Many things were on the move in the striving, hustling town on that evening. The system of checking on piece work, introduced by the superintendent Ed Hall in the corn-cutting machine plant, had brought on Bidwell's first industrial strike. The discontented workmen were not organized, and the strike was foredoomed to failure, but it had stirred the town deeply. One day, a week before, quite suddenly some fifty or sixty men had decided to quit. “We won't work for a fellow like Ed Hall,” they declared. “He sets a scale of prices and then, when we have driven ourselves to the limit to make a decent day's pay, he cuts the scale.” Leaving the shop the men went in a body to Main Street and two or three of them, developing unexpected eloquence, began delivering speeches on street corners. On the next day the strike spread and for several days the shop had been closed. Then a labor organizer came from Cleveland and on the day of his arrival the story ran through the street that strike breakers were to be brought in.
And on that evening of many adventures another element was introduced into the already disturbed life of the community. At the corner of Main and McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads. They went to one side and gathering in groups discussed the stranger's words. “I tell you what,” said a little old workman, pulling nervously at his graying mustache, “I'm on strike and I'm for sticking out until Steve Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of talk. I'll tell you what that man's doing. He's attacking our Government, that's what he's doing.” The workmen went off to their homes grumbling. The Government was to them a sacred thing, and they did not fancy having their demands for a better wage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and socialists. Many of the laborers of Bidwell were sons and grandsons of pioneers who had opened up the country where the great sprawling towns were now growing into cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great Civil War. During boyhood they had breathed a reverence for government out of the very air of the towns. The great men of whom the school-books talked had all been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been Garfield, Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had come Lincoln and Grant. For a time the very ground of the mid-American country had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forth gas and oil. Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.