Chapter 9

Grace Mainwaring to Van Mainwaring January 9, 1937

. . . When I ran into Joe Willis on the sidewalk yesterday, I thanked him for voting to keep Max as principal and couldn't resist asking him why given his previous doubts about Max's politics. Hearing about the good Max has done as a teacher helped. However, it was the knowledge that a respectable minister like Rev. Grange was involved in the rally that decided him. He confided further that Mr. Grady was a little too eager to fire Max. His determination seemed more like a personal vendetta at times than a desire to do what was best for the school and the students.

. . . Winter is still very much with us here in New Bedford like a boring guest who won't take even the most obvious hints that it's long past time for him to go. The thought of three more months of icy sidewalks and bone-chilling winds is almost more than I can stand. I don't know how Jim manages to sound so cheerful when he reads the CRNB weather report. At least Maisie, Hub and Henry haven't become too grownup and dignified for the occasional snowball fight. Of course, that may be a mixed blessing since every one of them throws better than I do.

From the Memoirs of Grace Bailey -

. . . I was surprised to see Hub on the front porch that Saturday morning. I hadn't expected him to arrive to help with the rally until late in the afternoon. He told me that he had been taking a walk to think some things over and his footsteps had brought him here before he realized where he was headed.

He seemed a little downcast, so I asked him what was troubling him. He had talked with Fr. Fitzroy who, it seemed, was now a little more reconciled to the fact of the rally. Rev. Grange had reassured him that no one was going to recruit for the International Brigades or raise money to arm the Spanish Republic.

Fr. Fitzroy still didn't approve of Hub or any other Catholic attending. He would advise any who asked privately about the subject not to but wouldn't publicly forbid it. Hub would have to search his own conscience and decide what course was best.

I couldn't see what was so awful about what Hub had told me. Hub explained that Fr. Fitzroy had gone on to say that perhaps he had pushed him too hard and too soon toward the priesthood. It might be better if Hub went to school, spent time with his friends, and thought carefully about whether the priesthood was really the life God meant for him.

Hub was certain that he was meant to be a priest, but Fr. Fitzroy thought that they should wait a few months before considering the subject again. If God had truly given him a vocation a little time shouldn't make any difference. I suggested as gently as I could that perhaps Fr. Fitzroy was trying to teach him patience. Hub conceded that that might be the case. He wasn't thrilled with the situation, but he accepted it with less reluctance than most boys his age would have managed.

Unfortunately, there was another problem. Mr. Bridgeman had forbidden Laura to see Hub if Hub attended the rally. Even worse, Laura didn't think she could go against her father. I told him that I was sorry that my actions had made life so difficult for him.

He shrugged off my apologies, telling me that it wasn't my fault that Mr. Bridgeman was being so unreasonable or that Fr. Fitzroy had his doubts about the rally. It was his choice to help me raise money for the Republic and his choice to take the consequences. I told him that he and his brother had done more than enough to help already. He didn't have to attend the rally if it would make it easier for him and Laura. He refused.

"Max says that every new generation has challenges which it has to meet. I think fascism is going to be my generation's challenge. I'm still too young to fight, but I can at least do this for those who are fighting. I owe them that much. I have to go to that rally. I can't let them down." That was when he saw me brushing tears from my eyes. "Are you alright, Aunt Grace? Is something wrong?"

"Nothing," I told him sniffing a little. "It's just seeing you so earnest . . . You looked so much like your father when he went off to war. We were all so idealistic then. We were going to set the world right so that your generation wouldn't have to suffer and sacrifice as we were doing." A wave of guilt and sadness swept over me. "I'm sorry we failed."

He put his hands on my shoulders-strong, gentle hands just like his father's. "You didn't fail, Aunt Grace. The diplomats and politicians you trusted to guard the peace failed. They let warmongering dictators like Hitler and Mussolini come to power and now they won't do anything to stop them. I promise you, my generation will stop them if we have to, even if we pay in blood to do it."

I took Hub in my arms and hugged him as tightly as I could. "I pray to God it never comes to that."

Shortly after Hub left, a very upset Laura Bridgeman showed up at the front door asking to see me. This morning was shaping up to be far busier than I had expected.

"You're my last chance," Laura implored. "I've talked to both of Hub's parents, but Mrs. Sutton can't persuade him not to go to the rally and Mr. Sutton won't even try."

"Why do you think I should?"

"Because it isn't worth it. All you're doing is helping a bunch of atheistic Communists persecute the church."

"Is that what your father says?"

"Yes. He says that you and Mr. Sutton are naïve idealists. He admires your loyalty to your husband. He just can't understand why a respectable businessman would volunteer to fight for the Republic. I can't understand it either."

I took her by the arm. "Let me show you something."

We went upstairs and I showed her the scrapbook I was keeping on the war in Spain. By the time she finished reading, she was more than a little shaken, especially by the articles from the New York Times and the Catholic Worker. She had been ready to discount anything from the Toronto Star and not just because of its reputation for sympathy with the far left. The firing of its first Spanish Civil War correspondent, Pierre Van Paasen, for plagiarizing his reports from the work of other journalists hadn't improved its credibility with her. Then I told her what I had learned from my acquaintance on the Star, the same one who had helped me find Van after he joined the International Brigades.

Van Paasen had plagiarized, but he hadn't lied about the events recorded in his stories, only about going to Spain to witness them personally instead of staying in his apartment in Paris. The paper's owner, J.E. Atkinson, had made sure of that and would have published a retraction of anything false. He had also made sure that Van Paasen's successor, Matthew Halton, actually went to Spain and did his own excellent reporting. Even so, I saw to it that every Star article in my scrapbook was accompanied by articles from other papers that confirmed its facts.

Poor Laura was shocked to find that so many of Franco's atrocities that the Catholic Register had assured her were falsehoods or exaggerations had actually happened. She couldn't understand how a Catholic publication's reporting could be so biased. I pointed out that the Register got its news of Spain from the press bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in America.

I suspected that the press bureau's correspondents were only allowed to see and report what the fascists wanted them to or were so embittered by the Republic's mistreatment of the church that they were willing to overlook the fascists' crimes. Laura still couldn't support the Republic, but, after reading about the savagery of the fighting in Madrid and elsewhere, she couldn't blame me for doing anything that might help my husband make it through alive.

"I think I understand you and Hub better," she said. "I still don't understand your husband. Hating fascism is one thing, but why did he feel he had to go to war?"

I told her how Van had been in Germany when Hitler and the Nazis took power. I recounted the insanity he had witnessed. She went pale with horror when I described how Van had seen S.A. thugs beat an old man to death in front of his shop for no other reason than that he was Jewish.

"My God . . .!" Laura exclaimed.

"That wasn't all," I continued. "Van tried to get a policeman to arrest the murderers." Van had admitted to me the last time I saw him that this action on the part of a con artist such as he was at the time showed just how upset he was at what he had seen. Obviously, I didn't mention that to Laura. The policeman refused to make any arrests, explaining that by decree of Interior Minister Hermann Goring, policemen such as himself were forbidden to interfere with the S.A.. "Besides," he added, "we Germans are simply dealing with our Jewish undesirables the way you Americans sometimes deal with your Negro undesirables.'"

Laura looked positively sick on hearing that. I hate to imagine how Van, as an American, must have felt.

"I think Van saw those thugs and that policeman every time he read about Franco's crimes or Hitler's efforts to aid him," I concluded.

"This war isn't as simple as noble Christians versus evil Communists, is it?"

"No. It isn't as simple as noble freedom fighters versus evil fascists either, although the fascists are as evil as human beings can get."

"I don't suppose you're going to persuade Hub not to come to the rally, are you?"

"I can't. He's growing up." I will admit to a pang or two of nostalgia for the lovable little scamp he used to be. "He's reaching the point where he has to decide a lot of things for himself and this is one of them."

Vanaver Mainwaring to Grace Mainwaring January 8, 1937

Just dropping you a line. My friends and I are in La Havre. As nearly the only member of our group who has ever been in France before, I have become very popular. Everybody wants to know the necessary French phrases for ordering meals and drinks and asking directions.

Some of my comrades are talking about the pretty girls they intend to meet in Paris. As for me, I'm glad that I belong only to you. I will probably find a good jazz club and enjoy the world's best music while I have the chance. No doubt I'll learn to take bullets and shells in my stride when I'm in Spain, but not being able to listen to jazz is the sort of thing that can wear on a person.

From the Journal of Honey Sutton January 10, 1937

Mass was an ordeal today. Laura tried to talk to Hub. Mr. Bridgeman dragged her away by the arm, telling Hub to stay away from her. When Max tried to persuade him to be more reasonable, he told him that he couldn't believe that he dared show his face in a Catholic church. We got some ugly looks from several people, but after mass, a couple of Catholic miners came up and congratulated Max.

. . . Dr Barlow told me and Max not to take too long visiting with Mrs. Whitney. She seemed to be recovering well from the pneumonia but needed her rest. It was a shock to see one of the most formidable people I knew looking so frail. However, having people to talk to revived her a little.

She politely but firmly brushed aside Max's thanks for helping him keep his job. "I didn't do it for you. I did it for the children of New Bedford. You have many faults, Max Sutton-your questionable politics not the least of them-but this much I can say for you. Before anything else, you always try to do what's best for the children under your care. That quality, even more than professional competence, is what makes you an inspired teacher and a first-rate administrator. It's why I defended you and why I recommended you to succeed me as principal in the first place."

"I don't know what to say," Max exclaimed.

"Don't say anything. When I was a little girl, the world was a far more orderly and tranquil place. Now everything is changing at an impossible speed. I would never have expected airplanes or cinema or women voting. Who knows what kind of world is waiting for today's children? It's up to you to prepare them for it. You have a tremendous responsibility. Live up to it."

"I promise you. I will."

"I know. That makes it easier to take up my niece and her husband on their offer to come live with them in Ottawa. I wish I could continue living on my own, but my health won't allow it. I will miss this town. It could do with a little less prying into neighbors' business and a little more charity, but most of the people in it mean well." The gaze she turned on me was sadder and softer than I was used to from her. "It's always been a good place to bring up children."

May Bailey to Jessie Buchanan January 14, 1937

The rally was a great success. We collected the rest of the money we needed for the mobile blood transfusion unit. Grace cut an impressive figure as a public speaker. Her work as a radio announcer has given her a certain poise and confidence in front of a microphone.

I wonder if I was the only one who found it incongruous that the daughter of mine owners was calling on workers to show solidarity with their fellow workers in another country defending themselves against her fellow industrialists. "Workers of the world, unite!" indeed. Granted, the industrialists of Spain are genuinely exploitative not to mention ruthless and unprincipled.

However, she did go a little overboard in characterizing the policy Hub came up with last summer of paying part of the miners' salaries in stock as an experiment in cooperative ownership rather than a temporary expedient to solve a cash flow problem. Thanks to her, it won't be easy to end the policy when our revenues improve.

Grace was sorry to have caused me trouble but didn't think we should end the policy. I had to concede that Hub could be right in believing that employees might be more loyal to the company if it was partly theirs. Grace even redeemed herself somewhat by suggesting a workable compromise.

Her idea was to give the employees the option of returning to being paid all of their salary in cash or continuing to have a part of it paid in stock. I am not so sure about her further suggestion of giving every new employee who has worked for the company a year the option of having part of his salary paid in stock. However, I can't disagree that when we eventually hire the children of the miners who work for us now, their fathers won't want them to have fewer benefits than themselves.

. . . Now that the campaign for the mobile blood transfusion unit is over, Grace will need something to do with her spare time. If she cleans the house a third time, the glare from all the polished surfaces will blind me. Fortunately, I have an idea.

Next Post: Volunteers in Spain. May makes Grace an offer.