Part 16

“We haven’t gone much beyond that point,” I continued. “We hide our primitive hate under what we proudly call race prejudice or patriotism, but it’s the old, unchanged fear and dislike of the unlike, and we act very much as the savages did who may have lived here before the glaciers ploughed up your State and helped to manufacture the coal you are now digging.

“I don’t know you,” I went on, “but I am pretty sure that you feel mean toward those poor ‘Dagoes’ just because you want to assert your superiority.

“I have discovered that a man isn’t quite happy unless he can feel himself superior to something, and these mountain folk of yours take those mangy, hungry looking dogs along just so they can have something to kick. Am I right?”

“Well,” he replied, clearing his throat and straightening himself, while into his eyes came a steel-like coldness, “you don’t mean to say that we are not superior to these Dagoes, these Black Hand murderers?”

“No, I am not ready to say that yet; but tell me about them. Whom did they kill, and how?”

Then he told me the story and he knew it well, for he was a re-elected State official now going to be sworn in. There was a coal miners’ strike--rather a chronic disease in that somewhat lawless State--and the militia was called out. Violence begat violence, and one of the militiamen, standing guard at night, was killed by a bullet, fired from a Winchester rifle at an approximately certain distance.

The Italians were found at that place the next day, were arrested, and were now on their way to the county seat to be tried.

My companion evidently had found my “graft” interesting, for he permitted me to interview the Italians.

None of them knew definitely of what crime they were accused, and all, of course, protested their innocence.

None of them had served as soldiers and all said they were unacquainted with the use of firearms.

When we reached the end of the road where we were all admonished to change cars and not forget our parcels, the officer graciously allowed me to make an experiment. The men were freed from their shackles, and I told them that a high and mighty official was watching them and that the best marksman of the group would find favor in his sight. They were then in turn given the Winchester rifle, which they handled as if it were a pickaxe. They did not know how to load it, and after it was loaded for them and I asked them to fire, they fell upon their knees and begged to be permitted to show their prowess with a stiletto, the use of which they understood. Within twenty-four hours additional testimony was furnished, which proved beyond doubt that the Italians were not implicated in the crime with which they were charged.

I felt deeply grateful to the man who permitted me to intervene in their behalf; but what would have happened if by chance, or the power we call Providence, I had not been thrown into the sphere of their suffering? Undoubtedly they would have been convicted of murder and paid the penalty for a crime which they never committed.

Not only is ignorance of our laws and language a fruitful cause of the delinquency of immigrants and their children, but the venality of police officials, the condition of our courts and prisons, not only fail to inspire respect, but contribute much to the development of those criminal tendencies with which nature has, to a degree, endowed all men....

Fortunately, I left the county jail with no thirst for blood; but with a fiercer passion to right the wrongs under which men suffer, and that, I think, was my one purpose in life when the prison door closed behind me.

INDUSTRIALISM AND THE IMMIGRANT

We talk much about the American home, which is even yet the basis of national well-being, although many of its functions are abrogated. The home still determines the good or ill of the child, and through him the good or ill of the nation. Yet we permit millions of people to work, with no chance to make a real home.

Children there will be, Nature sees to that; but what kind of children can be begotten in our slums?

The slums in America are as much a national disgrace as they are a national menace. The gunmen of New York were bred in hovels which even the home-making genius of the Jewish people could not turn into homes, or make fit for the training of children to decent living.

You who go slumming to see the sights, and turn up your sensitive noses at the bad smells, and your eyes to heaven, thanking God that you “are not as other men,” must not forget that the vast majority of our foreign-born workers are compelled to live as they do by economic and social forces, which they cannot control.

You remain ignorant of the brave struggles for the home, and the heroic stand for virtue behind those sooty walls. You know nothing of the fear of God, the desire to obey His law, and the love of their country, which filters in to those receptive souls.

The growth and power of the I. W. W., a revolutionary organization of the most radical type, anti-national, anti-religious, repudiating God and State with horrifying blasphemy, were made possible by the fact that our industrial leaders, our so-called “hard-headed business men,” have the hard spot in their hearts and a very soft spot in their heads.

Of all the blind men I have met, the blindest are those farsighted ones who see wealth in everything, and every common bush aflame with gold, and see nothing else. Blind they are to their own larger good, blind to the nation’s needs, blind to the signs of the times. The social weal of our country is in the hands of the most unsocial....

As I analyze my own relation to the nation of which I am as much a part as if I had been born under its flag, I find that it rests itself upon the feeling of gratitude. Not for the bread I eat, for I had bread enough in my native country; not for the comfort of home, for I had fair comforts before I came; not even for liberty and democracy as abstractions, or even as embodied in the State; for I have found that freedom is within, and democracy a matter of attitude towards one’s fellows.

I am grateful for the chance I have had here to develop unhampered my own self, for a certain largeness of vision which I think I would not have developed anywhere else; for the richness which a broad, unhindered contact with all sorts and conditions of men has brought into my life.

There is something more than gratitude in my heart now. There is a larger sense of the values I received which I have not yet appropriated. There is in my heart a sublime passion for America. Would it have grown into the burning flame it is, if I had always worked in New York’s sweat-shops?

If I had been beaten by New York’s police? If I had reared my family in a tenement, and had to send my children to work when they should have played and studied?

If I had known America only through her yellow journalism, and sensed her spirit only in ward elections? I do not know.

What has kept me from becoming an Anarchist, from being jailed or hanged for leading mobs against their despoilers, God alone knows. His guidance is as unquestioned as it is mysterious. There were disclosed to me, early in my career, in some strange way, the spiritual values latent here. In spite of the gross, granite-like materialism at the top, I discovered the richness of the heritage left by the fathers of this Republic; in spite of the poverty and hardship in which I had to share, I saw here the fine quality of its vision; in spite of the crudeness of its blundering ways, all the love a man may have for a country grew in my heart, and changed only in growing stronger. Yet I am not in the mood to call to account those toilers whose patriotism is less fervent than mine and whose ideals are still held in check by the “stomach line.”