From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [379]
The sharpest memory of his youth was of bunches of them, ten or twenty at a time, in out of the harvest fields in the fall for one of their free speech fights, sitting in the barred windows of the second floor of the jail singing their songs Joe Hill had written for them, or Ralph Chaplin’s Solidarity Forever, a singing that swelled through the town until nobody could escape it.
“The townspeople would have been better off if they’d have let them go ahead and read the Constitution on the street corners unmolested. Then they would have drifted on.”
When he made up his mind to run away from home, in protest, his father’s prisoners had realistically advised him to arm himself with a certified birth certificate.
“‘Its almost funny, kid,’ one of them told me, ‘how many people will try to accuse you of being an unnaturalized foreigner.’ His name was Bradbury,” Malloy grinned, “the guy who told me that, and his people had fought the French and Indians before the Revolution.”
One of them gave him a copy of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and The Little Red Songbook with Joe Hill’s songs, to take with him, and since then he had always carried his quota of new unread books in his pack or bindle or suitcase or seabag, even in the Army. The first book he had bought for himself, with the first money from the first job, was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to add to Veblen and Joe Hill, and since that first copy he had worn out ten others. The second thing he bought was his Red Card and his membership dues in the IWW. The rest went for his first real drunk and his first piece of ass. He had not been back home since.
“It was only an excuse,” he said. “I was just waiting for an excuse. My father was too lawful a sheriff, and my mother was too religious a Christian. No kid could beat that combination from the inside. I had already learned, long before I met the Wobblies, how much everybody hated conscientious cops and religious ladies. And above everything else I wanted not to be hated.”
After that, it was the harvest fields and timber camps as a bona-fide IWW with his dues paid up. He was too young for the war and they couldnt get him for that, and he always carried his birth certificate although as often as not they ignored it. He learned to know jails from the prisoners’ side. When they jailed the hundred-and-one on September 28, 1918, he joined the protest and the attempts to raise funds for them. During the two years the principals were in and out of Leavenworth most of his money went for that. He even cut down on the whorehouses. He had never seen or met any of the General Executive Board, but he had learned to worship Bill Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, George Andreytchine, Red Doran, Grover Perry, Charley Ashleigh, Harrison George and the rest—perhaps even more than the old timers who knew them. He worked hard for them, and went on reading. He felt he was being trained for something.
But already the old solidarity was shifting and beginning to break up. The wartime trial and the Leavenworth sentences had broken the back of the IWW. The Communist Revolution that scared the world had succeeded in Russia, and in the Wobblies disagreement over the Communists grew into a dissension and then into open factions. He went on reading; he wanted to be ready. He became a veteran of Centralia Washington, where they castrated first, and then lynched, Wesley Everest and afterwards sentenced seven other Wobblies for 2nd degree murder for having fought back but he was one of the young ones that Old Mike Sheehan helped to get away. He escaped both castration-lynching and trial. He beat his way down into California and joined the longshoremen’s union and went on reading.
Then Haywood and Andreytchine jumped their bail and went to Russia to throw in with the Communists,