1919

Ben Compton

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. …

The old people were Jews but at school Benny always said no he wasn’t a Jew he was an American because he’d been born in Brooklyn and lived at 2531 25th Avenue in Flatbush and they owned their home. The teacher in the seventh grade said he squinted and sent him home with a note, so Pop took an afternoon off from the jewelry store where he worked with a lens in his eye repairing watches, to take Benny to an optician who put drops in his eyes and made him read little teeny letters on a white card. Pop seemed tickled when the optician said Benny had to wear glasses, “Vatchmaker’s eyes… takes after his old man,” he said and patted his cheek. The steel eyeglasses were heavy on Benny’s nose and cut into him behind the ears. It made him feel funny to have Pop telling the optician that a boy with glasses wouldn’t be a bum and a baseball player like Sam and Isidore but would attend to his studies and be a lawyer and a scholar like the men of old. “A rabbi maybe,” said the optician, but Pop said rabbis were loafers and lived on the blood of the poor, he and the old woman still ate kosher and kept the sabbath like their fathers but synagogue and the rabbis… he made a spitting sound with his lips. The optician laughed and said as for himself he was a freethinker but religion was good for the commonpeople. When they got home momma said the glasses made Benny look awful old. Sam and Izzy yelled, “Hello, foureyes,” when they came in from selling papers, but at school next day they told the other kids it was a statesprison offence to roughhouse a feller with glasses. Once he had the glasses Benny got to be very good at his lessons.

In highschool he made the debating team. When he was thirteen Pop had a long illness and had to give up work for a year. They lost the house that was almost paid for and went to live in a flat on Myrtle Avenue. Benny got work in a drugstore evenings. Sam and Izzy left home, Sam to work in a furrier’s in Newark; Izzy had gotten to loafing in poolparlors so Pop threw him out. He’d always been a good athlete and palled around with an Irishman named Pug Riley who was going to get him into the ring. Momma cried and Pop forbade any of the kids to mention his name; still they all knew that Gladys, the oldest one, who was working as a stenographer over in Manhattan, sent Izzy a five dollar bill now and then. Benny looked much older than he was and hardly ever thought of anything except making money so the old people could have a house of their own again. When he grew up he’d be a lawyer and a business man and make a pile quick so that Gladys could quit work and get married and the old people could buy a big house and live in the country. Momma used to tell him about how when she was a young maiden in the old country they used to go out in the woods after strawberries and mushrooms and stop by a farmhouse and drink milk all warm and foamy from the cow. Benny was going to get rich and take them all out in the country for a trip to a summer resort.

When Pop was well enough to work again he rented half a two-family house in Flatbush where at least they’d be away from the noise of the elevated. The same year Benny graduated from highschool and won a prize for an essay on The American Government. He’d gotten very tall and thin and had terrible headaches. The old people said he’d outgrown himself and took him to see Dr. Cohen who lived on the same block but had his office downtown near Borough Hall. The doctor said he’d have to give up night work and studying too hard, what he needed was something that would keep him outdoors and develop his body. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he said, scratching the grizzled beard under his chin. Benny said he had to make some money this summer because he wanted to go to New York University in the fall. Dr. Cohen said he ought to eat plenty of milkdishes and fresh eggs and go somewhere where he could be out in the sun and take it easy all summer. He charged two dollars. Walking home the old man kept striking his forehead with the flat of his hand and saying he was a failure, thirty years he had worked in America and now he was a sick old man all used up and couldn’t provide for his children. Momma cried. Gladys told them not to be silly, Benny was a clever boy and a bright student and what was the use of all his booklearning if he couldn’t think up some way of getting a job in the country. Benny went to bed without saying anything.

A few days later Izzy came home. He rang the doorbell as soon as the old man had gone to work one morning. “You almost met Pop,” said Benny who opened the door. “Nutten doin’. I waited round the corner till I seen him go…. How’s everybody?” Izzy had on a light grey suit and a green necktie and wore a fedora hat to match the suit. He said he had to get to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to fight a Filipino featherweight on Saturday. “Take me with you,” said Benny. “You ain’t tough enough, kid… too much the momma’s boy.” In the end Benny went with him. They rode on the L to Brooklyn Bridge and then walked across New York to the ferry. They bought tickets to Elizabeth. When the train stopped in a freightyard they sneaked forward into the blind baggage. At West Philadelphia they dropped off and got chased by the yard detective. A brewery wagon picked them up and carried them along the road as far as West Chester. They had to walk the rest of the way. A Mennonite farmer let them spend the night in the barn, but in the morning he wouldn’t let them have any breakfast until they’d chopped wood for two hours. By the time they got to Lancaster Benny was all in. He went to sleep in the lockerroom at the Athletic Club and didn’t wake up until the fight was over. Izzy had knocked out the Filipino featherweight in the third round and won a purse of twentyfive dollars. He sent Benny over to a lodginghouse with the shine who took care of the lockerroom and went out with the boys to paint the town red. Next morning he turned up with his face green and got his eyes bloodshot; he’d spent all his money, but he’d gotten Benny a job helping a feller who did a little smalltime fightpromoting and ran a canteen in a construction camp up near Mauch Chunk.

It was a road job. Ben stayed there for two months earning ten dollars a week and his keep. He learned to drive a team and to keep books. The boss of the canteen, Hiram Volle, gypped the construction workers in their accounts, but Benny didn’t think much about it because they were most of ’em wops, until he got to be friends with a young fellow named Nick Gigli who worked with the gang at the gravelpit. Nick used to hang around the canteen before closingtime in the evening; then they’d go out and smoke a cigarette together and talk. Sundays they’d walk out in the country with the Sunday paper and fool around all afternoon lying in the sun and talking about the articles in the magazine section. Nick was from north Italy and all the men in the gang were Sicilians, so he was lonely. His father and elder brothers were anarchists and he was too; he told Benny about Bakunin and Malatesta and said Benny ought to be ashamed of himself for wanting to get to be a rich businessman; sure he ought to study and learn, maybe he ought to get to be a lawyer, but he ought to work for the revolution and the working class, to be a business man was to be a shark and a robber like that son of a bitch Volle. He taught Benny to roll cigarettes and told him about all the girls that were in love with him; that girl in the boxoffice of the movie in Mauch Chunk; he could have her anytime he wanted, but a revolutionist ought to be careful about the girls he went with, women took a classconscious working man’s mind off his aims, they were the main seduction of capitalist society. Ben asked him if he thought he ought to throw up his job with Volle, because Volle was such a crook, but Nick said any other capitalist would be the same, all they could do was wait for the Day. Nick was eighteen with bitter brown eyes and a skin almost as dark as a mulatto’s. Ben thought he was great on account of all he’d done; he’d shined shoes, been a sailor, a miner, a dishwasher and had worked in textile mills, shoefactories and a cement factory and had had all kinds of women and been in jail for three weeks in the Paterson strike. Round the camp if any of the wops saw Ben going anywhere alone he’d yell at him, “Hey, kid, where’s Nick?”

On Friday evening there was an argument in front of the window where the construction boss was paying the men off. That night, when Ben was getting into his bunk in the back of the tarpaper shack the canteen was in, Nick came around and whispered in his ear that the bosses had been gypping the men on time and that they were going on strike tomorrow. Ben said if they went out he’d go out too. Nick called him a brave comrade in Italian and hauled off and kissed him on both cheeks. Next morning only a few of the pick and shovel men turned out when the whistle blew. Ben hung around the door of the cookshack not knowing what to do with himself. Volle noticed him and told him to hitch up the team to go down to the station after a box of tobacco. Ben looked at his feet and said he couldn’t because he was on strike. Volle burst out laughing and told him to quit his kidding, funniest thing he’d ever heard of a kike walking out with a lot of wops. Ben felt himself go cold and stiff all over: “I’m not a kike any more’n you are…. I’m an American born… and I’m goin’ to stick with my class, you dirty crook.” Volle turned white and stepped up and shook a big fist under Ben’s nose and said he was fired and that if he wasn’t a little f — g shrimp of a foureyed kike he’d knock his goddam block off, anyway his brother sure would give him a whaling when he heard about it.

Ben went to his bunk and rolled his things into a bundle and went off to find Nick. Nick was a little down the road where the bunkhouses were, in the center of a bunch of wops all yelling and waving their arms. The superintendent and the gangbosses all turned out with revolvers in black holsters strapped around their waists and one of them made a speech in English and another one Sicilian saying that this was a squareshooting concern that had always treated laborers square and if they didn’t like it they could get the hell out. They’d never had a strike and didn’t propose to begin now. There was big money involved in this job and the company wasn’t going to work and see it tied up by any goddam foolishness. Any man who wasn’t on his job next time the whistle blew was fired and would have to get a move on and remember that the State of Pennsylvania had vagrancy laws. When the whistle blew again everybody went back to work except Ben and Nick. They walked off down the road with their bundles. Nick had tears in his eyes and was saying, “Too much gentle, too much patient… we do not know our strength yet.”

That night they found a brokendown schoolhouse a little off the road on a hill above a river. They’d bought some bread and peanut butter at a store and sat out in front eating it and talking about what they’d do. By the time they’d finished eating it was dark. Ben had never been out in the country alone like that at night. The wind rustled the woods all around and the rapid river seethed down in the valley. It was a chilly August night with a heavy dew. They didn’t have any covering so Nick showed Ben how to take his jacket off and put it over his head and how to sleep against the wall to keep from getting sore lying on the bare boards. He’d hardly gotten to sleep when he woke up icycold and shaking. There was a window broken; he could see the frame and the jagged bits of glass against the cloudy moonlight. He lay back, musta been dreaming. Something banged on the roof and rolled down the shingles over his head and dropped to the ground. “Hay, Ben, for chrissake wassat?” came Nick’s voice in a hoarse whisper. They both got up and stared out through the broken windowframe.

“That was busted before,” said Nick. He walked over and opened the outside door. They both shivered in the chilly wind up the valley that rustled the trees like rain, the river down below made a creaking grinding noise like a string of carts and wagons.

A stone hit the roof above them and rolled off. The next one went between their heads and hit the cracked plaster of the wall behind. Ben heard the click of the blade as Nick opened his pocketknife. He strained his eyes till the tears came but he couldn’t make out anything but the leaves stirring in the wind.

“You come outa there… come up here… talk… you son of a bitch,” yelled Nick.

There was no answer.

“What do you think?” whispered Nick over his shoulder to Ben.

Ben didn’t say anything; he was trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Nick pushed him back in and pulled the door to. They piled the dusty benches against the door and blocked up the lower part of the window with boards out of the floor.

“Break in. I keell one of him anyhow,” said Nick. “You don’t believe in speerits?”

“Naw, no such thing,” said Ben. They sat down side by side on the floor with their backs to the cracked plaster and listened. Nick had put the knife down between them. He took Ben’s fingers and made him feel the catch that held the blade steady. “Good knife… sailor knife,” he whispered. Ben strained his ears. Only the spattering sound of the wind in the trees and the steady grind of the river. No more stones came.

Next morning they left the schoolhouse at first day. Neither of them had had any sleep. Ben’s eyes were stinging. When the sun came up they found a man who was patching up a broken spring on a truck. They helped him jack it up with a block of wood and he gave them a lift into Scranton where they got jobs washing dishes in a hashjoint run by a Greek.

… all fixed fastfrozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. …

Pearldiving wasn’t much to Ben’s taste, so at the end of a couple of weeks, as he’d saved up the price of the ticket, he said he was going back home to see the old people. Nick stayed on because a girl in a candystore had fallen for him. Later he’d go up to Allentown, where a brother of his had a job in a steelmill and was making big money. The last thing he said when he went down and put Ben on the train for New York was, “Benny, you learn and study… be great man for workingclass and remember too much girls bad business.”

Ben hated leaving Nick but he had to get home to find a job for the winter that would give him time to study. He took the exams and matriculated at the College of the City of New York. The old man borrowed a hundred dollars from the Morris Plan to get him started and Sam sent him twentyfive from Newark to buy books with. Then he made a little money himself working in Kahn’s drugstore evenings. Sunday afternoons he went to the library and read Marx’s Capital. He joined the Socialist Party and went to lectures at the Rand School whenever he got a chance. He was working to be a wellsharpened instrument.

The next spring he got sick with scarlet fever and was ten weeks in the hospital. When he got out his eyes were so bad it gave him a headache to read for an hour. The old man owed the Morris Plan another hundred dollars besides the first hundred dollars and the interest and the investigation fees.

Ben had met a girl at a lecture at Cooper Union who had worked in a textile mill over in Jersey. She’d been arrested during the Paterson strike and had been blacklisted. Now she was a salesgirl at Wanamaker’s, but her folks still worked in the Botany Mill at Passaic. Her name was Helen Mauer; she was five years older than Ben, a pale blonde and already had lines in her face. She said there was nothing in the socialist movement; it was the syndicalists had the right idea. After the lecture she took him to the Cosmopolitan Café on 2nd Avenue to have a glass of tea and introduced him to some people she said were real rebels; when Ben told Gladys and the old people about them the old man said, “Pfooy… radical jews,” and made a spitting sound with his lips. He said Benny ought to cut out these monkeyshines and get to work. He was getting old and now he was in debt, and if he got sick it would be up to Benny to support him and the old woman. Ben said he was working all the time but that your folks didn’t count, it was the workingclass that he was working for. The old man got red in the face and said his family was sacred and next to that his own people. Momma and Gladys cried. The old man got to his feet; choking and coughing, he raised his hands above his head and cursed Ben and Ben left the house.

He had no money on him and was still weak from the scarlet fever. He walked across Brooklyn and across the Manhattan Bridge and up through the East Side, all full of ruddy lights and crowds and pushcarts and vegetables that smelt of the spring, to the house where Helen lived on East 6th Street. The landlady said he couldn’t go up to her room. Helen said it wasn’t any of her business but while they were arguing about it his ears began to ring and he fainted on the hall settee. When he came to with water running down his neck Helen helped him up the four flights and made him lie down on her bed. She yelled down to the landlady who was screaming about the police, that she would leave first thing in the morning and nothing in the world could make her leave sooner. She made Ben some tea and they sat up all night talking on her bed. They decided that they’d live in free union together and spent the rest of the night packing her things. She had mostly books and pamphlets.

Next morning they went out at six o’clock, because she had to be at Wanamaker’s at eight, to look for a room. They didn’t exactly tell the next landlady they weren’t married, but when she said, “So you’re bride and groom?” they nodded and smiled. Fortunately Helen had enough money in her purse to pay the week in advance. Then she had to run off to work. Ben didn’t have any money to buy anything to eat so he lay on the bed reading Progress and Poverty all day. When she came back in the evening she brought in some supper from a delicatessen. Eating the rye bread and salami they were very happy. She had such large breasts for such a slender little girl. He had to go out to a drugstore to buy some safeties because she said how could she have a baby just now when they had to give all their strength to the movement. There were bedbugs in the bed, but they told each other that they were as happy as they could be under the capitalist system, that some day they’d have a free society where workers wouldn’t have to huddle in filthy lodginghouses full of bedbugs or row with landladies and lovers could have babies if they wanted to.

A few days later Helen was laid off from Wanamaker’s because they were cutting down their personnel for the slack summer season. They went over to Jersey where she went to live with her folks and Ben got a job in the shipping department of a worsted mill. They rented a room together in Passaic. When a strike came he and Helen were both on the committee. Ben got to be quite a speechmaker. He was arrested several times and almost had his skull cracked by a policeman’s billy and got six months in jail out of it. But he’d found out that when he got up on a soapbox to talk he could make people listen to him, that he could talk and say what he thought and get a laugh or a cheer out of the massed upturned faces. When he stood up in court to take his sentence he started to talk about surplus value. The strikers in the audience cheered and the judge had the attendants clear the courtroom. Ben could see the reporters busily taking down what he said; he was glad to be a living example of the injustice and brutality of the capitalist system. The judge shut him up by saying he’d give him another six months for contempt of court if he didn’t keep quiet, and Ben was taken to the county jail in an automobile full of special deputies with riot guns. The papers spoke of him as a wellknown socialist agitator.

In jail Ben got to be friends with a wobbly named Bram Hicks, a tall youngster from Frisco with light hair and blue eyes who told him if he wanted to know the labormovement he ought to get him a red card and go out to the Coast. Bram was a boilermaker by profession but had shipped as a sailor for a change and landed in Perth Amboy broke. He’d been working on the repairshift of one of the mills and had gone out with the rest. He’d pushed a cop in the face when they’d broken up a picketline and been sent up for six months for assault and battery. Meeting him once a day in the prison yard was the one thing kept Ben going in jail.

They were both released on the same day. They walked along the street together. The strike was over. The mills were running. The streets where there’d been picketlines, the hall where Ben had made speeches looked quiet and ordinary. He took Bram around to Helen’s. She wasn’t there, but after a while she came in with a little redfaced ferretnosed Englishman whom she introduced as Billy, an English comrade. First thing Ben guessed that he was sleeping with her. He left Bram in the room with the Englishman and beckoned her outside. The narrow upper hall of the old frame house smelt of vinegar. “You’re through with me?” he asked in a shaky voice.

“Oh, Ben, don’t act so conventional.”

“You mighta waited till I got outa jail.”

“But can’t you see that we’re all comrades? You’re a brave fighter and oughtn’t to be so conventional, Ben…. Billy doesn’t mean anything to me. He’s a steward on a liner. He’ll be going away soon.”

“Then I don’t mean anything to you either.” He grabbed Helen’s wrist and squeezed it as hard as he could. “I guess I’m all wrong, but I’m crazy about you…. I thought you…”

“Ouch, Ben… you’re talkin’ silly, you know how much I like you.” They went back in the room and talked about the movement. Ben said he was going west with Bram Hicks.

… he becomes an appendage of the machine and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, most easily required knack that is required of him. …

Bram knew all the ropes. Walking, riding blind baggage or on empty gondolas, hopping rides on delivery wagons and trucks, they got to Buffalo. In a flophouse there Bram found a guy he knew who got them signed on as deckhands on a whaleback going back light to Duluth. In Duluth they joined a gang being shipped up to harvest wheat for an outfit in Saskatchewan. At first the work was very heavy for Ben and Bram was scared he’d cave in, but the fourteen hour days out in the sun and the dust, the copious grub, the dead sleep in the lofts of the big barns began to toughen him up. Lying flat on the straw in his sweat clothes he’d still feel through his sleep the tingle of the sun on his face and neck, the strain in his muscles, the whir of the reapers and binders along the horizon, the roar of the thresher, the grind of gears of the trucks carrying the red wheat to the elevators. He began to talk like a harvest stiff. After the harvest they worked in a fruitcannery on the Columbia River, a lousy steamy job full of the sour stench of rotting fruitpeelings. There they read in Solidarity about the shingleweavers’ strike and the free speech fight in Everett, and decided they’d go down and see what they could do to help out. The last day they worked there Bram lost the forefinger of his right hand repairing the slicing and peeling machinery. The company doctor said he couldn’t get any compensation because he’d already given notice, and, besides, not being a Canadian… A little shyster lawyer came around to the boarding house where Bram was lying on the bed in a fever, with his hand in a big wad of bandage, and tried to get him to sue, but Bram yelled at the lawyer to get the hell out. Ben said he was wrong, the working class ought to have its lawyers too.

When the hand had healed a little they went down on the boat from Vancouver to Seattle. I.W.W. headquarters there was like a picnic ground, crowded with young men coming in from every part of the U.S. and Canada. One day a big bunch went down to Everett on the boat to try to hold a meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues. The dock was full of deputies with rifles, and revolvers. “The Commercial Club boys are waiting for us,” some guy’s voice tittered nervously. The deputies had white handkerchiefs around their necks. “There’s Sheriff McRae,” said somebody. Bram edged up to Ben. “We better stick together…. Looks to me like we was goin’ to get tamped up some.” The wobblies were arrested as fast as they stepped off the boat and herded down to the end of the dock. The deputies were drunk most of them, Ben could smell the whisky on the breath of the redfaced guy who grabbed him by the arm. “Get a move on there, you son of a bitch…” He got a blow from a riflebutt in the small of the back. He could hear the crack of saps on men’s skulls. Anybody who resisted had his face beaten to a jelly with a club. The wobblies were made to climb up into a truck. With the dusk a cold drizzle had come on. “Boys, we got to show ’em we got guts,” a redhaired boy said. A deputy who was holding on to the back of the truck aimed a blow at him with his sap but lost his balance and fell off. The wobblies laughed. The deputy climbed on again, purple in the face. “You’ll be laughin’ outa the other side of your dirty mugs when we get through with you,” he yelled.

Out in the woods where the county road crossed the railroad track they were made to get out of the trucks. The deputies stood around them with their guns leveled while the sheriff who was reeling drunk, and two welldressed middleaged men talked over what they’d do. Ben heard the word gauntlet. “Look here, sheriff,” somebody said, “we’re not here to make any kind of disturbance. All we want’s our constitutional rights of free speech.” The sheriff turned towards them waving the butt of his revolver, “Oh, you do, do you, you c — s. Well, this is

Snohomish county and you ain’t goin’ to forget it… if you come here again some of you fellers is goin’ to die, that’s all there is about it…. All right, boys, let’s go.”

The deputies made two lines down towards the railroad track. They grabbed the wobblies one by one and beat them up. Three of them grabbed Ben. “You a wobbly?” “Sure I am, you dirty yellow…” he began. The sheriff came up and hauled off to hit him. “Look out, he’s got glasses on.” A big hand pulled the glasses off. “We’ll fix that.” Then the sheriff punched him in the nose with his fist. “Say you ain’t.” Ben’s mouth was full of blood. He set his jaw. “He’s a kike, hit him again for me.” “Say, you ain’t a wobbly.” Somebody whacked a rifle-barrel against his shins and he fell forward. “Run for it,” they were yelling. Blows with clubs and riflebutts were splitting his ears.

He tried to walk forward without running. He tripped on a rail and fell, cutting his arm on something sharp. There was so much blood in his eyes he couldn’t see. A heavy boot was kicking him again and again in the side. He was passing out. Somehow he staggered forward. Somebody was holding him up under the arms and was dragging him free of the cattleguard on the track. Another fellow began to wipe his face off with a handkerchief. He heard Bram’s voice way off somewhere, “We’re over the county line, boys.” What with losing his glasses and the rain and the night and the shooting pain all up and down his back Ben couldn’t see anything. He heard shots behind them and yells from where other guys were running the gauntlet. He was the center of a little straggling group of wobblies making their way down the railroad track. “Fellow workers,” Bram was saying in his deep quiet voice, “we must never forget this night.”

At the interurban trolley station they took up a collection among the ragged and bloody group to buy tickets to Seattle for the guys most hurt. Ben was so dazed and sick he could hardly hold the ticket when somebody pushed it into his hand. Bram and the rest of them set off to walk the thirty miles back to Seattle.

Ben was in hospital three weeks. The kicks in the back had affected his kidneys and he was in frightful pain most of the time. The morphine they gave him made him so dopey he barely knew what was happening when they brought in the boys wounded in the shooting on the Everett dock on November 5th. When he was discharged he could just walk. Everybody he knew was in jail. At General Delivery he found a letter from Gladys enclosing fifty dollars and saying his father wanted him to come home.

The Defense Committee told him to go ahead; he was just the man to raise funds for them in the east. An enormous amount of money would be needed for the defense of the seventyfour wobblies held in the Everett jail charged with murder. Ben hung around Seattle for a couple of weeks doing odd jobs for the Defense Committee, trying to figure out a way to get home. A sympathizer who worked in a shipping office finally got him a berth as supercargo on a freighter that was going to New York through the Panama canal. The sea trip and the detailed clerical work helped him to pull himself together. Still there wasn’t a night he didn’t wake up with a nightmare scream in his throat sitting up in his bunk dreaming the deputies were coming to get him to make him run the gauntlet. When he got to sleep again he’d dream he was caught in the cattleguard and the teeth were tearing his arms and heavy boots were kicking him in the back. It got so it took all his nerve to lie down in his bunk to go to sleep. The men on the ship thought he was a hophead and steered clear of him. It was a great day when he saw the tall buildings of New York shining in the brown morning haze.

… when in the course of development class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.…

Ben lived at home that winter because it was cheaper. When he told Pop he was going to study law in the office of a radical lawyer named Morris Stein whom he’d met in connection with raising money for the Everett boys, the old may was delighted. “A clever lawyer can protect the workers and the poor Jews and make money too,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Benny, I always knew you were a good boy.” Momma nodded and smiled. “Because in this country it’s not like over there under the warlords, even a lazy bum’s got constitootional rights, that’s why they wrote the constitootion for.” It made Ben feel sick talking to them about it.

He worked as a clerk in Stein’s office on lower Broadway and in the evenings addressed protest meetings about the Everett massacre. Morris Stein’s sister Fanya, who was a thin dark wealthy woman about thirtyfive, was an ardent pacifist and made him read Tolstoy and Kropotkin. She believed that Wilson would keep the country out of the European war and sent money to all the women’s peace organizations. She had a car and used to run him around town sometimes when he had several meetings in one evening. His heart would always be thumping when he went into the hall where the meeting was and began to hear the babble and rustle of the audience filing in, garment workers on the East Side, waterfront workers in Brooklyn, workers in chemical and metalproducts plants in Newark, parlor socialists and pinks at the Rand School or on lower Fifth Avenue, the vast anonymous mass of all classes, races, trades in Madison Square Garden. His hands would always be cold when he shook hands with the chairman and other speakers on the platform. When his turn came to speak there’d be a moment when all the faces looking up at him would blur into a mass of pink, the hum of the hall would deafen him, he’d be in a panic for fear he’d forgotten what he wanted to say. Then all at once he’d hear his own voice enunciating clearly and firmly, feel its reverberance along the walls and ceiling, feel ears growing tense, men and women leaning forward in their chairs, see the rows of faces quite clearly, the groups of people who couldn’t find seats crowding at the doors. Phrases like protest, massaction, united workingclass of this country and the world, revolution, would light up the eyes and faces under him like the glare of a bonfire.

After the speech he’d feel shaky, his glasses would be so misted he’d have to wipe them, he’d feel all the awkwardness of his tall gangling frame. Fanya would get him away as soon as she could, tell him with shining eyes that he’d spoken magnificently, take him downtown, if the meeting had been in Manhattan, to have some supper in the Brevoort basement or at the Cosmopolitan Café before he went home on the subway to Brooklyn. He knew that she was in love with him, but they rarely talked about anything outside of the movement.

When the Russian revolution came in February, Ben and the Steins bought every edition of the papers for weeks, read all the correspondents’ reports with desperate intentness; it was the dawning of The Day. There was a feeling of carnival all down the East Side and in the Jewish sections of Brooklyn. The old people cried whenever they spoke of it. “Next Austria, then the Reich, then England… freed peoples everywhere,” Pop would say. “And last, Uncle Sam,” Ben would add, grimly setting his jaw.

The April day Woodrow Wilson declared war, Fanya went to bed with a hysterical crying fit. Ben went up to see her at the apartment Morris Stein and his wife had on Riverside Drive. She’d come back from Washington the day before. She’d been up there with a women’s peace delegation trying to see the President. The detectives had run them off the White House lawn and several girls had been arrested. “What did you expect?… of course the capitalists want war. They’ll think a little different when they find what they’re getting’s a revolution.” She begged him to stay with her, but he left saying he had to go see them down at The Call. As he left the house, he found himself making a spitting noise with his lips like his father. He told himself he’d never go there again.

He registered for the draft on Stein’s advice, though he wrote conscientious objector on the card. Soon after that he and Stein quarrelled. Stein said there was nothing to it but to bow before the storm; Ben said he was going to agitate against it until he was put in jail. That meant he was out of a job and it was the end of his studying law. Kahn wouldn’t take him back in his drugstore because he was afraid the cops would raid him if it got to be known he had a radical working for him. Ben’s brother Sam was working in a munition factory at Perth Amboy and making big money; he kept writing Ben to stop his foolishness and get a job there too. Even Gladys told him it was silly to ram his head against a stone wall. In July he left home and went back to live with Helen Mauer over in Passaic. His number hadn’t been called yet, so it was easy to get a job in the shipping department of one of the mills. They were working overtime and losing hands fast by the draft.

The Rand School had been closed up, The Call suspended, every day new friends were going around to Wilson’s way of looking at things. Helen’s folks and their friends were making good money, working overtime; they laughed or got sore at any talk of protest strikes or revolutionary movements; people were buying washing machines, liberty bonds, vacuum cleaners, making first payments on houses. The girls were buying fur coats and silk stockings. Helen and Ben began to plan to go out to Chicago, where the wobblies were putting up a fight. September 2nd came the roundup of I.W.W. officials by government agents. Ben and Helen expected to be arrested, but they were passed over. They spent a rainy Sunday huddled on the bed in their dank room, trying to decide what they ought to do. Everything they trusted was giving way under their feet. “I feel like a rat in a trap,” Helen kept saying. Every now and then Ben would jump up and walk up and down hitting his forehead with the palm of his hand. “We gotta do something here, look what they’re doing in Russia.”

One day a warworker came around to the shipping department to sign everybody up for a Liberty Bond. He was a cockylooking young man in a yellow slicker. Ben wasn’t much given to arguments during working hours, so he just shook his head and went back to the manifest he was making out. “You don’t want to spoil the record of your department, do you? It’s one hundred percent perfect so far.” Ben tried to smile. “It seems too bad, but I guess it’ll have to be.” Ben could feel the eyes of the other men in the office on him. The young man in the slicker was balancing uneasily from one foot to the other. “I don’t suppose you want people to think you’re a pro-German or a pacifist, do you?” “They can suppose what they damn like, for all I care.” “Let’s see your registration card, I bet you’re a slacker.” “Look here, get me,” said Ben, getting to his feet, “I don’t believe in capitalist war and I’m not going to do anything I can help to support it.” The young man in the slicker turned his back, “Oh, if you’re one of them yellow bastards I won’t even talk to you.” Ben went back to work. That evening when he was punching the timeclock a cop stepped up to him. “Let’s see your registration card, buddy.” Ben brought the card out from his inside pocket. The cop read it over carefully, “Looks all right to me,” he said reluctantly. At the end of the week Ben found he was fired; no reason given.

He went to the room in a panic. When Helen came back he said he was going to Mexico. “They could get me under the espionage act for what I told that guy about fighting capitalism.” Helen tried to calm him down, but he said he wouldn’t sleep in that room another night, so they packed their bags and went over to New York on the train. They had about a hundred dollars saved up between them. They got a room on East 8th Street under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Gold. It was the next morning that they read in the Times that the Maximalists had taken over the government in Petrograd with the slogan All Power to the Soviets. They were sitting in a small pastry shop on 2nd Avenue drinking their morning coffee, when Ben, who had run around to the newsstand for a paper, came back with the news. Helen began to cry: “Oh, darling, it’s too good to be true. It’s the world revolution…. Now the workers ’ll see that they were being deceived by false good times, that the war’s really aimed at them. Now the other armies ’ll start to mutiny.” Ben took her hand under the table and squeezed it hard. “We gotto work now, darling…. I’ll go to jail here before I’ll run away to Mexico. I’d acted like a yellow bastard if it hadn’t been for you, Helen…. A man’s no good alone.”

They gulped their coffee and walked around to the Ferbers’ house on 17th Street. Al Ferber was a doctor, a short stout man with a big paunch; he was just leaving the house to go to his office. He went back into the hall with them and yelled upstairs to his wife: “Molly, come down… Kerensky’s run out of Petrograd with a flea in his ear… dressed as a woman he ran.” Then he said in Yiddish to Ben that if the comrades were going to hold a meeting to send greetings to the soldiers’ and peasants’ government, he’d give a hundred dollars toward expenses, but his name would have to be kept out of it or else he’d lose his practice. Molly Ferber came downstairs in a quilted dressing gown and said she’d sell something and add another hundred. They spent the day going around to find comrades they had the addresses of; they didn’t dare use the phone for fear of the wires being tapped.

The meeting was held at the Empire Casino in the Bronx a week later. Two Federal agents with beefsteak faces sat in the front row with a stenographer who took down everything that was said. The police closed the doors after the first couple of hundred people had come in. The speakers on the platform could hear them breaking up the crowd outside with motorcycles. Soldiers and sailors in uniform were sneaking into the gallery by ones and twos and trying to stare the speakers out of countenance.

When the old whitehaired man who was chairman of the meeting walked to the front of the stage and said, “Comrades, gentlemen of the Department of Justice and not forgetting our young wellwishers up in the gallery, we have met to send a resolution of greetings from the oppressed workers of America to the triumphant workers of Russia,” everybody stood up and cheered. The crowd milling around outside cheered too. Somewhere they could hear a bunch singing the International. They could hear policewhistles and the dang dang of a patrol wagon. Ben noticed that Fanya Stein was in the audience; she looked pale and her eyes held onto him with a fixed feverish stare. When his turn came to speak he began by saying that on account of the kind sympathizers from Washington in the audience, he couldn’t say what he wanted to say but that every man and woman in the audience who was not a traitor to their class knew what he wanted to say…. “The capitalist governments are digging their own graves by driving their people to slaughter in a crazy unneccessary war that nobody can benefit from except bankers and munition makers…. The American working class, like the working classes of the rest of the world, will learn their lesson. The profiteers are giving us instruction in the use of guns; the day will come when we will use it.” “That’s enough, let’s go, boys,” yelled a voice from the gallery. The soldiers and sailors started hustling the people out of the seats. The police from the entrances converged on the speakers. Ben and a couple of others were arrested. The men in the audience who were of conscription age were made to show their registration cards before they could leave. Ben was hustled out into a closed limousine with the blinds drawn before he could speak to Helen. He’d hardly noticed who it was had clicked the handcuffs on his wrists.

They kept him for three days without anything to eat or drink in a disused office in the Federal building on Park Row. Every few hours a new bunch of detectives would stamp into the room and question him. His head throbbing, and ready to faint with thirst, he’d face the ring of long yellow faces, jowly red faces, pimply faces, boozers’ and hopheads’ faces, feel the eyes boring into him; sometimes they kidded and cajoled him, and sometimes they bullied and threatened; one bunch brought in pieces of rubber hose to beat him up with. He jumped up and faced them. For some reason they didn’t beat him up, but instead brought him some water and a couple of stale ham sandwiches. After that he was able to sleep a little.

An agent yanked him off his bench and led him out into a well-appointed office where he was questioned almost kindly by an elderly man at a mahogany desk with a bunch of roses on the corner of it. The smell of the roses made him feel sick. The elderly man said he could see his lawyer and Morris Stein came into the room.

“Benny,” he said, “leave everything to me… Mr. Watkins has consented to quash all charges if you’ll promise to report for military training. It seems your number’s been called.”

“If you let me out,” Ben said in a low trembling voice, “I’ll do my best to oppose capitalist war until you arrest me again.” Morris Stein and Mr. Watkins looked at each other and shook their heads indulgently. “Well,” said Mr. Watkins, “I can’t help but admire your spirit and wish it was in a better cause.” It ended by his being let out on fifteen thousand dollars bail on Morris Stein’s assurance that he would do no agitating until the date of his trial. The Steins wouldn’t tell him who put up the bail.

Morris and Edna Stein gave him a room in their apartment; Fanya was there all the time. They fed him good food and tried to make him drink wine with his meals and a glass of milk before going to bed. He didn’t have any interest in anything, slept as much as he could, read all the books he found on the place. When Morris would try to talk to him about his case he’d shut him up, “You’re doing this, Morris… do anything… why should I care. I might as well be in jail as like this.” “Well, I must say that’s a compliment,” Fanya said laughing.

Helen Mauer called up several times to tell him how things were going. She’d always say she had no news to tell that she could say over the telephone, but he never asked her to come up to see him. About as far as he went from the Steins’ apartment was to go out every day to sit for a while on a bench on the Drive and look out over the grey Hudson at the rows of frame houses on the Jersey side and the grey palisades.

The day his case came up for trial the press was full of hints of German victories. It was spring and sunny outside the broad grimy windows of the courtroom. Ben sat sleepily in the stuffy gloom. Everything seemed very simple. Stein and the Judge had their little jokes together and the Assistant District Attorney was positively genial. The jury reported “guilty” and the judge sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment. Morris Stein filed an appeal and the judge let him stay out on bail. The only moment Ben came to life was when he was allowed to address the court before being sentenced. He made a speech about the revolutionary movement he’d been preparing all these weeks. Even as he said it it seemed silly and weak. He almost stopped in the middle. His voice strengthened and filled the courtroom as he got to the end. Even the judge and the old snuffling attendants sat up when he recited for his peroration, the last words of the communist manifesto:

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The appeal dragged and dragged. Ben started studying law again. He wanted to work in Stein’s office to pay for his keep, but Stein said it would be risky, he said the war would be over soon and the red scare would die down, so that he could get him off with a light sentence. He brought lawbooks up for him to study and promised to take him into partnership if he passed his bar exam, once he could get his citizenship restored. Edna Stein was a fat spiteful woman and rarely spoke to him; Fanya fussed over him with nervous doting attentions that made him feel sick. He slept badly and his kidneys bothered him. One night he got up and dressed and was tiptoeing down the carpeted hall towards the door with his shoes in his hand, when Fanya with her black hair down her back came out of the door of her room. She was in a nightdress that showed her skinny figure and flat breasts. “Benny, where are you going?”

“I’m going crazy here… I’ve got to get out.” His teeth were chattering. “I’ve got to get back into the movement…. They’ll catch me and send me to jail right away… it will be better like that.”

“You poor boy, you’re in no condition.” She threw her arms round his neck and pulled him into her room.

“Fanya, you gotto let me go…. I might make it across the Mexican border… other guys have.”

“You’re crazy… and what about your bail?”

“What do I care… don’t you see we gotto do something.”

She’d pulled him down on her bed and was stroking his forehead. “Poor boy… I love you so, Benny, couldn’t you think of me a little bit… just a little teeny bit… I could help you so much in the movement…. Tomorrow we’ll talk about it… I want to help you, Benny.” He let her untie his necktie.

The armistice came, and news of the peace conference, revolutionary movements all over Europe, Trotsky’s armies driving the whites out of Russia. Fanya Stein told everybody she and Ben were married and took him to live with her at her studio apartment on 8th Street, where she nursed him through the flu and double pneumonia. The first day the doctor said he could go out she drove up the Hudson in her Buick sedan. They came back in the early summer gloaming to find a special delivery letter from Morris. The circuit court had denied the appeal, but reduced the sentence to ten years. The next day at noon he’d have to report to be delivered by his bondsmen to the custody of the U.S. District Court. He’d probably go to Atlanta. Soon after the letter Morris himself turned up. Fanya had broken down and was crying hysterically. Morris looked pale. “Ben,” he said, “we’re beaten… You’ll have to go to Atlanta for a while… you’ll have good company down there… but don’t worry. We’ll take your case to the President. Now that the war’s over they can’t keep the liberal press muzzled any more.”

“That’s all right,” said Ben, “it’s better to know the worst.”

Fanya jumped up from the couch where she’d been sobbing and started screaming at her brother. When Ben went out to walk around the block he left them quarreling bitterly. He found himself looking carefully at the houses, the taxicabs, the streetlights, people’s faces, a funny hydrant that had a torso like a woman’s, some bottles of mineral oil stacked in a drugstore window, Nujol. He decided he’d better go over to Brooklyn to say goodby to the old people. At the subway station he stopped. He hadn’t the strength; he’d write them.

Next morning at nine he went down to Morris Stein’s office with his suitcase in his hand. He’d made Fanya promise not to come. He had to tell himself several times he was going to jail, he felt as if he was going on a business trip of some kind. He had on a new suit of English tweed Fanya had bought him.

Lower Broadway was all streaked red, white and blue with flags; there were crowds of clerks and stenographers and officeboys lining both pavements where he came up out of the subway. Cops on motorcycles were keeping the street clear. From down towards the Battery came the sound of a military band playing Keep the Home Fires Burning. Everybody looked flushed and happy. It was hard to keep from walking in step to the music in the fresh summer morning that smelt of the harbor and ships. He had to keep telling himself: those are the people who sent Debs to jail, those are the people who shot Joe Hill, who murdered Frank Little, those are the people who beat us up in Everett, who want me to rot for ten years in jail.

The colored elevatorboy grinned at him when he took him up in the elevator, “Is they startin’ to go past yet, mister?” Ben shook his head and frowned.

The lawoffice looked clean and shiny. The telephone girl had red hair and wore a gold star. There was an American flag draped over the door of Stein’s private office. Stein was at his desk talking to an upperclasslooking young man in a tweed suit. “Ben,” Stein said cheerily, “meet Stevens Warner… He’s just gotten out of Charlestown, served a year for refusing to register.”

“Not quite a year,” said the young man, getting up and shaking hands. “I’m out on good behavior.”

Ben didn’t like him, in his tweed suit and his expensive looking necktie; all at once he remembered that he was wearing the same kind of suit himself. The thought made him sore. “How was it?” he asked coldly.

“Not so bad, they had me working in the greenhouse… They treated me fairly well when they found out I’d already been to the front.”

“How was that?”

“Oh, in the ambulance service…. They just thought I was mildly insane…. It was a damned instructive experience.”

“They treat the workers different,” said Ben angrily.

“And now we’re going to start a nationwide campaign to get all the other boys out,” said Stein, getting to his feet and rubbing his hands, “starting with Debs… you’ll see, Ben, you won’t be down there long… people are coming to their senses already.”

A burst of brassy music came up from Broadway, and the regular tramp of soldiers marching. They all looked out of the window. All down the long grey canyon flags were streaming out, uncoiling tickertape and papers glinted all through the ruddy sunlight, squirmed in the shadows; people were yelling themselves hoarse.

“Damn fools,” said Warner, “it won’t make the doughboys forget about K.P.”

Morris Stein came back into the room with a funny brightness in his eyes. “Makes me feel maybe I missed something.”

“Well, I’ve got to be going,” said Warner, shaking hands again. “You certainly got a rotten break, Compton… don’t think for a minute we won’t be working night and day to get you out… I’m sure public sentiment will change. We have great hopes of President Wilson… after all, his labor record was fairly good before the war.”

“I guess it’ll be the workers will get me out, if I’m gotten out,” said Ben.

Warner’s eyes were searching his face. Ben didn’t smile. Warner stood before him uneasily for a moment and then took his hand again. Ben didn’t return the pressure. “Good luck,” said Warner and walked out of the office.

“What’s that, one of these liberalminded college boys?” Ben asked of Stein. Stein nodded. He’d gotten interested in some papers on his desk. “Yes… great boy, Steve Warner… you’ll find some books or magazines in the library… I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Ben went into the library and took down a book on Torts. He read and read the fine print. When Stein came to get him he didn’t know what he’d been reading or how much time had passed. Walking up Broadway the going was slow on account of the crowds and the bands and the steady files of marching soldiers in khaki with tin hats on their heads. Stein nudged him to take his hat off as a regimental flag passed them in the middle of a fife and drum corps. He kept it in his hand so as not to have to take it off again. He took a deep breath of the dusty sunny air of the street, full of girls’ perfumerysmells and gasoline from the exhaust of the trucks hauling the big guns, full of laughing and shouting and shuffle and tramp of feet; then the dark doorway of the Federal Building gulped them.

It was a relief to have it all over, alone with the deputy on the train for Atlanta. The deputy was a big morose man with bluish sacks under his eyes. As the handcuffs cut Ben’s wrist he unlocked them except when the train was in a station. Ben remembered it was his birthday; he was twentythree years old.