Places and Persons

...They seemed to have an unerring eye for the distinction between a real Communist and a mere holiday maker...

...For Defense of the Soviet Union...

...Swarthy men, blond men of the North, South Americans, Poles, Lithuanians, thousands of "Eyetalians" of course, a few unmistakable "Rooshians," as well as strange mixtures and crosses, mongrel products of an East Side that is losing some of its race lines on the fringes...

...cellar pinks from the Village, artists, laborers, unemployed, etc...

...It was a showman's crowd if ever there was one, and the Reds proved to be poor showmen...

...They had hoped, so some of them told me, to stir up, not a riot, but a great surge of protest against the hapless condition of William Z. Foster and others of their leaders now languishing in "capitalistic dungeons...

...Among these Veterans of Foreign Wars one occasionally came across the old army blue of the SpanishAmerican, and now and then, something of a rarity these days, a man or two of the ancient Hawkins's Zouaves...

...Incidentally, the Junior Naval Reservists who marched with the V.F.W...

...This goes for New York, anyway...

...Proud divils they are now, all harnessed up and the like...

...For Immediate Liberation of the Delegation of Unemployed ! For Equal Pay for Equal Work for Women, Negro, Young Workers...

...They had a holiday, a rare enough experience save when they had enforced holidays, and they were in no mood for ructions, for excursions and alarums...

...If any one had been able to set up a revival of Huber's Museum, complete with snake charmer, fat lady, bearded lady, sword swallower, tatooed man, and such, he would have made a fortune...

...Many of the veterans remained in the crowds that jammed the square and the side streets for the lateafternoon affair...

...Perhaps if the Communists had been able to broach a few kegs they could have put on a better show...

...Certainly the circulars the populace found in the letter boxes of their flats on the morning of May 1 were sufficiently incendiary to promise action of some sort...

...May 14, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 45 Places and Persons ALL QUIET IN UNION SQUARE By HERBERT REED PATRIOTISM and revolution (the latter hardly even incipient on its record for the day) split their holiday in Union Square in equable fashion, and for once at least the dove of peace was queen of the May...

...For these better-class speakeasies are "carrying" many a man out of a job, giving him his glass of beer, and now and then lending him a little money...

...But their speakers could not reach the great mobs of the side streets...

...Ah, a lot of furriners," quoth he, and spat in disgust...

...The former they allowed to swarm into the northern plaza of the square, as carefully selected as if they had been hand-picked long in advance, and then the blue cordon shut down...

...I've a lad on the cops myself now, and another going to Delehanty's school...

...Good-natured New York, that same good-natured New York that will mill around in the streets any time in the hope of something approaching a free show, gathered obligingly enough to furnish a Soviet photograph which probably will be labeled abroad as a "general strike...

...among them a few majors, colonels and captains, complete with gloves and swagger stick...

...It is detracting nothing from their real menace in this town, to say that the revolutionary materials were not at hand...

...Nor was there any race riot in Harlem itself as had been hoped...

...Well, to begin with, it is perhaps needless to say that the strike did not materialize...

...And the men with the red flags in the square...

...There isn't a man in the lot with guts enough to shellack a cop...

...But there was no fight in any of them...

...But the Commissioner did not hesitate to pay his respects to Rutgers Square...

...Time was in the good old days of the lumber yards and the slaughter houses when many a cop got his shellacking, and no hard feelings either...

...Decorous and just a bit solemn, this patriotic demonstration was really little more than a pleasant foretaste of Decoration Day...

...It is true that the workers laid down their tools for the day as so many of them have always done, but they did not fling them away...

...The police did a much too good job to suit the Communists...

...Milling about myself for an hour or two, I leaned against a railing and talked with an old time East-side New Yorker, who passed the time of day, spoke of the heat, and indeed of everything save the matter in hand...

...There was not so much as a cheer in all that throng...

...Outside the counted noses of the Reds themselves, there were few in the crowd who had the stomach for a two-mile march on a broiling hot day all the way up to Union Square The crowds had been gathering steadily throughout the morning...

...And here were to be found the real unemployed, plus, of course, the employed...

...It was all in fun then...

...said Rutgers Square, and that was all...

...True enough it was that labor had laid down its tools for the day, as it had ever since I can remember, but in these days of a very real unemployment problem, most of the workless men seemed to have something else on hand than mere listening to the harangues of the Reds...

...The cold truth of the matter is that the proprietor of the speakeasy, the better-class speakeasy—oh yes, there are better-class speakeasies—is much more popular today than any Communist can hope to be...

...Even had the Reds attempted a march to City Hall or elsewhere I doubt if they could have added a single recruit to their column, and besides, the absence of the leadership of violence was very noticeable in their own closed ranks...

...There was not any too much life even in the Young Pioneers...

...There were plenty of "furriners" in the side streets...

...Times have changed...

...It was the sort of crowd—and I have been watching New York crowds for more than a quarter of a century—that would have followed a first-class barker with side show anywhere, making the "demonstration" even more of a flop than it was...

...Only the better class of unemployed, the more adroit and gifted panhandlers, and the more respectable citizens who have had the park habit all their lives, patronize this square, and it was quite the proper station for the formation of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and their friends, which included some four hundred White Russians, about whom, with their Sixty-ninth and Seventy-first Regiment bands, there was nothing very ferocious, or even militant...

...The line about the Negroes was calculated to bring down a great delegation from Harlem...

...The City Hall is something else again, being reserved for the greeters...

...Against Imperialist War...

...occasionally supplemented the "Boo...

...Boo...

...So Commissioner Whalen, proud and arrogant as usual, but unmistakably more popular with the average New York crowd than he was, ruled the day in Union Square...

...but then, Madison Square is always rather sedate...

...equally any upholder of anything under the flag and the sun can uphold to his heart's content and in force— all without molesting or molestation...

...For Work or Unemployed Insurance...

...It did not materialize...

...In the rather more elite Madison Square, now a shrine of patriotism, due to the eternal light and the visit of Colonel Lindberg, there was a much higher percentage of doffing of hats as the colors went by then one would have been led to expect by the mass of incendiary "literature" that had been spread through the town...

...The newspapers kept their riot headlines, big and black, standing all day, with the exception of one sheet that conducted a riot all its own, and went flaring into the side streets off the square, only to evoke a gargantuan grin from the proletariat there assembled...

...Peace, if not pacifism, was very much in the air...

...In the far-distant future this May Day will be remembered, I think, mainly because it was very hot, and there was a great thunderstorm in the late afternoon...

...To Hell with Whalen...

...And there you have it...

...Sheep," he said, waving his hand toward the mob in the street, "New York sheep...

...In Rutgers Square, with its gathering of around fifteen thousand, there was an unmistakable apathy...

...He had established the fact that any bewailer of the state of things as they are can bewail to his heart's content and in force in Union Square...

...There was not anything to speak of in the way of a song of hate when Commissioner Whalen and Chief Inspector John O'Brien turned up...

...Here is one of them: Strike May 1 For the Seven Hour Day—Five Day Week...

...And that aftermath, whether a certain group of the public and of officialdom likes it or not, was to be found in the thousands of speakeasies of the city, where the beer flowed as it always flows on a holiday, but not perhaps as copiously as it would have flowed in better times...

...The Communists' Central Committee, having been decapitated, so to speak, only C. A. Hathaway, Herbert Benjamin, and Guy Schmidt were left to handle the demonstration...

...earlier in the day, had arrived at Madison Square equipped with rifles and had to be disarmed...

...Let us take a look at Rutgers Square about this time...

...admired Grover Whalen's neatly caparisoned detachment of police, many of them personally and favorably known to groups of their neighbors who had made the pilgrimage to Fourteenth Street, and after buying apples and candy, and languidly wandering about, departed homeward from a fairly satisfactory outing under a hot sun...

...whch, as anyone will admit, is hardly a fighting word...

...I doubt if there is a man of them left with any stomach for three years behind the bars or even the prospect of it...

...However, it was not a hungry crowd anyway, and although there were men in it to whom the immediate future looked black enough in all conscience, the idea of violence was far from their thoughts...

...However, even a highly capitalistic conveyance, under the direction of the head of the "cossacks," was better than no transportation at all...

...There was a breakdown of the loud-speaker system, so that outside their own immediate gathering the ex46 THE COMMONWEAL May 14, 1930 horters were practically voiceless...

...The march from Rutgers Square was less inspiring than pathetic—little children dropping out after a block or two to sit between the comforting number elevens of some guardian of the peace—the swaying, unorganized march of the true believers in all that is Soviet—the herding in the Square, with occasional bursts of flag-waving—the mumbling singing of the Marseillaise and the "solidarity" song that certainly needed a Walter Damrosch or an Ernest Schelling to pull it into some sort of musical hegemony...

...There was a line1 of demarcation between those of the demonstration and the many thousands of the audience, as sharply defined as a castle moat...

...Now any such demonstration as this has its aftermath...

...On the day it is doubtful if they could have been stirred to action for any cause in the world...

...but it was evident in most cases that this was merely personal inspiration...

...To say that the Communist and their friends gathered in Union Square is to say that which was not true...

...Now this sharp line of demarcation worked a real hardship on the agitators...

...They, having no heart for walking, were glad to accept a ride in Whalen's boo-wagon, which to many seemed a somewhat traitorous proceeding...

...He made a flying trip down there while the Communists were arranging their m?rching columns, and all that Rutgers Square said to him was "Boo...