Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Joe and Ikey Menzies had been out of jail for a couple of months, their comrades of the Workers' party having scraped together the bail. Now came their trial, with several other members of the party. The state was undertaking to show that this organization was nothing but the Communist party under a camouflage; it was the "legal" part of the organization, but the real direction was in the hands of an "underground" group, which received funds and took orders from Moscow. It advocated the forcible overthrow of the "capitalist state," and the setting up of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," after the Russian pattern. On the other hand, the indicted men claimed that they had organized a legitimate working-class political party, and their attitude to violence was purely defensive. They believed the capitalists would never permit the power to be taken from them peaceably; it was the capitalists who would overthrow the constitution, and the workers would have to defend themselves.

The prisoners were all tried at once, and the procedure took three weeks and was quite an education in contemporary problems -- or would have been, had the newspapers reported both sides. To get the workers' side, you had to sit in the court room; and Bunny went whenever he could get loose from the university. He was there when the prosecution sprung a "surprise" witness, and it was a surprise to Bunny also -- his boyhood friend, Ben Skutt! Ben, it appeared, had grown a moustache and taken a course in the Moscow dialect, and had turned up as an oil worker out of a job, and been admitted to the Workers' party, and before long had got a job in the office. Now he had harrowing stories to tell of the criminal things he had heard said, and of efforts the party had made to incite the oil workers to rise and destroy the wells. On the other hand, so Bunny was told by Ikey Menzies, the Communists were ready to swear that Ben Skutt had himself done all the proposing of destruction -- at the crisis of the strike he had spent his time insisting that the only way to save the situation was to get a bunch of real fighting men and burn up half a dozen oil fields.