Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/73

CHAPTER 4. SOCIAL WORK 60 back to the night captain. I was ushered into a room full of police each of them fatter and more dumb looking than the other. They commenced to swear at me and advance with their fists. I just laughed at them and said I was not foolish enough to give them a chance to beat me up.

At last the night captain told me that if I went out again to sell papers I would be beaten up. "Is that the law talking?" I asked. "That's the law talking," he replied.

My boss did not agree with my ideas, but paid me for those four days I was locked up. In a few days I talked to the Chief of Police who, upon looking at The Conscientious Objector, said; "You can't sell that in my town."

"You talk like Hitler!"

"What?"

"You talk like Hitler," I repeated.

He grunted and picked up the CW saying "What is this?" You had better see Father Mac at the Cathedral; if he says it is all right it is all right; if he says it isn't; then it isn't." Later I called Father Mac, who had presided at an America First meeting before the war. He said "Why should I put my neck out?"

I corresponded with Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union who said they would carry the case to the Supreme Court whenever Carl Whitehead, their lawyer in Denver, wanted to take the case. I talked to Mr. Whitehead whom I had known for years. He did not have time then to attend to the matter but would do so later.

My wife and children visited Ben Salmon's widow and her children with me. Charles was studying for the priesthood and is now a priest in Denver. My wife did not want to be in the same city where I was being arrested although the papers had nothing about it, I shed an aura which was too radical it seemed. Accordingly she moved to Santa Fe. I helped them pack.

Two men who operated milking machines in the barn were incensed because of my vote at the union meeting against war bonds and for conscientious objectors. They made slurring remarks against me, trying to provoke a fight for several weeks. They were of mediocre minds and with little intelligence so it was of no use to argue with them. I had to overcome their animosity in some other way. When I walked to the far away milk room with my one bucket of milk I made it my business to walk by their "strings" of cows, which were in the furthermost end of the barn from the milk room, and carry one of their heavy DeLaval bucket of milk along with me. After a few days they cooled down and became friends, although they never did understand the radical and pacifist argument.