Thus, the prison doors were swung wide open, and, above all, the honor and the reputation of a man swept to the garbage-heaps of life.
True, at the morrow's great mass-meeting, there were destined to be protests and calls for investigation.

The Socialist press was destined to take it up, defend him and demand the truth.

But, swamped by a perfectly overwhelming capitalist press, not only naturally hostile but in this case already heavily subsidized; shattered by the close-knit, circumstantial evidence; hamstrung and hampered in every way by the power of unlimited money and Tammany pull, the Socialists might as well have tried to sweep back the sea with a broom as save this man from legal crucifixion.

Worse still, they themselves, and the beaten strikers with whom they had been fraternizing, got a black eye in the affair; and many an editorial column, many a pulpit, unctuously discoursed thereon.
Many an anti-Socialist thug and grafter, loud-mouthed and blatant, bellowed revamped platitudes of "immorality" and "breaking up the home," and the "nation of fatherless children," pointing at Gabriel Armstrong as a shining example of Socialist hypocrisy and filth.
Press, law, church, capitalism itself nailed this man and the movement he stood for, to the cross.

And the pimps and parasites of the private detective agency chuckled in their well-paid glee.