Biography
Ralph Verlaine, signing IWW card 229442 and Industrial Union 620, recounts forced confinement in a chain gang outside Macon, Georgia in the first-person article Soybeans. A man who offered food and employment delivered him to guards for two dollars; he describes being chained to other captives, trucked to a worksite, forced to clear land, beaten, denied a hearing or charge, and released after eighty-four days. The article recounts six years studying for the Catholic clergy, religious dissent and estrangement from four brothers and five sisters, followed by unemployment and transient labor. After recovering on the Gulf Coast he worked at New Orleans as a statistician, then revisited the worksite and saw Ford Motor Car Company soybean signs. Its June 1932 opening conflicts with its FDR-presidency and graduation chronology, so no exact arrest year or calendar endpoints are assigned. This is an attributed personal account; publication does not independently verify every allegation. Source: https://files.libcom.org/files/OBUMdecember1937.pdf#page=12
