# The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist/Chapter 1

Chapter 1
Childhood – Youth
1893–1916
Ohio– Wisconsin
I am writing these first hundred pages at the Catholic Worker Peter Maurin Farm on Staten Island, N.Y., and will finish the book in my shack on Desert Ranch west of Phoenix, Arizona. Between these farms and Valley Farm, Negley, Ohio, a mile from the Pennsylvania state line and thirteen miles from the Ohio River and the West Virginia state line, where I was born in the midst of the 1893 depression there is a story of a Rebel who travels both in body and spirit as he meets and faces a changing world.
I hardly got born at all, for I was a three and a half pounds, seven months baby, put to bed in a cigar box; and when in a regular bed my mother could hardly find me among the covers. A mud hole just over a bridge on the dirt road was my nesting place when I bounced off of the pillow in my mother's arms, for I was so small I couldn't be held in arms like a regular baby. Anyway that first year I hardly made it, what with pneumonia, colic, and other troubles. After that I was not sick and grew to my five foot nine and a half inches.
My mother came of that Fitz-Randolph family that landed at Barnstable, Mass., in 1720. Ashford and Vail are the Quaker names of my ancestors in this line. My paternal grandfather came from Ireland in 1848 at the time of the potato famine. Whether the name was misspelled in transit I do not know. He fought for the North in the Navy when not fighting booze. He married a Pennsylvania Dutch girl by the name of Calvin. I never saw her. Each of their children were adopted by different Protestant neighbors. Peter Brown, a wealthy farmer, adopted my father. I saw my Irish grandfather when I was a small boy when he came for a visit from California. He gave me a bright penny. Both he and my grandfather Fitz-Randolph were tanners with vats in which to dip the hides.
John Brown and Johnny Appleseed were names familiar in our household and the Coppac Brothers who died at Harpers Ferry with John Brown had lived on a farm which was pointed out to me with pride, for here were stations of ​the Underground by means of which the escaped slaves were helped to Canada and freedom. A bewhiskered picture of John Brown hung in the parlor and I was ten years old before I knew the difference between God, Moses, and John Brown.
I was just as ignorant of my own origin as I was of God. Half a mile down the maple-lined road were three stumps. I was told that the doctor had found me in the first stump. My sister Julia was discovered in the second stump, and my brother Frank was hid in the third stump. We would often say, "I'll race you to my stump." As there were no more stumps there, the fiction for the other babies was that the doctor brought them in his satchel.
The house where I was born was a huge brick house built in 1838, each room had a small grate fireplace, for there was a coal mine on this 333-acre farm. About 100 acres of brush and woods surrounded this mine; blackberry bushes, hazelnut bushes, wild strawberries. Directly back of the house and about a mile up the hill was a lone pine tree which had been planted the day that Lincoln was shot; and thus this hill, down which we went with our sleds in winter, was called Lincoln Hill. Mr. Brown was the first farmer in that community to have purebred Jersey cows; I remember old Cato, a cow with horns like the handle bars of a bicycle. I used to sit on her neck and hold these horns to keep from falling. I never have been afraid of snakes, for in the spring they would emerge by the dozen from the huge ice house where ice packed in sawdust was kept. Then the hay-tedder would kick up countless copperheads as we were haying. Sloan's Liniment, the Modoc Oil that was sold in the medicine shows down by the river every winter, Peruna and Carter's Liver Pills were always handy, but for regular cuts and bruises a little tobacco juice, my father said, was the best remedy. He ought to know for had been chewing it since he was eight years of age.
My first memory is that of my Quaker great-grandmother in her bonnet sitting in the east room by her Franklin stove and telling my three-year-old sister Julia and myself of how the peaceful Quakers loved the Indians and were not hurt by them. In this Republican community my father was a Democrat. (I found out years later that when I was a baby he had been a Populist and my mother had baked ginger cookie for Coxey's Army as they encamped on the meadow near us. The reader had better begin to get used to my quick change of gears through these years, from time and place and subject, here and there.) A neighbor girl, Mable Clark, who helped my mother when my brother Frank was born in 1898 taught me on the piano the chorus of the only music which I can play today: "Mid camp fires gleaming; mid shot and shell; I will be dreaming of my own Bluebell." I shed tears because I had not been born in time to go to war. My first remembrance of money dates from the time in the 1900 campaign when I lost a quarter betting on Bryan. A lot of money for a kid then.
On rainy days we children climbed to the top hay loft and munched apples and salt and bran. A side door showed us Camp Bouquet, a mile away across the lower meadow where it rose several hundred feet high in the V where two creeks met. Indians had camped there for centuries and in the French and Indian War a certain General Bouquet had given his name to the place. Methodists ​and Baptist had camp meetings there but it was a long way around by road to get there, and I never attended, although we could see the lights and hear the Hallelujahs as they shouted at nights in the late summer. Indians must have stood on this bluff and shot arrows at the game in our meadow years before, for we found many arrowheads there.
As the oldest grandchild I went each summer after the age of ten to help my grandmother in her garden. Her especial pride was ground cherries; a kind of a husk tomato growing on a small bush. These fell off, a few each day, and were taken into a spare bedroom and spread out to dry. Each relative prized the quart of preserves which he was sure to get for Christmas from my grandmother. Here was a huge house of twenty rooms, a red Astrikan apple tree, a spring that never went dry or froze up, out of which water swelled sparkling and cold for the milk and butter in the milk house and for the watering trough for the horses.
As I grew older I cultivated corn the length of a mile-long hillside field, behind Dexter, the old white horse. I shoved back hay in the sheep barn mid wasps and sweat. My uncle Louis would always say, "It'll hold another load." I rode horses bareback after the cows to the lower farm in the evening. At daylight I walked the mile to the night pasture and warmed my bare feet where the cows had been lying. It seems impossible that a boy could have eaten a dozen or more buckwheat cakes for breakfast—but those were the days!
"Go to sister Randolph's; she's a good woman," was the direction given for miles around to tramps who asked for food. The stories which these "ambassadors" brought of the outside world and the kindness which my grandmother had towards everyone seem to me, now that I think of it, as the first appearance of that "Celestial Bulldozer" which has prepared the way for my unorthodox life. Perhaps I had a good start in being named for my grandmother's favorite brother, Ammon Ashford. (Ammon rhymes with Mammon.) He was the only rebel in the family. He did not belong to church but when he died he left me his Bible with the Sermon on the Mount underlined heavily. He had been a 49-er in California; a sheriff in Missouri who was shot in the leg by Jesse James. He was the local blacksmith when I knew him.
In the summer I met my family Wednesday nights at the local Baptist church, which was only a quarter of a mile from my grandmothers; also on Sundays. I sat through long Baptist theological sermons. Finally, at the age of 12, after cringing at the terrible threats of damnation from the pulpit during a six weeks' revival meeting at our church, I was baptized in the creek and gazed upon by a curious crowd—the only sucker caught in the theological net. This was in the swimming hole which I knew but the preacher did not, so he stumbled on a rock and nearly choked me. During the winter and several summers I did all of the janitor work of the church: filling the huge hanging oil lamps and cleaning the chimneys, carrying coal and emptying ashes from the big round stoves—but then I got to ring the bell and that was something. I did this free of charge and gave $15 a year to the church which was much more in proportion than rich farmers gave. I felt that I should be a missionary.
My father was one of those fine looking, dark Irishmen who made friends in this Republican community so that in time he was elected township clerk, ​although a Democrat. He was also secretary of the Masonic lodge in a town several miles to the west. One of his best friends was a man by the name of Clark who was a Russelite, or as they called them in those days a "Millennial Dawn." Pastor Russell lived in nearby Pittsburgh and said that there was no hell. This was terrible for we all knew that everyone but the Baptists were going there, so to believe there was no hell upset all the countryside theology. This Clark had the local sawmill and cider mill. When he got this new religion he ceased chewing J. T. tobacco, and to help him break this tobacco habit he always had his pockets full of chocolate drops. My interest was not in his losing the tobacco habit but in getting a chocolate drop. These were the forerunners of our modern Jehovah's Witness. (Mr. Clark, unlike modern JWs who seldom have any scruples in doing war work, refused to do any work connected with munitions in World War I, and made a meager living sharpening knives and lawnmowers.)
Now in 1906, which I remembered for two things: the San Francisco earthquake, and the death of Mr. Brown, the farm was sold and we moved about 20 miles northwest to the county seat, Lisbon. This was the birthplace of Mark Hanna, and McKinley had lived there when a boy. Here my father was in the real estate and insurance business, and a lonesome Democrat. There was no Baptist church in this town so I attended the Presbyterian church. I was an usher and helped take up the collection. Two of the Elders who gave out communion were disreputable and un-Christian in their daily lives. This caused me to doubt. When I asked the minister about this and about the bloodthirstiness of the Old Testament his only reply was for me to pray. This I did, but the questions kept coming up. Finally he told me to go to Youngstown and hear Billy Sunday, the great revivalist who had thousands pouring down the "sawdust trail" of his tent saying they had been "saved." Then my doubts would all be resolved. I went one rainy night. The blasphemy of this bigot was so powerful that it opened my eyes to the fact that my supposed conversion at a revival meeting was no more real religion than was this wholesale devil worship of Billy Sunday.
I went home and asked more questions. I prayed and read the Bible but the God of Love was never mentioned to me. Around Christmas I got up in the Achor Baptist Church where I had been baptized and said that I was an atheist and did not believe in God or the Bible. My father had wanted me to leave the church quietly as it would hurt his business and political ambitions. I told him that I had splashed in and I was going to splash out.
But I was still a Democrat. I spent the next summer going over the County getting subscriptions for Bryan's paper THE COMMONER. While at my grandmother's the minister who had baptized me, Rev. McKeever, subscribed for THE COMMONER, saying, "Ammon, there is one paper I never want you to read: THE APPEAL TO REASON." I had never heard of it but was in no mood to have anyone tell me what to do. Accordingly when I saw a bricklayer going to work past the house one Monday morning I asked him to take the fifty cents I had made on THE COMMONER and subscribe for this new radical paper. I had been told that this bricklayer was a socialist. My cousin Jessie was there, from her home in Beaver Falls, Pa., at the country each summer. She ​was a Republican for the same reason that I was a Democrat: her father was a Republican. A man, the age of my father, was there that summer also. He was my second cousin Isaac McCready. He was a radical. His fiery red-headed wife was a beautiful woman. Isaac did not believe in God and all of the relatives who were church goers were anxiously looking for the judgment of God to kill him. He had a "tobacco heart" but outlived most of them. (Here was forming a thread that would weave into my life in a few years. For my cousin, riotously red-headed and beautiful, Georgia, was to marry a man in Georgia who was the son of the chaplain of Atlanta prison.)
I become a Socialist
By the fall of 1910 I had exchanged my lost Baptist heaven for the new Socialist Heaven on Earth. Here in Lisbon the local Socialists were proud to elect the son of the Democratic mayor as secretary of their local. The first Socialist I met was "Curly", a vegetarian. I thought this was a part of the rebellion so the butcher joined the capitalist in the list of my enemies. Then I read Upton Sinclair's Jungle and had more reason both for being a vegetarian and being a Socialist. My father scolded me for my radicalism and especially for spending my Sunday morning in distributing THE APPEAL TO REASON on doorsteps, rather than ushering, in the Presbyterian church. My father was a good-natured man whose bark was worse than his bite. (In later years he told me he wanted to see if I really was a good rebel and was secretly glad that I kept on with my Socialism.) I introduced Fred Strickland, and Cornelius Lehane – a big Irishman who wore a gold cross on his vest and who was beaten up by the police and died soon afterward in Connecticut during World War I. They stayed at our house and my father talked radicalism intelligently with them. My father allowed me to put up a sign on the public square by the Civil War cannon giving definitions of Socialism. It stood there for years. This was a staid Republican town but it had a little history of rebellion for here during the Civil War lived Clement Vallindgham who favored the South, was put in prison, and ran for Governor of Ohio while in prison. Near here also was captured "Raider Morgan" who got further north than any other Southerner. During a winter vacation I worked in the local pottery and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.) Section 6, Article 2, of the Socialist Party constitution had not yet barred "wobblies," as they were called, from also belonging to the Party.
In August of 1914 my grandfather broke his leg, and this being an easy time to make promises for the winter, I offered to live with him that winter and walk or ride the 5 1/2 miles to the high school in East Palestine, where I would be a junior. Here I met a man about ten years my senior who was a Socialist, Ed Firth. He was also a Sunday School teacher. He was an expert pottery worker. I would have treasured his friendship during all these years, as we had much in common, but he died in prison in World War I. He was indicted with the Communist Labor Party group.
That winter I milked eight cows, morning and night, and worked all day Saturday. I sat behind a huge wood stove nights and studied, taking five subjects. ​Apples, and cider from the barrel in the dark cellar form the pleasant memory of that winter. Sometimes when the snow was very deep I walked; at other times I went horseback or with horse and buggy. Mother Bloor came to East Palestine and I drove her, with horse and buggy, to organize the first Socialist local among the miners in my home town of Negley. She was a wonderful woman and an inspiration. I was also on the track team and in the mile and half mile run. I was not so fast but I had a lot of endurance. It seemed that the more I had to do the more I did. But this winter was enough of the farm for me. I determined to seek my fortune in the city for the summer.
To Wisconsin
A former Sunday School teacher of mine took crews out each summer to sell cornflakes, house to house. I had never been to a large city or even seen a street car. The first day in Cleveland I made $8, got lost, and ended up knocking at a door across the hall from where I should have knocked, and being abashed by meeting a roomful of girls. By the next summer I had a crew of my own in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. I sold to retailers and wholesalers.
Meanwhile I had entered Hiram, Ohio, college as a freshman; started a Socialist club there, and had speakers such as J. G. Phelps Stokes and C.E. Ruthenberg, later to be the founder of the Communist Party. Vachel Lindsay had attended this college and here I first became acquainted with his troubadour poetry. Away from home now I thought it was smart to smoke cigarettes, get drunk, play penny ante until daylight, steal canned fruit from the cellar of the Dean's house (for which I was sent home in disgrace for two weeks). This was all of my Baptist "dont's" coming out.
In Portage, Wisconsin, the next summer, I sold a package of cornflakes to a young lady who seemed very nearly to glide down the banister to answer the door. She appeared holding a copy of Jack London's Iron Heel in her hand. I was reading the same book from the town library. This was beautiful Zona Gale, author of Lulu Bett; she persuaded me that the University of Wisconsin was better than Dartmouth, so I went to Madison in the fall.
Here I took journalism in the same class attended by Bob LaFollette, Jr. There were a dozen Socialist legislators here, and I earned $17 space rates telling about them for the NEW YORK CALL, and also credit in my course in journalism. I especially liked my class in geology, and if I had not thought a revolution more important I might have been a geologist. I remember seminars of an unofficial sort at the home of the radical Horace M. Kallen. I washed pots and pans at a frat house for my meals, and carried a paper route. At times I would spend a quarter for tickets and popcorn, and take dark, cold, and beautiful Miriam Gaylord, daughter of the Socialist state senator, to a cheap movie. Randolph Bourne lectured here and my roommate, Bill Brockhausen, and I gave up our bed for him. I did not catch much of his message then, but in later years I was to remember his opposition to war and his aphorism: "War is the health of the state." He was the only New Republic liberal who did not fall for the war. Emma Goldman, the fiery anarchist who spoke about "free love" ​and birth control, when these words were only whispered by "decent" people, came to Madison. The one anarchist I knew was working towards a degree, and he asked me to introduce her. I cannot remember what she said, except that she was adept at repartee when people tried to tangle her up in conversation. I had taken public speaking in high school and at Hiram college, but I was the very worst in each class. I did get up at a Socialist meeting and give a talk on the I.W.W. An old time Socialist trade unionist who knew much more than I did criticized me until I was in tears, but I needed it. I asked him how I could be a good speaker. He told me to be sure of my facts and not do as I had just done, talk about something that I didn't know anything about. Then he said to go to some town where I knew no one; get up on a soapbox and commence. After the first speech, if I was any good at all, I would be a speaker.
Here in Madison I took military drill, for I was not a pacifist; I wanted to know how to shoot, come the revolution. I met some young Quaker Socialists and attended their meetings; the only one I remember now is Darlington Hoopes, who ran for Vice President and for President on the Socialist ticket years later. That session of the legislature had a conservative setup, so they increased the tuition for outside of the state students from $24 to $148. I did not have that much money, so when my folks wrote that they had moved to Columbus I decided to go to Ohio State that fall.
I Meet Selma
I spent that summer selling aluminum ware in Wisconsin towns; cooking in churches. The last town I worked in was West Allis. On the day before I planned to go to Ohio, I met a friend from Madison who invited me to a lawn party of young Socialists, the next day. They all knew each other and I was the only stranger. I took a liking to a certain girl and asked for a date but could not get one for four days. Meanwhile I took a friend of hers home. She whispered to this friend, "Better look out for that fellow." Four days later I had a date with my new girl friend, Selma Melms, daughter of the Socialist sheriff of Milwaukee, leader of the Yipsels, as the young Socialists were called, and secretary to the President of the State Federation of Labor. On the excuse that I had to go back to Ohio I had a date every night for ten nights, and we became engaged. Selma was the broad faced peasant type that always appealed to me. Love is blind, and how much the fact that I was a happy Irishman, much more radical than the staid Germans of Milwaukee, and that Selma was the first radical girl I had ever met (other than Miriam whom we fellows accused of thinking so much of her handsome father that she could never appreciate us) had to do with our engagement is difficult to determine. I went back to Ohio very happy.
That term at Ohio State was one of the best years of my life as a student. I was head of the Intercollegiate Socialist Club and secretary of the Socialist local down town. In my classes in philosophy and sociology there was much room for my radical agitation. I had never been sad about my radicalism, and with this love of Selma in my heart I felt that I could conquer the world. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., was my very good friend at the University. I started the first ​cooperative second-hand store for resale of books on the campus.
The next summer I sold cornflakes in the New England states and in Ohio. I had been a delegate from Lisbon to the state convention of the party in 1912, and was now a delegate in 1916, so I knew comrades from all over the state. Now during the 1916 presidential campaign I spoke on soapboxes, scores of times, for Allan Benson, the Socialist candidate. We spent several weeks in Dedham, Mass., not knowing then that this town would later be famous at the time of the Sacco–Vanzetti trial. One night when soapboxing in Akron, before about 800 people, my voice gave out. I believed in doctors then, so, asked one about it the next day. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him that I was a salesman. "You talk all day, and you talk all night, and I suppose you smoke cigarettes." "Yes," I answered. "You'll have to stop one or these things," he replied; so I stopped smoking. Later, in Warren, Ohio, I read Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. The next year I was to be in Atlanta prison with him; and the next year in a solitary cell where I could get no cigarettes, so it was a good thing that I stopped smoking. That Celestial Bulldozer again!
That winter it was necessary for me to help at home, as there were five sisters and two brothers younger than myself. I got a job delivering a bakery wagon and built up an excellent route by making a special each day of some product which I was sure to have fresh. My smallest sister had been born when I was away at school, so when I arrived with cookies—part of the 10% breakage which I was allowed—Lorraine promptly called me "Ammon-cookie." Meanwhile I had introduced Ben Reitman and Bob Minor and other radicals from the soapbox down town. We had come within a hundred votes of electing a Socialist mayor; had members of the city council, and the president of the school board. It was exciting to be a Socialist and on the winning side for once.
During this winter I studied Yogi, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. Rosicrucian friends had cast my horoscope: Leo with Saturn in ascendancy, which meant that I would always be in trouble, but never defeated. As if to bear out this prediction of difficulty Selma wrote that she was breaking our engagement, but she would not tell me why. (After we were married I discovered that two Socialists, who claimed to be mutual friends of both of us, had told her long tales about me which had but a faint basis in fact.)
One clear memory I have of Columbus is that of the Rev. Washington Gladden, a Congregational minister of the old liberal style, bewhiskered and benign. So many people came to hear him that he had to have his services in a theatre. He achieved distinction for refusing money from Rockefeller, saying that it was "tainted." These days hardly a voice is raised against the great Foundations who seek to buy respectability by subsidizing individuals and organizations.