Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/111

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 98 refused to be banished to an island where he could not propagandize the truth, but who instead drank the hemlock. This Socrates tells us:

"Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you... O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth? O men of Athens, I say to you do as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not if I have to die many times. I would have you know that if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you injure me."

I have tramped in all of these United States. As I write I look on the fields of waving grain, the huge cottonwoods that line the laterals, and the jutted stretch of seeming cardboard-like mountains at whose feet live the Pima and Maricopa Indians. In and out of prison I have refused to honor the jingoistic Star Spangled Banner. Truly America the Beautiful means much to me. I refuse to desert this country to those who would bring it to atomic ruin. It is my country as much as it is theirs. Despite Bilbo I think of Jefferson; despite Edgar Guest, Bruce Barton and Dale Carnegie, I think of Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Edwin Markham. Despite the two warmongering Roosevelts and Wilson, I think of Altgeld, old Bob LaFollette and Debs. Despite the Klan and Legion vigilantes I think of the old-time Wobblies, of Sacco and Vanzetti, and of Berkman and Emma Goldman. Despite the warmongering churches I think of the old-time Quakers who paid no taxes for war and who hid escaped slaves; I think of Jim Connolly and Ben Salmon. Despite the warmongering Lowells and Cabots, I think of William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau. It was hard work which built this country. Despite the bourgeois philosophy of the go-getter we worship that machine which now enslaves us. Our military training will not corrupt EVERY youth; a few will appreciate the path of manual labor, economic uncertainty, an absolutist stand against war and against the state whose main business is war.



"You can't cheat an honest man." This saying of the late W. C. Fields was quoted to me by one of my day-to-day employers, in discussing his predicament when he had a building erected by a Phoenix contractor and found that this contractor had not paid $5,000 to sub contractors, so there were liens on his property when he came from the north to live in it. He found some property hidden away by this scoundrel and was able to come out even on the deal. The contractor was a professing Christian. Next time he got a Mormon contractor who was more honest, it happened.

Thinking back over the employers for whom I have worked a sufficient length of time for me to know them; from the Ohio pottery in 1912 where I was told to