He registered for the draft on Stein’s advice, though he wrote conscientious objector on the card. Soon after that he and Stein quarrelled. Stein said there was nothing to it but to bow before the storm; Ben said he was going to agitate against it until he was put in jail. That meant he was out of a job and it was the end of his studying law. Kahn wouldn’t take him back in his drugstore because he was afraid the cops would raid him if it got to be known he had a radical working for him. Ben’s brother Sam was working in a munition factory at Perth Amboy and making big money; he kept writing Ben to stop his foolishness and get a job there too. Even Gladys told him it was silly to ram his head against a stone wall. In July he left home and went back to live with Helen Mauer over in Passaic. His number hadn’t been called yet, so it was easy to get a job in the shipping department of one of the mills. They were working overtime and losing hands fast by the draft.
The Rand School had been closed up, The Call suspended, every day new friends were going around to Wilson’s way of looking at things. Helen’s folks and their friends were making good money, working overtime; they laughed or got sore at any talk of protest strikes or revolutionary movements; people were buying washing machines, liberty bonds, vacuum cleaners, making first payments on houses. The girls were buying fur coats and silk stockings. Helen and Ben began to plan to go out to Chicago, where the wobblies were putting up a fight. September 2nd came the roundup of I.W.W. officials by government agents. Ben and Helen expected to be arrested, but they were passed over. They spent a rainy Sunday huddled on the bed in their dank room, trying to decide what they ought to do. Everything they trusted was giving way under their feet. “I feel like a rat in a trap,” Helen kept saying. Every now and then Ben would jump up and walk up and down hitting his forehead with the palm of his hand. “We gotta do something here, look what they’re doing in Russia.”
One day a warworker came around to the shipping department to sign everybody up for a Liberty Bond. He was a cockylooking young man in a yellow slicker. Ben wasn’t much given to arguments during working hours, so he just shook his head and went back to the manifest he was making out. “You don’t want to spoil the record of your department, do you? It’s one hundred percent perfect so far.” Ben tried to smile. “It seems too bad, but I guess it’ll have to be.” Ben could feel the eyes of the other men in the office on him. The young man in the slicker was balancing uneasily from one foot to the other. “I don’t suppose you want people to think you’re a pro-German or a pacifist, do you?” “They can suppose what they damn like, for all I care.” “Let’s see your registration card, I bet you’re a slacker.” “Look here, get me,” said Ben, getting to his feet, “I don’t believe in capitalist war and I’m not going to do anything I can help to support it.” The young man in the slicker turned his back, “Oh, if you’re one of them yellow bastards I won’t even talk to you.” Ben went back to work. That evening when he was punching the timeclock a cop stepped up to him. “Let’s see your registration card, buddy.” Ben brought the card out from his inside pocket. The cop read it over carefully, “Looks all right to me,” he said reluctantly. At the end of the week Ben found he was fired; no reason given.
He went to the room in a panic. When Helen came back he said he was going to Mexico. “They could get me under the espionage act for what I told that guy about fighting capitalism.” Helen tried to calm him down, but he said he wouldn’t sleep in that room another night, so they packed their bags and went over to New York on the train. They had about a hundred dollars saved up between them. They got a room on East 8th Street under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Gold. It was the next morning that they read in the Times that the Maximalists had taken over the government in Petrograd with the slogan All Power to the Soviets. They were sitting in a small pastry shop on 2nd Avenue drinking their morning coffee, when Ben, who had run around to the newsstand for a paper, came back with the news. Helen began to cry: “Oh, darling, it’s too good to be true. It’s the world revolution…. Now the workers ’ll see that they were being deceived by false good times, that the war’s really aimed at them. Now the other armies ’ll start to mutiny.” Ben took her hand under the table and squeezed it hard. “We gotto work now, darling…. I’ll go to jail here before I’ll run away to Mexico. I’d acted like a yellow bastard if it hadn’t been for you, Helen…. A man’s no good alone.”
They gulped their coffee and walked around to the Ferbers’ house on 17th Street. Al Ferber was a doctor, a short stout man with a big paunch; he was just leaving the house to go to his office. He went back into the hall with them and yelled upstairs to his wife: “Molly, come down… Kerensky’s run out of Petrograd with a flea in his ear… dressed as a woman he ran.” Then he said in Yiddish to Ben that if the comrades were going to hold a meeting to send greetings to the soldiers’ and peasants’ government, he’d give a hundred dollars toward expenses, but his name would have to be kept out of it or else he’d lose his practice. Molly Ferber came downstairs in a quilted dressing gown and said she’d sell something and add another hundred. They spent the day going around to find comrades they had the addresses of; they didn’t dare use the phone for fear of the wires being tapped.
The meeting was held at the Empire Casino in the Bronx a week later. Two Federal agents with beefsteak faces sat in the front row with a stenographer who took down everything that was said. The police closed the doors after the first couple of hundred people had come in. The speakers on the platform could hear them breaking up the crowd outside with motorcycles. Soldiers and sailors in uniform were sneaking into the gallery by ones and twos and trying to stare the speakers out of countenance.
When the old whitehaired man who was chairman of the meeting walked to the front of the stage and said, “Comrades, gentlemen of the Department of Justice and not forgetting our young wellwishers up in the gallery, we have met to send a resolution of greetings from the oppressed workers of America to the triumphant workers of Russia,” everybody stood up and cheered. The crowd milling around outside cheered too. Somewhere they could hear a bunch singing the International. They could hear policewhistles and the dang dang of a patrol wagon. Ben noticed that Fanya Stein was in the audience; she looked pale and her eyes held onto him with a fixed feverish stare. When his turn came to speak he began by saying that on account of the kind sympathizers from Washington in the audience, he couldn’t say what he wanted to say but that every man and woman in the audience who was not a traitor to their class knew what he wanted to say…. “The capitalist governments are digging their own graves by driving their people to slaughter in a crazy unneccessary war that nobody can benefit from except bankers and munition makers…. The American working class, like the working classes of the rest of the world, will learn their lesson. The profiteers are giving us instruction in the use of guns; the day will come when we will use it.” “That’s enough, let’s go, boys,” yelled a voice from the gallery. The soldiers and sailors started hustling the people out of the seats. The police from the entrances converged on the speakers. Ben and a couple of others were arrested. The men in the audience who were of conscription age were made to show their registration cards before they could leave. Ben was hustled out into a closed limousine with the blinds drawn before he could speak to Helen. He’d hardly noticed who it was had clicked the handcuffs on his wrists.