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. Ph
rases 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.