British-born Socialist, wobbly organizer, political prisoner, and founding Communist, Charles Ashleigh was a working-class poet, openly (as much as comrades were then) gay, lover of Charles McKay for much of the 1920s, and a victim of deportation. A gifted writer, below he vividly tells of his experience of the U.S. through its prisons. Arriving in the U.S. in 1912, he participated in Socialist Party and then I.W.W. organizing, becoming nationally known as leader of the Everett Defense. Arrested in the 1917 sweep of I.W.W. leaders and found guilty of seditious conspiracy, Ashleigh was sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth. Released in the December, 1921 amnesty, Ashleigh traveled to New York City where he first met McKay. Deported in April, 1922 he would meet McKay at the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, who would send him to India. Deported from India back to Britain, he would be active with the Profintern throughout the 1920s and remained an activist his whole life. Charles Ashleigh died in Brighton on December 25, 1974.

‘Prison—and the American Scene’ by Charles Ashleigh from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 6 No. 15. April 14, 1922.

SUPPER is over, and we are back in our cells for the night. From five o’clock until seven the next morning, we shall be enclosed, two in each cell, two in each little stone and iron coffin, seven feet by three-and-a-half.

The guards walk softly and swiftly along the galleries, counting the men. The cell-house bell clangs twice sharply; the count is correct. No one has escaped. The human stock is all properly assorted and stalled.

Then come the “runners” with the evening papers. If you wish, and if you have the price, you may subscribe to a daily paper. All the political prisoners do so; and this is the cell-house where the “politicals’’ are housed.

There comes a silence, broken by a slight rustling. The boys are tearing the heart out of the evening’s news. They are rushing down the columns, searching for certain headlines: “Russia,” “Strike,” “Labor,” “West Virginia.” And when they come to such a headline, they stiffen, bending forward, frowningly concentrated.

Perhaps tonight’s news records a victory—a strike won; a victory of struggling Russia over the harassing Whites. Then you will hear a cry from some cell. Some prisoner wishes to tell a friend, in another cell, to read the item.

“Hey, there, Jack, in Number 52!”

“Yes?”

“Got the Star? Turn to page three—top of the second column!”

Everyone else on that side of the cell-block has heard this, of course; and there is a stirring and rustling as they all hunt for the article. For a few minutes there is silence; and then the voices flash out in happy comment. The guards order less noise. But it is some time before the unusual loudness dies down.

But then comes a silence deeper than that which usually reigns in this rectangular house of grayness. It is the reaction. Now the boys are thinking…They are thinking of their own isolation from the thing which is to them the very core of life. The world whirls on; the molten stream of events flows on tempestuously; there are crashing conflicts and aching defeats and, here and there, a hard won victory. And they are out of it! Condemned to sameness and inaction, to the clogging sluggishness of prison.

And that night it is not just the hardness of the straw bed that keeps sleep from their eyes and unconsciousness from their gnawing minds. It is memory and yearning, and the sterile fever of hope.

This is a scene out of America. Many have been writing of the American Scene. Many have, But I can not write of it; for the American scene is too broad and varied and changing for me to compass. So I have taken one scene from the shifting panorama of America; and from it one can, perhaps, make some estimate of all America, of America as it has appeared to me, a foreigner, in my ten years’ sojourn.

You see, in England they do not allow convicts to subscribe to newspapers. They may permit this in certain special cases, but it is certainly not allowed to the ordinary convict. And we in Leavenworth Penitentiary were quite ordinary convicts; for the Department of Justice makes no distinction between political and other prisoners. In fact, have we not heard, hundreds of times, the statement that “there are no political prisoners in America?”

So in America convicts may subscribe to newspapers; they may play outdoor games in the summer; they may receive all the letters sent to them—provided they pass the prison censorship. They have many privileges which come not within the fairest dreams of British prison reformers.

But in America, also, prisoners are occasionally beaten up. In some American prisons they have still the whipping post. In Leavenworth, although there is no whipping post, they chain men to the bars of their cell doors for hours at a time. And they will permit other prisoners—“favorites”— to enter punishment cells and to beat the occupants with baseball bats.

Also, in American prisons, there is much favoritism: there are men in American prisons who are prisoners hardly more than in name. They are permitted to go outside the walls, to eat at a special table, even to wear civilian clothes. Some of these men have earned these privileges through sheer merit, others through “playing politics” or through acting as spies upon their fellow inmates.

In English prisons there is no physical brutality; and there is practically no favoritism. In England, the system is implacable: cold, mechanical, relentless, dehumanized. In other words, it is “just.” The British system is based upon the hard abstract concept of justice: everyone shall be treated exactly alike—even punishment shall be meted out with all the automatic inevitability and impersonality of a slot machine.

But the Americans are human: they will beat one man and pat another on the back, precisely as you and I treat our enemies and our friends, or as we should like to treat them.

And it seems to me that here is a clue to the whole of America, to that much-discussed but unseizable thing we call the American spirit. For it is true that an American, met casually in a train, at a baseball game, or in a bootlegger’s parlor, will—if he likes you—take you home to dine with him, and offer to put you up for a week, with insistent and somewhat boisterous good comradeship. And it is also true that Americans, if they do not like you or your opinions, will beat you, railroad you to jail, tar and feather you or lynch you.

I have called this attitude human. Perhaps that is not quite the right word. I should perhaps have said child-like or emotional. For, it seems to me, in no country in the world are judgments based so completely and intimately upon emotional impulses as in America. And in no country are there fewer checks, fewer rational safeguards placed about the strong and willful mutations of impulse, than in America.

That is why I love and hate America at the same time. It is because the lush vigor of American emotional energy manifests itself in such varying forms: in shapes that charm and in shapes that horrify. And I think that it is a half-comprehending realization of this wanton prodigality of your emotional life which has made some people—who are rather afraid of it—seek to batten down this crude surging with all manner of inhibitive legislation and suppressive conventions. A hopeless task, indeed! For this raw life cannot be prisoned, it can only be driven or cajoled into new channels. And this insistent vitality of America, which throbs in its power-houses and thunders in its mills, postures abandonedly in its jazz and its religious revivals, and speaks through the mouths of Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson here, and through the mouth of Billy Sunday there—this hot and naked power will not even be denied by its would-be suppressors. Even them it conquers, and makes ecstatic dervishes out of prohibitionists, frenetic mystics out of blue-law advocates. Why even your aesthetic pessimists work harder at their job than those of any other land. I have never seen such eager labor put into absinthine languishings and the pursuit of pale sins as that displayed by the Greenwich Village decadents.

A prison guard in Leavenworth will often chat in a friendly way with a prisoner; he will even confide to him problems of his family or working life, and ask his advice. Such a thing in an English prison is inconceivable. Just as much as a lynching, such as the killing of Frank Little, would be inconceivable in England. Life burns here in England with a steadier fire. It does not rise to lick the stake to which a mutilated Negro is bound; nor, perhaps, does it flame into the sudden beauty of comradeship and sacrifice shown by hundreds of humble workers of the West who would travel through blizzards and desert, to go to jail for a cause. There is nothing here to equal the color and the tension of an East Side garment workers’ strike.

But England has its uses: it provides you with a quiet place in which to sit down in peace to write about America. And it gives you a far-off place of calm from which to view America. For American life crashes rather too incessantly and demandingly upon one’s consciousness; its drama sucks you into its own vortex; it is hard to remove from this strong and tumultuous life, in order to write about it.

Over there, your armies of gunmen and strikers are deployed, ready to shoot death into each other’s camps. There is raw conflict in America. Over there, your artists and poets, weaned at last from the withered breasts of Europe, are beginning to express, inchoately, perhaps, but significantly, the dark and varied complexities of American life. The women’s clubs are discussing Dostoievsky or Hamsun, superficially, indeed, but interestedly. The American Legion riots in Kansas City; and the Holy Rollers dance and howl ecstatically in small towns of New Jersey. And a great crowd, red-mouthed and frenzied, roars thunderously when Babe Ruth hits a homer.

Out of this turmoil, what will come? Out of your whelming strengths and appalling weaknesses, what will be forged? What giant thing is struggling for form in the womb of America? Will it be a great brute tyranny of vulgarity; or will some shining glory of comradeship and power emerge to make a new morning for the world?

And it is because they sense this struggle and this imminence, and because they will that it shall come with beauty and fulfillment for us all, that a hundred men still scan eagerly the newspapers, every quiet evening, in their cells, at Leavenworth.

Truth emerged from the The Duluth Labor Leader, a weekly English language publication of the Scandinavian local of the Socialist Party in Duluth, Minnesota and began on May Day, 1917 as a Left Wing alternative to the Duluth Labor World. The paper was aligned to both the SP and the IWW leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-IWW raids in September, 1917. The paper was reborn as Truth, with the Duluth Scandinavian Socialists joining the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. Shortly after the editor, Jack Carney, was arrested and convicted of espionage in 1920. Truth continued to publish with a new editor JO Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the CP.

PDF of full issue: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1922-04-14/ed-1/seq-1