Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/63

CHAPTER 4. SOCIAL WORK 50 Selma had the regular atheistic attitude of the old time Socialists among whom she was brought up. When we were hiking we had worked in Atlanta for over a year and had visited Mrs. Millis. Selma had attended the Christian Science church out of courtesy and accepted much of that teaching. I had read the books along with her, feeling that perhaps this approach to religion might be the only one by which she would accept my Tolstoian Sermon on the Mount principles. It was not difficult for both of us to accept the non-medical teaching of Christian Science, whether we accepted their theology in toto or not. Mrs. Millis was the only pacifist among them. The bourgeois atmosphere of their churches did not attract us and their super patriotism made me shudder. We faithfully attended services and studied the daily lessons for years and determined to bring up our children without medicine.

Selma was not a vegetarian and I did not feel like imposing my ideas on this subject on my family. When Carmen was about five years of age she was at the table and asked me why I did not eat meat. I told her that was an idea of mine. "But why?" she insisted. "I don't like to kill animals, and why should some one else kill them for me?" I answered. "But Daddy, maybe, this pig just died; nobody killed it." was her reply.

Both girls were interested in music, dancing and dramatics. We often took walks up the river both winter and summer on Sunday mornings.

By 1938 anyone who had studied history could tell that a war was coming on soon, my wife suggested that she take the girls to New York City while I had a good job and before I got into jail. We had seen the life there and they were old enough to appreciate some of the advantages which they might have there. So in July 1938 we drove there and I came back to Milwaukee alone. My father had died in June, in Cleveland.

Emma Goldman spoke in Milwaukee in the late thirties. I had not met her for years. Later when I wrote to her in Toronto telling her of the Haymarket meeting and of the Catholic Workers being ushers she wrote to me: "I appreciate the good wishes of the young Catholics and I ask you to kindly give them my thanks and my greetings."

In 1937 Dorothy Day spoke at the Eucharistic Congress in Milwaukee, being invited there by Bishop (now Cardinal) Stritch. She had been upstairs in the office of the LIBERATOR when I had been working in my small office at the foot of the stairs for Roger Baldwin, but I had never met her. Then she was a Communist. Our mutual friends were Hugo and Livia Gellert and Claude McKay. She had left the Communists and joined the Catholic Church and in 1933 with Peter Maurin had started the CATHOLIC WORKER. I met her after the meeting and was of course pleased with her words of praise for I.W.W.'s and Communists to the great crowd of Catholics who would not otherwise know much about radicalism. I had but a few words with her on our way to Nina's. She spoke at Marquette to a room full of nuns, priests and students the next day. I was only able to come late to the meeting and had to sit in the very front row. In answering questions from patriotic questioners she mentioned something of my pacifist record, saying that I was not a Catholic, but an anarchist and that when the next war came she would be with me in opposition to it. Her