Then a labor organizer came from Cleveland and on the day
of his arrival the story ran through the street that strike breakers were
to be brought in.
And on that evening of many adventures another element was introduced into
the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Main and
McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were
being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a
man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the
corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained
factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or
necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the
workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads.
They went to one side and gathering in groups discussed the stranger's
words. "I tell you what," said a little old workman, pulling nervously at
his graying mustache, "I'm on strike and I'm for sticking out until Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of
talk. I'll tell you what that man's doing. He's attacking our Government,
that's what he's doing." The workmen went off to their homes grumbling. The
Government was to them a sacred thing, and they did not fancy having their
demands for a better wage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and
socialists.
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