since the health of the factory workers was so bad and their hours so long. It was about to be discovered, incidentally, in the Spanish-American War, that militiamen were worse than useless on battlefields, they were so poorly trained.
• • •
And that was surely the impression young Alexander Hamilton McCone had of the militiamen who arrived at the factory on Christmas Eve: that these were not soldiers. They were brought on a special train to a siding inside the factory’s high iron fence. They straggled out of the car and onto a loading platform as though they were ordinary passengers on various errands. Their uniforms were only partly buttoned, and often mis-buttoned, at that. Several had lost their hats. Almost all carried laughably unmilitary suitcases and parcels.
Their officers? Their captain was the postmaster of Greenfield, Ohio. Their two. lieutenants were twin sons of the president of the Greenfield Bank and Trust Company. The postmaster and the banker had both done local favors for the governor. The commissions were their rewards. And the officers, in turn, had rewarded those who had pleased them in some way by making them sergeants or corporals. And the privates, in turn, voters or sons of voters, had it within their power, if they felt like using it, to ruin the lives of their superiors with contempt and ridicule, which could go on for generations.
There on the loading platform at the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company old Daniel McCone finally had to ask one of the many soldiers milling about and eating at the same time, “Who is in charge here?”
As luck would have it, he had put the question to the captain, who told him this: “Well—as much as anybody, I guess I am.”
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