Free Clarkton by Howard Fast

There’s nothing the commies like better than a strike; it’s meat and drink to them.”
    â€œI think that’s something less than the main problem,” Lowell said impatiently. He did not like red-baiting; he felt, instinctively, that there was something unclean in this inordinate urge to build a Communist menace. Aside from Joe Santana, the barber, who was a Communist and made no secret of it, he could not recall that he had ever seen a Communist, known one, or been faced with the problem of one—unless Elliott Abbott was one of them, a notion that he put aside at once, thinking that his anger against Elliott could at least be kept rational.
    â€œYes and no—don’t underestimate those babies,” Wilson nodded, his voice taking on that slightly patronizing air it always assumed sooner or later when he spoke to Lowell. “Ham Gelb could say a word or two about that. But what I’m thinking about is the whole character of our operation here in Clarkton. Until 1932, your father never had any trouble with these folks. As a matter of fact, he made them feel they were all one big family, not in a soft way, you understand; there was an iron fist in the velvet glove; but he interested them in profit-sharing and all that kind of thing, and there just never was any trouble to speak about. Well, there was plenty of trouble in the ’thirties, when the union came in, until the war brought it back to normalcy. These are high-paid, skilled workers we got here, and I like to run a plant without any trouble. But if this strike stretches out too far, they’re going to become mean. You’d be surprised at how mean nice people can become, George. That’s one part of it; the other is the market. I want to settle this and get into the market.”
    â€œWho is Ham Gelb?” Lowell asked.
    Wilson seemed surprised for a moment; he leaned forward, looking keenly at Lowell, then he sucked at his cigar, relaxed, and grinned.
    â€œIt doesn’t have to remain a secret,” Lowell said.
    â€œYou picked him.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, I picked him?”
    Wilson stared at Lowell again, changed, became apologetic and intimate. “I thought you picked him out yourself. He’s one of the two men Leopold and James sent up here. He’s one of their best men too, a very smart apple. I thought you asked specifically for him. The other one is just a young squirt called Frank Norman, but Gelb more than makes up for that. I stopped worrying when Gelb got here. I want you to meet him.”

5. A fter Mike Sawyer had been shaved, intro duced to Joe Santana, to his seven-year-old daughter, who was leaving for school, to his five-year-old son, who was finger-painting himself and most of his room and as much of the barber shop as he could get to, past Joe’s guard, and to Hannah, who persuaded him to come back that evening for a real Italian dinner, Danny Ryan suggested that they walk back up the valley toward the plant, stopping in at the two main soup kitchens—so that Sawyer could see how that was organized and how well the system was running.
    â€œAnd it’s no hayride here,” Ryan said. “It’s not like a situation you’d have in New York or in Boston, or even in a place like Worcester, where you got a community to fall back on. When we go out on strike here, the whole town goes out, and we got to scrounge down in our own pockets.”
    Sawyer realized that, and he suggested that something might be done to get mass support from the entire western half of the state.
    â€œWe got a little already,” Ryan said, “with that truckload coming in today. Later on, we’ll want more.”
    The first soup kitchen, just around the corner of Fir Street, was under the direction of a Greek, Sam Saropoles, a big, dark man, who had lost two sons in the war as well as almost all of his relatives in the resistance back in the old country. Worry had taken off