From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [367]
But already the old solidarity was shifting and beginning to break up. The wartime trial and the Leavenworth sentences had broken the back of the IWW. The Communist Revolution that scared the world had succeeded in Russia, and in the Wobblies disagreement over the Communists grew into a dissension and then into open factions. He went on reading; he wanted to be ready. He became a veteran of Centralia Washington, where they castrated first, and then lynched, Wesley Everest and afterwards sentenced seven other Wobblies for 2nd degree murder for having fought back but he was one of the young ones that Old Mike Sheehan helped to get away. He escaped both castration-lynching and trial. He beat his way down into California and joined the longshoremen’s union and went on reading.
Then Haywood and Andreytchine jumped their bail and went to Russia to throw in with the Communists, and that finished it. Chaplin and the others out on bond went back to Leavenworth.
“The funny thing is,” he smiled, “we were the first to adopt the color Red. The Communists stole it from us. That wasnt all they stole from us either.”
Prew, who had sung Casey Jones all his life without ever hearing of Joe Hill and the Wobblies, had already learned enough to know he meant the driving force that was Big Bill Haywood.
“They stole it and threw it away,” he said. “Like kids robbing a candy store of more than they can eat and throwing it away. They killed Bill Haywood.”
After that there were three more years of formality, up and down California from one isolated unit that still made pretense of paying dues to another, always trying to help get the rest of the old by-now-almost-forgotten hundred-and-one out of Leavenworth. In California he studied, and came to love, the memory of Jack London and the old group of Socialists in Frisco, George Sterling, Upton Sinclair, and the rest, whose outfit also had shrivelled down to death; London himself almost as much as he loved Joseph Hillstrom. He went on reading. Then the bottom that had been sliding and sliding finally fell clear out. Some gave up and went to Russia like Haywood; others, like Chaplin, embarked on the philosophy that would eventually lead them to chauvinism. Jack Malloy went on reading, wondering what he was training for, and finally decided to take to the sea. He was nineteen. An era had ended.
He served several years as an AB on South American freighters out of Frisco. He was still looking. He went on reading. It was during that time that he had, for lack of something better, become a disciple of Upton Sinclair’s leftover brand of Socialism that he later rejected. The Sage of Monrovia who lived with posterity eternally in his thoughts was just about the only contestant left in the field, and the 19-year-old disciple-in-search-of-a-Messiah helped distribute the pamphlets on all the ships he worked on at a time when, while it was not against the law, you were through working for that line if the officers ever caught you.
“It taught me two things,” Malloy grinned. “One; you never could succeed with what I wanted to succeed with by using propaganda; logically, in the end, the end will not only not justify the means, it will not even be achieved by them; you cant divide the mass by a common factor that will give you a norm to work by, because while it may be mathematically correct it is false when applied to the individual member. The masses are one thing, the amalgam of individuals is another. And you cannot escape that paradox by leveling them off to a fourth-grade-mind common to all. We were going to have to do better than that; I didnt know what, or how; and I dont know now. But we’ll have to.
“The second thing it taught me was that you cant live for posterity, especially if you are a prude, because posterity’s morals are always different from your morals. Sinclair is as big a prude about sex as Ralph Chaplin: they’re both married. It hurt them terribly to see us common rank and file patronize whorehouses. When they couldnt convince us, they decided to ignore it. I suspect that both of their revolutionary activities were brought on by a parentally-installed horror of the grossness of the penis and the vulva and a hunger for the Ideal Love. But you cant escape life by rebelling any more than you can escape it by playing blind. You cant take one subject, like economics, and with it escape the problems of all the rest of the subjects, like sex. Eventually, unless you become a liar, you always come back to the one thing you’re running from. And you cant for