CHAPTER 2. ANTI-WAR AGITATION 30
prison clothes and asked if I wanted to sell my overcoat. I was not handcuffed but I guess my white face from the months of solitary was sign enough to anyone as to my being an ex-convict.
I was ushered into a cell where Joe Webb, a mountain boy, also slept. He had been found guilty of murder, and was to be executed. Through influential friends I was able to get him a new trial, and he got life on the chain gang instead. I was now able to read and write as I pleased. Selma had received some of my contraband letters from my sister. She was cordial and not married to anyone else, so there was still hope. There was not the restriction on correspondents then that there is now, so I had letters from many people over the country. Mary Raoul Millis, a Socialist of an old southern family whom I had met in Cleveland in 1913, lived in Atlanta and visited me in the Federal Prison and also here in the Tower. (She is the mother of Walter Millis, the author of The Martial Spirit, the best book on the Spanish–American War farce.) Peggy Harwell, a pretty young woman who was a Socialist and a Theosophist, also visited me in both jails. They told me that my red-headed cousin Georgia had gone to the warden's office when I was in solitary and raised particular hell because she was not allowed to see me. I asked for radical books to read and among other books Tolstoy's Kingdom of God is Within You was brought. I felt that it must have been written especially for me, for here was the answer already written out to all the questions that I had tried to figure out for myself in solitary. To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. If the workers ever did get a majority of either, they would have the envy and greed in their hearts and would be chained by these as much as by the chains of the master class. And the State which they would like to call a Cooperative Commonwealth would be based on power; the state would not wither away but would grow. Therefore the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority. I had already started this revolution in solitary by becoming a Christian. Now I had completed it by becoming an Anarchist. Mrs. Millis was a Christian Scientist and she brought me Science and Health to read. I did so, but it did not appeal to me. Mr. Bazemore, the deputy sheriff, said that "the Federals" wanted him to watch my mail to see if I would divulge the name of the person who had sent my contraband letters out of prison, but he wasn't paid to stool pigeon for them and I could write what I liked for all he cared.
Debs had entered Moundsville, West Virginia prison to start his twenty years. He could not be allowed to receive letters from another convict so I wrote to his brother Theodore in Terre Haute expressing my admiration for one who in his old age was still a rebel. Sam Castleton, who was to be Deb's lawyer in Atlanta, was also my lawyer. My case came up for trial after seven weeks. Castleton told me that if I was not too radical he might get me off with six months.
When I was in court a Holiness preacher was being tried first. He had refused to register, he said, because the Bible said not to kill, and putting your name down on the list of killers was the first thing the government wanted you to do. The first thing for a Christian to do was to write his name in the Book of Life instead of the Book of Death, and refuse to register. He had announced this far
