I dropped into the I.W.W. headquarters and talked with Bill Haywood and Russ, Italian and Slovak organizers handling a strike at Pullman

And Haywood was wondering how in hell Robert T. Lincoln, chairman of the board of directors of the Pullman Company, ever sprang from the loins of Abraham Lincoln, the finest guy of all of ’em in American history

And the Russ organizer said the Pullman officers were a lot of liars telling the newspapers a ten per cent pay raise was going to all the Pullman workers

And the Slovak swore and said women were going crazy out at Pullman trying to raise families and keep their boys and girls straight on nineteen cents an hour for yard-men and roustabouts.

Well, I picked up a telephone to call Amy Lowell at the Congress Hotel and tell her what a good job she did writing about the life of Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian working-class poet.

It was a party line and two men were talking. One said: May Blossom is the greatest bitch in the world; she’s only six months old but you can count on it she’s the greatest bitch the world has ever seen.

How does she behave?—came the query; and the answer was: You never saw a bulldog bitch in your life more gentle; I raised her myself; I would trust my mother with her.

And the talk ran on litters and whelps, brindles and fawns, ending with the price of May Blossom, rated as the world’s greatest bitch, fixed at one hundred seventy-five dollars.

And when they hung up I got Amy at the Congress. I told her I was sorry I missed her lecture on Imagism the night before at the Little Theatre and I’d like to come over and ask her some questions about Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian working-class poet.

Amy said she just finished breakfast one o’clock in the afternoon, she reads all night instead of sleeping, and she’d try to arrange her program so I’d get a look-in.

I told her I felt kind of restless about the new poetry and I had high hopes the new poetry one way or another would be able to get at the real stuff of American life, slipping its fingers into the steel meshes and copper coils of it under the streets and over the houses and people and factories and groceries, conceding a fair batting average to Dante and Keats for what they wrote about love and roses and the moon.

Government

The Government—I heard about the Government and I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at it when I saw it.

Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to the calaboose. It was the Government in action.

I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw this was the Government, doing things.