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By Root 2524 0

and Fitzi, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and many others whom I still had in my heart. I wanted to hear about the general situation, the labour movement, and the I.W.W., which had since been all but demolished by the war phobia, as well as about my own comrades. Bill stopped my volley of questions. Before we proceeded, he said, he would first have to make his own position clear to me. I noticed that he was under the nervous tension that used to come over him when he stood before a large audience, his big frame shaking with suppressed feeling. He had jumped his bail, he said suddenly; he had run away. Not because of the twenty years of prison that faced him, though that was no small matter at his age. “Ridiculous, Bill,” I interrupted; “you would never have to serve the whole sentence. Gene Debs was pardoned and Kate Richard O’Hare also.” “Listen first,” he interrupted; “the prison was not the deciding factor. It was Russia, Russia, which fulfilled what we had dreamed about and propagated all our lives, I as well as you. Russia, the home of the liberated proletariat, was calling me.” He had also been urged by Moscow to come, he added. He was told he was needed in Russia. From here he would be able to revolutionize the American masses and to prepare them for the dictatorship of the proletariat. It had not been easy to decide to leave his comrades to face their long terms in prison alone. But the Revolution was more important and its ends justified all means. Of course, the twenty-thousand-dollar bail would be paid by the Communist Party. He had been given a solemn pledge for that. He hoped, he said, that I would understand his motives and not think him a shirker.

I did not ask any more about America, nor did I satisfy his request to tell him my impressions of Russia. With a shock I realized that Bill was as blindfolded as we had been on our arrival in the country. Would he also undergo the excruciating operation that would remove the scales from his eyes? And what would become of Bill when his house of cards had tumbled over him, and all his hopes were buried like ours? [...]

Sasha ridiculed the motives Bill had given for running away. Russia and all the other reasons were not convincing to him. They were no doubt contributory factors, but the main reason was that Bill quaked before the twenty years in Leavenworth. In late years he had repeatedly shown the white feather. I need have no anxiety about Bill’s future, Sasha assured me. He would fit in, even when he came to see the stupendous delusion foisted on the world by Moscow. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. Bill had always stood for a strong State and centralization. What was his One Big Union but a dictatorship? “Bill will be in clover here,” Sasha concluded; “just wait and see.”

Two days later William Z. Foster telephoned to ask whether he could come up. It was my wash-day and I was too busy, but Sasha offered to receive Foster in his room until I should be through with my work. It occurred to me that Foster might like to meet Schapiro and other comrades still free. But when I asked him about it, he said he was not interested in Russian syndicalists. He only wanted to talk to Sasha and me. Foster had been among the first in America to advocate revolutionary labour tactics in the economic struggle, which the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalists had applied. It seemed strange that he should decline to meet these rebels and to hear from them what place, if any, syndicalism had in the Communist regime.

He arrived in the company of Jim Browder,43 a Kansas boy, whom we used to know as an active I.W.W. Sasha took them in charge. At noon, when my work was finished and lunch prepared, I invited our guests to share it with us. Vegetables and fruit were plentiful on the market and much cheaper than meat and fish. We lived almost entirely on this diet. The boys had evidently not lost their American appetite. They ate with relish and expressed appreciation of E.G.’s skill in preparing such dishes. Foster said nothing during the meal except to inform us that he was in Russia in the capacity