Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/18

CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD – YOUTH 5 was a Republican for the same reason that I was a Democrat: her father was a Republican. A man, the age of my father, was there that summer also. He was my second cousin Isaac McCready. He was a radical. His fiery red-headed wife was a beautiful woman. Isaac did not believe in God and all of the relatives who were church goers were anxiously looking for the judgment of God to kill him. He had a "tobacco heart" but outlived most of them. (Here was forming a thread that would weave into my life in a few years. For my cousin, riotously red-headed and beautiful, Georgia, was to marry a man in Georgia who was the son of the chaplain of Atlanta prison.)

By the fall of 1910 I had exchanged my lost Baptist heaven for the new Socialist Heaven on Earth. Here in Lisbon the local Socialists were proud to elect the son of the Democratic mayor as secretary of their local. The first Socialist I met was "Curly", a vegetarian. I thought this was a part of the rebellion so the butcher joined the capitalist in the list of my enemies. Then I read Upton Sinclair's Jungle and had more reason both for being a vegetarian and being a Socialist. My father scolded me for my radicalism and especially for spending my Sunday morning in distributing THE APPEAL TO REASON on doorsteps, rather than ushering, in the Presbyterian church. My father was a good-natured man whose bark was worse than his bite. (In later years he told me he wanted to see if I really was a good rebel and was secretly glad that I kept on with my Socialism.) I introduced Fred Strickland, and Cornelius Lehane – a big Irishman who wore a gold cross on his vest and who was beaten up by the police and died soon afterward in Connecticut during World War I. They stayed at our house and my father talked radicalism intelligently with them. My father allowed me to put up a sign on the public square by the Civil War cannon giving definitions of Socialism. It stood there for years. This was a staid Republican town but it had a little history of rebellion for here during the Civil War lived Clement Vallindgham who favored the South, was put in prison, and ran for Governor of Ohio while in prison. Near here also was captured "Raider Morgan" who got further north than any other Southerner. During a winter vacation I worked in the local pottery and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.) Section 6, Article 2, of the Socialist Party constitution had not yet barred "wobblies," as they were called, from also belonging to the Party.

In August of 1914 my grandfather broke his leg, and this being an easy time to make promises for the winter, I offered to live with him that winter and walk or ride the 5 1/2 miles to the high school in East Palestine, where I would be a junior. Here I met a man about ten years my senior who was a Socialist, Ed Firth. He was also a Sunday School teacher. He was an expert pottery worker. I would have treasured his friendship during all these years, as we had much in common, but he died in prison in World War I. He was indicted with the Communist Labor Party group.

That winter I milked eight cows, morning and night, and worked all day Saturday. I sat behind a huge wood stove nights and studied, taking five subjects.