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angels. Everybody's a little bad and a little good. It wasn't planned in the sense that any individual started out to say, “I'll get him.” There was a general disposition on the part of a good many of the excitable people on the West Coast and throughout the country to say, “This man must be an awful bad egg to stir up all this trouble on the waterfront.” Stirring up trouble on the waterfront was just not well thought of. But I don't think it was planned. I think it was much more spontaneous. It may have been ill willed. I'm sure there was a lot of excited gossip and repeating of information that wasn't true information, just repeating something that was heard to somebody else so that by the time it came out third hand it was stated as a fact.

For instance, Paul Scharrenberg, as good a man as he, who was a union officer on the West Coast, said in a speech that Bridges was a Communist and a fire brand and ought to be gotten rid of. I wrote at once to Mr. Scharrenberg and said, “What do you really know about this?” He replied that he really didn't know, that it was just on his best belief and information. He had been told Bridges was, so he supposed he was.

There was a great deal of that going on. People got excited. People who didn't know anything about the