Webb Cruthers

Webb Cruthers is a journalism student whose political talk draws Anne Elizabeth Trent into unfamiliar social and labor worlds. He presents himself as an anarchist and urges others toward solidarity, yet when police threaten him at a textile strike he runs; his later admission of fear and attraction to Anne complicates the image of the assured radical. Through Webb, political conviction appears not as a settled pose but as something tested in public and unsettled in private.

Identity and Background

Webb studies journalism alongside Anne Elizabeth Trent and becomes one of her close companions after she enters the School of Journalism against Edwin Vinal’s preference that she prepare for teaching or social work. Shorter than Anne, dark-haired, and youthful in appearance, he is said to look about fifteen despite claiming to be twenty-one. His pale complexion earns him the nickname Babyface. He speaks confidentially, with a manner that makes even his own statements seem not entirely serious, and identifies himself as an anarchist.

Politics is a constant presence in Webb’s conversation and possessions. He carries pamphlets on socialism and syndicalism, along with copies of Mother Earth and The Masses. His interests connect him to the arguments and organizing around him, but the narrative shows those interests through everyday habits as well as declarations: he seeks conversation, knows people in many different places, and brings Anne into settings she has not previously encountered.

Anne’s Companion in the City

Webb takes Anne around the East Side, where they visit saloons, Romanian rathskellers, and Arabian restaurants. The outings offer her a livelier alternative to spending time with Edwin, while exposing her to a social world beyond her earlier experience. Webb seems able to make people trust him to settle the bill despite having little money; when Anne’s money is spent, he charges what remains. Anne drinks only occasionally and, if Webb becomes too unruly, makes him take her to a subway so she can go home. The next day he may be tired and unsteady, telling her stories about his drunken adventures.

This companionship is warm but not uncomplicated. Webb supplies access, conversation, and a sense of movement through the city, while Anne retains the ability to set limits and leave. His charm and sociability coexist with dependence on her money and episodes of drinking. The account presents him neither simply as a guide nor as a political instructor: he is a friend whose company is attractive, exasperating, and shaped by an uneven but active negotiation between them.

The Textile Strike and a Test of Conviction

After Christmas, Webb becomes absorbed in a textile workers’ strike in a New Jersey town and takes Anne to see the mills. The industrial setting is guarded by police and armed special deputies; at strike headquarters, organizers work amid handbills, newspapers, and the crowds of workers who have gathered there. Webb’s response is openly angry. When he and Anne encounter Ben Compton, Ben urges Webb to speak at a meeting, framing the workers’ fight as part of a wider historic struggle. Webb initially protests that he is only a college student, then agrees to try to speak about democracy in industry.

The meeting is closed to most of the assembled strikers on the claim that the hall is full. Ben speaks from a lamppost, but police drag him away as the crowd shifts back from the hall and mounted officers press people down the street. Webb then climbs onto a fire hydrant and denounces the exclusion, arguing that the strikers had rented the hall and had a permit. When mounted police move toward him, however, he takes Anne’s hand and runs through the crowd. His words and his escape occur in quick succession: he confronts the injustice in public, then chooses not to remain for arrest.

On the train afterward, Webb keeps his cap low and muffler raised and pretends not to know Anne at the station because he fears a detective will recognize him. In private, he asks what she thought of the episode and whether he ought to have stayed to be arrested like Ben. Anne criticizes his flight. Webb’s question makes the difference between his own choice and Ben’s arrest a subject of direct, uncomfortable reflection, rather than allowing his speech alone to stand as proof of courage.

Attraction, Retreat, and Return to the Picket Line

After the strike day, Webb and Anne go to a friend’s studio to warm up and make tea. When Anne calls him a coward, Webb tries to distinguish occasions when a person should retreat from those when he should act bravely. He then tells her that he is strongly attracted to her and had been cowardly in not saying so earlier. He rejects conventional ideas of romantic love but argues that attraction should be acknowledged. Anne says she does not understand what he means. Webb reacts with confusion and anger, then tells her to go home and calls the confession a mistake. Anne leaves, yet feels warm and tender toward him on the journey back.

They do not meet for several days. Webb then calls and asks Anne to join him on the picket line the following morning. In the early light, she sees strikers in thin clothes facing police efforts to break up the line; some workers sing Solidarity Forever while others jeer at strikebreakers. When a young woman falls and a policeman kicks her, Anne tries to help and is struck and taken to a police wagon. The account establishes Webb’s invitation and Anne’s presence at the picket, but does not specify what Webb does during the assault or what becomes of him afterward. Their relationship, like his political trajectory, is left unresolved: the text records his declaration, her response, and his renewed invitation into the strike, not a settled romantic outcome.

Narrative Role

Webb’s importance lies in the friction between what he advocates and what he can bear when advocacy carries immediate risk. His flight from the police does not erase his speech, just as his speech does not make the flight disappear. The contrast becomes sharper when he later invites Anne back to the picket line, although the narrative does not claim that this invitation resolves his earlier hesitation. His political materials, social confidence, limited means, drinking, and uncertain courage make radical commitment part of a lived, imperfect character rather than a purely rhetorical position. His intimate confession follows the same pattern: he insists on candor, then withdraws when Anne cannot meet it as he hopes. The resulting portrait is of a young man willing to speak and act, but not yet able to make his convictions and vulnerabilities coincide.