This is a short history and evocation of the lives of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur. Born in the years shortly after the Civil War, they plowed a deep furrow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arthur Le Sueur was born two years after the end of the Civil War,and five years after Lincoln's signing at last, of the Homestead Act. That Act brought floods of migrations from the old countries, where, since the failure of the '48 revolutions, workers and farmers had pressed against the crowded ports, seeking to get passage to the new lands where bonanzas were promised and it was said the birds flew, fried a golden brown, into your mouth and the streets were paved with 0010 8 gold. They came from the Jersey Isles where they fled in rowboats from Normandy, after the rise of Napoleon and the crushing of the people's struggle in France in 1794. Their house had been a refuge for the exiles of '48, including Victor Hugo who sat with the children on his knee, imbuing them with a staunch hatred for the rising bourgeoisie and the colonialism of Britain and France.

Marian Le Sueur was born ten years later, of a line of English remittance men and Irish rebels and the Dutch and Indian marriages they made crossing the Wilderness Road on the Lincoln trail, some stopping at Toulon, Illinois and others following the opening of land into Iowa, Texas and Oklahoma. She was of the mid-west village life, the democratic square, courthouse, small farm, town hall; the revolt of women; the agrarian reform movements; the picture of Ingersoll on the coffins of the dead.

To understand both them and ourselves, the times that begot them must be understood; the struggles of their nation, and every form of struggle the people waged against the usurpation of power, for the guarantees of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the period of the beginning of the growth of monopoly, expansion and gigantic cartelism. Their greatness lay, as it does in all of us, in the extent that they partook of the destiny and fulfillment of the experience of their nation, fought against its mutilation, embodied in flesh and blood all the agonies, all the lessons, even the fearful errors, all the struggles to conquer reality, all the triumphs and despair of our people across three generations of history.

In their youth the depression of 1873 gave them their 0011 9 first and deep lesson in the growth of industrialism controlled by growing cartels: amalgamation of gigantic robbers, which would lead to wars of colonial seizures, two major world wars, and the atomic bomb.

To understand their great strength and their errors, their triumphs and the fierce grip they have on our future, which we cherish, not only in memory but in action, in affection, in tensions and in strengths, we must review the long period through which they lived. There were two forces mounting to world conflict that we and our children must resolve in the future: on the one hand, the powerful growth of state and world imperialism; on the other, the growth of the American people's movements; and, affecting my parents deeply in their later days, the great rising of over half the colonial peoples of the earth.

We must look at our inheritance as both memory and the future, rushing back, demanding action.

My people did not leave me land, or wealth, or great empires. I have on my desk a small inheritance, an instrument to estimate the prairie curve which my grandfather used, carrying out the plan of Thomas Jefferson, who saw a patterned, mathematical future in America, nothing hit or miss with a tree or a fence mark; but a survey clear as the Bill of Rights, set to the light of Polaris, of Aldebaran, of the Big Dipper, true to the moon and the sun and the needs of men, ignoring all that eroded, moved, changed like ridges and rivers. This was part of the democratic accuracy and justice.

The mapless, formless wilderness, alive in the subtle mind 0012 10 of Dakota, Pottowatamie, Fox or Chippewa, was henceforth marked clearly in orderly titles in the severe democratic court houses. Each township of six miles square was divided into thirty-six sections, each one mile divided into four equal quarters, each full section measuring six hundred and forty acres, including the road, with errors in curvature and measurement caused by the earth. Each quarter was the historic one hundred and sixty acres, the free homestead, the dream of every starving, hounded worker on the docks of Dunkirk. My grandfather carried this instrument through the dark nights waiting for the sight of the stars to set the meridian.

Now I have always cried to these forebears and cried to them for answers, for compasses, and seen their deeds, their actions, solid and muscular. They have always put a marker up at the place of disaster, guided your hand to the fissure of the mortgage and the quitclaim; pointed out the assassin, identified the murderer, the usurer, the depraved. They have kept records of the Long Trail of Tears, the Battle of Wounded Knee and how many were killed by government bad beef; kept the bone splinter and the shoes of the dead child. Now, in a moment of crisis and cold, they point out where the warm ash of the old fires can give you warmth, where strength is cached. I can even catch their heraldic voices in the wind of struggle.

My family came from all the great migrations. They came on the stinking boats after the famine of '48; the black Irish, following the farms west. The migration is the common experience of us all, of both my red and white fathers and 0013 11 mothers. The Trail of Tears, still alive with migrations—the migration from seized tribal and ancient and deeded lands into raw dust and alien corn—is known to us all. Where I lived in Kansas it was said that ninety thousand went through there on the way to the Oregon Trail. They also trailed back. My grandmother sat in her buggy on the line of the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, when the stolen land was opened as a state. With her shotgun over her knees, she made the run and held the land till the claim was filed.

They wore the country on each foot. They salted it with their sweat, changed it with their labor, and had little more than six feet for their bodies. They kept alive the dignity of dissent and the right to impose upon it change; the cry for justice.

They were dissenters from England, Campbellites who could no longer stand the feudal property relations of the Church. They were circuit riders in Kentucky and educators at Oberlin, the first college in America to grant degrees to women. They manned underground stations before the Civil War.

They saw the steady impoverishment of land and people. Marian's family lost the rich farm lands her grandfather had helped to survey. Arthur's family broke the Chicago potato market, lost the rich land at Nininger, and homesteaded again in Dakota. His father went on to the mines hoping to strike it rich but died instead of tuberculosis.

As young people they saw their depressions, their wars, and the deepening of class war. In the 1890's great strikes involving thousands of workers hit back at the National Association 0014 12 of Manufacturers, which represented the new cartels. The Pinkertons, like the present F. B. I., organized violence and espionage against the workers, the destruction of civil liberties and the attack against the foreign-born.

It was the period of asking why for the petty bourgeois radical, the small business man and the farmer and intellectual, alike menaced by this rising power. It was the time of the panacea, of utopia, of the speaker at the small meeting, the church, the picnic, the opera house jammed for the antimonopoly debate; of the tour over the farm country with the co-op chart, the Socialist books for sale, agrarian radical newspapers—the Appeal to Reason , and also the Iconoclast , edited by Arthur Le Sueur when he was Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota.

The Village and farm agnostic was very verbal, for he had to break away from fear and the terror of Calvinism and its hellfire. It was the season of money panaceas and cranks. Anyone with a reform or solution for monopoly printed and distributed his idea or spoke from any prominence. It was a time of great creativeness of the people, of the development of wheat, of the blacksmiths' wrestling with the problems of the plow and the harrow and the great reaper. But alas, the people did not reap anything but disaster from this great bonanza.

It must be clearly known, and was stated by my parents: there is only one force that creates value and that is labor, and one manner of expropriation of wealth, the exploitation of labor and the natural resources. Empires were built by 0015 13 the seizures of Indian lands—nineteen million acres in Minnesota, three million in Iowa and as many from the Pottowatamies of the Illini—and by the seizure of timber, and timber land, in more millions of acres, much of it sugared off, stolen or given outright. Speculators and railroads grabbed one-eighth of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri and Minnesota, and one-third of Arkansas under the “Swamp Land Grants” in 1849. Farmers who later bought back this land paid fifty million dollars for it, and then lost it again to the mortgage holders who accumulated millions of unearned wealth, in what the Populists called “the multiplication of nothing.”

In Minnesota alone, in a deed of night, the Territorial Government gave the Northwest Railroad land grants which covered an area larger than four eastern states. A new group of thieves, the Minneapolis Millers, sprang up on the wheat bonanzas. Organized in three centers of power, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Duluth Board and the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, they catapulted great fortunes with only the stroke of a pencil. They made millions in the mixing house alone, selling themselves the same bushel of grain and giving themselves a commission for the robbery. There was dockage for dirt, false balances, and phantom switching costs, and there were hives of commission men, speculators and elevator managers.

The farmer driving madly from one elevator to another found they were all controlled by the same bosses, whose sway extended to every spur of railroad, excluding all competition or freedom to market. He found that the banks were also owned by them, that he was ruled by powers he could not 0016 14 see and hawked on world futures without his say. A man he could not see, on Fourth Street in Minneapolis, pressed his finger on the telegraphic key and dictated what price should be paid for wheat in every town, and there were no other buyers.

“There has been enough money stolen from the farmers by the wheat ring,” said Ignatius Donnelly, candidate of the Populists, “to pave the road to hell with gold.”

This great steal and great lie pointed to resistance by the people. Marian and Arthur Le Sueur were part of these movements—Arthur of the United Socialist Party of 1901, the I.W.W., the Socialist Party under Eugene V. Debs, the Non-Partisan League, and the Farmer-Labor Party.

The outlaws have lived so long upon the surrounding country that they believe it to be their inalienable right to live upon it. Amazing is the testimony brought out by the investigation and exposure of the millers. They maintained their actions were not immoral or predatory. They morally sanctioned stealing on the grounds that everybody did it and it was their unchallengeable right. They had the audacity to cover their rapacity by the assumption that any critic of their thievery must be a “foreign agent” or a “dangerous red.”

We can now estimate the land poverty and erosion but we find it more difficult to estimate the human erosion, to make a map of deprivations, of the mad women at screen doors, of the Joads with the sadness of all immigrants, the small farmer on the road again.

But there has been a further erosion, the erosion of memory, of purpose, of accurate charts for the journey. These 0017 15 charts of a trail and a direction made by such fighters as Marian and Arthur Le Sueur make a path for us all. They make it easier to down the fear and the slowness; they make more sturdy those who remain silent, or are tempted by the rewards of the lackey, the informer, or just the “collaborator.” They make the path to the future so bright and indestructible that the death bed confessors, the criers of return to old shelters, to dead ideas, to feudal fathers, are put to shame.

It is true that old Socialists truly never die. They never fell into sloughs of depression, cynicism, unbelief, or despair or inactivity. An easterner said to my mother in 1952, “It's a terrible thing, all the failure of the third party movement, such energy, gone to waste, lost.…” My mother, then seventy-five years old, was running for Senator on the peace platform of the Progressive Party of Minnesota! They sense no failure of any kind, knowing the future is secured. They have faith in these strengths continuing.

Agrarian Socialists from the beginning of the century, with skill and agility they participated and led in the struggles of the people; they arrived at the foremost post, but not too far ahead. They sensed, like compass needles, the direction of all struggles against monopoly; the need for agrarian reform, the breaking of power in the cities by organized labor, the alliance of every third party and reform movement of the worker and farmer. While regional leaders, they were internationalists of a passionate kind, excited by every attempt of man to break the fetters of body and mind.

Socialism was their culture, action, poetry, life itself. Social good was their only good. They contributed stintlessly 0018 16 to the education of our people. Arthur Le Sueur, with his map, went to every village, every county in the Dakotas to get out a leaflet, ring the school bell, set up the map, and show the face of the predators! They went by hand car, horse, and model T, and they met in pastures when they were banned from speaking in the villages. When he was the Socialist mayor of Minot, his first act was to order the balls and chains of county prisoners thrown into the river. He was sued for this by the Republican City Council!

Stones were thrown through our windows during World War I, yellow paint thrown on our car. In the rural court house where they practiced law together, the Le Sueurs defended the foreign born, the men and women arrested for opposing the war, the Socialists, the Non-Partisan Leaguers who were tarred and feathered. Wherever there was a fight they were there. They seemed to have something we sometimes lack, a terrible, wonderful lust for the fight.

Arthur returned like Ulysses from every fight and told how he bested the prostitute judges, how he stood against the Vigilante committees, how he bested them in argument. When he was dying at eighty-three, he was still fighting. In his delirium he made preparations for civil rights struggles, and he hoped to live to see the freeing of Korea. The thousand veins of his social passion rose out of the corruption of the body. He did not want to see the minister they asked to send him—said he would stand by the facts until it was out of the realm of “speculation”. He died in the year of the Smith Act. He wanted to defend us all and, in delirium, worried by the fact 0019 17 that he had no “wealth” to leave us for our defense, he conveyed schemes to us of ways of fighting.

My mother in the same way, her children and grandchildren hounded by the F. B. I., her phone tapped, had visions of the “singing tomorrows”—and wished only to stave off decay long enough to see that great future with our people singing in peace on the great prairies.

They left a compass greater than my grandfather's. They left their names in the great smoking texts of the peoples' struggles, to be read as volcanic and water movement on rock or glacial terrain. They lived upon the storm, were refreshed by disaster, cut their teeth upon loss, walked out like David for the fight, laughed at the puny merchants with jaundiced eye on profit, broke all indictments and injunctions against thought, or assemblage, asked for amnesty from all verdicts of madmen and assassins, shook the prairies with gigantic laughter at the corporations' laws against majority or minority thought. They knew that the people, like the giant pines, rise up from below and two-thirds of the strength and nourishment is below ground. They always walked out upon these unseen strengths and always partook of them. Inquiries and litigations they ignored, or went to court armed with thunderbolts of insolence and contempt for the puny servility of newt-eyed judges, lickspittles of monopoly. On their death beds they planned further forays, defenses, attacks, hazardous and gay, the enterprise of all revolt, knowing the great works of the people, composing all the time.

In the slow, brave, tortuous movement of the agrarian struggle, they were moving toward Marxism, aware that sharper 0020 18 instruments must be had for the stronger struggles. Slowly, in analysis, they saw their instruments had been failing; they saw the viciousness, the vastness of the enemy, the failures of reform, the inadequacies, as Arthur said, of electing “the fox to look after the hen coop.”

Their bitter struggles had bitter lessons; they saw the great wave of the future rise and fall back into silence and seeming sleep. They looked and saw the new weapons in China. They left reluctant, sensing great battles, eager to be in them.

Their compass points toward the inevitable weapon of Marxism. Their strength continues in us at the portal where they always stood, the door to the future. Our faces bare to the bone, our mouths gagged with the wind, we walk in deeper paths than they knew. They had a dream, we see the reality. Even our enemies are weaker than theirs, for capitalism is a decayed, faceless nightmare, exposed by the people of the world, who reach across the world market to touch hands, to affirm again relationship and love.

This is our inheritance.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

Oliver Goldsmith

“Oh for a man who is a man, and as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot put your hand through.”

Thoreau

Arthur Le Sueur was born December 7, 1867 in Nininger, Minnesota of Amy and John Le Sueur, recently come from the Jersey Isle with all their kit and kaboodle. Amy had her embroidery, her harp, and French gold-leaf embossed song-books; John his tools, jewels, and enough cousins to work the new Homestead land. They built a mansion not far from Ignatius Donnelly's and shared the hopes of the inhabitants that Nininger would become the river port and the greatest metropolis on the upper Mississipi. But through some skulduggery, the Hastings across the river and St. Paul up the river got the port franchise, and a one-eyed robber baron named Jim Hill got a franchise for a defunct railroad in St. Paul. John Le Sueur raised so many potatoes that he broke the Chicago potato market and had to dump the potatoes in the Mississippi river caves, a lesson in supply and demand which Arthur always said has some relation to a bald-headed man with 0022 20 abundant whiskers. He was born nine years after the founding of the state and the scandalous railroad bond swindle, two years after the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, and six years before the terrible depression of 1873. From his mother he breathed the air of Voltaire and the rights of man, and even the name of Mary Wollstonecraft. His father was an authoritarian Episcopalian, a man full of temper and stubborness, but gentled by the life of Amy Le Sueur who kept up the linen tablecloths, the paintings and songs, and the big fires of an evening. But when her sixth child was born she was thrown from a farm wagon and lost the child and died herself.

Arthur was around five then. Unable to pay the banker, they lost the big mansion and had to move into poorer quarters. All the boys had to plow and hoe and John Le Sueur became a bitter and stern man. They did their own cooking, usually oatmeal and molasses, and Arthur did not gain his growth till he was nineteen. After that he grew three inches.

The boy at eight plowed the sand of the river bottoms and had much to think about. He was learning lessons of bankers, property, marriage and religion, and deepening those strains of contemplation and poetry, always strangely emerging from the frontier man with the stern Normandy face, peculiarly like the Indian faces of the Dakotas.

He wrote these things down many years later. These are his own telling:

“Looking back I can see how my mother tolerated my father's fanaticism rather than believed in it. She was a woman, played the harp in the roustabout river town, sat at her needlework, 0023 21 did hand illuminated copies of French roundalays. She told of long talks with Victor Hugo. After her death my father probably lonely, with his brood of motherless children and constantly failing, he began to punish us severely as he had never done when mother lived. He became silent and then violent and fanatical. I was very seriously inclined to get to heaven where my mother was. I suffered the terrors of the night and the eye of God which penetrated your every thought; and my father's eye in the early morning prayers and evening prayers as he looked at every one of us, examining our inmost secret thoughts, watching our actions, assuming everything was evil. I went to bed with the covers over my head praying to join my mother.

“He preached to us as the ax bit into the stump, as the plow turned the soil. His doctrine was that every word of the Bible was true. He believed in hell fire and the only salvation from sin, the sacrifice of Jesus. You couldn't get salvation unless you believed as he did and if you didn't have salvation you would go to hell. He would have had to invent a hell in any case to have a proper place to consign democrats and catholics.

“I was about eleven when we were walking side by side, coming back from work, and as usual, when swinging an ax or doing any work he was talking his religion and I cannot recall what he was proving to me but he said, ‘We know that this is true because Christ said it was.’ I said, ‘Well, wasn't that true before Christ said it was, if it was true?’ He hauled off with a right hand and slapped me with all his might, hitting me on the side of the head, knocking me tizzle and upwards. He usually used a leather strap with a buckle on it but this time he couldn't wait. Before I could get on my feet and my senses together he was shouting the doctrine down at me.

“But a boy like a man, convinced against his will, is of the 0024 22 same opinion still. But this drove me to work out my own philosophy.

“The following summer I was plowing the field. I always thought of what Bishop Whipple would say when he sat in our front room. That room, never opened, was opened to him. Before my mother died I sat often on his knee and listened as he told about the Indians, what wonderful people they were. He did not look upon them as beasts as the others did. He even blamed the white treaty makers and told how he had appealed to Lincoln for amnesty for them. I remembered this all my life.

“Another influence, a happening that influenced me…My father had spent a fortune on his land on the river, and we had taken out a mortgage of ten thousand dollars with a Hastings banker who had a son who wanted to marry my sister Anne; but she did not care for him, so my father refused the money lender savagely and the money lender foreclosed the mortgage and one day we were hoeing our rented land which bore on the highway. My father so religious that he would not allow a fiddle or a pack of cards in the house.

“One day we were planting potatoes near this highway with a couple of neighbor boys and my oldest brother when the money lender and his son, driving a pair of spanking horses, drove by and my father, following his feeling of Christian duty that he must raise hell with everybody he disagreed with, stepped out on the road and hailed him and commenced to abuse him in polite terms. The money lender was afraid my father would snatch him out of the buggy so he lay whip to his lively horses and was away down the road to Hastings. But when he later returned he waited till we came back to the end of the row and shouted over the fence to us, ‘I would like to know who could blacken the character of a blackguard like you.’ My father swung his wooden country hoe with the heavy 0025 23 length of handle over his shoulder and went through a gap in the fence shouting, ‘I will show you.’ I followed behind to the fence and stopped when I saw the money lender and his son each had a revolver in his hand and the son shouted to my father who was advancing steadily, ‘If you make another step this way I will shoot.’

“My father's civic as well as Christian ire was roused and he was sprinting toward the buggy, straight into the revolvers, and they both fired, but he kept right on going. They both jumped out of the buggy and the horse jumped away and my father jumped faster toward them, a thin spry man.

“They both took another shot at him and he kept coming and when he got to a hoe handle's length of the old man he brought his handle length down on the old man's head. Only the beaver hat saved his life. Then in the same gesture, he raised it again and I can see the picture to this instant, the young man with the big silver revolver in both hands, up to his eye, taking good aim and firing straight into my father's belly. But my father brought the hoe down on the young man's shoulders and he did not fire again but turned and ran.

“My Dad, a real sprinter, even with those bullets in him, chased the young man a quarter of a mile, then came back to us stunned, the blood sloshing out of his shoes.

“The shot had just missed his heart and he carried bullets in his back to his grave but he lived to sue the money lender and he kept his hoe in a convenient place conforming to his usual maxim, ‘Trust in God but keep your powder dry’.

“But what influenced me the rest of my life was the trial which followed at Hastings with a lawyer named John Brisbane. I was a witness and as I came back I passed the counsel table and Brisbane reached out and got me by the arm and drew me close and patted me on the head and said, ‘My boy, you will be a great lawyer someday.’

“For years after that, while on the river drives, working on farms and in the woods, when I tried to get the education and was the laughing stock at Ann Arbor where I was called the ‘Bull of the Woods,’ for twenty years, earning money in summers in the log drive until I finally passed the bar and set up my one law book on a kitchen table, I heard those words in that Hastings court house.

“The following summer I was plowing. We had left Nininger and gotten free land twenty-five miles west of Grand Forks on the Turtle River. It was late and cold and I had no mittens. I was plowing a walking plow with my bare hands and I felt an awful misery. Not only to endure the work of a man, and the oatmeal and molasses but the insult we had to endure in the way of preaching and condemnations on the sinfulness of boys and the certainty of hell for them.

“So I stood in the middle of the circle of sky and I asked out loud how did the old man know this was the truth? Who wrote the Bible? How did the men who wrote the Bible know it more than anyone else, and if I myself had no capacity for knowing all of it was that a sound basis for being condemned forever to hell?

“I cried the old cry—Strike me dead God and show me you are there!

“But there was the old silence. The plow and the cold and the earth were there. I went on in my misery from and to, furrow and back again. Suddenly it seemed to me there was only one way I personally could know anything of either God, man or creation. Impressions would come to my mind that I could rely upon, and be informed of these impulses through sight, hearing, smell, taste or feeling. Information was carried to my mind from God, earth and man, and no other way. All these impressions that got into my mind would be subject to adjustment one with the other and required calculation. There 0027 25 was no other way to figure out God and have an opinion based on facts.

“There had to be judgement, talking into consideration all the knowable facts about each item which the mind stored away. I had to learn all the psalms and the prophets so I began to find things to support my views. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showest his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech and Night unto night showest knowledge. So I saw the universe was big and I need not worry about going to hell, or a Being looking at me with hate.

“And so the sapling grew.”

It is hard to follow the next years. In 1880 my father left the farm and hired out for eight dollars a month cutting cord wood and splitting logs. He became a logger in the winter and a thresher in the summer. He carried his books with him and studied. He had to figure out the words himself and always afterward pronounced them the way he first saw them. He saved his money to go to law school.

Around the fires of the lumber camp and in the heat of the harvest day he must have heard the high and low talk of the Haymarket struggle for the eight hour day, the depression of the eighties, the formation of the great agrarian organizations: the Grange, the anti-Monopolist Party headed by his old neighbor Donnelly, and the Farmers Alliance and the Populist Party; and talk of the organizations of workers in the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. He must have heard of the Pullman strike, the miners' strike led by Bill Haywood, and Coxey's army of the unemployed that moved on Washington. It was a period of great labor 0028 26 and farmer struggles, and he was among the men who had begun to get some political savvy. He certainly felt on his own back and knew in his blood the lash of the growing, ruthless exploitation, erosion and destruction. He saw men die under the great trees and cursed the endless wandering, womanless life of the “bindle stiff”. By hanging on to his money, he was able to buy himself a threshing rig by the time he was nineteen. It was an old thresher, and he invented the first automatic tier for it. He saved enough from the summer's harvest to go to Ann Arbor to law school.

Here he was called the Bull of the Woods, in his lumberjack clothes. He studied so hard that he could see a whole page of Blackstone law and then recite it verbatim. He learned poetry at night and pleasured himself with his Dakota talent for story-telling and jokes.

Back in Fargo he went into the law office of a liberal North Dakota lawyer, Tracy Bangs, whom he loved all his life.

Later, he finally set up his kitchen table and one law book in the frontier town of Minot which lay between the cattle country and the wheat country. Men passed through there, going back and forth, following the crops and the westering cattle. Here the immigrants were settling. They came in box cars and in buck boards, the Russian Dakars, Scandinavians, Norwegians, Hungarians, Croatians. They needed lawyers and an honest one was a rarity. They came to the stocky, stubborn Bull of the Woods, Arthur Le Sueur. He began to be a lawyer.

This was in 1900.

There are marks of his struggle. There were choices to be made. A young lawyer could amass a fortune by dealing in titles. One of the first clients to come into Arthur's office was an emissary of the Empire builder, Jim Hill. He took cases for Jim Hill and then he took cases of the workers against Jim Hill. He became assistant to the Attorney General.

He seemed to have steered a windy course. He made money in investments, got a taste of the great barbecue, saw he could become a rich and powerful man. He also saw the poor immigrant rooked out of his land; he saw the men who had come to plow the land, build homes and raise families, pushed out by the railroad kingdom.

He watched the Socialist Party growing in this period. Founded in 1892, it polled thirty thousand votes in the year of the Pullman strike. In 1905 he attended the Socialist convention in Chicago. In 1908 he was on the Red Special of the Debs and Hanford campaign, and in 1912 he was socialist Mayor of Minot.

In this period he seemed to move steadily in the direction of the peoples' struggle which he was to follow all his life. He became a Socialist.

At that time an ideological struggle was forming the American working class. The Socialist party, as the leading party of the working class at that time, had many factions, rifts, splits, reformings. Arthur Le Sueur has in his files the tracks and trails of those struggles as they formed him, as he struggled within the class pressures of his place and time. Out of the roots of the agrarian movement, of grangers and greenbackers, from the European left wing of Marx and Engels, 0030 28 and the Bernsteinism of Germany and syndicalism of France, the Socialist Party made its struggle. It was made up of immigrants, poor farmers, and petty bourgeois radicals, doctors, lawyers, preachers and even priests. Its weakness was its isolation from mass organizations of labor.

Daniel De Leon had led the party with a strong authoritarian hand. Morris Hillquit led the faction against him and with Victor Berger and Debs broke away from the extreme left wing and helped unite a disintegrating party, with only independent state units and small groups of Christian Socialists, into a united Socialists movement. Their program was to “conquer the powers of government and use them for the purpose of transforming the present system of private ownership of the means of production and distribution into collective ownership by the entire people.”

There were direct actionists, who later split off into the I.W. W. There were those like De Leon who wanted to fight only for Socialism and had no immediate demands, and there were trade unionists who wanted to fight for immediate aims and low key socialism. They all hated the A.F. of L. and most of them were dual unionists. They had right, left and middle. Their program was to fight for hours and wages, social insurance, equal civil and political rights for men and women, for the initiative, referendum and recall.

Arthur Le Sueur debated De Leon at Cooper Union on the money question. He argued with the left wingers on direct action and sabotage. He has files of letters of these theoretical discussions and criticisms. He began to travel and lecture and debate these questions. Papers, leaflets, pamphlets and books 0031 29 were distributed, sold. The Socialist youth was organized, a magazine for women was edited in Chicago. Lecturers came into the territory and spoke at the picnics. Farmers carried in one pocket the Iconoclast or the Agnostic and in the other the Christian Socialist

Along with the growth of monopoly, this period also represented the growth of the people in political and economic struggles, and the painful acceptance by the labor movement of theoretical knowledge and the necessity of education for the American working class. It was the time of the minds forging, of the sighing in the balance of the vaunted democracy. It was the time of the great gathering on the prairie, of the picnic with the Socialist speakers and the argument in the bunk house of the right and left of political and economic power, of the fronts to fight on and ways to do it, of how the worker and farmer might secure his land and the machine he operated, to get back at least some of the products of his labor. It was the time of the heated argument in the school house, of the speaker at the rear of the wagon who talked against the wind, against the cries of babies who, he warned, would be killed in the first world war. They rang the school bell, passed out leaflets, hung maps on the wall, and then got in their old Ford with the Socialist Party signs on it to go to the next meeting. They were refused halls and schools and churches, so they spoke in the open field, or in a barn, or in the big kitchens.

By 1912 the Socialist Party was at its peak, leading strikes, free speech fights, civil rights causes, political struggles. There were fifty-six Socialist mayors in five states; Emil Seidel was 0032 30 elected mayor of Milwaukee, and Arthur Le Sueur mayor of Minot, North Dakota. There were one thousand and thirty-nine dues-paying members in elected offices. Debs and Seidel ran on the Presidential ticket and polled eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand votes. There was a strong Socialist press, with three hundred and twenty-five periodicals. The Appeal to Reason had five hundred thousand subscribers and got out large special editions that ran into the millions. Arthur Le Sueur edited his paper, the Iconoclast , in Minot which, in a crisis, could circularize the town and countryside in two hours.

Woodrow Wilson cried out that we were on the verge of a revolution. The N.A.M. got behind Teddy Roosevelt to back reforms, and even started a third party to siphon off the militant protests.

There was also a struggle within the Socialist Party. Bill Haywood and others left in protest against the petty bourgeois character of the Party, dominated by millionaire socialists and professional and middle class members who fought against militant action, and moved toward collaboration with the corrupt A.F. of L. and Gompers. The Socialist Party never recovered from this split of its militant workers, and the outbreak of the war deepened the chasm. In the St. Louis convention one part supported the war and the left wing opposed it; many were tried and jailed, to emerge after the Russian Revolution and the debacle of the war to form the Communist Party.

Many leaders of the left, like Haywood, joined the I.W.W. Arthur Le Sueur seems here to have taken a middle road within the Socialist and reform movements, which he 0033 31 maintained with painful integrity all his days. He supported the I.W.W. while at the same time urging them to moderation. He was against the first World War, but believed that head-on collision against conscription was suicidal. He did not foresee the revolution in Russia and its effects upon the war and the world. He held on to his deep respect for Blackstonian law, believing it to be a great advance of the people in court. In this belief he often found himself at variance with many of his colleagues and often broke with the labor movement, but as always, he stuck to his belief and fought all comers for it. At the end of his life, blind and poor and virtually alone, he walked into court rooms where the attorney and the judge had already met and decided the case. But he still stood on the glories of the Chartist movement and the English law.

The Iconoclast of 1912 has the following item:

“Art Le Sueur is the apostle and high priest of Socialism in North Dakota. He was met at the station with the band and they marched to the Opera House…he spoke at the picnic and those that came to find that Socialism was a menace went away declaring it to be the hope of the world. Comrade Art is a forceful speaker. He puts up his charts and they receive close attention. Physically he is a strong man and impresses one with his sincerity and earnestness. When he gets through you cannot find a trace of where there was a Democrat in the township.…Also had a red hot ball game at the picnic…potato race and dancing…fifty-five books were sold. This is our year…we will be free…the mortgage is always with us. He drew up a wagon in a company town and made a speech and a little old man grabbed his hand. I been waitin' fer ye mister ain't had nothin' to vote for but Republican and Democrat 0034 32 and that's like choosing between a hog and a pig—since the Populist Party. I been waitin' twelve year fer ye.”

Arthur Le Sueur at this time was also a banker. This reflects more than anything the contradictions and turmoil of the times. As a banker he acted in this way: The banks wanted to foreclose on cattle loans in the fall but they did not want to claim the cattle till spring. They did not want to extend the loans, but they wanted the farmer to feed the cattle all winter on range and then foreclose in the spring. Arthur Le Sueur sent out word to the Socialist farmers to come into town on a certain day. Over fifty came and he told them to line up at the bank and ask for an extension of their loan. When it was refused, they should all say the same thing: “Very well, come and get your property.” When the bank said they could not get the cattle in the winter, the farmers were to reply: “Very well, then, I will bring my cattle into town today and leave them at the back of the bank!” The farmers lined up clear down the block. The bankers were frantic. The loans were extended!

In the summer of 1913 two I.W.W.s, Jack Law and Allen, came to Minot to organize the construction workers and teamsters. The business men came to Le Sueur to help them run the organizers out of town. A big construction job was going up and a union and a strike would lose them much money. The lawyer called their attention to the fact that the organizers had as much right in the city as he or any other man, and he warned them he would prosecute anyone who attempted, or incited others, to tar and feather them, or ride them out on 0035 33 a rail, or any criminal acts against the street speakers. For eight nights the organizers spoke peacefully and there was nothing but order. But Minot was a gamblers' wide open frontier town. It was run by power companies, the railroad, the wheat ring and the Commercial club working through thugs, piggers, and gamblers.

The evening of the ninth day the meeting was being held when a cigar manufacturer and a well known gambler drove a big car into the crowd and roared the muffler. Law, the speaker, kept order and adjourned the meeting. The next day seventy-five special police, thugs and gamblers were sworn in by the sheriff whose brother was the biggest gambler in the town. That evening a case of eggs was thrown from the top of a building into the crowd. Law and Allen held the people in check. The sheriff did nothing. On Sunday the tension was taut between the working class and the business men. A big crowd was milling around as the speaking started and the police began to pull the speakers down from the soap box. Then after twenty I.W.W.s had been arrested, the Socialists began to take the box and they were pulled down and arrested until over a hundred had been arrested. Then the mayor, Arthur Le Sueur, took the box. The police hesitated. “Arrest me also,” he said. And they did.

Some of the men were brutally beaten. They stood in the cells, man to man, solid, and the hot water steam was turned on them. They tried to find informers but no one would talk or allow themselves to be bailed out, including the mayor. Many middle class Socialists, merchants, dentists and others, 0036 34 were in those cells. From the block Le Sueur conducted the defense. The Iconoclast reports the trial:

“Over a long protracted trial he brought out the proofs, made the issues clear.…‘If these men are guilty of the charges against them then I am decidedly so. Don't acquit me unless you acquit all the rest. Yours truly is more guilty than any of the others!’ With these words he hurled defiance in the face of the representatives of the rotten and demoralized city fathers. Those blockheads sitting as jurors heard for the first time a discussion of the science of political economy. Comrade Le Sueur told them that the present organization of society makes the law serve the robber barons, and how the man owning the tools of industry becomes the master of the man using them.”

Men and women had been driven from the city, habeas corpus was refused, men were convicted without evidence, men had been injured for life. The governor wired the mayor, accusing him of not keeping the peace, and Le Sueur answered:

“There has been no violence except that perpetrated by the police officers. I am for law and order all the time but I believe it as binding on the chief of police as any tramp.…I hold no brief for the I.W.W. and have no more sympathy for them than for any organization of working men and women! The officials in power have no respect for law and order, clubbing citizens, punching women in the ribs…if it is not stopped, you will be morally responsible…for here there is only the question of guaranteeing those few simple rights of personal liberty and security without which any government is nothing but a legal hell.”

When at last the half-starved, beaten men were released they had no place to go, so the Socialists opened a camp and 0037 35 protected it with their own armed guards. The chief of police, despite the promise of the court, said to the mayor: “We are going to go out and get those S.O.Bs.” Le Sueur told him: “They are sick from your lousy jails and they have to rest up. If you touch one hair of their heads I'll blow your brains out; I'll shoot you at sight. I'll blast your frail heads off.” The police didn't go out to the camp.

They knew the gangsters would try to destroy the Iconoclast which put out a daily edition during the trouble. Two big I.W.W. cow hands, seven feet tall, stood outside the press door with all the deer and rabbit rifles they could muster in a heap beside them. When the sheriff and his boys came, the two said, “Just stay where you are on the sidewalk, boys.” The Sheriff said, “You know it's illegal to be armed.” “We're not armed,” the boys said. “You can search us; those guns are just lying there but don't come any further, just stand there and we'll stand here and everything will be all right, but step over that step and you might be dead and you wouldn't want to be dead, would you sheriff?” So the Sheriff and his boys dribbled away.

There were five hundred armed Socialists waiting for the violence the Chamber of Commerce had prepared. Some of the bankers, lawyers, wheat kings and railroad barons left the state.

This was only one of the struggles. They introduced liquor control, slum clearance, they ran Arthur Le Sueur for the Senate. Arthur proposed at the I.W.W. convention that they unite with the farmers instead of fighting them; that they work only for farmers with a “red card,” the I.W.W. membership 0038 36 card, and thus control the labor market with the progressive farmer.

The I.W.W. established a long line of militant itinerant workers in the wheat and orchards from Oklahoma to Alberta.

Then the first world war broke.

Arthur left the state and went to Fort Scott, Kansas to head the law department of the new Socialist Correspondence School, the People's College headed by Debs.

Here he met Marian Wharton, come a long way to be a Socialist and head the English department at the new college.

Here they were married.

“He believed that happiness was the only good; reason the only torch; justice the only worship; humanity the only religion; and love the only priest.

“He added to the sum of human joy, and were everyone for whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave he would sleep tonight beneath a wilderness of flowers.”

Robert G. Ingersoll

“My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian—an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, et al . Your tribe chased them out of the country for their religion's sake.

“Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine…your people…burned him.…All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them.…The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.”

Mark Twain

“With a great sum obtained I this freedom.”

Aristotle

“Freedom's a hard bought thing.”

Stephen Vincent Benet

After many migrations of her family, Mayme Lucy was born in Bedford, Iowa in 1877, where her mother Antoinette 0040 38 McGovern Lucy had fled in the depression to her last farm. Her brilliant lawyer husband fled home whenever the bitter advent of another unwanted child turned her into an enemy. She had worked as a cook at Drake University, up to the last. She always had her children alone and later her husband would come back, start his brilliant law career again, and become the spokesman for what she called “the underdog,” and a well-known criminal lawyer. He believed that the Civil War marked the end of American democracy; offers of judgeship, political plums, bought and paid for Senators, fat eaters at the barbecue table, all disgusted him.

He was a friend of Robert Ingersoll's and invited him for dinner; his wife allowed this in return for his refraining from practical jokes on her Campbellite ministers and missionaries from India. Her father had also been a dissenter, and carried a shilleleigh during the Civil War because he was outspoken in his belief that the war meant centralization of government, the development of corporate steals and the end of democratic jurisprudence and education. He taught at Oberlin where he had helped organize the underground railroad. In his own way he seceded from his country at the end, becoming deaf so as not to hear of it and dead with his devoted wife, who being of good health, died eight hours after he did. They were both buried in the field of the Toulon farm, and now, still in the field, a great granite stone keeps the plow in a tide around them.

The strong democratic men felt the defeat of the law and education, of the beloved principles and practices of Jeffersonian 0041 39 democracy, of the Christian Socialists; they saw the defeat of the land, the wars and depression. The families broke up, as the fabric of the land, the lost villages shook, scattered, broke in a toll of dispersion, disappearance, death, drunkenness, amnesia, and silence. “Where he went I do not know. He disappeared in the gold rush…at sea…Lord knows where.” A card in the horse hair trunk saying “I am fine hope you are the same.…”

The women were often left alone, the men gone to better fields. The pattern of the migrating, lost, silent, drunk father is a mid-west pattern, and accompanying that picture is the upright fanatical prohibitionist mother, bread earner, strong woman, isolated and alone. My grandmother raised her own children, my mother hers, and I mine.

So upright in her beliefs, my grandmother carried on the upright puritan village life without ever knowing that the fight for the eight hour day impinged upon her, that the growing labor movement and struggle for wages, or the wars of annexation, had something to do with the fact that she lost her land, was often poor, and saw the old Scotch and Irish pushed out of their land by the new immigrants whom she came to hate. Searching for a cause, she laid it all to drink and became the Secretary of the Oklahoma W.C.T.U. (Women's Christian Temperance Union) under the leadership of that courageous woman, Frances Willard, who later united with Susan B. Anthony and the intrepid women fighting for the vote.

With her peculiar single courage after going into Oklahoma at the opening of the territory and filing land, she packed her small bag every week, set out by buck board, into 0042 40 the miserable mining communities where she met in shacks and white steepled church the harried, devout, half-maddened women who saw the miserable pay checks go weekly at the corner saloon, and who attempted to stave off poverty and the disappearance of their husbands by smashing the saloons. They rode on floats in temperance parades with signs reading “Tremble King Alcohol we shall grow up” and “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.”

We became a kind of poor landed gentry without connection except with reforms that often met defeat. In my childhood, with the covert fear of the dispossessed, always with women, we set out on dark nights of migration, into the perils and the naked strife and the awful struggle of women, their faces set in rigid discipline so the children could not take terror from them; trekking to another farm, another city in the familiar unmarked trail from Indiana to Illinois into Iowa, into the Dakotas and Minnesota or down into Texas and back again. My grandmother, alone on her last trek, died on a train in the plains.

She always spoke of spunk and grit and barren intestinal courage. I have here a beautiful picture of the New England white house brought to my birthplace, Murray, Iowa. The shadow of a lost day chastely falls from the rigid angles of the straight house, and a tough agile old man stands laughing in the sun while the women rebuke him in their long skirts, which my grandmother wore to her death. The fichu and full bosom, the long sleeves and high at the throat for modesty, were the sign and signal of a last moment of “decency,” as she always said. It was the decency of the rural agrarian primitive 0043 41 Christianity, of the flowering of the struggle for democracy.

She never knew that the great fathers Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson had given way to Carnegie, Morgan and DuPont. She never knew it was so late; too late to turn the fiddle into the lyre, country reel into dancings, the songs of the Cumberland, the Kentucky Campbellites into lyrics and songs of the picket line; too late for the village and prairie dream of an Athens on the Mississippi. New Salem was deserted on the Sangamon (abundant) country; the wooden stool, the axe and the hoe had given way to the giant in the fields. She saw that the village life was gone but she did not see the factory in the field, turning the farmer into the serf of Consolidated peas and corn!

Bitterly she had to oppose her daughters' militant struggle for the vote, or the new industrial developments. But she abandoned the talk of justice and beauty and the rights of all because she could not see how it would come about. She was pragmatic, puritan, realistic in her way. She knew in her bones that steadily, insidiously, and ruthlessly the enemy was winning; the sons of Tubal Cain had outfoxed the angels, and the great tumorous and drunk giants lay across the land. But she held to her passion and moral conviction to the last, and she believed in and held her own human dignity and that of her fellows above reproach.

It was not enough for her first girl child with the tall head and the great asking eyes, born in her lonely room in the New England house in the middle of Iowa.

It is hard to write about Marian Le Sueur, not because she was my mother, but because like myself she was a woman. In many ways her history is suppressed within the history of the man, the history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myth of its conquerors.

To those who remember her as an independent, aggressive, bold and brilliant woman it is difficult to understand that for each of these distinctions she had to fight most of society, public opinion and the laws of the land. Women especially would like to believe that her talents were God-given. But it was not so. Her anger, her strength, her determination, even her brilliance and her oratory were things she developed, often alone, and struggled and fought for, as much as Frederick Douglass had to struggle to even read. In Texas her husband divorced her on the grounds of dangerous thoughts gleaned from reading books!

You have to think of her in the line of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Ameba Bloomer, Carrie Nation, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and the later suffragists of whom she was one. These courageous women set a pattern not understood yet, standing in their prim strength, in their sweetness and sobriety against cruel ridicule, moral censure, charges of insanity; for there is no cruelty like that of the oppressor who feels his loss of the bit on those it has been his gain to oppress. “Pine knots as we are,” Susan Anthony said. They used the only means open to them—they became orators when it was considered immoral for a woman to speak in public; if she went to meetings she was only to listen and 0045 43 learn. But they could use their constitutional right of petition, and they could tramp up and down, getting signatures for the right to work, to get a divorce, to speak in public, to vote.

If the women in the Christian church did not sit separate from the men it was only an act of courtesy or perhaps a long lost act of rebellion on their part. St. Paul still sat in the front pew saying it is better to marry than to burn, and the heads of the women were covered. She had no legal right to her own property, or to her children; both were the property of the man. A man was responsible legally for the crimes of his wife as he was for his jackass or his cow.

It is touching to think of the young girl, the most brilliant mind in her family, yet a girl. Her father said why weren't you a boy? Her mother said you have too high a forehead for a woman, cover it up—as you covered your legs, your arms, your neck, and all the natural processes of becoming a woman.

The others in the family were jealous because she liked to study. Her brothers said you will never find a husband. The oldest brother, Frank, came back from the race tracks,the darling of his mother, and played practical jokes. At sixteen, after her father's death, she ran away from home to Chicago, bought a red wig and got a job. She did not go to her father's funeral, which my grandmother always said was attended by every “tramp” he had defended.

She went to Drake University, the school of the Christian Church, and was a brilliant mathematician. She went back to Osceola on weekends. The young men who were training to be preachers drove down on Sundays in tandems with spanking horses. A year before her graduation, in her eighteenth year, 0046 44 she married one of them, and they went immediately to his first parish at Boise, Idaho.

The young and frightened wife at a meeting of the Ladies' Aid said that she didn't know if she had been poisoned by something, but she was nauseated. The ladies gave each other significant looks; two were delegated to take the young bride out to tell her privately never to mention again that she was sick because she was going to have a baby. I tell this to show the prudery, the medieval ignorance and darkness.

She came with her husband to the Chicago summer school. She took a course against his wishes on comparative religions, popular and very radical, and to her amazement she found there were other religions, older and as spiritual as the one she knew. She went to school the day before her baby was born.

Her baby died the next summer. I was born the following summer in Murray, Iowa. The rest of these years is the anonymous history of a mother following her husband except that she, with her vigorous and searching mind, studied and read, first William Ellery Channing, the liberals of the church, then Emerson, who remained a great influence, especially the essay on Self-Reliance which is worn out in many collections she still has. She had a son born in Oklahoma at her mother's house, and another son born in San Antonio, Texas.

Then she took one of the leaps of growth for which she was always ready. She welcomed change. She seemed, if she feared it, to always leap that fear and move in new directions. She came to the conclusion entirely outside the experience of her society, that it was a sin to stay with a man you no longer loved. But she had never earned her living. She could not 0047 45 possess any property that did not belong to her husband. She had no vote, no legal status, and divorce in her society was virtually unknown. She faced the poverty of the women she knew who, to raise money even for the church, had to have church suppers, for the only way they could filch money was to put it on the grocery bill, to make cakes and other things and sell them. She and her children were utterly dependent upon the man.

It must be remembered that at this time, outside the professions of nurse and teacher, there were few professions or jobs open to a woman. My mother opened a physical culture studio for women, and here she met Bernarr McFadden who came to lecture to a large audience of women she organized to hear him. She dabbled in real estate and managed a large fig orchard, hiring Mexican workers. She told a liberal lawyer friend that the only way you could make money was to get something where you hire other people and make a profit off their labor. He said all by yourself you've discovered the capitalist system!

She got a bank account and the bank, without asking her, took her money to cover her husband's overdrawn account. She could not get a divorce and was threatened with the loss of her children.

We left everything sitting on the table, our belongings, our books, and left as if we were going on a vacation. But we fled over the “border,” to Oklahoma, to my grandmother. Later, Marian's husband got the divorce on the grounds of desertion and her interest in “dangerous literature.”

Lecturing by women was considered genteel, even though 0048 46 the platform had become a militant place for the voice of women. Susan Anthony had toured the mining towns and the villages. My mother felt a social responsibility toward women. She had read Ellen Key and found her problem was not her own, but a social problem, and she wanted to speak to women. She had never taken the platform before. She was shy and conventional and intimidated by her long position as a housewife and her isolation from all but church life. Her husband's family said she was insane, that she was a wanton, a “free” woman, a bad woman. My Grandmother gave up her hardearned position as librarian in the little town of Perry to go back to family raising.

It was a daring and wonderful thing to take the road to talk about the rights of women, in the beginning to stand trembling with nervousness, to be the butt of jokes, to see the frightened, asking eyes of the women who packed the opera houses.

A Missouri paper carried this item in August, 1912:

“The Methodist Church reports a crowded house for Mrs. Wharton's physical culture lecture “The Glory of Superb Womanhood.' In the evening she occupied the pulpit, speaking of Love and Bread. ‘Relating to the sexual science and the science of eugenics, ignorance has been called innocence. Prudery has reigned supreme,’ she said. ‘Women have been born and reared in ignorance, taught to feel shame toward the most sacred functions of life. Immoralities in and out of wedlock, the terrible white slave traffic, ruined lives, blighted homes, all can be traced to inequality of the sexes, and ignorance’.”

Later she barnstormed the little towns, to speak in tents 0049 47 with quarters, horn blowers and juggler acts; but always the farm and village women waited to speak to her and she saw their eyes, and the children at their skirts, and the weighted and torn bodies.

She became an orator, taking her courage from those eyes. Unequipped and untrained, she studied, made massive notes, overcame her timidity, learned to let her voice go, to compose from the audience which became always the miracle of her speaking. She came to hate exploitation of women by men, at first hating the men, and fiercely struggling to get a place for herself in the world of men.

She started clinics for the miners' children in Oklahoma, but soon found that the wealthy middle-class women who supported them could go only so far, that they were bitted by their husbands and the economic interests of their husbands.

She began to find out that it was not all a matter of love, but of bread also.

She met the editor of the Kansas City Star , Billy Williams, who was a friend of Theodore Dreiser. She went down to the hall where the IW.W., the Syndicalists, and the Socialists had school all winter between seasons. Here she went deeper to the roots of women's oppression and to the oppression of one class by another.

In Chicago she met Emma Goldman and Eleanor Fitzgerald; she studied anarchism. Later, she met Alexander Berkman who was a great influence on her life and on my own.

But she became a socialist.