Oil! by Upton Sinclair

From such a week end Bunny would return to Angel City, and accompany Rachel to a meeting of the Young People's Socialist League. In an obscure hall twenty-five or thirty boys and girls of the working-class met once a week, and read papers, and discussed problems of politics and economics, the labor movement and the Socialist party. Rachel had grown up with this organization, and had prestige with it because she had got a college education, and because she brought "Comrade Ross" with her. The most thoroughly class-conscious young people could not help being thrilled by a spectacle so unusual as a millionaire who sympathized with the workers and had helped to bail out political prisoners.

With these young Socialists, as with the old ones, it was right wing versus left; everybody argued tactics, and got tremendously excited. The Communists also had an organization, the Young Workers' League, and the two rivals carried on sniping operations; sometimes they held formal debates, and young people would jump up and down in their seats, and carry on the controversy in their homes and working places for weeks afterwards. It was Moscow versus Amsterdam, the Third International versus the Second, the "reds" against the "pinks," as the mild Socialists were called. And this same struggle was going on in the soul of Bunny. Paul Watkins would pull him forward, and then Rachel Menzies would haul him back; and his trouble seemed to be, he was of the opinion of the one he talked with last. He was so prone to see the other fellow's point of view, and lose himself in that! Why couldn't he have a mind of his own?