The 42nd Parallel

The Camera Eye (26)

the garden was crowded and outside Madison Square was full of cops that made everybody move on and the bombsquad all turned out

we couldn’t get a seat so we ran up the stairs to the top gallery and looked down through the blue air at the faces thick as gravel and above them on the speakers’ stand tiny black figures and a man was speaking and whenever he said war there were hisses and whenever he said Russia there was clapping on account of the revolution I didn’t know who was speaking somebody said Max Eastman and somebody said another guy but we clapped and yelled for the revolution and hissed for Morgan and the capitalist war and there was a dick looking into our faces as if he was trying to remember them

then we went to hear Emma Goldman at the Bronx Casino but the meeting was forbidden and the streets around were very crowded and there were moving vans moving through the crowd and they said the moving vans were full of cops with machineguns and there were little policedepartment Fords with searchlights and they charged the crowd with the Fords and the searchlights everybody talked machineguns revolution civil liberty freedom of speech but occasionally somebody got into the way of a cop and was beaten up and shoved into a patrol wagon and the cops were scared and they said they were calling out the fire department to disperse the crowd and everybody said it was an outrage and what about Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry?

afterwards we went to the Brevoort it was much nicer everybody who was anybody was there and there was Emma Goldman eating frankfurters and sauerkraut and everybody looked at Emma Goldman and at everybody else that was anybody and everybody was for peace and the coöperative commonwealth and the Russian revolution and we talked about red flags and barricades and suitable posts for machineguns

and we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed