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uniforms of czarist police who came in the night to beat Jews. Morris and his younger brother Jack (aka Jakob) would run out the back door while their father and mother took blows from police truncheons in the hope that the police would not look for the children.
    Josef Chilovsky reacted to the pogroms and other oppressions by engaging in sedition against the Russian czar, and one night Morris watched police drag his father off to prison and subsequent exile in Siberia. At age twenty-eight, Josef fled across Russia to the Black Sea and slipped aboard a freighter that, on March 15, 1910, landed him at Galveston, Texas. Josef made his way to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi River, and finally to Chicago, where he melded into the large community of east European emigrés.
    Josef was an expert cobbler able to fashion leather into fine boots, and in less than two years he saved enough money to send for his wife and sons. They arrived on Ellis Island in New York December 11, 1911, and embarked by train for Chicago. Their coach was unheated, its wooden seats hard, and on the third day of the journey the mother told the boys they had no more money for food. A woman seated across the aisle overheard and said to them in Russian, “I have much food.” From a basket, she gave them bread and sausages, and during the remainder of the trip other passengers shared food with them.
    Parents and teachers at a demanding Jewish school constantly impressed upon Morris the importance of work and “self-elevation.” Though at age fourteen he went to work as an apprentice in his father’s small shop and as a messenger in the Chicago financial district, he continued to study. He read Russian classics, philosophy, and American history; took courses at the Chicago Institute of Art; and on Sundays attended free lectures delivered at the Hull House by notable speakers such as Clarence Darrow. He also explored the architecture and landmarks of Chicago, including the stockyards that promptly turned him to vegetarianism.
    At the art institute, Morris fell under the influence of radical students who, despite their incoherence, disposed him toward
radicalism. He and his father avidly followed reports of the Russian Revolution, and the more he learned of communism, the more its promises to humanity enthralled him. To obtain a job driving a horse-drawn milk wagon, he joined a union peopled with a few young communists and began to agitate with them. When various factions coalesced to form the United Communist Party of America, he formally joined at age nineteen and was considered a charter member.
    Whatever the party asked, Morris did. He proselytized so energetically among union members and customers that they called him “the Red Milkman.” Twice police arrested him during street demonstrations, and once they pummeled him with banana stalks. Now and then he questioned party tactics. Roused in the dead of night to stuff leaflets into residential mailboxes, he asked, “Why do we have to distribute these damn things at 2 A.M.? People might take us for burglars and shoot us.”
    He was told, “Because, this is the way the Bolsheviks did it.” At the time, such an answer sufficed to silence any doubter.
    The milk company paid deliverymen according to the number of customers served, and by adding new clients to his route, Morris earned relatively high pay. The births of two more brothers, Benjamin and Phillip, overcrowded the family house, and now that he could afford to do so he moved into a nearby apartment of his own. It became a kind of party social center and hostel for itinerant comrades who soon learned that he usually was good for a loan of a few dollars and he did not dun for repayment. Sharing was the essence of the communism he then understood.
    Morris in the mid-1920s caught the attention of an important party functionary, Earl Russell Browder, who probably affected Morris’ life more than any other man