Around this time I had organized a colony. The Bonus Army had been run out of Washington, and some of the remnants came to San Antonio. The contingent of veterans and their families camped at the San Antonio Fair Grounds and were starving and sick.

I had a big idea of welding this group together, having them organize agriculturally and industrially, forming an economic unit that would be self-supporting. There were vacant farms and buildings everywhere.

On the edge of San Antonio was an industrial site belonging to the Humble Company, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil. I told them my plans and they leased me thirty-five acres with rail trackage—for a dollar a year. There was a running water well, garden and truck lands, and several buildings.

I also made arrangements with the railroad company to get free feight cars to be used for houses. Great railroad cranes mounted on wheels rolled down the tracks and lifted the freight cars in front like match boxes, and set them in place over on the property. We got forty or more of these freight cars, and by "chiseling" for necessary lumber, doors, and windows, the colony was physically completed. We had a population of 250 to 350.

The reason the colony got such a good start was that there was no such thing as relief at the beginning. No American citizen was then getting either employment, commoditites or money from the government. People by the tens of thousands were floating aimlessly and hopelessly over the country as I had seen with my own eyes on the hobo trips.

Here in the new colony some man, or a whole family, would come into camp and ask for something to eat and a place to stay. Quite often they would be alive with lice, and weak with fever and disease. None of them had good shoes, some were nearly barefooted, few had socks, and some stuffed cardboard in the holes of their soles. On arrival their feet would be cut up and stinking.

We would outfit these fellows, have them take three or four shower-baths, shave them in the community barber shop, tape their feet, and give them warm socks and new shoes. Accomodation would be given the women and children, too. Then we would give them plenty of good warm food. Strangely enough, within a few days they would be asking to help in the work. Most of the men worked hard, helping to put up the freight cars, converting them into houses, and making the colony livable.

Very soon we began to get our freight cars fixed with windows, with ventilation and heat. We put the kids in school. There was a swimming pool. The children began to gain weight. We had a common dining room for all those who were willing to eat in it, a battery of Army stoves, and a kitchen service equal to any in the country.

We had accumulated by that time several automobiles, some of which we got free and some of which cost us ten or fifteen dollars each. The automobiles were operating excellently, because we had very good mechanics. We organized blanket weavers, and they got started—almost—for a blanket was never completed. There was a mechanical repair department which traded its work, and in some instances got money for the work. Going to the farmers and different people on the basis of barter and exchange, we obtained foods, animals and surplus farm machinery.

So, having heard about the League for Industrial Democracy, I organized the group into the "Diga Colony"—Diga being an anagram of letters out of Agricultural and Industrial Democracy. I worked with an old friend, Charles Simmang, an engraver, and we designed a symbol in the shape of a cross. At the top of the cross there was a representation of the world showing the continents of North and South America, expressing a hope that we might have peace. In the middle there was the Alamo, a symbol of sacrifice. There was a cap of liberty, and also a wheel of industry, and a plowshare, on the basis of equality.

We had a clinic and a drug store. I made a deal with the doctors to deliver babies at ten dollars each. We also had a band, an orchestra, a shoe shop, and what-not. It was great stuff.

In the group were very few who had ever had any real responsibilities of citizenship. They had been suffering, hungry, without work, and were still suffering and without work. That seems to have been all they understood. As for any philosophy of government, they never heard of philosophy, and they thought government was something that sent you to war, made you pay taxes, or if it was a good one, paid bonuses and pensions.

Here, however, were a group of people that would starve to death unless they worked together; so I figured that they would eventually cooperate and make a success as a colony. The depression appeared to be endless, so I began to dicker for land, houses and equipment. I boiled over with enthusiasm, and set about to build a model state or colony or co-operative—whatever you cared to call it. Even if the experiment failed, I felt it would surely prove something. People were happier, getting something to eat, and working.

Let a man have plenty to eat, under healthful conditions, and he will work. In dealing intimately with the thousands of people of all races, I have met very few really lazy ones. The old theory of unregenerate masses of people who won't work and "don't want to live in good houses" is a cold-blooded lie.

I set up the organization in agricultural, business, and industrial sections on a collective basis. None had ever heard of socialism—except as some vague thing that was "bad." As for Communism, all they knew was that it was Russian, unpatriotic, and sinful. As for the word "collectivism," it was just a word that had gotten misplaced. In many contacts, I found that their idea of "capitalism" was a state of society in which you can be hungry for a while, but you will finally get a good job, and possibly have others that can either go hungry or work for you.

There were, however, practical considerations, and we had to get commodities and materials. So we continued to "chisel"—a process supposed to be different from begging, because you either take surplus stuff, or offer to work for it, and do the work if you must. By this process we got paint, torn-down buildings, metal lath; we went out to the farmers, did some of their work for them, and got part of their farm products.

"Colonies" were getting a lot of attention in those days. There were several in the United States which proved succesful. Co-operative movements were being established in large numbers, largely on a barter and exchange basis, with a varied assortment of ideas on money. Nearly all of this, however, was due to necessity, and the depression, for people are not going to live in a colony engaging in barter and exchange if they can live where they please and as they please, with money in their pockets.

I did not know it then, but this colony was headed for the rocks when it started. Not a man in the crowd understood co-operation for the common good.

This inability to work for the common good seemed strange to me. They had no idea of planning together, although they were willing to work individually.

With my idea fixed on making the colony a success, I would pounce on some fellow who was a colonist with a fair education. But he would either turn out an eccentric radical, or some brainless weak fellow with an inferiority complex. Usually, if he had any ability, he would stay long enough to get on his feet, and then would leave.

Our situation was definitely at variance with the economic order of the day. We were attempting to exist on barter and exchange, almost wholly without money, while people got money for working literally across the fence.

Money, I told them, was just a snare and a delusion; money, my friends, is merely a medium of exchange. But this made no impression whatever. What they wanted to see was the medium of exchange in the shape of clinking dollars and long green. My barter vaccination didn't take.

All of what I said was true. But money was then, and is now, the basis of American society and thinking. We think of a dollar bill as value, and not the exchange of labor for goods. In the colony there was an immediate clash of the system inside, and the money system outside.

Two economics cannot exist side by side within a given area, especially a money and a non-money one. Such things as "Epics" and the like are bound to be failures because they represent a patchwork economy, intended to be operated side by side with the capitalist economy, which is dominant. It has to be one or the other.

I bought all the books I could get on co-operative movements. Most of them were involved and dull, but I read on. Co-operatives in Denmark seemed successful. There co-operatives were organized for nearly everything—from bacon to banks, electricity, cold storage plants. So I proceeded to talk very loftily on the subject; I am afraid, however, I was about as big a bore as the reverend gentlemen who preached to me when I was an amateur bum. I regret none of this, because I found the experiment was worthwhile as a demonstration of certain failures, if nothing else. Moreover, it demonstrated certain things that must be done, and made a definite story of the development of the American mind, as against the European mind. As I said, the people were bored, and I think not at all interested in what I was saying. But times were hard and, since the people knew they would starve if they left, they stayed with the colony.

The time I nearly lost all caste was when I subscribed to various socialist and liberal papers, including The American Guardian, printed by my good friend, Oscar Ameringer, famous old Socialist. I put the papers out for the colonists to read.

None of them read the papers, but there were murmurings of my being too radical.

Of the colonists, ninety percent were of early American stock; hillbillies, farmers, tenants, average citizens in general. The other ten percent were mainly of Mexican extraction, for this was Texas.

But in spite of all drawbacks, it was a thriving colony. People began to get relatively prosperous. I had made a rule in the beginning that if anybody made any money they had to turn it into the common pot. A mechanic would work in town and make a few dollars, and he would bring it in. A veteran would get ten dollars compensation, and if he cared to stay in the colony he was required to turn that money in. There was no compulsion about staying in the colony, but if one stayed, there had to be a common income. As long as there was hardly any income, this worked well. It looked as though the colony was going to be a success, for we were working together well.

About that time, however, Hoover started the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He was forced to make loans to states for relief. Also, the government began to construct certain buildings throughout the country which were supposed to bring "recovery." Congress saw to it that people got prevailing wages.

Our men began to get work on Army projects. One worked thirty hours in a week and got a dollar an hour. He had been the meekest, most respectable and hard-working man in the colony. He drew his thirty dollars. He arrived on the scene tight as a drum, swaggering down the street. He beat his wife, turned capitalist, and left. Tony, an ex-sailor, who was tattooed all over, went to town and made twelve dollars and forty cents. Tony began dressing up, made some more money, finally got a suit, and never turned in a penny. He also turned capitalist, and ran off with somebody's wife and three children, as ambitious a financier as I ever knew.

Castes began to form. Blackie, the head cook, and a good one—a half Indian from Oklahoma, was accused of being "part nigger." Although he did the work, his ancestral pride began to assert itself violently one morning and he ran his assistants out of the kitchen with a butcher knife. The desire for self-expression and the discarding of complexes became the order of the day. The big boss of the group, who had been working like the devil and keeping fairly good discipline, got a little proud himself, and I suspected him of doing a little hoarding. Yes, capitalism had come to the colony. I began to think the best thing to do was to get everybody a Wall Street Journal, and close up.

There were penny castes and dollar castes and race castes. The penny caste was composed of those who had less than a dollar and they were the advanced thinkers. Those who had over a dollar, but under five dollars, were the liberal Democrats, and were a little worried about radicalism. Those having over five dollars were the Tories and reactionaries, and looked with disdain on the others, whom they regarded as a proletarian mob.

The colony began to disintegrate rapidly.

I looked around them, and I thought all about it. Money was the only thing that they had on their minds. They were good people—about as good as any, although hungry and unfortunate, and the first look they had at money blew them as high as the sky.

All basic ideas as to soil, or primitive political or social organizations, are either absent or very faint in the average American mind. So rapid was our rise as a nation, so great our resources, and so illimitable our opportunities to waste and still have more, that no one ever took the trouble to think about social organization, of saving resources instead of dollars. So when the depression hit, the people simply didn't know what it was all about.

The study of colonies and utopias shows that they are predicated upon some special religious faith, or upon a group being so isolated from another society or economy that it is forced to work out its own salvation. During the time the Diga experiement was going on, I had to admit to myself that all colonies similarly situated had failed in the past, and if this one succeeded it would be an exception. The Mormons, who went to Utah, succeeded because they lived in an isolated part of the country, having control of a wide area in which the economy was practically autonomous. Also, there was no clash with the economic views and practices of the rest of the nation, and surplus commodities and products were sold and exchanged through the usual channels of banking and credits. Surviving, the Mormons were eventually absorbed into the life and economy of the whole nation. Then they gave up polygamy, which was the only practical difference. Their original success, however, was based on going into a pioneer country, which nobody else wanted, and being isolated from the rest of the nation. And they had the binding power of a single religion.

Diga colony was to me a great experience, because it involved doing a necessary work—and also was a laboratory that proved to my mind the utter futility of makeshift economics. When a system is dead, it can't be revived, any more than you can revive the whole body by trying to revive the ears, toes, or hands of a corpse. We have grown into a nation, and the condition of a laborer in Northampton, Massachusetts, has a direct effect on a worker in Tucamcari, New Mexico. There may be variations in some trades, professions, and races, but on the whole there must be certain minimum standards, and the economic system cannot be a hodge-podge of conflicting systems and plans.

You cannot save civilization in this country by speeches on thrift, and by having Epics, Townsend Plans, Father Coughlins, and wind-jammers like Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith—nor by listening to pious, or vulgar, or ostentatious "successful men" who accidentally "made" money and who know nothing about economics.

Finally, I had to admit complete failure. But I learned many important things about government and human nature.

All this time I had been collecting taxes and acting as an official of the county and the state. I had my eye a long way off, however. The Bootleg Decade had ended by then, Hoover had retreated to California, but there was talking to do. Some of it was high and some of it was low.