The Tree Bears Fruit
9
in American history, that it determined for me the course of
my life. This was the murder of my archbishop, Leon Tourian,
at the foot of the altar of the Armenian Holy Cross Church in
New York on Christmas Sunday, 1933.1 He was killed by assassins who slashed with a butcher knife at the groin of the
Archbishop as he led the Christmas processional. The murderers—caught and convicted—proved to be members of an
Armenian political terrorist group called Dashnag, which carried its Old World feuds to our shores.
My hatred for organized evil began with the murder of this
innocent servant of God who had been my priest and a beloved family friend. It was my personal awakening. The murder, too, was the first sign of how potently Old World hatreds
had infiltrated into an America that I had considered impervious to them.
There was another factor determining my future. This was
the depression of the early 1930's, which I witnessed at first
hand while hitch-hiking across the country. It catapulted me
into a world of stark realities. At one stroke, my thinking was
revolutionized. I was ripped away from the idyllic isolationism
of Mineola, the world of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil
in which I had been reared. I began to question that world.
I began to probe into its broken promises.
I tramped with the bonus marchers, ate slops with them,
and slept in their miserable shacks on the Potomac. In my indignation I wrote a long article in the Mineola Sun. What else
could I do? Hitch-hiking across the country, I saw two young
men in St. Louis attack each other with knives over a loaf of
bread. I saw others cross the continent in boxcars, looking for
work. On lower Cherry Street in Kansas City, Missouri, I saw
women forced to scrape a living by offering themselves for
twenty-five cents a visit. On another street the price was fifteen cents.
I saw breadlines. The last breadline I had seen was as a child
of nine in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the winter of 1918. The memory
1
The incident is described in detail in Under Cover, pp. 15—16, 20.