Charles Ashleigh was among those swept up in 1917’s mass arrests of radicals and, awaiting trial, lodged in Chicago’s county jail with dozens of comrades. Earning his reputation as a fantastic writer, Ashleigh tells of the deeply individual response to confinement of his fellow prisoners. Wonderful.

‘The Cook County Jail’ by Charles Ashleigh from The Ohio Socialist. No. 25. July 17, 1918.

In the consideration of principles, theories and movements, we should never lose sight of the personal. Many people who are too bookfed, or whose cerebral diet has been too severely confined to the “practical,” or academic become inclined to live mentally among generalizations only. It is good to observe a great array of men–an army or a marching pilgrimage.

It is impressive, the sight of this moving mass in its slow and fluid immensity. But one should not forget that each unit of this host is a breathing bundle of emotions, a compact battle-ground, perhaps, of conflicting passions, warring instincts and twisted purpose. And some among them may even have souls which are half-wild gardens, purpled with the mist of dreams amidst which play the fountains of fantasy.

And so it is with us in jail, friend of mine. You look upon us as a body, a band of men who are passing through this ordeal of iron and stone and monotony, so that, one day, a larger and more colorful life shall be won for this world’s folk. A legion of crusaders, adventuring to win the Holy City of social and industrial freedom; a strong-souled company of knights, seeking the Holy Grail; which is liberty and mirth and the space to laugh and love and live.

We are all this. It is indeed, true, that we represent the most significant and dynamic factor in America’s evolution towards a complete democracy–a democracy industrial as well as political. In the mass we are all that, but considering us individually, each one of us adds to these common qualities the tang, the color of his own personality.

We are shut up in stone iron-barred cells, measuring six feet by eight. Three of us are in each of these miniature hells, and therein we sleep and eat and perform all the intimate physiological funds. Unventilated, badly lighted and evil smelling are our close-packed kennels, and within them our rasped spirits surge and jar or lapse into a drab sluggishness. The humiliation of being constantly subject to orders; our health enfeebled by confinement, monotony and malnutrition–all these things are terrible tests for the plastic souls of men.

And each one of us, in his own way, reacts to these tests. Some, thank heaven, conserve their sense of humor. It is humor somewhat shot through with irony, ’tis true, but it is the divine and salving grace of humor, at that.

We march with proud front and cheery mien during the few hours in which we are allowed to walk up and down in the gray stone-flagged corridors “for exercise.” We talk of daily trifles or of battles seen of work performed. Volubly we talk of these things, but–are there not other things deep and insistent in us, of which we do not speak, after the manner of those who subscribe to the convention of “manly reserve?”

I do not know if that is so of the others, but I suspect it of some, and I know that it is true of myself. For manifold are the things which flicked across the field of my consciousness, and while I may be busy in banter or the recounting of stale surface experience, another part of me is hushed in contemplation of these willful, broken visions.

It is, perhaps, the pure smell of newly fallen rain in the slow darkening evening of a London street. Or it may be the swift impression of a little French cafe, humble and vivacious, where began a rich friendship. Or, one day, when walking on the Argentine pampas, I saw the sun decline, attended by all the color of a regal court of the Orient…or, perhaps, the memory, faint as a drifting leaf, of an encounter which seemed to carry promise of a splendid burgeoning, but which ended soon with a commonplace parting that left a sorrow pale as the dying of distant smoke upon the sky.

But, whatever their content, these are dear and close remembrances which step, with gentle intrusion, upon the threshold of my wearyness, stinging me to sudden flares of feeling which are staunched in their beginning. They happen, I suppose, to everyone, and at any time, but I think they are more frequent and more poignant, although more shattered, to one who is in in prison.

Sometimes I wish I could quiet these chance stirrings; I would refuse these vagrants of consciousness that enter without warning, bearing varied cargoes of compelling waves. But that is only when I am in the first hurt of them. I would not really banish them if I could; for though they bring pain, they also awaken and stir me to a renewed appetite for that eternal and supreme intoxication–life.

The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from January, 1917 to November, 1919. It was edited by Alfred Wagenknecht Wagenknecht spent most of 1918 in jail for “violation of the Conscription Act.” The paper grew from a monthly to a semi-monthly and then to a weekly in July, 1918 and eventually a press run of over 20,000. The Ohio Socialist Party’s endorsement of the Left Wing Manifesto led to it suspension at the undemocratic, packed Socialist Party Convention in 1919. As a recognized voice of the Left Wing, the paper carried the odd geographical subheading, “Official Organ of the Socialist Parties of Ohio and Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and New Mexico” by 1919’s start. In November of that year the paper changed to the “labor organ” of the Communist Labor Party and its offices moved to New York City and its name changed to The Toiler, a precursor to the Daily Worker. There the paper was edited by James P. Cannon for a time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/ohio-socialist/025-jul-17-1918-ohio-soc.pdf