Coming Event?

THE SHADOW BEFORE--William Rollins Jr.--Me Bride ($2.50). Few readers of this novel of U. S. industrial warfare will doubt where Author Rollins' sympathies are, but fewer will be able to accuse him of bedizening reality with overmuch Red paint. Author Rollins' picture of a U. S. mill town under a strike is no sermon but a text. Aimed obliquely from the "left." The Shadow Before should hit many a "right"-minded reader squarely in the middle. Until the strike started, the New England mill town of Fullerton seemed a fairly pleasant little place. To young Harry Baumann it was just the site of his father's factory, which gave him enough money to be a Harvardman, raise delightful hell in New York. To Mill-Superintendent Thayer it was the whole U. S. To his silly wife it was the small town to which she was condemned. To his daughter Marjorie it was the springboard to dramatic triumphs in Manhattan. To Micky, level-headed Irish girl who worked in the Baumann mill, it was just things-as-they-are, and pleasant enough when she went down to the seaside cave with her Portuguese lover, Ramon. To Labor Agitator Marvin, Fullerton was another opportunity. When the Baumann mill announced a 10% wage-cut to protect its dividends, trouble started. Marvin organized a strike. Ramon, who had been promoted, was too ambitious to join, but Micky did. That put a stop to their affair. Mrs. Thayer thought Ramon, with a little polishing, might do for her Marjorie, but as Marjorie. lately seduced by Harry Baumann, shrank from the idea. Mrs. Thayer took him herself. Harry, tired of familiar sensations, joined the strikers; got a brand-new sensation when he went on the picket-line and was beaten up before policemen recognized him. As the months wore on and the strike continued, public opinion went more & more against the strikers. Kicked out of their rented headquarters, they built their own shack. One night a citizens' committee, headed by the chief of police, made a raid. Guns went off and the chief and one of the strikers' guards were killed.

Newspaper readers who remember the Gastonia, N. C. mill strike (TIME, Aug. 12, 1929, et seq.) will recognize bits of the ensuing trial scene. Trial highspots: the prosecution raises a laugh against a defense witness by hanging on him the old joke about getting syphilis in a toilet; the defense successfully counters by showing that a prosecution witness once got drunk, took a horse into a church. The 15 defendants were pronounced guilty; Ring leader Marvin got 25 years in jail. Harry Baumann, caught trying to set fire to his father's mill, sought a final sensation by shooting himself. Silly Mrs. Thayer died of overexerting her alcoholic heart. Her husband was proud the strike was broken, wanted to clean all the foreigners out of Fullerton. Marjorie at last was leaving for her Manhattan dramatic school. Micky was going to have a baby. The Author, in company with many a left-wing litterateur, has taken a modern highroad to Parnassus. He comes honestly by his industrial subject. After serving in the War with an ambulance corps, later in the French artillery, he worked nine months in a Canadian mill town, then as a bobbin-boy in a New Bedford, Mass. mill. When he sold his first short story he took up writing as a profession. After two years of free-lancing in Europe he reported the New Bedford mill strike (1928) for the Communist New Masses, next year covered the murder trial of 16 Gastonia strikers. Not a baptized Communist, 37-year-old Author Rollins keeps bachelor quarters in Manhattan. Other books: Midnight Treasure, The Obelisk.

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