CHAPTER 2. ANTI-WAR AGITATION 16
Don't be seen talking to me very often, for the guards are watching and will make trouble. Write to me by way of Blackie and I will do the same."
That night Peter again became more aggressive. For about six weeks I slept but a few hours each night until I was transferred to another cell. Meanwhile my good natured passive resistance had persuaded Peter that he had better leave me alone. I got him interested in English lessons in the prison school. When I left his cell, he said he would pass the word around that I was nobody's punk, and none of the other wolves would bother me.
I was transferred to the new cell house, with four in a cell. Boston Dave and John were counterfeiters and Johnny Spanish had done ten years in Sing Sing with Gyp the Blood, and was doing five years in Atlanta. He spoke well of Warden Osborne. Later I was to read Frank Tannenbaum's Osborne of Sing Sing, and corroborate what Johnny had told me.
A red-headed kid who had a radio without a license was doing time as a spy. He was not a radical or subversive, only interested in radio and did not know he had to get a license. He celled a few cells from me. One noon he slipped me a saw made from a knife, as we were in line going to dinner. It seems that he had cut several bars of a window in the basement which faced outside and was preparing to escape. Some dumb guard had leaned against them and they gave, so the whole cell block was being searched for a saw. The kid had enough sense not to be caught with it. Why he gave it to me I do not know, but now I had it. I stopped and tied my shoe string and secured the saw up my sleeve, and thus got out of my regular place in line and at the table. Here I stuck the saw underneath the table, and it may be there yet for all I know. As we left the mess hall, all of the guards in the prison lined us up and searched for that saw. If they had searched us coming in I would have been found with it, and of course would not have told on the kid.
John, in my cell, was boss of the paint gang and was from Columbus, Ohio. He had not known me, but all prisoners like someone who has put up a good fight and faced death and has not weakened. So he had me transferred to his gang, and when he left in about 6 months I was made the boss of the gang. I had a pass to go anywhere I wanted inside the walls.
The editor of the prison paper, GOOD WORDS, asked me to give him something to print. I told him that was what I got in for, printing things in papers, and that my ideas were too radical for him. He insisted so I gave him this quote which, believe it or not, appeared in a box underneath the editorial caption of the Department of Justice on April 1, 1918:
- "A prison is the only house in a slave state where a free man can abide with honor," Thoreau.
This had the o.k. of the warden and was not sneaked in. The ignorant official thought it praised prisons. The CONSERVATOR, edited by the radical Horace Traubel, literary executor of Walt Whitman, was allowed in because they thought it was conservative. The IRISH WORLD which was much against the war came to the Catholic chaplain and he got copies to us radicals through
