"What"s going on?" How that cry ran over Chicago. Every newspaper man in town got a.s.signments on the story. The papers were loaded with it every day. All over the city they appeared, everywhere--the Marching Men.
There were leaders enough! The Cuban War and the State Militia had taught too many men the swing of the march step for there not to be at least two or three competent drill masters in every little company of men.
And there was the marching song the Russian wrote for McGregor. Who could forget it? Its high pitched harsh feminine strain rang in the brain. How it went pitching and tumbling along in that wailing calling endless high note. It had strange breaks and intervals in the rendering. The men did not sing it. They chanted it. There was in it just the weird haunting something the Russians know how to put into their songs and into the books they write. It isn"t the quality of the soil. Some of our own music has that. But in this Russian song there was something else, something world-wide and religious--a soul, a spirit. Perhaps it is just the spirit that broods over that strange land and people. There was something of Russia in McGregor himself.
Anyway the marching song was the most persistently penetrating thing Americans had ever heard. It was in the streets, the shops, the offices, the alleys and in the air overhead--the wail--half shout. No noise could drown it. It swung and pitched and rioted through the air.
And there was the fellow who wrote the music down for McGregor. He was the real thing and he bore the marks of the shackles on his legs. He had remembered the march from hearing the men sing it as they went over the Steppes to Siberia, the men who were going up out of misery to more misery. "It would come out of the air," he explained. "The guards would run down the line of men to shout and strike out with their short whips. "Stop it!" they cried. And still it went on for hours, defying everything, there on the cold cheerless plains."
And he had brought it to America and put it to music for McGregor"s marchers.
Of course the police tried to stop the marchers. Into a street they would run crying "Disperse!" The men did disperse only to appear again on some vacant lot working away at the perfection of the marching.
Once an excited squad of police captured a company of them. 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.
How the people, the comfortable well-fed middle cla.s.s people were afraid! It swept over the country like a religious revival, the creeping dread.
The writing men got to McGregor, the brain back of it all, fast enough. Everywhere his influence appeared. In the afternoon there would be a hundred newspaper men standing on the stairway leading up to the big bare office in Van Buren Street. At his desk he sat, big and red and silent. He looked like a man half asleep. I suppose the thing that was in their minds had something to do with the way men looked at him but in any case the crowd in Weingardner"s agreed that there was in the man something of the same fear-inspiring bigness there was in the movement he had started and was guiding.
It seems absurdly simple now. There he sat at his desk. The police might have walked in and arrested him. But if you begin figuring that way the whole thing was absurd. What differs it if men march coming from work, swinging along shoulder to shoulder or shuffle aimlessly along, and what harm can come out of the singing of a song?
You see McGregor understood something that all of us had not counted on. He knew that every one has an imagination. He was at war with men"s minds. He challenged something in us that we hardly realised was there. He had been sitting there for years thinking it out. He had watched Dr. Dowie and Mrs. Eddy. He knew what he was doing.
A crowd of newspaper men went one night to hear McGregor at a big outdoor meeting up on the North Side. Dr. Cowell was with them--the big English statesman and writer who later was drowned on the _t.i.tanic._ He was a big man, physically and mentally, and was in Chicago to see McGregor and try to understand what he was doing.
And McGregor got him as he had all men. Out there under the sky the men stood silent, Cowell"s head sticking up above the sea of faces, and McGregor talked. The newspaper men declared he could not talk.
They were wrong about that. McGregor had a way of throwing up his arms and straining and shouting out his sentences, that got to the souls of men.
He was a kind of crude artist drawing pictures on the mind.
That night he talked about labour as always--labour personified--huge crude old Labour. How he made the men before him see and feel the blind giant who has lived in the world since time began and who still goes stumbling blindly about, rubbing his eyes and lying down to sleep away centuries in the dust of the fields and the factories.
A man arose in the audience and climbed upon the platform beside McGregor. It was a daring thing to do and men"s knees trembled. While the man was crawling up to the platform shouts arose. One has in mind a picture of a bustling little fellow going into the house and into the upper room where Jesus and his followers were having the last supper together, going in there to wrangle about the price to be paid for the wine.
The man who got on the platform with McGregor was a socialist. He wanted to argue.
But McGregor did not argue with him. He sprang forward, it was a quick tiger-like movement, and spun the socialist about, making him stand small and blinking and comical before the crowd.
Then McGregor began to talk. He made of the little stuttering arguing socialist a figure representing all labour, made him the personification of the old weary struggle of the world. And the socialist who went to argue stood with tears in his eyes, proud of his position in men"s eyes.
All over the city McGregor talked of old Labour and how he was to be built up and put before men"s eyes by the movement of the Marching Men. How our legs tingled to fall in step and go marching away with him.
Out of the crowds there came the note of that wailing march. Some one always started that.
That night on the North Side Doctor Cowell got hold of the shoulder of a newspaper man and led him to a car. He who knew Bismarck and who had sat in council with kings went walking and babbling half the night through the empty streets.
It is amusing now to think of the things men said under the influence of McGregor. Like old Doctor Johnson and his friend Savage they walked half drunk through the streets swearing that whatever happened they would stick to the movement. Doctor Cowell himself said things just as absurd as that.
And all over the country men were getting the idea--the Marching Men-- old Labour in one ma.s.s marching before the eyes of men--old Labour that was going to make the world see--see and feel its bigness at last. Men were to come to the end of strife--men united--Marching!
Marching! Marching!
CHAPTER V
In all of the time of The Marching Men there was but one bit of written matter from the leader McGregor. It had a circulation running into the millions and was printed in every tongue spoken in America. A copy of the little circular lies before me now.
THE MARCHERS
"They ask us what we mean.
Well, here is our answer.
We mean to go on marching.
We mean to march in the morning and in the evening when the sun goes down.
On Sundays they may sit on their porches or shout at men playing ball in a field But we will march.
On the hard cobblestones of the city streets and through the dust of country roads we will march.
Our legs may be weary and our throats hot and dry, But still we will march, shoulder to shoulder.
We will march until the ground shakes and tall buildings tremble.
Shoulder to shoulder we will go--all of us-- On and on forever.
We will not talk nor listen to talk.
We will march and we will teach our sons and our daughters to march.
Their minds are troubled. Our minds are clear.
We do not think and banter words.
We march.
Our faces are coa.r.s.e and there is dust in our hair and beards.
See, the inner parts of our hands are rough.
And still we march--we the workers."
CHAPTER VI
Who will ever forget that Labour Day in Chicago? How they marched!-- thousands and thousands and more thousands! They filled the streets.
The cars stopped. Men trembled with the import of the impending hour.
Here they come! How the ground trembles! The chant chant chant of that song! It must have been thus that Grant felt at the great review of the veterans in Washington when all day long they marched past him, the men of the Civil War, the whites of their eyes showing in the tan of their faces. McGregor stood on the stone curbing above the tracks in Grant Park. As the men marched they ma.s.sed in there about him, thousands of them, steel workers and iron workers and great red-necked butchers and teamsters.
And in the air wailed the marching song of the workers.