U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [529]
without help in the val ey hemmed by dark strike-silent hil s the man wil die (my father died, we know what it is like to see a man die) the women wil lay him out on the rickety cot the miners wil bury him
in the jail it's light too hot the steamheat hisses we talk through the greenpainted iron bars to a tal white mustachioed old man some smiling miners in shirtsleeves a boy faces white from mining have already the tal-lowy look of jailfaces foreigners what can we say to the dead? foreign-ers what can we say to the jailed? the representative of the political party talks fast through the bars join up with us and no other union we'l send you tobacco candy solidarity our lawyers wil write briefs speakers wil shout your names at meetings they'l carry your names on card-board on picketlines the men in jail shrug their shoul-ders smile thinly our eyes look in their eyes through the bars what can I say? (in another continent I have
seen the faces looking out through the barred basement windows behind the ragged sentry's boots I have seen be-fore day the straggling footsore prisoners herded through the streets limping between bayonets heard the vol ey
-523-I have seen the dead lying out in those distant deeper val eys) what can we say to the jailed?
in the law's office we stand against the wal the law is a big man with eyes angry in a big pumpkinface who sits and stares at us meddling foreigners through the door the deputies crane with their guns they stand guard at the mines they blockade the miners'
soupkitchens
they've cut off the road up the val ey the hiredmen with guns stand ready to shoot (they have made us foreign-ers in the land where we were born they are the conquer-ing army that has filtered into the country unnoticed they have taken the hil tops by stealth they levy tol they stand at the minehead they stand at the pol s they stand
by when the bailiffs carry the furniture of the family evicted from the city tenement out on the sidewalk they are there when the bankers foreclose on a farm they are ambushed and ready to shoot down the strikers marching behind the flag up the switchback road to the mine
those that the guns spare they jail)
the law stares across the desk out of angry eyes his face reddens in splotches like a gobbler's neck with the strut of the power of submachineguns sawedoffshotguns teargas and vomitinggas the power that can feed you or leave you to starve
sits easy at his desk his back is covered he feels strong behind him he feels the prosecutingattorney the judge an
-524-owner himself the political boss the minesuperintendent the board of directors the president of the utility the ma,-nipulator of the holdingcompany he lifts his hand towards the telephone
the deputies crowd in the door
we have only words against
POWER SUPERPOWER
In eighteen eighty when Thomas Edison's agent
was hooking up the first telephone in London, he put an ad in the paper for a secretary and stenographer. The eager young cockney with sprouting muttonchop
whiskers who answered it
had recently lost his job as officeboy. In his spare time he had been learning shorthand and bookkeeping and taking dictation from the editor of the English Vanity Fair at night and jotting down the speeches in Parliament for the papers. He came of temperance smal shopkeeper stock; already he was butting his
bul ethead against the harsh structure of caste that doomed boys of his class to a lifo of alpaca jackets, pen-manship, subordination. To get a job with an American firm was to put a foot on the rung of a ladder that led up into the blue.
He did his best to make himself indispensable;
they let him operate the switchboard for the first half-hour when the telephone service was opened. Edison noticed his weekly reports on the electrical situation in England and sent for him to be his personal secretary.
-525-Samuel Insul landed in America on a raw March day in eightyone. Immediately he was taken out to
Menlo Park, shown about the little group of labora-tories, saw the strings of electriclightbulbs shining at in-tervals across the snowy lots, al lit from the world's first central electric station. Edison put him right to work and he wasn't through til midnight. Next morn-ing at six he was on the job; Edison had no use for any nonsense about hours or vacations. Insul worked from that time on until he was seventy without a break; no nonsense about hours or vacations. Electric power