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strike. Furious citizens, trying to get telephone calls through
strike-breaking girls, danced helplessly. Every truck that made its way
from the factories to the freight-stations was guarded by a policeman,
trying to look stoical beside the scab driver. A line of fifty
trucks from the Zenith Steel and Machinery Company was attacked by
strikers-rushing out from the sidewalk, pulling drivers from the seats,
smashing carburetors and commutators, while telephone girls cheered from
the walk, and small boys heaved bricks.

The National Guard was ordered out. Colonel Nixon, who in private life
was Mr. Caleb Nixon, secretary of the Pullmore Tractor Company, put on
a long khaki coat and stalked through crowds, a .44 automatic in hand.
Even Babbitt's friend, Clarence Drum the shoe merchant--a round and
merry man who told stories at the Athletic Club, and who strangely
resembled a Victorian pug-dog--was to be seen as a waddling but
ferocious captain, with his belt tight about his comfortable little
belly, and his round little mouth petulant as he piped to chattering
groups on corners. "Move on there now! I can't have any of this
loitering!"

Every newspaper in the city, save one, was against the strikers. When
mobs raided the news-stands, at each was stationed a militiaman, a
young, embarrassed citizen-soldier with eye-glasses, bookkeeper or
grocery-clerk in private life, trying to look dangerous while small boys
yelped, "Get onto de tin soldier!" and striking truck-drivers inquired
tenderly, "Say, Joe, when I was fighting in France, was you in camp
in the States or was you doing Swede exercises in the Y. M. C. A.? Be
careful of that bayonet, now, or you'll cut yourself!"

There was no one in Zenith who talked of anything but the strike, and
no one who did not take sides. You were either a courageous friend of
Labor, or you were a fearless supporter of the Rights of Property; and
in either case you were belligerent, and ready to disown any friend who
did not hate the enemy.

A condensed-milk plant was set afire--each side charged it to the
other--and the city was hysterical.

And Babbitt chose this time to be publicly liberal.

He belonged to the sound, sane, right-thinking wing, and at first he
agreed that the Crooked Agitators ought to be shot. He was sorry when
his friend, Seneca Doane, defended arrested strikers, and he thought of
going to Doane and explaining about these agitators, but when he read a
broadside alleg