Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/17

CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD – YOUTH 4 although a Democrat. He was also secretary of the Masonic lodge in a town several miles to the west. One of his best friends was a man by the name of Clark who was a Russelite, or as they called them in those days a "Millennial Dawn." Pastor Russell lived in nearby Pittsburgh and said that there was no hell. This was terrible for we all knew that everyone but the Baptists were going there, so to believe there was no hell upset all the countryside theology. This Clark had the local sawmill and cider mill. When he got this new religion he ceased chewing J. T. tobacco, and to help him break this tobacco habit he always had his pockets full of chocolate drops. My interest was not in his losing the tobacco habit but in getting a chocolate drop. These were the forerunners of our modern Jehovah's Witness. (Mr. Clark, unlike modern JWs who seldom have any scruples in doing war work, refused to do any work connected with munitions in World War I, and made a meager living sharpening knives and lawnmowers.)

Now in 1906, which I remembered for two things: the San Francisco earthquake, and the death of Mr. Brown, the farm was sold and we moved about 20 miles northwest to the county seat, Lisbon. This was the birthplace of Mark Hanna, and McKinley had lived there when a boy. Here my father was in the real estate and insurance business, and a lonesome Democrat. There was no Baptist church in this town so I attended the Presbyterian church. I was an usher and helped take up the collection. Two of the Elders who gave out communion were disreputable and un-Christian in their daily lives. This caused me to doubt. When I asked the minister about this and about the bloodthirstiness of the Old Testament his only reply was for me to pray. This I did, but the questions kept coming up. Finally he told me to go to Youngstown and hear Billy Sunday, the great revivalist who had thousands pouring down the "sawdust trail" of his tent saying they had been "saved." Then my doubts would all be resolved. I went one rainy night. The blasphemy of this bigot was so powerful that it opened my eyes to the fact that my supposed conversion at a revival meeting was no more real religion than was this wholesale devil worship of Billy Sunday.

I went home and asked more questions. I prayed and read the Bible but the God of Love was never mentioned to me. Around Christmas I got up in the Achor Baptist Church where I had been baptized and said that I was an atheist and did not believe in God or the Bible. My father had wanted me to leave the church quietly as it would hurt his business and political ambitions. I told him that I had splashed in and I was going to splash out.

But I was still a Democrat. I spent the next summer going over the County getting subscriptions for Bryan's paper THE COMMONER. While at my grandmother's the minister who had baptized me, Rev. McKeever, subscribed for THE COMMONER, saying, "Ammon, there is one paper I never want you to read: THE APPEAL TO REASON." I had never heard of it but was in no mood to have anyone tell me what to do. Accordingly when I saw a bricklayer going to work past the house one Monday morning I asked him to take the fifty cents I had made on THE COMMONER and subscribe for this new radical paper. I had been told that this bricklayer was a socialist. My cousin Jessie was there, from her home in Beaver Falls, Pa., at the country each summer. She