America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the dark, quick little men constantly got into trouble with what were called “white women.” The Filipinos lived and worked in clots of five or six. If you had a fight with one, you had six on you. They bought automobiles cooperatively by clots and got women the same way. The wages of five or six mounted up and they could afford to buy themselves a pretty fair communal woman. For some reason this outraged the tender morals of certain of our citizens who didn’t seem to be morally sensitive in other directions. There used to be some pretty fine gang fights in the poolrooms of Market Street of a Saturday night.
    In addition to the Filipinos for chopping the lettuce, the cutting and packing sheds required labor. Women and men to prepare the lettuce for the crates, and icers and nailers. These were migrant people who went from one place to another as the crops came in. There were a great many of them and they worked, some by the hour and some by piecework.
    Eventually, as was inevitable, these people decided that they wanted to have a union. It was happening all over and they didn’t want to be left out. The owners yelled that communists were behind it all, and maybe they were. Nobody ever proved anything one way or another, but the union got formed. I guess wages were pretty low and profits pretty high. So, now [that] they had a union, the shed people made demands for higher wages and when they were refused, went on strikes.
    Now what happened would not be believable if it were not verified by the Salinas papers of the time. A man suddenly appeared, went to the owners and the sheriff and announced himself as an expert in handling strikes. He must have been a commanding figure. The sheriff turned the situation over to him.
    The General took a suite in the Geoffrey House, installed direct telephone lines to various stations, even had one group of telephones that were not connected to anything. He set armed guards over his suite and he put Salinas in a state of siege. He organized Vigilantes. Service-station operators, owners of small stores, clerks, bank tellers got out sporting rifles, shotguns, all the hundreds of weapons owned by small-town Americans who in the West at least, I guess, are the most heavily armed people in the world. I remember counting up and found that I had twelve firearms of various calibers and I was not one of the best equipped. In addition to the riflemen, squads drilled in the streets with baseball bats. Everyone was having a good time. Stores were closed and to move about town was to be challenged every block or so by viciously weaponed people one had gone to school with.
    Down at the lettuce sheds, the pickets began to get apprehensive.
    The General sat in his guarded suite at the Geoffrey House issuing orders and devising tactics. He may have believed that Salinas was in danger of being annihilated. I have no way of knowing. Suddenly he issued the information that the Longshoremen of San Francisco, a hundred miles away, the most powerful and best disciplined union in the State, were marching on Salinas, singing “The Internationale.” A shudder of excited horror ran through Salinas. Orders were issued from Headquarters. The townsmen marched to the outskirts determined to sell their lives dearly. The sheriff seems to have become a kind of runner for the General.
    Then a particularly vigilant citizen made a frightening discovery and became a hero. He found that on one road leading into Salinas, red flags had been set up at intervals. It was no more than the General had anticipated. This was undoubtedly the route along which the Longshoremen were going to march. The General wired the governor to stand by to issue orders to the National Guard, but being a foxy tactician himself, he had all of the red flags publicly burned in Main Street.
    All might have gone well if at about this time the Highway Commission had not complained that someone was stealing the survey markers for