"We Want Love"

So broad and militant a movement inevitably precipitated opposition from other students. In some places Fascist Clubs were organized. This was true of the University of Colorado with its American Brown Shirts, and Columbia, where the Fascists brought in Daniell of Stock Exchange-stink bomb fame. At Peoples Junior College in Los Angeles a song sheet appeared on which were printed the college song, the Star Spangled Banner and a purple swastika. Both at Johns Hopkins and Amherst, where there were strikes, R.O.T.C. men threw firecrackers and rotten vegetables into the ranks of the demonstrators. At the former university, the R.O.T.C. turned the water hose on speakers, faculty as well as student.

The most challenging of these skirmishes took place at Harvard University, where members of the Student L.I.D. and the N.S.L. with boldness, had called a strike. A group of Harvard CRIMSON cub candidates was organized by that newspaper into the Michael Mullins Chowder Club, which was to run a counter meeting in "favor of war" in an effort to discredit the whole strike. The Freshman Dining Halls at Cambridge would supply the pro-war exponents with eggs and tomatoes.

At eleven o'clock some 2,000 students appeared in front of the Widener Library. The Chowder Club came out in regalia, one clad in towels holding a "Down with Peace" sign, another in black robes with a bomb, another in boy scout togs tooting a bugle and leading cheers for "We Want War," and the prize of the lot clad as a Nazi Storm Trooper.

When the Chowder Club falled to break up the strike meeting, it went to the opposite ledge flanking Widener and staged a mock meeting. In between was massed the throng of 2,000. On one side heads inclined faithfully in the direction of the pacifists. On the other side several hundred hands were raised in a fascist salute. Today this is only fascist tomfoolery. Tomorrow it will be fascism in earnest.

Like their colleagues in Germany all their canons of chivalry were abandoned when dealing with pacifists and radicals. An instructor's wife climbed on the ledge to speak for the strikers. The Chowder Club forced her to turn her face so that her profile could be snapped, and generally manhandled her, yelling "We Want Love." It took a flying wedge of strikers to seatter them.

Yet in the end spectators were impressed with the courage and sincerity of the strikers, and were revolted by the placards and antics of the war proponents. The last speaker for the strikers was warmly applauded when he pointed out that the other side was using the fascist tactics that had triumphed in Germany, but that the strikers were here to see that those tactics did not win in America, and that the strike was a dress rehearsal for what students would do should war come.

Bulletin of Student League for Industrial Democracy.