Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/62

CHAPTER 4. SOCIAL WORK 49 among the clergy were also sponsors. The ushers of the meeting were the young Catholic Workers. The diocesan paper did not like this united front of the CW with anarchists and Communists but the CW youngsters stood their ground and distributed a pink leaflet giving the CW position on labor. I had asked old Mr. Bruce of the Catholic Bruce Publishing Company to be a sponsor. He was sympathetic but said he was too old to stand the criticism which would come from conservative Catholics. He wished me well.

During these years in Milwaukee I never contributed to the Community Fund because many of the contributions came by force from employees in dime stores and other establishments where the pay was low and where there was no union. After a time I was able to get our union to delegate another fellow and myself to protest to the Community Fund on this matter and that year the headline was: "Fund Motto Is: No Compulsion." This was the headline on Oct. 7, 1937. In my speeches in churches and before labor groups I often quoted the following verse from Robert Burns to wake the audience up:
 * "A fig for those by law protected!
 * Liberty's a glorious feast!
 * Courts for cowards were erected,
 * Churches built to please the priest."

In 1934 my wife and I visited Carleton Washburne at Winnetka, Illinois, asking his opinion about enrolling Carmen and Sharon in the progressive schools there. He felt that the atmosphere was too "goldcoast". Selma and the girls got an apartment there and I went down on week ends to see them. However, by Christmas, we felt that Washburne was right and that it was no place for radicals. We felt that it would be well to allow the girls to see the Jim Crow, deep south, and whatever there was left of progressive education in the school in Fairhope, Alabama, where I had taught history in 1924. Sharon was in kindergarten there. Selma wrote that Sharon was present when her class was marching around in a game with broomsticks. Sharon stood aside and did not play. The teacher came over to her asking, "Are you sick, little girl?" Sharon replied, "I'm Science; I don't get sick." (She had gone to Christian Science Sunday School once, and neither she nor Carmen had ever tasted medicine.) "Why don't you play this game then?" the teacher asked. "It's a gun game," was the reply. "But we don't have any guns," the teacher countered. "That's because you can't find them. You would have them if you could get them; so you have broomsticks instead," was Sharon's answer. The teacher grabbed her by the shoulder telling her she must obey. Sharon told her to take her hands off of her; that she obeyed only what was good. Sharon did not pout, but played the next game which was non-military. At this school the old radical spirit was weakening so my wife brought the girls back to Milwaukee at the end of the year.