"But what good is a man for any other sort of work," he said, "when he has been trained to the mills for thirty-two years!" It was not very long after that when the "great strike" began--indeed, it grew out of the organization which he had tried to launched--and Bill Hahn threw himself into it with all his strength.

He was one of the leaders.

I shall not attempt to repeat here his description of the bitter struggle, the coming of the soldiery, the street riots, the long lists of arrests ("some," said he, "got into jail on purpose, so that they could at least have enough to eat!"), the late meetings of strikers, the wild turmoil and excitement.
Of all this he told me, and then he stopped suddenly, and after a long pause he said in a low voice: "Comrade, did ye ever see your wife and your sickly daughter and your kids sufferin' for bread to eat ?" He paused again with a hard, dry sob in his voice.
"Did ye ever see that ?" "No," said I, very humbly, "I have never seen anything like that." He turned on me suddenly, and I shall never forget the look on his face, nor the blaze in his eyes: "Then what can you know about working-men ?" What could I answer?
A moment passed and then he said, as if a little remorseful at having turned thus on me: "Comrade, I tell you, the iron entered my soul--them days." It seems that the leaders of the strike were mostly old employees like Bill Hahn, and the company had conceived the idea that if these men could be eliminated the organization would collapse, and the strikers be forced back to work.

One day Bill Hahn found that proceedings had been started to turn him out of his home, upon which he had not been able to keep up his payments, and at the same time the merchant, of whom he had been a respected customer for years, refused to give him any further credit.
"But we lived somehow," he said, "we lived and we fought." It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant.

He said he made a great discovery: that the "black people" against whom they had struck in 1894 were not to blame! "I tell you," said he, "we found when we got started that them black people--we used to call 'em dagoes--were just workin' people like us--and in hell with us.