Now Powers Hapgood came into the restaurant, an ordinary-looking Middle Western Anglo-Saxon cheap business suit. He wore a union badge in his lapel. He was cheerful. He knew my father slightly. He knew Uncle Alex quite well. He apologized for being late. He had been in court morning, testifying about violence on a picket line some months before. He personally had had nothing to do with the violence. His days of derring-do were behind him. Never again would he fight anybody, or be clubbed to his knees, or be locked up in jail.
He was a talker, with far more wonderful stories than Father or Uncle Alex had ever told. He was thrown into a lunatic asylum after he led the pickets at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. He was in fights with organizers for John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers, which he considered too right wing. In 1936 he was a CIO organizer at a strike against RCA in Camden, New Jersey. He was put in jail. When several thousand strikers surrounded the jail, as a sort of reverse lynch mob, the sheriff thought it best to turn him loose again. And on and on. I have put my recollections of some of the stories he told into the mouth of, as I say, a fictitious character in this book.
It turned out that he had been telling stories all morning in court, too. The judge was fascinated, and almost everybody else in court was, too - presumably by such unselfish high adventures. The judge had encouraged Hapgood, I gathered, to go on and on. Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's sufferings and derring-do.
I remember the name of the judge. It was Claycomb. I am able to remember it so easily because I had been a high-school classmate of the judge's son, "Moon."
Moon Claycomb's father, according to Powers Hapgood, asked him this final question just before lunch: "Mr. Hapgood," he said, "why would a man from such a distinguished family and with such a fine education choose to live as you do?"
"Why?" said Hapgood, according to Hapgood. "Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir."
