Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Bunny passed his examinations, and was duly established as a "grave old senior" in Southern Pacific University. And then he hunted up his friends -- and such a load of troubles as fell onto his shoulders! Literally everybody had troubles! Rachel and Jacob Menzies had come back from their summer's fruit-picking, to find their two younger brothers, the "left wingers," in the county jail! The police had raided a Communist meeting and arrested all the speakers, and the organizers, and the literature sellers, and all who had red badges in their buttonholes. They had raided the Communist headquarters -- determined, so the newspapers announced, to root every Moscow agent out of the city. They had sorted the prisoners, and fined a few, and were holding the rest, including the Menzies boys, under that convenient universal charge, "suspicion of criminal syndicalism."

These foolish boys had made their own trouble, said Rachel; but still it was an outrage to arrest people for their beliefs; and it was tormenting to think of your own flesh and blood shut up in those horrible cages. Bunny asked the bail -- it was two thousand dollars per brother. He began explaining his troubles with his father, and his own impotence; and Rachel said of course, she understood, they couldn't expect him to bail out the whole radical movement. And yet that did not entirely restore his peace of mind.