CHAPTER 3. MARRIAGE—TRAVEL IN 48 STATES 35
- As the revolution's growing
- Much stronger year by year;
- And whether love or dynamite
- Our victory shall acclaim,
- Our foes will fight with all their might
- In lowly Jesus' name.
- As the revolution's growing
I also had an article in THE TOILER, the organ of the Communist Labor Party edited by my old friend Alfred Wagenknecht, on the Socialist Party convention. Around this time about a dozen Socialist Assemblymen in Albany were being expelled because of their radicalism. They were not very radical but the Lusk Committee was out to get even pinks. In their testimony of the trial it was brought up that I had been secretary of the Socialist Party in Columbus, Ohio in 1917, and was routed by the state organization to oppose the war and the draft. Seymour Stedman, once a candidate for Vice President on the Socialist ticket himself, was the defense lawyer and his rebuttal was that I was not a Socialist but a Quaker. Later I wrote to him telling him that he knew the facts and he replied that he had forgotten. The squeaking Assemblymen lost their jobs anyway, and later all of them lived through another war and supported it. Evan Thomas, Julius Eichel, J. B.C. Woods, and Selma and I met every two weeks, along with other pacifists, and held meetings under the name World War Objectors. We published a large leaflet with a picture of the Perfect Soldier, Bob Minor's huge man with a bayonet but no head, and issued it under the heading Stop the Next War Now. I bought thousands of I.W.W. bronze amnesty buttons and sold them at meetings: a picture of a man behind bars. We went to Margaret Sanger's office and helped distributed her illegal birth control pamphlet and other literature. I remember talking to bewhiskered Edwin Markham, author of that epic that had cheered me in solitary: The Man with the Hoe.
Finally in the spring of 1921 Selma and I read Thoreau and Walt Whitman and decided on hiking over the country. I was working as a soda jerk at the Pennsylvania station. We quit our jobs and with $100 set forth. When I looked at the calendar I saw it was on the exact anniversary of my entrance into solitary: June 21. What happened during the next four years I have written in a manuscript entitled High Roads and Hot Roads. Suffice it to say that we never thumbed a ride but waited for people to ask us.
We hiked first over Staten Island, visited Walter Hirshberg in Atlantic City, whom I had known as CO in Atlanta. His father was an old time anarchist who ran the Boardwalk Bookstore. Got to Norfolk and had a three weeks ride on a leaky coal barge; back up to Boston where we visited with Francis Xavier Hennessey, now a fallen away Catholic, who had been a CO in Leavenworth. Then to see John Dunn in Providence, R. I. We climbed Mt. Washington one night; and found the New England people the kindest folks of the whole country. Visited my folks in Saginaw and Selma's in Milwaukee. Then spent several weeks in Chicago as guest of my old radical friend Ed Smith. Visited
