Let me particularize concerning this belief. First he was in all his
writings the advocate of resistance, the champion of rebellion. But long
before he had reduced the matter to a syllogism, he was a resistant in
fact. What else could you expect from the Crusader, the Reformationist,
the Revolutionist? It might be said by the people who believe in the
supreme influence of circumstances, that it was his social environment
which made him such--that given the ideal social order and he would
have been as mild a pacificator as Jesus: which is equivalent to saying
that given the outward circumstances and an ear of wheat will grow from
a seed corn.
Lum was the resistant, the man of action; the man who while scarcely
more than a boy, enlisted as a volunteer in the 125th New York infantry
to fight a cause he then deemed just; who being taken prisoner, twice
effected his escape; who sick of the inaction of superiors, while a
third-time prisoner waiting to be exchanged, took his exchange in his
own hands, at the risk of death for desertion, and within a month
re-enlisted in the cavalry, where by sheer force of daring he rose from
private to captain; the man who smashed the idol of the Greenback
movement, sooner than let him betray its voters, reckless himself of the
rebound of hate from the politicians; the man who cast all business
prospects and journalistic hopes aside as so much chaff, when he picked
up the fallen banner of the fight in Chicago, by editing the paper of
Albert Parsons, then in prison and doomed to die; the man who could say
to his well-beloved friend, when that friend asked him whether he should
petition Governor Oglesby for his life, knowing that that petition would
be granted, the man who, under these circumstances could say: "Die,
Parsons"; the man who poor, defeated, dirty, ragged, hungry, could
proudly refuse the proffered hand of the then king of the labor
movement, that king who had kept his kingdom by repudiating the martyrs
of Chicago from the limitless height of one soul over another, answer
"there's blood on it, Powderly"; the man who faced a public audience to
defend the shooting of Frick by Alexander Berkman, a few days after the
occurrence, because he felt that when another has done a thing which you
approve as leading in the direction of your own aspirations, it is your
duty to share the effects of the counterblast his action may have
provoked; the man who seized the unknown Monster, Death, with a smile on
his lips--all of this man was germinating in the child of the pious home
who even when a mere boy had dared Jehovah.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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