The same
men were back in line the next evening. The police could not arrest a
hundred thousand men because they marched shoulder to shoulder along
the streets and chanted a weird march song as they went.
The whole thing was not an outbreak of labour. It was something
different from anything that had come into the world before. The
unions were in it but besides the unions there were the Poles, the
Russian Jews, the Hunks from the stockyards and the steel works in
South Chicago. They had their own leaders, speaking their own
languages. And how they could throw their legs into the march! The
armies of the old world had for years been training men for the
strange demonstration that had broken out in Chicago.
The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of it
now in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapers
of that day to realise how the imagination of men was caught and held.
Every train brought writers tumbling into Chicago. In the evening
fifty of them would gather in the back room at Weingardner's
restaurant where such men congregate.
And then the thing broke out all over the country, in steel towns like
Pittsburgh and Johnstown and Lorain and McKeesport and men working in
little independent factories in towns down in Indiana began drilling
and chanting the march song on summer evenings on the village baseball
ground.
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