1919

  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 sl
eep 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 o
nce 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.”