Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/21

CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD – YOUTH 8 cooperative second-hand store for resale of books on the campus.

The next summer I sold cornflakes in the New England states and in Ohio. I had been a delegate from Lisbon to the state convention of the party in 1912, and was now a delegate in 1916, so I knew comrades from all over the state. Now during the 1916 presidential campaign I spoke on soapboxes, scores of times, for Allan Benson, the Socialist candidate. We spent several weeks in Dedham, Mass., not knowing then that this town would later be famous at the time of the Sacco–Vanzetti trial. One night when soapboxing in Akron, before about 800 people, my voice gave out. I believed in doctors then, so, asked one about it the next day. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him that I was a salesman. "You talk all day, and you talk all night, and I suppose you smoke cigarettes." "Yes," I answered. "You'll have to stop one orof [sic] these things," he replied; so I stopped smoking. Later, in Warren, Ohio, I read Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. The next year I was to be in Atlanta prison with him; and the next year in a solitary cell where I could get no cigarettes, so it was a good thing that I stopped smoking. That Celestial Bulldozer again!

That winter it was necessary for me to help at home, as there were five sisters and two brothers younger than myself. I got a job delivering a bakery wagon and built up an excellent route by making a special each day of some product which I was sure to have fresh. My smallest sister had been born when I was away at school, so when I arrived with cookies—part of the 10% breakage which I was allowed—Lorraine promptly called me "Ammon-cookie." Meanwhile I had introduced Ben Reitman and Bob Minor and other radicals from the soapbox down town. We had come within a hundred votes of electing a Socialist mayor; had members of the city council, and the president of the school board. It was exciting to be a Socialist and on the winning side for once.

During this winter I studied Yogi, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. Rosicrucian friends had cast my horoscope: Leo with Saturn in ascendancy, which meant that I would always be in trouble, but never defeated. As if to bear out this prediction of difficulty Selma wrote that she was breaking our engagement, but she would not tell me why. (After we were married I discovered that two Socialists, who claimed to be mutual friends of both of us, had told her long tales about me which had but a faint basis in fact.)

One clear memory I have of Columbus is that of the Rev. Washington Gladden, a Congregational minister of the old liberal style, bewhiskered and benign. So many people came to hear him that he had to have his services in a theatre. He achieved distinction for refusing money from Rockefeller, saying that it was "tainted." These days hardly a voice is raised against the great Foundations who seek to buy respectability by subsidizing individuals and organizations.