d and screamed and smoked and its bankers grew rich. Stupidity,
license, and graft sat enthroned in the City Hall. The new black folk
were exploited as cheerfully as white Polacks and Italians; the rent of
shacks mounted merrily, the street car lines counted gleeful gains, and
the crimes of white men and black men flourished in the dark. The high
and skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harder
the mass of laborers strove to unionize their fellows and to bargain
with employers.

Nor were the new blacks fools. They had no love for nothings in labor;
they had no wish to make their fellows' wage envelopes smaller, but they
were determined to make their own larger. They, too, were willing to
join in the new union movement. But the unions did not want them. Just
as employers monopolized meat and steel, so they sought to monopolize
labor and beat a giant's bargain. In the higher trades they succeeded.
The best electrician in the city was refused admittance to the union and
driven from the town because he was black. No black builder, printer, or
machinist could join a union or work in East St. Louis, no matter what
his skill or character. But out of the stink of the stockyards and the
dust of the aluminum works and the sweat of the lumber yards the willing
blacks could not be kept.

They were invited to join unions of the laborers here and they joined.
White workers and black workers struck at the aluminum works in the fall
and won higher wages and better hours; then again in the spring they
struck to make bargaining compulsory for the employer, but this time
they fronted new things. The conflagration of war had spread to America;
government and court stepped in and ordered no hesitation, no strikes;
the work must go on.

Deeper was the call for workers. Black men poured in and red anger
flamed in the hearts of the white workers. The anger was against the
wielders of the thunderbolts, but here it was impotent because employers
stood with the hand of the government before their faces; it was against
entrenched union labor, which had risen on the backs of the unskilled
and unintelligent and on the backs of those whom for any reason of race
or prejudice or chicane they could beat beyond the bars of competition;
and finally the anger of the mass of white workers was turned toward
these new black interlopers, who seemed to come to spoil their last
dream of a great monopoly of common labor.

These angers f