Der Geist issue 4 is now available! That creates a total of 724 pages of egoism from 1845 to 1945, with “lost” works reprinted, new translations every issue, rare photos and images, and new research and writing.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

In this issue, a previously undiscovered speech by Ragnar Redbeard; original translations of Max Stirner and Malfew Seklew; rare reproductions from Dora Marsden and Friedrich Nietzsche; individualists and eccentrics versus the KKK; and more.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 4
Spring 2021
Paperback, 172 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651-21-3
ISSN 2639-5339

BISHOP FALLOWS RAKES K. K. K. BEFORE DILL PICKLE CLUB

“The Ku Klux Klan strikes at the heart of American democracy; it is playing to men’s baser passions,” declared Bishop Samuel Fallows, presiding bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church, before 200 persons at the revived Dill Pickle club in Tooker alley, last night. A third of the audience were Negro men and women.

“If American life has grown so morally desperate,” the bishop said, “that violators of the law must have secret warnings and night visits by shrouded men; if the courts have become so impotent that a secret society must try offenders, then God help this country.

“I came to the Dill Pickle club last year to protest against the ungodly, un-Christian and un-Ameriean treatment of the Jews in Poland. I now say: Down with the Ku Klux Klan! It Is a vicious thing.”

Just north of Towertown, on the outskirts of the elegant Gold Coast, was the famous Dill Pickle Club, establish to provide a theater in which poets could recite their verses. [Founder Jack] Jones often found it necessary, however, to tailor the presentation for the audience that was present, and typical nightclub entertainment was not uncommon. “I give the audience the high-brow stuff until the crowd begins to grow thin,” he explained, “and then I turn on the sex faucet.” […] Several attempts were made during the 1920’s to commercialize the Towertown bohemia. One such enterprise was a seventy-five-cent “Seeing Bohemia” tour, during which patrons were conducted through tearooms and studios decorated for the occasion in a bizarre fashion. The Dill Pickle Club reportedly staged raids, at least a few times, and later increased its admissions charge as a come-on to those who expected to see legally forbidden activities. [With] the coming of Prohibition, Towertown became something of a haunt of the underworld, too. The Dill Pickle became a scarcely-disguised speakeasy, and even had itself raided a few times just for the publicity… The gangsters did not appall the writers and journalists the way they did most men; they knew them personally; Chicago was a a jungle anyway, and Prohibition was decidedly unpopular.

The Search for “Chicago’s Great Soul”

When Chicago was the intellectual and literary heart of America — and incredibly it once was — its nerve center was a rambling old barn in back of 876 1/2 North Dearborn Parkway, or, more specifically, at 18 Tooker Place. You walked down an alley and found, between two piles of ash cans, a short narrow door bearing the sign, “Step high, bend low and leave your dignity behind,” and you had arrived at the Dill Pickle Club.

It lasted from 1917 to 1932, a span of years which marks almost exactly the rise, decline, and fall of any authentic cultural vigor the city ever saw, reflecting too the glare of the wild and uproarious twenties with sound effects by tommy gun.

The Dill Pickle Club started as a high-souled movement of revolution, and the early group included Jack Jones, one of the I.W.W. founders; poet Carl Sandburg; Jim Larkin and Jack Carney, two Irish revolutionaries; William Z. Foster and Jack Johnston, two American Communists; writers Ben Hecht and Alfred Kreymborg; and Stanley Sokolsky, the sculptor.

Initially, it was the idea of Larkin, a former commander in chief of the Irish Republican Army and one of the warriors in the Irish revolution of 1916 headed by Padraic Pearce; he started it in memory of a Dublin club as a sort of rallying point of young revolutionaries.

But its Moses and leading light from beginning to end was “Dynamiter Jack” Jones, a Canadian-born, sharp-featured, bushy-haired union organizer, a house painter by trade and creative painter by hobby. First married to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, still a well-known Communist, Jones authored a book called Techup, which became the model plan for the C. I. O. ‘s industrial unionization. His life was studded with tragedy; shortly after the advent of the Dill Pickle Club, Jones married a beautiful young socialite artist. Sailing north on Lake Michigan for a honeymoon trip, their craft was overturned in a sudden storm. Jones clung to his bride and the capsized boat for a herculean eighteen hours, but she was drowned and he near death when aid finally reached them.

The Dill Pickle Club quickly became a hangout for literary and artistic rebels, and the Hobo College crowd moved over from the West Side. It was a hodgepodge, sometimes wild-eyed collection of little theater folk, flappers, society leaders, anarchists, hoboes, and writers, but the most alive and stimulating group ever assembled beneath a Chicago roof. It was, in short, a synthesis, a comradely coming together of the most imaginative and daring souls from every walk of life: the minister met the prostitute, the labor leader knew the editor, the politician met his constituents, the college student found the philosopher, the sociologist studied the criminal, the criminal discovered the beauty of art and perhaps a lawyer, and the writers found treasure beyond belief. The writers included Hecht, shaping his Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, Sandburg playing his banjo, Charles MacArthur, Manuel Komroff, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Maxwell Bodenheim, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Henry Justin Smith, Austin O’Malley, John Drury, and many others; and they were joined by attorney Clarence Darrow, artist Edgar Miller, and actor Richard Bennett, father of Joan and Constance.

The declared intention of the Dill Pickle Club was to “find Chicago’s great soul.” Another purpose, said Dr. Ben Reitman, long its lecture chairman, was “to elevate the minds of the people to a lower level.” He added:

“We of the Dill Pickle Club believe in everything. We are radicals, pickpockets, second-story men, and thinkers. Some of us practice free love and free love and some medicine. Many of us have gone through religion and tired of it. Some of us have tired of our wives.”

As many as seven hundred people often crowded into the Sunday night lecture meetings, and no topic was barred. Here poets read their own verses; artists talked Dadaism, futuristic abstracts, and Picasso; and experts discussed Vorticism, Freud, psychoanalysis, free love, and companionate marriage. You could get any ideas off your chest, whether you were a paroled convict, a concert musician, an unwed mother, a psychiatrist, a reformed vegetarian, or a three- headed guinea pig. You could advocate murder and arson. In a period when women were revolting against a prudery that was almost obscene in its inversion of truth and lascivious whispering silences, the “inside stuff on sex” was a big draw; the largest crowd that ever attended a lecture came to hear Magnus Hershfield when he discussed sexual abnormalities. It was the heyday of gabby greatness, and a Dill Pickle audience might hear General Coxy (of Coxy’s Army), Tom Mooney’s brother John, Frederick Cook, the uncrowned discoverer of the North Pole, Chicago Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, con man “Yellow Kid” Weil, “Big Bill” Heywood, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Eugene Debs, and Emma Goldman.

The heckling was devastating. If the visitor didn’t leave his dignity intact outside, as the motto warned, it was battered beyond recognition inside. The detractors used powerful eloquence, vulgar sarcasm, biting wit, and Marxist logic. Lucy Page Gaston, who came to lecture against cigarettes, said later it was “the most awful adventure of my life.” When she was through, Statistical Slim unstuck himself from his chair, opined nastily about reformers in general, then announced:

“I never smoked a cigarette in my life. Always been a snuff user. But after hearin’ this woman and lookin’ into her face, I’m gonna start smokin’. Has anybody got a cigarette?” Then Chairman Reitman ordered two collections taken up, one for the Anti-Cigarette League and the other to buy cigarettes for pacifists then serving jail sentences. Lucy was “infinitely disgusted.”

The collections couldn’t have amounted to much. The Dill Picklers, gathered about the old pot-bellied stove in their old barn, were a proud proletariat, hugging their poverty. Once, some bandits wandered in and relieved the whole assembly of a total $1.02 except for one embarrassed gentleman who parted with $875. The Picklers explained hastily he wasn’t a regular.

Lizzie Davis, then queen of the hoboes, once introduced a speaker as “the famous New York gangster who ran Al Capone out of Brooklyn.” Even the Dill Picklers were skeptical until they heard later that “Wild Bill” Lovett had been killed in New York. He was wanted for fourteen murders. Lizzie, who wanted to be a writer, knew innumerable gangsters, thieves, prostitutes, con men, and hop-heads. She often sat all night talking with them. Sometimes she didn’t talk; she just stayed all night.

In addition to the serious intellectuals, the club attracted a fantastic assortment of guests; it was the rendezvous of high low-brows and low high-brows, long-haired boys and short-haired girls. There was Lena, a little old lady with a poke bonnet and a half-dozen underskirts, widow of the hanged August Spies; Countess Luddie, who wore sandals and bobbed her hair; Van Cina, the Dutch artist vittles and vice and piccolo player; Paddy Caroll from Hell’s Half Acre; a Spanish spiritualist who shaved off her hair and dyed her head green; and Reitman, in a frock coat, his red shirt showing beneath a Windsor tie, demanding silence while his wife read her poem, “I Am a Woman, Wee,” about standing in the light and looking toward the sun and cosmic love.

Reitman, a physician, an ex-anarchist press agent for Emma Goldman and once a foe of matrimony, also presided over a forum when six young women, “authorities on the subject,” discussed the faults and errors of the matrimonially-inclined male.

“Long practice has shown these ladies just where the man falls down when wooing women,” explained Reitman.

Once an unmarried pregnant girl was presented for the audience to decide her fate, suicide or abortion, but there are no records of the verdict.

At one time an unnamed patron was going to donate $250,000 for a club building; the first floor was to be used for a forum, a little theater, and a dance hall; the second and third floors would contain rent-free quarters for struggling young artists. The quarter of a mil- lion in cash never materialized, but miraculously, the group managed to follow that general plan of action in its ramshackle old carriage house. The Dill Picklers presented plays salvaged from the purgatory shelf which couldn’t appear in legitimate theaters: Dreiser’s labor drama, The Girl in the Coffin, Pendleton King’s Cocaine, Padraic Pearce’s The Singer, and a Russian refugee performed Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Death by violence was no stranger among the Dill Pickle members. In a period of revolt, it occurs among rebels whether there is physical revolution or not. Life and ideas run at a furious pace, and sometimes the pace is too great. One poet got a cop’s bullet in the neck while trying to break into a store one night to get paper to write his poems. Another arranged for a drinking wake and then put a bullet in his head. Harry Batter had left an estate of four hundred dollars with instructions to spend fifty dollars to bury him and drink up the balance. It was the most popular wake Chicago ever had.

A minister, Dr. Thornton A. Mills, once pastor of the New England Congregational church at Delaware and Dearborn, in the same block as the Dill Pickle club, constantly defended Jones, and it cost him his parish. To the distaste and alarm of his fashionable flock, he believed that the membership of his wealthy church needed augmenting, and he saw a field of service among the Dill Picklers; he felt they could be brought into his fold and re-educated. His first wife divorced him, and his third suicide try was successful.

Of course the Dill Pickle Club spawned its branch temples. Eddie Clasby opened the Seven Arts Club (among the arts were Vice, Vulgarity, Sacrilege, and Midnight Slumming), Berty Weber’s House of Blazes was the most disreputable branch. Big John’s Coal Scuttle, Dick Vail’s Blue Fish, Berger’s House of Correction, and Monty Randall’s Montparnasse were all poor imitators. Even today, on North Clark Street, there is a latter-day remnant of the Dill Pickle called the College of Complexes.

The Dill Pickle itself began coming apart at the seams about 1931. The Chicago press had constantly derided them, but conceded at the end that, of the 57 varieties, the Dill Pickle Club was most entertaining. The newspapers accused them of plotting “the over-throw of New York’s Greenwich Village and the Latin Quarter in Paris… with pink-shaded lamps, black cats, incense and Turkish cigarettes.” Actually, they could afford no fancier trappings than ten-cent egg sandwiches. It was strictly “Art for Art’s sake. We’re going to make Chicago the center of intellectual expression, the Mecca of the free-minded,” they insisted to the last.

The hecklers were supplanted by people who hurled rotten vegetables at the speakers; one night, Dr. Reitman was kidnapped, robbed, and beaten. At the end, members were hounded by cops (Jones had 150 arrest slips the last winter), landlords, gangsters, Prohibition agents, and finally the Internal Revenue department. Through the years, Dill Picklers had constant run-ins with Volstead officials, though there was never any bootlegging; indeed, it was unnecessary, as the visitors brought their own flasks, and Jones sold ginger ale. Then the government revenue men decided, after fifteen years, the club was not “educational” but for profit, though Jack Jones was still yelling his heart out when the final decision came in. But the denouement was a typical Chicago climax: hoodlums tried to horn in and seize control of the club. It started when five gangsters tried to collect a “Capone defense fund”; they wanted to install their mobsters to act as short-change waiters, serve bootleg liquor, and see that the proper crooks got their proper cut. Jones refused to pay vittles and vice off. Suddenly a swarm of city inspectors descended on him and decided he’d been breaking the law for years. Jones finally closed the club himself rather than turn it over to underworld operation.

“Dynamiter Jack” then got a job in a WPA printing project and used to hang around Bughouse Square in the evening, in the shadow of the raucous old glory that was the Dill Pickle Club. He died, broken and unknown, in 1940, followed by Reitman in 1943. The next year there was one last election for the presidency of the non- existent Dill Pickle Club, and one-armed Cholly Wendorf, who is still the Dean of Bughouse Square, won out over Jeff Davis, king of the Hoboes of America, Inc., Jimmy Sheridan of the Sheridan brothers, and Herbert Shaw, the Cosmic Kid.

The moral of this story may be: Chicago has a lot of everything else, but it never had a soul.

The Optimist’s Ego

I do not feel me travelling these rails,
Elbowing the herd;
For have I not been chosen to be I?

Some great wise power pruned so well
Through the bloom of teeming life
That I am pleased with this I that I am.
It picked me a keen gray firey glance
To look out from the lifted mind
It clothed my Self with,
To glimpse all these vistas
That open before me as I ride.

Looking down into the cross-paths
I find the source of this Me that is I
(Which I adore);
I see the vistas of the mother-worlds
Bringing forth I’s and I’s
To finally fashion just this one
That fits my last and crown so perfectly.

As I press forward into the expanses
Down each passing avenue I look and see
The radiating rows of golden paths
Called for want of better names:
Poetry, Art, Music—
Dawning into the sun-stream
Which happened to be just I;
Dressing the lambent fibers
Which threaded down the pattern into Me.
How perfectly they’ve come together;
What a choice revelry of dance
They carry on in Me. (Where are we passing?)
So that waking they crowd my longings,
And sleeping they people a world
That I may roam in glory-gleaming ways.
Often I meet John there
And match colors with him,
To prove that the heavenly streets he painted
Were but the poor thoroughfares of his day,
Compared with the endless crosslines
And the intricate composite alleys
That transport us into the glow world Of the expanded I
Of my day

Beffel sometimes used the pseudonyms Lancey Fitzgibbons, George Moresby, Mary Starland and Daniel Tower. He wrote extensively about anarchist and labor causes, such as the Centralia Masacre, Sacco and Vanzetti, and others. His papers includes an unpublished manuscript on Mikhail Bakunin.

A Century of Progress by John Drury (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers Inc 1933)

“TOWER TOWN,” over the river on the near north side. Chicago’s largest and most flourishing bohemian quarter, bounded roughly on the south by Grand Avenue, on the east by Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive, on the north by Division Street and on the west by Clark Street. District centers about the historic old Chicago Avenue Water Tower, Chicago and Michigan Avenues. Studios, art galleries, tea rooms, bookshops, alley forums and Italian restaurants are on every hand. The famous Dill Pickle Club, conducted by Jack Jones, is “Tower Town’s” main rendezvous. On Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings lectures, debates and dances are held here. The Dill Pickle occupies a chapter in Albert Parry’s “Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America.” It is located at 18 Tooker Place. Nearby is “Bughouse Square” (Washington Square, North Dearborn Street and Walton Place), haunt of soap-box orators.

Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1953)

In Towertown, one-eyed Jack Jones had started the Dill Pickle Club, and here, every Saturday night, a Chicago one act play, written by some unknown Chicago playwright, presented by unknown Chicago actors, took the boards. […] With the coming of Prohibition, Towertown became something of a haunt for the underworld, too. The Dill Pickle became a scarcely-disguised speakeasy, and even had itself raided a few times just for the publicity.

Hobohemia by Frank O. Beck (Rindge: Richard R. Smith Publisher Inc. 1956)

One evening in 1919 no less a luminary than Sherwood Anderson published in The Chicago Daily News the statement, “Jack Jones and the Dill Pickle Club are the bright spots in the rather somber aspects of our town.”

Jack was a man of stature and a visit to the Club was for many years a must in the itinerary of all pilgrims making a round of the night clubs of the Windy City. It was a focal point of the nightlife of Towertown, a region of the near north side where, when the shades of night arrived, foregathered the Bohemian, the artist, the near-artist and the strange conglomeration of city dwellers who follow in their train.

The Dill Pickle Club is surely an appropriate name for an eating spot. What epicure but does not relish the dill, the humble anise of the Scriptures? When the eating club was opened on Locust Street and patronized mainly by disputatious labor leaders, it had over its door the sign, “The Copper Kettle and the Dill Pickle. ” A few years later, Bohemia-in-Chicago was stirred by food poisoning caused (supposedly) by the use of the copper kettle and the Club dropped “The Copper Kettle” end of the name and the Dill Pickle went it alone. While the Irish were pleased, the Germans were not.

The same Jack Jones, who in 1917 opened the Dill Pickle Club, now incorporated the club, copyrighted the name and moved it to Tooker Alley, where he continued to serve “coffee and a few light foods that are tolerable” as John Drury writes in his Dining in Chicago. On Wednesdays, his mild-mannered sister prepared a goodly assortment of sandwiches for the literary group who took over that evening. It was on one of these special evenings that I, in search of a copywriter, bought “coffee and — ” for a young writer, Carl Sandburg. He ate it in a dimly lighted recess in the wall, as I tried to persuade him to come with me to do some special writing, as I was then making the Chicago Area Survey of the Inter-Church World Movement.

But for John Archibald (Jack) Jones, the Dill Pickle Club was to serve purposes other than gastronomy. This king of the Picklers came to Chicago about the year 1907 and, as a labor leader, he wished his Club to serve his ends, by enlisting the intelligentsia.

Where he came from and who he was was definitely secondary to the fact that he was a most intelligent and militant labor agitator, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. His Club was to be a public forum for the discussion of what, to Jones, was the most vital subject in our national life, the rights of manual laborers.

Of an earlier interesting place, a nursery rhyme said, “The way into my parlor is up a winding stair.” The way into the Dill Pickle Club was even more complicated. Off North State Street to the left you wedged yourself, if you were thin enough, through a hole in the wall, a narrow slit between the four-story buildings. Then, with ashcans and garbage cans making it wise to watch your step, you went over the cobblestones and bricks of Tooker Alley to No. 18, where you faced a bright green light over an orange door with three small stained glass apertures. Here you were admonished, if you aspired to enter, to “Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside.” Crawling was really the best means of locomotion from there on in.

Blazed across the vestibule was the enigmatical line “This club is established to elevate the minds of people to a lower level.” There were several ways in which the Club made no more sense than that.

However, the founder, Jack Jones, an American pioneer in the field of labor education, was a powerful magnet and drew unusual personalities within his orbit. It was probably in the cards from the beginning that Jack, years later, should die alone in a third-class men’s lodging house, and his wasted and besotted body, not yet sixty-four years old, be buried in a casket, the gift of a thousand derelict men on the stem on West Madison Street.

What mattered was what Jack Jones, a flaming missionary of industrial justice, did with his opportunity in the Dill Pickle Club. At once it became the rendezvous of leading labor organizers and leaders, of radical artists too often coarse and ribald, of modern poets often equally unrefined and gross, of rising literary personages and revolutionists. It became more than a serious labor forum, it became an institution for all the arts. It opened its doors wide to everybody who had a message, a grievance, a hope, or a criticism, constructive or destructive; who wished to raise his voice against oppression, prejudice and injustice in all their multiforms. To every guest, at some time during his sojourn at the Club, Jack Jones, the ingenious, put the question, “Are you a nut about anything?”

One night in an unrestrained moment the group of the evening accepted the following credo: “We of the Dill Pickle believe in everything. We are radicals, pickpockets, second-story men and thinkers. Some of us practice free love, and some, medicine. Most of us have gone through religion and have tired of it. Some of us have tired of our wives.” This was the Dill Pickle Club in its most indulgent and unrestrained mood.

This creed did not express the main objectives of the Club. It was definitely not a place where men grow broad bellied and narrow minded, despite the fact that there were hedonists there and those allergic to purity. Through the years they did much creative work. Here experts taught dancing and other arts. Poets read their own verses. Artists, wood carvers, ornamental iron designers, sculptors and painters created and displayed their handicraft, always to an interested public. From the haymow on the second floor — the city used transportation that fed on hay — came the mingled odors of charcoal, turpentine, fixatives. Often a party of visitors stood by, waiting to be shocked at the nude subject.

In the birth and early development of the little theatre the Club must be given prominent mention. This, one of the earliest of the little theatres, presented some of the finest amateur talent. Jack, a man of varied talent, built with his own hands a splendid stage, invented and installed an unusual lighting system, wrote, directed and acted in the plays.

The open forum of the Club was stimulated by the idea that truth wholly controlled may become dangerous. Yet no matter how important the question brought before the Dill forum or how illustrious the speaker, he was thrown to the lions, as he expected to be. His message — important, crack-brained, serious or humorous — the omnipresent heckler treated the same as the last and the next. And what consummate hecklers were there! There was big John Laughman, whose biting Irish witticism, often almost sadistical, literally cowed the speaker and thrilled the audience; little Birdie Weber, hook-nosed and bespectacled, vulgar always and thunderous in his approach, confused and trapped the orator. The heckling was usually brilliant and constituted not an inconsiderable part of the entertainment.

The Dill Pickle Club drew to its platform a surprising “Who’s Who” of speakers. In my diary are listed speakers heard there, and many of them were monthly guests. There was Maxwell Bodenheim, author of Ninth Avenue; Carl Sandburg, the poet; Ben Reitman, King of the Hoboes; Ben Hecht, author of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, editor of the Chicago Literary Times and a promising poet; Countess Luddie, who wore sandals and bobbed her hair; Paddy Carrol from Hell’s Half Acre; Aimee Semple McPherson, and a Spanish spiritualist who shaved her head and dyed it green; Morris Levine, blind, gray-haired orator; Van Cima, Dutch artist and piccolo player; Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, and Rube Menken, Russian art critic; Eugene Debs and William D. Haywood, tycoons of the labor movement; Sherwood Anderson, the playwright, and Jim Larkin, the famous Irish rebel; Harry Batters, selling socialism to the Democrats and democracy to the Socialists; Yellow Kid Weil, of high-finance fame; Clarence Darrow and scores of the more brilliant members of the faculties of Northwestern and Chicago universities. Sooner or later everybody had a chance to ex- press himself and the Club’s Sunday night doings often made Monday morning news.

One night one of the university speakers remarked seriously, “More famous people have passed through this Club than through any fifty universities in the world.” The statement was, to say the least, extravagant. It was statements like this that convinced me that I was using rather well the time I gave to them. Early in the Club’s history, Jack Jones invited me to join his staff and called me “Chaplain.” I have met few groups with such enormous responsiveness and so much in need of education of the spirit. I tried to understand when they needed praise and when they needed prayer. They always needed a friend. Jack Jones climaxed his study of labor’s problems by writing a treatise, “The Tech-Up,” a pronouncement on technocracy.

Harper Leech, co-originator of the War Insurance plan, wrote of Jack’s “The Tech-Up”: “A masterpiece of explanation of the industrial form of unionism.” It brought Jack a trip to Washington, D. C., during World War I at Uncle Sam’s expense, for conference with the Department of Labor. Labor sympathizers of the Dill Pickle type later followed the worker’s movement through syndicalism and the Worker’s Party into the Communist Party.

When the crest of bootlegging came, the Club’s cultural flame flickered low. The lawless horned in on the management of the Club and chiseling gangsters followed. Man shall not live by free love, companionate marriage, unrestrained Bohemianism, rackets, “red” Russia, alone — vital subjects though they were to the adherents of the Club. However, sincere voices raised against suppression, prejudice and injustice bring their own reward. Dill Pickle’s popular forum, little theatre, art school, social center, all often on the five-yard line in their way and day, served the cause of adult education and democracy.

And possibly society has a greater ability to reform itself than many of us thought that day.