Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/24

CHAPTER 2. ANTI-WAR AGITATION 11 to escape turncoat comrades. I took leaflets to my old comrade Ed Frieh in Huntington, West Virginia, and also went to the end of the spur railroad in notorious Cabin Creek, but the man whose name I had had moved away and the house was empty. I walked down the tracks carrying two suitcases full of leaflets.

Finally, around midnight I noticed a light in a house and knocked at the door. A middle-aged Negro came to the door and I explained the situation asking him if I could sleep there that night and offering to pay him. He said that there were no white folks within six miles and if I did not mind sleeping in the home of a colored person and would say nothing about it to white people the next day I could stay. I was glad to walk into the dimly lighted hall and to hear him say, "Here 'Liza, get out'a that there bed and let this white gentleman sleep." Whereupon a colored girl ran giggling down the hallway and into another room. The bed was warm and I was tired. The next morning I had the regular southern breakfast of grits, biscuits, sowbelly and coffee set before me. My hosts were cordial and found it difficult to understand why I refused their sowbelly. I needed to be strong to carry those heavy grips they said. Somehow they got the idea that it was "my religion" not to eat meat and all was well.

I wore a huge button marked PEACE, yet the dumb troopers, who entered the train the next day and said they were hunting for a score of radicals who were putting out seditious literature, opened my grips and seeing the books on top of the literature muttered something about my being a student returning from college and moved on.

Getting back to Columbus the night before I was to have my trial I routed my brothers Frank and Paul and my sisters Lola and Lida and their young friends with leaflets over the university section where we lived and where there were few cops. I took the dangerous downtown section. We would place leaflets and stickers for a few blocks and then skip a few blocks, and backtrack and zigzag. There were no squad cars and radio in those days, so a person did not have to be smart to outwit a cop. I put stickers on nearly all the downtown store fronts. Finally at 2.30 a.m. I was caught and put in solitary.

I asked to see a lawyer but was told I could not see one. Detective Wilson said that unless I registered for the draft by June 5th, which was registration day, I was to be shot, on orders from Washington. I was shown a copy of the local paper with headlines "Extreme Penalty for Traitors." I only saw it through the bars and was not allowed to read it. It was not until my release from prison in 1919 that I read this paper and discovered that there was nothing definite in the follow up about the death penalty. This was just a scare headline. However if men take you out to a cliff on a dark night, lower you at the end of a rope and tell you it is a hundred feet and when you get tired to drop-then when you drop it is only two feet; it might as well have been a hundred feet, for you thought it was.

Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had also told them that I had registered.) I felt that if they gave in some one had to stick, and I was that one. While I was in solitary a statement was given out