Publisher's Synopsis
Description: ""Yukeoma, the grand old man of the Hopi, personifies man as part of Nature, much more than Thoreau did at Walden or in his life. He saw the Sun as Father and the Earth as Mother, and the Corn as Step-mother. He lived and prayed for that rain which was necessary for his people, and which came at Walden without effort. His people handled snakes as Thoreau did the fishes, frogs, birds, and woodchucks. . . . He spent, not one night in jail, but many years in confinement, among them time at Alcatraz, one of the worst of American prisons."" ""Early one morning we accompanied Dorothy to the bus station and in a small restaurant nearby we had a cup of coffee. While there, two taxi drivers were having an argument and one of them took the sugar bowl and threw it in the face of the other one. The proprietor was crying over the broken sugar bowl. Dorothy got up and took a napkin and some water and commenced to clean the face of the taxi driver. Such was her exit from the city to speak on pacifism in the colleges."" ""I know what it is to be in a dark cell for five days, being told that I was to be executed. I know what it is to enter prison an 'innocent.' I know what it is to be ready to take my life because of loneliness and despair. I, too, know the uncertainty of the law and with what cooked-up charges one is liable to be confronted. I know, too, that Alexander Berkman helped me in those perilous days, and this being in jail again was a conscious move on his part and not an accident. He chose the hard life, and he chose the hard death. To me he is a friend, a comrade, a hero."" Others besides the Hopi, Yukeoma, Dorothy Day, and Alexander Berkman, included in the book Ammon Hennacy finished shortly before his death in 1970 are: John Woolman, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Mother Jones, Albert Parsons, John Peter Altgeld, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, John Taylor, Bartolemeo Vanzetti, Malcolm X, and Helen Demoskoff. But out of all these persons, it is perhaps the author, himself, who shines forth as first among those of whom he writes, in that Ammon Hennacy, himself, is the embodiment of the One-Man Revolution in America. But Ammon in truth may be more than that. For some men, it is their fate to play the role of archetype for lesser mortals. As it might be said that Carl Jung is the archetype of the wise old man, so we might say that the Christian anarchist and pacifist, Ammon Hennacy, with his penetrating vision into the chaos of our times, is the archetype of the prophet whom, like any prophet, we fail to heed at our own peril. About the Contributor(s): Ammon Hennacy (1893-1970) was born in Negley, Ohio. His formal education consisted of one year each at three institutions: Hiram College in Ohio (1913), the University of Wisconsin (1914), and Ohio State University (1915). With the outbreak of World War I, he refused to register for military service and consequently served two years in the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1931 he engaged in social work in Milwaukee, where he organized one of the first social workers' unions. With the coming of World War II, he again refused to register for the draft. He became baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 1952 by an anarchist priest. Between 1953 and 1961, he was an associate editor of The Catholic Worker. In 1961 he organized and directed the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in remembrance of the martyrdom of Joe Hill. In Utah he was involved in picketing and fasting protests against scheduled executions of condemned prisoners at the state prison, fasting on various occasions for periods ranging from twelve to forty-five consecutive days. In 1965 he married Joan Thomas, and formally left the Catholic Church. From that time on, he wished to be known as a non-church Christian. Shortly after the publication of The One-Man Revolution in America, he suffered a heart attack while picketing for Lance and Kel
