Presently I caught Joe's eye. At once he left his platform seat and came to me in the rear of the hall.
"Come on, Bill," he said. "We want you up here." And we made our way up to the platform. There Marsh reached over and gripped my hand.
"Hello, Bill, glad you're with us," he said. I tingled slightly at his tone and at a thousand friendly eyes that met mine for an instant. Then it was over. The work went on.
What they did at first seemed haphazard enough. Reports from the districts were being read with frequent interruptions, petty corrections and useless discussions that strayed from the point and made me impatient. And yet wide vistas opened here. Telegrams by the dozen were read from labor unions all over the country, from groups of socialists East and West, there were cables from England, Germany, France, from Russia, Poland, Norway, from Italy, Spain and even Japan. "Greetings to our comrades!" came pouring in from all over the earth. What measureless army of labor was this? All at once the dense mass in the rear would part to let a new body of men march through. These were new strikers to swell the ranks, and at their coming all business would stop, there would be wild cheers and stamping of feet, shrill whistles, pandemonium!
Gradually I began to feel what was happening in this hall. That first "strike feeling"--diffused, shifting and uncertain--was condensing as in a storm cloud here, swelling, thickening, whirling, attracting swiftly to itself all these floating forces. Here was the first awakening of that mass thought and passion, which swelling later into full life was to give me such flashes of insight into the deep buried resources of the common herd of mankind, their resources and their power of vision when they are joined and fused in a mass. Here in a few hours the great spirit of the crowd was born.
For now the crowd began to question, think and plan. Ideas were thrown out pell mell. I found that every plan of action, everything felt and thought and spoken, though it might start from a single man, was at once transformed by the feeling of all, expressed in fragments of speech, in applause, or in loud bursts of laughter, or again by a chilling silence in which an unwelcome thought soon died. The crowd spoke its will through many voices, through men who sprang up and talked hard a few moments, then sat down and were lost to sight--some to rise later again and again and grow in force of thought and expression, others not to be seen again, they had simply been parts of the crowd, and the crowd had made them rise and speak.