Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/115

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 102 Underneath one arm I displayed the current CW. Passersby read the sign to one another and employees in the Federal Building read it from the windows. Half a dozen people stopped and asked questions in a sympathetic manner, some of them youngsters who had never heard of the term Conscientious Objector. To them and to the reporters I gave copies of the CW. The young recruiting officer across the street, out of the rain, came across and read my sign and smiled good naturedly and shook his head, not his fist. What a change from World War I when I was to be shot for refusing to register and for agitating less openly than this! No one openly said a word against my action. One reporter who said he was from an outside-of-the-city paper took my picture. I thought at the time he was from the FBI, and later found this to be true.

The young reporter of the evening paper took half a dozen pictures and questioned me sympathetically about the purpose of my picketing. That night the headline read: "DRAFT RESISTER ADMITS GUILT AS FRIEND PICKETS COURT". Note that Joe was called "resister" instead of "evader." Some of the facts of Joe's history and mine were twisted in the report but the essential quotation as to our purpose was correct. "We are governed by the Sermon on the Mount which tells us to return good for evil. But courts and governments return evil for evil. That's why we would abolish them and let every man be governed by his own conscience."

I should know better at my age than to wisecrack to a reporter, but to his questions about Indonesia, after I had given him a lengthy explanation and he still looked curious, I said I knew that name because I knew how to spell it, but as my friend Byron Bryant says of Bill Ryan and myself "fighting the whole world of pipsqueaks," it does not do to become too serious. The reporter must have understood our emphasis for in describing my work in the vegetable fields he coined the phrase "spiritual independence" as the reason for my vocation. The next day the same paper carried a picture of myself and sign.

The Judge postponed the sentence until the following Monday and asked Joe to speak to the probation officer who was in court. This officer asked him if he knew the man who was picketing outside, and tried to argue with him that there was no such thing as a Christian Anarchist. Joe replied: "Well, Tolstoy and the CATHOLIC WORKER and Hennacy says there is, so it must be so." "Do you want probation?" the officer asked. Joe answered: "If I go to jail to witness against war and then accept probation or parole I would then be witnessing only for my own comfort. Tell the judge to do his part; I have done mine."

My anarchist friend Byron Bryant, home from Stanford for vacation in nearby Wickenburg, came down for the trial. He had registered and was granted Conscientious Objector status. (None of the local pacifists showed up although several of them were ministers who had this Monday off.) Bryant came out with Joe at noon and each carried the sign for a few steps as "token pickets." We went to a cafeteria where Bryant stood treat. Then Joe drove us in his truck with his signs on it, to Tempe where we were fortunate to find Father Rook home and had a pleasant visit with him.

On the next Monday I picketed the court again from 10 to 12. Joe's lawyer, furnished free by the Progressive Party, came out and told me that Joe had