CHAPTER XXXI
MAKING BOMB-MAKERS
It had been agreed by the trustees of Tarrytown that while
we might not tell about the Ludlow massacre at a street-meeting,
we might tell about it at a meeting in a theatre or hall. I
set out to find a theatre or hall, but there was no theatre or
hall that could be rented for that purpose. I then went up on
the heights, where the Rockefellers live, and appealed to the
sense of fair play of Mr. Rockefeller's neighbors. This is
the Pocantico hills country, a line of magnificent estates and
palatial homes, of which you see pictures in the "Sunday supplements."
You might have thought it poor territory for
radical propaganda; nevertheless, I was able to persuade one
of the residents, Mrs. Charles J. Gould, to allow the use of
her open-air theatre for a meeting in defense of free speech.
Imagine, if you can, the excitement of the New York newspapers,
when they learned that there was to be an I. W. W.
meeting—so they called it—in an open-air theatre on a millionaire
estate almost next door to the Rockefellers!
We held the meeting, attended by some three hundred people of the town, rich and poor, including a number of laborers from young Mr. Rockefeller's estate. John W. Brown, organizer of the United Mine-workers, told the story of the strike, and we moved a resolution that it was the sense of the meeting that Mr. Rockefeller's treatment of his strikers had been such that we called upon the President of the United States to confiscate his mines. We discussed that resolution for a couple of hours, and we carried it unanimously! But alas, it happened that Adolf Wolff, an Anarchist sculptor and poet, got up and delivered a tirade, abusing me for having pleaded for free speech with the trustees of Tarrytown. "We shouldn't plead, we should take!" declared Comrade Wolff. A lady from the South got up and sang negro-songs to pacify the tumultuous meeting, and so the newspapers could make a joke of the whole affair—which they did.
In their last public session with us, the trustees of the
