Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/44

CHAPTER 2. ANTI-WAR AGITATION 31 and wide but on the night before the draft God came to him in a dream and said that "the powers that be are ordained of God" and he should not disobey them. So he made up his mind to register the next day; but then he took sick and couldn't. It was obvious that he was squeaking, and that if God was talking to him He might as well have kept him well so he could go and register. His wife and children asked the judge for clemency and the judge gave him 24 hours in jail.

My case came next. I was asked if I had really refused to register for the first and second drafts and if I had not changed my mind like the minister and would be ready to register for the third draft if and when it came along. I replied that I had entered prison an atheist and not a pacifist, but that my study of the Sermon on the Mount had made me an all-around pacifist, and the logic of Tolstoy had made me move to the extreme left and become an anarchist. I could see my lawyer wince and put his finger to his lips. I continued for about ten minutes to explain my new radical ideas. The District Attorney, Hooper Alexander, an old fashioned looking Southerner, came up to the judge and whispered and the judge said, "case dismissed." I looked around to see whose case it was and it was mine. My lawyer seemed bewildered and so was I. Mr. Alexander beckoned for me to come to his office and asked me how the hell I got that way. I explained some of my history to him. He had read letters that came to me and said he understood. The reason he had dismissed my case was the contrast between this preacher who was bellyaching out of it and myself who was willing to take more punishment. He liked a good fighter. He was not a pacifist nor in sympathy with anarchism he said, but he realized something was wrong with the world and those who supported the status quo surely did not have the answer. He wanted to know if I had enough money to pay my way to the Delaware, Ohio jail to do my nine months for refusing to register the first time. I told him I had because the Socialists of Columbus had sent me $2 a month to buy candy and I could not use it while in solitary. He said that if I had been penniless he would have given me the fare out of his own pocket. He was signing my papers ten days late to appear at the Federal Court in Columbus. He was supposed to send me with a guard and had no right to take the law into his own hands and allow me this ten days of freedom, but he was doing it, he said, because he liked a good fighter. I had approached the court this time with love for my enemy and had never thought that it would result in my freedom.

After a few joyous days with Selma and with my family, I was one of the few prisoners in the Delaware, Ohio county jail. After a few weeks I was eating dinner with the sheriff and his family. At times I was the only prisoner and would lock myself in at night, and in the daytime beat rugs and mow lawns for 40c an hour. Among my employers was Senator Willis nearby. The head of the Department of Sociology at Ohio Wesleyan University here had known me in Madison and sent students to interview the only political prisoner in town. Bishop Brown of Galion, Ohio, the "Bishop of the Bolsheviks and Infidels" came over to see me in his Episcopalian robes. That day my sisters Lola, Lida, Leah and Lorraine had come to see me and he bought ice cream for all of us. I had been reading books on health from the non-medical point of view and took ten