Waste Heritage

“A cordon of police was drawn up in front of the smashed-in store fronts keeping the crowds back. Here and there a moronic souvenir hunter dived for a scrap of broken glass or any relic that had been missed by the early morning clean-up job. The people milled solid for five blocks. There was a line of seven street cars where the service had got dislocated. They snailed along striking their gongs. The shrill of the gongs, the honking of horns and the jamming-in of gears kept up all the time as the traffic crawled along in first. It was one of those freak turn-outs. A woman leant from a car yelling and waving a red flag. No one paid any attention to her. That was the kind of thing that was in the air all over town. Hysteria. Mob hysteria. All on account of a few hundred jobless evicted from a three weeks-old-sit-down.

The kinds of things people did that day were the kind they do in a market panic or just after war has been declared. …”

From Waste Heritage by Irene Baird (first published in 1939, this edition Univ of Ottawa Press 2007. Edited by Colin Hill)