THE winds from the West were ominous and they chilled the
bones of respectable people. They grew to gale proportions as
1896 approached; the respectable people whispered of the dan-
ger of revolution. They penetrated the office of Theodore Roosevelt in
police headquarters on Mulberry Street and filled him with a curious
tangle of exhilaration and alarm. He agreed that danger existed, but
danger brought with it excitement. Had he not been an officer in the
New York National Guard? Could he not, metaphorically speaking, take
down his sword to defend his country against the menace from within?
But Mark Hanna, who was to be the Horatius of 1896, preferred cam-
paign contributions and declared this chatter of revolution nonsensical.

"You're just a lot of damn fools," he said, at luncheon, in the Cleve-
land Union League Club. ¹

The winds began to blow in 1886, with the explosion of the bomb
in Haymarket Square in Chicago. They stirred uneasily until four of
the anarchists, as they were conveniently called, had been hanged in
November, 1887. They gathered new force, in 1893, when Governor
John P. Altgeld of Illinois, knowing it to be political suicide, pardoned
two of the men whose sentences of death had been changed to life im --
prisonment because the evidence against them was even less substantial.
Altgeld, as he had foreseen, paid the penalty of courage. He vanished
from public life. Except for a poem by Vachel Lindsay, he would have
vanished from memory.

These winds were from Illinois; there were others. In May, 1892,
Mr. Henry Clay Frick of the Carnegie Steel Company notified his
superintendent that, "with a desire to act toward our employees in the
most liberal manner," a number of wage reductions had been put into
effect. On June 25, he wrote to Robert A. Pinkerton of New York for
three hundred armed guards. They were needed, he said, to maintain
order at the Homestead plant near Pittsburgh and they would be moved

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