by Jean Merrill
It was natural that the truck drivers should have been unnerved by Phase One of the Pea Shooter Campaign, when they did not know who was shooting at them. However, they were even more unnerved by Phase Two, after it had been established that it was children who were doing the shooting.
As there were children all over the city, the truck drivers did not feel safe anywhere. If there was a child anywhere in sight, a truck driver hesitated to leave his truck to make a delivery or to have a cup of coffee. Most drivers thought twice about driving down a block where they could see children at play.
Although only a small number of the children in the city were involved in the shooting, it was almost impossible to judge from appearance alone which children might have pea shooters concealed in their jackets. One driver’s suspicions got so out of hand that he had his own children searched for pea shooters every night before dinner.
When the children realized that the truck drivers were afraid of them, it was hard for them to resist teasing the drivers. Even those children so strictly brought up that they would not have thought of shooting at a truck tire, much less joining a Frank-the-Flower Club, got a good deal of satisfaction out of just hanging around parked trucks. Two or three children had only to stand on the sidewalk near a truck to give a truck driver the jitters.
“Don’t trust any of them,” Big Moe instructed his drivers. “If a kid gets within a hundred feet of your truck, clobber him.” Clobbering, unfortunately, made enemies of even friendly, reliable children.
Matters went from bad to worse. Truckers, driving through blocks where children were playing, panicked and stepped on the gas and as a result were often arrested for speeding. When policemen halted a truck to write out a speeding ticket, the truck was what Frank-the-Flower fans called a “Sitting Truck,” an easy shot. The truck drivers couldn’t win.
The Frank-the-Flower Clubs had a whole language of their own. The expression, “Don’t be a truck” replaced, among Frank-the-Flower fans, such earlier slang as “Don’t be a dope, a jerk, a square.” Although “Don’t be a truck” is an expression that we all use today, it dates back to Phase Two of the Pea Shooter Campaign.
“You’re a crackpot,” as an expression of affection also originated with the Frank-the-Flower fans, who used the phrase to mean “You’re a good guy, a prince, a buddy, a doll, a sweet-heart.” The use of this expression undoubtedly inspired the popular polka tune of the period, “Be My Little Crackpot.”
The motto of the Frank-the-Flower Clubs was: “A Frank-the-Flower man is Respectful to Police Commissioners, Automobiles, Taxis, and Older People, and Death on Trucks. A Frank-the-Flower man is Loyal, Clean, and a Good Shot.”
Members of the clubs greeted each other in a kind of code. “Hi ya, Bachelor” was a popular greeting. To which the proper reply was: “Hi ya, Button.” Or, “Hi ya, Rose.” To which: “Hi ya, Bud,” was the answer.
Each club had its own variations:
“Hi ya, Sweet.” “Hi ya, Pea.”
“Hi ya, Chris.” “Hi ya, Anthemum.”
“Hi ya, Hi ya,” “Hi ya, Cinth.”
“Hi ya, Daff.” “Did you say Daff?” “I said, Hi ya, Daff.” “Oh! Hi ya, Dill.”
The American Ambassador to Russia acquired a reputation for a quick wit when a sharp-tongued Russian diplomat addressed him at a party by his first name. To the diplomat’s greeting, “Hi ya, John,” the Ambassador responded without batting an eyelash, “Hi ya, Quill”—a nickname that stuck to the Russian for years.
The Ambassador’s retort led to the President of the United States’ being asked at his next press conference whether his Ambassador was a member of a Frank-the-Flower Club. In defense of the Ambassador, the President simply grinned and replied, “Don’t be a truck.”
This response, although it lost the President the support of the trucking industry, greatly increased his popularity with both automobile drivers and pedestrians. While English teachers did not approve of the President speaking in such a slangy way, the majority of voters were impressed with the President’s detailed knowledge of what was going on in every city of the country.
The general public had mixed feelings about the children’s part in the Pushcart War. A few agreed with Big Moe that shooting at trucks was hoodlum behavior and should be severely punished. But the majority of people took the attitude that children had always had pea shooters, and that the pea-tack shooters were only a passing craze.
A respected child psychologist of the period said that in attacking the trucks, the children were expressing resentment of parents who pushed them around. “It is a classic case of the little guy against the big guy,” said the psychologist. The psychologist’s advice was that it was better on the whole for the children to be killing trucks than their parents. To forbid them to shoot at trucks, he suggested, might create worse problems. This made parents think twice about taking a firm stand about the trucks.
The pushcart peddlers did not know what to make of the children’s campaign. It bothered Harry the Hot Dog that any eight-year-old could get away with flattening a truck while he had to stand idly by. He was much put out by a rumor that a nine-year-old boy in the East Harlem section of the city had killed almost as many trucks in one week as Harry had killed in the opening week of the Pea Shooter Campaign.
“Whose war is this, anyway?” Harry demanded.
“They are making a joke of it,” he complained at a meeting that General Anna had called to discuss the situation.
“This war is a serious business,” Harry said. “To pushcart peddlers, a matter of life and death. And these kids are making it like a big picnic. A big joke. They are laughing at us.”
“Some joke!” said Morris the Florist. “Killing thousands of trucks. Let them joke, I say.”
“Why is it a joke?” asked Papa Peretz. “Maybe they seriously don’t like the trucks. A big truck hits a little kid. Is that a joke? I tell you, kids today are very smart.”
“All those clubs!” Harry said. “They are making Frank the Flower look silly. They are even making fun of his hat.”
Maxie Hammerman laughed. “For twenty years I have made fun of Frank the Flower’s hat, and he does not care. He is proud of that hat.”
“Also,” said Morris the Florist, “the club members are writing letters to Frank the Flower in jail, and it is nice to get letters when you are confined.”
CHAPTER XVIII
The Retreat of the Trucks & Rumors of a Build-Up on the Fashion Front
Although the children’s Pea Shooter Campaign may have been, as many people said, a craze that would have died as suddenly as it had started, the truck drivers could not afford to wait and see. At the height of the children’s campaign, the casualties were so heavy that the truck companies had to take their trucks off the streets.
The retreat of the trucks made it very pleasant for the people who wanted to drive around the city doing errands or a little sightseeing. It was delightful to see taxis zipping around corners again, making U-turns, and snaking in and out among the women drivers as gaily as they had in the days before the trucks had taken over the streets. Even the women drivers seemed to enjoy it. After years of battling with the trucks, dodging the taxis seemed like a game.
One sporting lady even blew a kiss to a taxi driver who clipped off her fender, and called out to him, “Well done!” (This so charmed the taxi driver, that he towed the lady to a garage, bought her a new fender, took her out to dinner, and married her.)
Indeed, everyone was in the best of spirits that first day that the trucks did not appear on the streets. It was like a holiday. The buses were loaded with ladies out shopping for new hats and perfume. Fathers took the afternoon off from their offices to take their children to the zoo. Teachers gave no homework. There were picnics in the parks, and the movie houses and bowling alleys were crowded.
All the pushcarts were back on the streets, and the pushcart peddlers did more business on that day than they had for nineteen years. The whole city was ju
bilant.
Except for the truck drivers, of course. The Three were quick to see that it would be dangerous to keep the trucks off the streets for more than a few days. Once people became accustomed to having the freedom of the streets again, they would object to the return of the trucks. The Three agreed that it was imperative to get the trucks back on the streets as fast as possible.
Big Moe called the Mayor and demanded that something be done to make the streets safe for trucks. “This is very bad for business,” said Big Moe. “Another week of this, and I will be out of business.”
Mayor Cudd was naturally sympathetic. He summoned the City Council, and the Council proposed to put a tax on tacks sold to anyone under the age of twenty-one. It was thought that if this tax were high enough (the Council set the rate at a dollar per pound of tacks), this would discourage children from buying tacks in any quantity.
This proposal, however, was not enough to satisfy the truck drivers. What guarantee was there, they demanded, when the newspapers published the proposals, that persons over twenty-one might not take it into their heads to shoot at truck tires? Frank the Flower, Big Moe pointed out to Mayor Cudd, was over twenty-one.
“But he is a crackpot,” said the Mayor.
“Maybe,” said Big Moe. “But listen to this. My wife tells me that a very fancy store on Fifth Avenue uptown put in its window two days ago a Frank-the-Flower hat for ladies, and the price of that hat is $29.95.”
“Twenty-nine, ninety-five for a crackpot hat!” said Mayor Cudd.
“That is not the point,” said Big Moe. “The point is that the store already cannot keep up with the orders for that $29.95 hat.”
“What do you mean already?” asked Mayor Cudd.
“I mean already before today’s paper in which I see a full-page advertisement for this hat,” said Big Moe.
“Look in the paper,” said Big Moe. “There is a big drawing of the hat, and it says underneath: A Real Traffic Stopper! It also says: Do truck drivers whistle at you? This will really flatten them!”
“Also,” said Big Moe, “I should warn you that a fashion magazine which my wife reads has on its cover this week the movie star, Wenda Gambling, in this same $29.95 Frank-the-Flower hat. And I would like to know what you will say when your wife asks you if she can have a $29.95 hat such as Wenda Gambling is wearing?”
“My wife does not ask my advice about hats,” said Mayor Cudd.
“Naturally,” said Big Moe. “That is the danger. Children are bad enough. But if the ladies get into this, we are finished.”
The Mayor saw the danger. He called the City Council together again, and the Council amended the new tax ruling to cover the sales of tacks to persons of all ages.
CHAPTER XIX
The Tacks Tax & The British Ultimatum
The Tacks Tax, as all students of American history know, was the most unpopular tax in the history of New York City. It caused revolution in the city schools and almost brought England into the war.
The citizens of New York protested at once that the tax was undemocratic. They said it discriminated unfairly against the users of tacks as opposed to the users of screws, nails, bolts, and pins.
Users of screws, nails, bolts, and pins (and that took in nearly every household in the city) objected as strongly to the Tacks Tax as the tacks users. Their argument was that if the Mayor and the City Council could put a whopping tax on tacks, there was nothing to keep them from putting a whopping tax on screws, nails, bolts, and pins any time they chose.
The pushcart peddlers had no special interest in tacks, as they relied exclusively on pins for the manufacture of their ammunition. However, they supported the protest against the tax as a matter of principle.
Mr. Jerusalem risked arrest by giving away boxes of tacks to his customers, rather than charge the hated tax. He was picked up by the Pea-Tack Squad, but the Police Commissioner refused to jail him on the grounds that the Council ruling put a tax only on tacks that were sold. The Police Commissioner said that if Mr. Jerusalem wanted to go broke giving away tacks, that was his own business.
Teachers were among the hardest hit by the Tacks Tax, and they went on strike in protest. You could not have a bulletin board without tacks, they claimed. And you could not run a New York City classroom without a bulletin board, they said, or things got hopelessly out of hand.
Twelve thousand teachers carrying NO TACKS—NO TEACHERS signs picketed Mayor Cudd’s office. And while they were picketing, the city schools had to be closed.
With the schools closed, children of school age were on the streets from morning to night, and the shooting of trucks increased accordingly. (As many of the children had been making their pea-tacks with pins all along—they couldn’t see that it made any difference—the Tacks Tax did not bother them seriously.)
The strongest objection to the tax naturally came from England, who was at the time the world’s largest producer of tacks. Most of the tacks used in New York City came from England.
England charged that the New York City Tacks Tax was designed to cut England out of the American tack market and was, in fact, a violation of Section 238 of the British-American International Tack Agreement. The British Ambassador protested in the strongest of terms to the President in Washington and suggested that his country might have to intervene directly in the fighting in New York if the Tacks Tax was not at once repealed.
The President acted promptly. He called Mayor Cudd to the White House and warned him that unless the tax law was repealed within twenty-four hours, he would have to send Federal troops to keep order in the city.
Mayor Cudd had to ask the City Council to repeal the tax he had asked them to pass the week before. The lifting of the tax was celebrated by the wildest spree of tack buying in the history of the city. (Over 800,000 pounds of tacks were sold on the first day of the repeal.) The Mayor, in alarm, hastily improvised the Pea Blockade in hopes of averting a mass outbreak of pea-shooting.
CHAPTER XX
The Pea Blockade
On the morning of May 11th, the Mayor issued an emergency order prohibiting the sale of dried peas in New York City until peace in the streets had been restored.
“No peace—no peas,” said the Mayor in an address to the city, explaining the reasons for his action.
The City Council, the Mayor told the people, had contracted with Big Moe for nineteen Mighty Mammoths to blockade all bridges and tunnels leading into New York. Mammoth drivers had been instructed to search all incoming trucks for shipments of peas.
“And furthermore,” announced the Mayor, “I have ordered the Pea-Tack Squad to close all pea-packaging plants in the city until further notice.”
It was the Pea Blockade and the closing of all the pea-packaging plants that led to the discovery of the Pushcart Conspiracy, although the discovery was the purest sort of accident.
All of the pea-packagers in the city objected to the shutdown order. But the Pea-Tack Squad on the whole handled matters tactfully.
The Squad pointed out to the pea-packagers that: in the first place, the pea-packagers could not get any peas to package while the Pea Blockade was in effect, and that, in the second place, they could not get any trucks to deliver their packaged peas until there was order in the streets again. Since this was true, most of the packagers—some of them grumbling a little and some of them grumbling a lot—did as they were ordered. They dismissed their workers and locked up their plants.
On the whole, the Pea Blockade went smoothly until the Pea-Tack Squad arrived at Posey’s plant. Mr. P. Posey, of Posey’s Peas (“By the Ounce, By the Pound, By the Ton”) did not give up so easily.
Although Mr. Posey had advertised his peas “By the Ounce, By the Pound, By the Ton” for thirty-one years, he had never had an order for a ton of peas until the spring of the Pushcart War. Most of his business was by the pound. Mr. Posey’s biggest order in pre-war days had been a three-hundred-pound order from a church that was having a baked-pea barbecue.
Eve
r since the one-ton order, Mr. Posey had had big ideas. He was full of plans for expanding his business, and naturally he did not want to close down his plant just as his advertising was beginning to pay.
With the profits from his one-ton order, Mr. Posey had laid in a large supply of peas, enough to last through a long blockade. Moreover, he did not use trucks to deliver his packaged peas.
Mr. Posey was an old-fashioned pea merchant, and he had his peas delivered by pushcart. He had found that the push-carts could get through the crowded streets more easily, and often faster, than the trucks. Also, their charges for delivery were less. The one-ton order had been delivered in twenty one-hundred-pound sacks by four pushcarts.
So, with a good supply of peas in his plant and no need for trucks to deliver them, Mr. Posey saw no reason at all for closing up his plant. Most of his business was with small restaurants that featured pea soup, and he could not see that pea soup had anything to do with the war in the streets.
“This is a peaceful pea plant,” Mr. Posey said to Mrs. Posey, who helped him in the business. “And nobody is going to shut us down without a fight.”
CHAPTER XXI
The Barricade at Posey’s Plant
When the Pea-Tack Squad arrived at Posey’s plant on the second morning of the Pea Blockade, they found the doors barricaded with one-hundred-pound sacks of dried peas.
“Open up,” ordered the Chief of the Pea-Tack Squad, when six Squad men could not budge the door.
“Mayor’s orders,” he explained, when he saw Mr. Posey glaring down at him from a second-story window of the plant.
“I’m closed today,” Mr. Posey called down, “for business reasons. Tell the Mayor.”
