What follows here—after this introduction—are excerpts from Left of the Left, Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir of his father, Sam, who was a large figure on the margins of American life in the last century. Dolgoff embodied an ideal once celebrated on the American left. He was…
a worker-intellectual—someone who toils with his hands all his life and meanwhile develops his mind and deepens his knowledge and contributes mightily to progress and decency in the society around him.
Sam Dolgoff sounded like no-one else, as Paul Berman has noted: “I used to love hearing him on the phone—nobody had a gruffer voice than Sam Dolgoff. Pure gravel.” (Berman tried on another metaphor in a eulogy to Dolgoff where he had him sounding like a “broken cello.”) Anatole Dolgoff cultivates his own voice in Left of the Left. He takes an inside-out view of politics, offering an intimate account of what it’s like to live a life in struggle. His memoir of his father isn’t a dry run through a desiccated past. It’s full of felt life as well as good argufying. Dolgoffs may be locked on one contrariety—Bakunin vs. Marx—that seems out of time, but Left of the Left does much more than score debaters’ points when it excoriates totalitarians who got the Left twisted throughout the last century. As Dolgoff touches on the appalling history of Bolsheviks and Stalinists and Fidel-philes and Maoists and Ortega-istas, his memoir becomes a post-Millennial add-on to what might be the richest tradition of political lit in the 20th C.—the tradition of testaments to CP perfidy. It’s also a New York story of Jews without money and solidarity in the city!
Left of the Left starts off with an introduction by Andrew Cornell that usefully provides a historical frame for Sam Dolgoff’s life even as it zeroes in on his and his comrades’ inner lives:
Sam Dolgoff was a house painter, a loving husband and father, a militant labor organizer, a powerful orator, and a self-taught public intellectual. He was not, perhaps, as daring and globetrotting a figure as Emma Goldman or the subjects of some other radical biographies. To hilarious and heart-breaking effect, Anatole describes the way Carlo Tresca and other mentors talked Sam out of joining street fights with Italian American fascists or shipping out to fight in the Spanish Revolution, owing to his poor eyesight and family responsibilities. But Sam Dolgoff was heroic in a least one respect, and that was his tenacity.
Sam stuck to his bedrock beliefs that humans were capable of cooperating with one another, managing their own affairs, and sharing earth’s wealth equitably. For seven decades he continued to express these ideas in print and speech. And he continued to show up—to demonstrations, to lightly attended forums, and to tedious meetings, even when many of his former collaborators had given up. In doing so he served as a connecting thread that stitched together generations of people invested in the project of human liberation…
It also becomes readily apparent that Sam and his wife Esther truly lived the communal ethos they espoused. Hardly a chapter of this memoir passes without an account of old Wobblies camped out on the Dolgoffs’ living room sofa, or Sam giving away prized possessions to a new acquaintance. This spirit of selflessness is mirrored in the structure of the book, for Anatole’s portrait of his father soon spins off to recount the stories of his mother (herself a dedicated anarchist organizer), other family members, and more than a dozen fascinating revolutionaries, such as Russell Blackwell, Ben Fletcher, Dorothy Day, and Federico Arcos, whose own stories and contributions are in danger of being lost to history. The book, then, serves as the collective biography of an entire milieu, echoing the fashion in which Goldman studded her own autobiography, “Living My Life,” with biographical sketches of comrades and lovers.
These stories are not always rousing. We meet aging seafarers and longshoremen grown cynical and lonely following the cascading catastrophes of the Red Scare, the repressive turn in world Communism, and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. But that is part of what makes this book so fascinating; where else can one glimpse the interior life of old Wobblies still devoted to class war as they watch fellow workers embrace middle-class identities and the anarchist movement become overrun with college students? As these sections unfurled, I recognized the double entendre tucked into the book’s title; this is not only the story of a man who was more radical than many other rabble rousers, but also an account of what remained—what was left—of the Left during the years that Anatole was growing up.
Cornell notes that Anatole’s narrative jumps forward and backwards. Alive to the fact Left of the Left is not a straightforward biography with an obvious chronological thru-line, Cornell does some fills at the top, limning different strains in American anarchism—from born organizers in the labor movement to lone wolves and Galleanists locked on “propaganda by deed.” I encourage readers to go back to his text for more dope about that dimension of Sam Dolgoff’s way in the world, but in the slightly adapted excerpts that follow I’ve tried to be true to the organic (or better, “anarchic”?) form that Anatole came up with as he composed the book. I’m betting you’ll enjoy going with his flow. Anatole Dolgoff has written what should become a classic work on the American left. B.D.
Anatole Durruti Dolgoff (Or, the Lower East Side Boy’s Progress)
I was born April 8 1937. On November 11 of that year my father, Sam Dolgoff, addressed an open air meeting held at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago. Directly behind him stood the stone monument to Albert Parsons and three other anarchists falsely accused of planting a bomb that killed a number of policeman at a rally for the Eight Hour Day in Haymarket Square. They were hanged for the crime in 1887 despite their innocence, in what has become known as the Haymarket Tragedy. My father shared the platform at this fiftieth anniversary of their martyrdom with Lucy Parsons, the black woman who had been a cofounder of the IWW. She was still beautiful, but frail and nearly blind by then, and she called out to my father, her old friend, “Sammy, Sammy!” and clung to his arm.
I have a photograph of him facing that small crowd, the monument behind him, wearing an overcoat against the Chicago wind: young, wild black hair swept back as best he can. It is the proudest moment of his life—the proof being he is wearing a suit and tie for the occasion. My father considered himself the direct spiritual descendent of the Haymarket anarchists and all who knew him well had no doubt that he was.
April 8, 1937, followed by a few months the death of Buenaventura Durruti. The leader of an anarchist column defending Spain against Francisco Franco’s fascist army, he took a bullet through the brain in the Battle of Madrid. Durruti held no rank and answered only to his unadorned name. He refused to be saluted. He slept amongst his comrades, in the field. My father was moved to tears by his death, and that is how I became the only person in the world named Anatole Durruti Dolgoff.
As you can see, I was born into a revolutionary family—and a revolutionary tradition…
Lofty stuff. The reality is I hated my name as a child. Bad enough Anatole—and with it the god-forbid connotation of femininity on the Lower East Side, reinforced by Danny Kaye’s swishy “I’m Anatole of Paris” routine in the hit film of the time, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Bad enough, Anatole. But, Durruti? Such a strange name out of nowhere, I was never quite sure of the spelling. The neighborhood Johnnies and Jimmies laughed at me when the teacher read it off in class, and my shameful secret was exposed.
“I hate my name, “I would announce dramatically to Mother, who took these things seriously: which is partly why I brought the subject up, to mischievously see her get ruffled.
“Sam, the boy hates his name,“ she would announce, in hurt baffled tones.
And my father would say simply, “The day will come when you will appreciate your name. It is a name of nobility and honor.”
Who needed that?
But the years have passed. And yes I have come to appreciate my name, deeply so. I have come to embrace it as a way of “coming home,” to do right by my heritage in my old age.
Operatic Politics
Sensitivity to the world’s great anguish and its wrongs were at the core of my father’s character; he had an organic identification with the abused and exploited of this world. I remember sitting on the living room couch with him one evening in the last months of his life, following Mother’s death. The year was 1990 and the TV news was filled with the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. The camera lingered on the care-worn face of an impoverished old woman, draped in black, symbolic of the desperate plight of the Russian people. My eighty eight year old father sobbed.
“Who is to feed her?” he asked.
Sympathy for those who suffer is, fortunately, a thoroughly human trait. What made my father become an anarchist was his hatred of those institutions that perpetuated and profited from the suffering of others, namely the State, the Capitalist system, and organized, entrenched religion. In his reading of the world they were the embodiment of arbitrary authority and his hatred of arbitrary, hierarchal authority had no bottom. Nor was there a bottom to his contempt for those who held power within these institutions. He took it all personally.
His scorn could reach operatic proportions.
There was the time he flung a chair across the living room at the grainy TV image of Secretary of State Dean Rusk calmly explaining in his composed manner the necessity of the Vietnam War. “Go ahead, that will do a lot of good” Mother taunted him. My father despised diplomats.
Then there was the quiet Sunday afternoon he rose from his chair upon reading Kipling and threw his complete works, book after book, out our fifth floor window. It was an action he later regretted, because he actually admired Kipling’s work, but the man’s war-lust and racism infuriated him.
His comments concerning the “greats” of this world came marinated in lye; he was most defiantly not a subscriber to the Great Man Theory of History.
Of Stalin, the Man of Steel: “That evil sonofabitch is lower than whale shit!” And the sonofabitch had a special twist to it.
Nothing pleased him more than deflating an inflated reputation. He mocked Lenin (“that Mongolian conniver”) and Trotsky (“you mean Brownstein, the tailor?”) as much for the cultish worship they inspired in their followers as for their betrayal of the Russian Revolution. He relished the tid-bit that came down from Emma Goldman, who was a close friend of Lenin’s wife during the early years of Bolshevik rule: (“Seems the Hero of the Revolution was less than a hero of the bedroom.”)
The Founding Fathers fared no better. The thought of them curled his lip. “A bunch of slave owners, autocrats, smugglers. Tom Paine was the only one any damn good—and they got rid of him. Read the Constitution they came up with. See if you like it.”
Worker’s Ed
Sam’s “formal education” ended at the eighth grade, but not his education. These are among my strongest boyhood memories of him: He would arrive home from work with the smell of sweat and turpentine about him, paint encrusting his nails and glasses: exhausted, haggard. After eating, he soaked in the bathtub for an hour; he had a tight, muscled body in those days, not the bloated, emphysema-distorted one that many who knew him in later life remember. Then his education began. He would lie in his bed surrounded by books and obscure radical publications piled as high as the mattress. And he would read. Not just political theory. Everything. Night after night, every weekend, each spare moment, he would lie on his back in a haze of cigarette smoke, reading.
He took his learning seriously but not his learned self. Years beyond these childhood memories, in 1971, Angus Cameron, the distinguished editor at Alfred Knopf, prepared to publish Sam’s ground-breaking Bakunin on Anarchy. It was—is—a scholarly treatise on the towering nineteenth-century Russian revolutionist. Sam had translated Bakunin’s writings from various languages into English; the manuscript was replete with footnotes and references, which in some respects are the most important part of the book.
“Your credentials?” Cameron asked.
“Doctor of Shmearology, NYU, with a concentration in shit houses and boiler rooms,” Sam answered with mock pomposity, describing what he had painted there. It was the closest he had ever come to a college degree.
Cameron, a man of humour, appreciated the answer. “Bet you never expected to be in this office,” he exclaimed.
“As a matter of fact, I am well acquainted with your office!”
Cameron was astonished to learn that by astounding coincidence Sam had painted his office several years earlier.
In fact, Sam’s knowledge of history, social movements, philosophy, psychology, and literature was vast and deep on many fronts. It started when he was a young man, taken under the wing of many leading anarchist and socialist intellectuals of the time.” They were my university” he said.
He would take no job that required him to hire or fire another worker; he considered it immoral to exercise the power of bread over a fellow human being. Nor would he follow the career path of many an ex-radical and take the cushy jobs in the union bureaucracy he was offered. He wanted no part of union corruption and the betrayal of its members.
Foundational Virtue
This is as good a time as any to mention that Sam had guts—a quality of his that I discovered in a strange way when I burst home from school one ordinary day to find him in bed, in fetal position, wrapped in blankets, shivering violently, and Mother draped over him, cradling him in her arms. Sun streamed in through their bedroom windows. It was broad daylight. Sam was never home at this time and never in bed. I was eleven years old.
He had been brought home by two of the men on the job. Seems he had cleaned his arms and neck with a rag soaked in benzene; that is how you removed the oil-based paint. But he had neglected to dry himself thoroughly and lit a cigarette, which ignited his right arm in flames. It was a revolting scene and as his flesh started to roast, some of the men started to gag and vomit from the odor. And in those seconds when he could have burned to death he extended his flaming arm outward—horizontal to the ground—and walked calmly to the other end of the large room, some thirty feet, and thrust it into a pile of sand. The men said they had never seen anything like it.
Sam went into shock; he could not stop shivering. Then he caught the flu and it took him ten days to get back to work. Not once did he mention the incident to us.
Old-fashioned guts: intestinal fortitude. The second time I was surprised to find him home in the afternoon involved high scaffold work—which he was wary of, and took only when there was nothing else to feed us. Far above the pavement, some ten stories up, he discovered the hard way that his partner, a new man, did not know how to tie the security knots. The scaffold turned into a lever, which rotated in a vicious arc, and threw the man off. Desperately, he hung on, to the scaffold, torso and feet dangling, rigid with fear. As happens in New York, a crowd materialized in an instant, to stare upward at the unfolding horror. Sam was at the pivot point twenty feet or so above the new man. He, too, had been knocked off balance and clung to the vertical cable. Somehow, he got to the new man, spoke to him gently, and holding him firmly and guiding him, managed to slide the two of them down the cable to the ground. The audience clapped, which was nice, then dispersed.
I remember his hands that day. The cables had sheared off a lifetime of calluses, and left them red, smooth, and painful. But the interesting thing to me now, as I write this, was his response; he got on the scaffold the next morning. And he took the new man, a Dominican immigrant, up with him after a stern talking to, and taught him the ropes. The man explained he was desperate for the work and had lied about his experience, thinking he could pick up what to do by watching Sam. All Sam had to hear was that the man was desperate for the work.
I think it is self-evident that Sam’s life strategy was not designed for economic advancement. You can add to that his refusal to take unemployment insurance for many years because he thought it charity from an institution he opposed: the State. Nor would he accept a tip or bonus, which he thought demeaned him. He put food on the table with back-breaking labor. Mostly he painted the decrepit apartments of the crumbling nineteenth-century tenements in our neighborhood. He was a superb old-fashioned craftsman: able, in the age before hi-tech, to match colours perfectly; even those that have faded from exposure over the years. He knew how to plaster, spackle, provide primer coating and otherwise prepare a wall before actually applying the finishing paint that you see. It was incredible the way he could cover one quarter of wall with a single dip of the brush and long seemingly effortless strokes of his right arm—all to the rhythm of a Wobbly tune that he exhaled faintly, as unconscious to him as the Hebrew prayers were to his sleeping father.
Leo’s Road Home
“The essence of all slavery consists in taking another man’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.” These words are not Sam’s, but those of Leo Tolstoy. Nor was Tolstoy alone in this view; it is why the radicals of his day referred to Capitalism as wage-slavery. Sam came to view the whole of dominant society—the whole of centralized authority, be it the State, the Capitalist System, or organized hierarchal Religion—as a vast moral crime. And it is this moral crime that the dispossessed of the world must oppose.
These were not the beliefs of a good Socialist Party member, but Sam expressed them with accelerating vehemence and force, to the extent that the officers of the Party, and not a few rank-and-file members, accused him of disrupting the functioning of the organization. The upshot of Sam’s sojourn through the Party was that he was put on trial for insubordination and expelled. Decades later he would exclaim with a droll smile that the Party was right to do so—though not so much for his being insubordinate as for asking inconvenient questions. Hardly Galileo facing the hooded Inquisition, he welcomed the trial, because it gave him the opportunity to expound his views. “After the trial, one of the judges came up to me and said, ‘You know, you are not too bad. In fact you put up a pretty good defense, as far as things go, although your case is hopeless. I am going to give you a tip. You are not a socialist. You are an anarchist. You belong with the crazies.’ So I asked him, ‘What is their address?’”
I doubt the judge gave Sam an actual address, but he and a number of other failed YPSLs found their way to “a dingy little loft on Eighteenth street and Broadway near Union Square,” headquarters of the anarchist periodical Road to Freedom. “We were heartily welcomed and without membership qualifications invited to attend group meetings and participate in all activities. I was overwhelmed to learn that there existed a different, anti-statist international … movement diametrically opposed to authoritarian Marxism…”
Sam had found his home.
“Reds” & Reality
Road to Freedom had a nominal co-editor who seldom showed up, and never worked. His name was Hippolyte Havel. Sam did not know him at the height of his career as a militant anarchist writer, editor, close friend of Emma Goldman, and well-known member of the Greenwich Village Bohemian community. When Sam knew him he was pretty much incapable of doing anything, was entirely supported by comrades and what he could cadge from gullible strangers passing through. Sam remembered him as “an ill tempered, abusive alcoholic, a paranoiac who regarded even the slightest difference of opinion as a personal affront. Nor could he carry on a discussion on any subject for more than a few minutes without constant interruptions, abruptly launching into a tirade on totally unrelated matters. It was most painful to witness the deterioration of a once vibrant personality.”
Many years later, in the 1940s, Sam attended The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neil’s bitter commentary on lost illusions, cowardice, and betrayal. One of the characters spends the entire play sprawled across a table in Harry Hope’s funereal bar, drunk; every now and then he rises to spout something vehemently incomprehensible before collapsing again. “That’s Hippolyte Havel!” Sam exclaimed. There was no doubt!
Hippolyte Havel, flesh and blood human being, morphed into a character in an O’Neil play! That provides me the solution to a problem I have had. How to make accessible to people who were born after Sam died the breadth of his experience and the myriad people he knew so many years ago? Simple chronology—you know, first Sam did this, and then he said that—cannot convey to you the richness of Sam’s lifetime journey in the anarchist movement, which he embarked upon when he joined Road to Freedom. But we do have the movies, and a special one at that.
Reds was a film I dragged Sam to in 1982, for he disliked going to the movies…
Reds is a three hour long, romanticized but fundamentally accurate depiction of the life and times of the brilliant American journalist John Reed (Warren Beatty). The man cut quite a figure. He rode with the Mexican bandit/revolutionary Pancho Villa. He was closely associated with the Wobblies and good friends with Big Bill Haywood. He was active in the rich New York radical/bohemian scene, knew everybody, was in on everything. He witnessed the Russian Revolution first hand; his Ten Days That Shook the World remains a classic account of that momentous event. He became a committed Bolshevik, was instrumental in founding the American Communist Party. He died young of a terrible illness, typhus, in Moscow where his remains were interred in the Kremlin Wall. Numerous old-time radicals and writers—themselves, not actors—appear throughout Reds and comment on the characters depicted in the film. I thought Sam would enjoy Reds and on the whole he did. (“Who ever thought Hollywood would make such a film?”)
The problem was in the details. Sam was nearly deaf at this stage so I had to trundle him up front, where, with his swollen belly, he sat on the edge of his too small seat, leaning forward on his wooden cane, breathing noisily, trying to catch the dialog. He knew personally or was familiar with nearly every character in Reds. This included many of the aged witnesses, who were, after all, his contemporaries. As the film got going, Sam became involved and growled comments on the proceedings, his gravel baritone blasting into the darkness. There followed from the audience, like a Greek Chorus, a call and response session.
Sam, viewing one of the old-timers on screen, blares: “Henry Miller! The man was a bohemian in Paris. He knows nothing about these things.”
Response: “Shhh!!
An aged lady I do not remember appears on screen.
Sam: “Her!”
Response: “Quiet!!”
The scene shifts to Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union: Sam: “Him I can respect. That’s more like it.”
Response: An intolerant HISSS!
Big Bill Haywood shows up in little more than a bit part for a line or two: Sam waves his hand in disgust at the actor. “Nothing like him! The man has no stature. Haywood had stature! Haywood had one eye, but he never wore a patch like this fella!”
Response: Shut the fuck up! Call the manager!…
Then, toward the end, there is the touching if slightly absurd montage of the devoted Diane Keaton, in the attempt to reach the dying Beatty, hiking through the Soviet snow in a blizzard. Apparently, she is not allowed to enter Moscow directly.
Sam: “Now that is ridiculous. Those days anyone could get in! The regime was looking for support. Did you know that Bryant married the American Ambassador after Reed died?”
The audience response ends here; instead a flash light skips through the darkness and two young ushers find us up front. “Sir, we must ask you to leave!”
“Why? What did we do?”
“Come on, it is almost over anyway,” I say.
Outside, in the bright sunlight of the parking lot, some of the film’s patrons can barely contain spitting at us; seeing an old man in suspenders with white socks showing beneath the cuffs of his pants made them angrier. Their fury was directed at a character that could have walked directly out of the film.
On the way home, in the car, I search for something about which Sam and I can agree: “How did you like the guy who plays Eugene O’Neill?” It was Jack Nicholson, who has an affair with Bryant in the film. I enjoyed his performance.
“No good!”
“No good? I thought he was very good. Why?”
“Too gloomy.”
“Well, O’Neill must have been a gloomy guy, right? Look at his plays!”
“But he was not gloomy in that way.” Sam insisted. “He was a good fella to have a drink with. He had that Irish wit. He didn’t wear his troubles in public like a hair shirt, going around depressing everybody!”
Their paths had intersected in the radical, artistic, bohemian circles of the time. Early on O’Neill had shipped-out—that is, worked as a merchant seaman—and had been a Wobbly, and hung with anarchists. He was not yet Eugene O’Neill.
Sam’s off-hand comment surprised me. “You know that? You knew Eugene O’Neill? You drank with him? Why didn’t you tell me?” I felt, while not hurt, put-out.
“Why should I tell you? What earthly difference does it make if I knew Eugene O’Neill?”
I suppose he was right in the scheme of things.
The Clap Doctor from Chi
Sam was fortunate to form close friendships with a number of colourful characters in his Chicago days. Some served as mentors; others he simply palled around with. He hit it off especially well with a tall, rugged looking fellow of bad complexion, dirty knuckles, and greasy shoulder length hair by the name of Dr. Ben Reitman—celebrated in Wobbly circles as “the clap doctor from Chi.” They often met at the forums conducted by “hobo college”, a fraternal organization that provided food, lodging, and education to the down-and-out on skid-row—West Madison Street—and less often at more dignified forums run by the anarchist Free Society group. The two men had more in common than poor personal hygiene. Each was the product of poverty-stricken Jewish immigrants. Each went on the bum early; Reitman was riding box-cars at age ten. Though Reitman was able to get training, and became a doctor, each man was restless, rebellious, difficult, and tender hearted.
Reitman has been excoriated by feminist historians as a perfect son of a bitch, a cad, for what they deem his shabby treatment of Emma Goldman in the course of their torrid love affair of 1908 thru 1917. Not that Sam disagreed. Emma summed up Reitman’s faults succinctly: his vulgarity, “his bombast, his braggadocio, his promiscuity, which lacked the least sense of selection.” Sam once told his close friend, the historian Paul Avrich, that “it was impossible to have too low an opinion of Reitman.”
On the other hand, he liked the guy. Reitman earned his “clap doctor” appellation because he treated street prostitutes for VD at a time when no “respectable” doctor would touch them. This, long before penicillin was discovered. His “practice,” consisted of whores, skid-row bums, thieves, destitute immigrants, low-lives difficult to categorize. These were the people he grew up with and with whom he lived. He was a pioneer of public health, setting up free clinics for the most wretched of the poor, and with Goldman toured the country advocating birth control, women’s rights, and other disreputable causes. Hard to hate a man locked up at night for dispensing birth control advice in public, but let out during the day to treat imprisoned prostitutes and work in the hospital laboratory. And, not least in those Prohibition days, you could count on him for a prescription to buy legal booze.
Certainly, Sam thought, his good deeds deserved some positive mention from Emma’s bitter defenders. But my father was in many ways an old-fashioned man. “Is the poor woman entitled to no privacy, no peace?” he pleaded when Emma’s intimate love letters to Reitman were published in the 1980s. To which the answer is “no.” She belongs to history now, and history loves scandal, revelation.
Reitman was kidnapped in San Diego while on a speaking tour with Emma in 1912. They had come to lend support to the Wobblies caught up in a free speech fight so vicious it drew national attention. While Emma was detained forcibly by authorities in another part of town, eight bastards pushed their way into his hotel room, drove him into the desert night, stripped him naked, beat him, burned IWW into his buttocks with a glowing cigar, poured hot tar over him head first, and rolled him. Then they wrenched his balls and shoved a club up his anal cavity. He nearly died.
That was all long before Sam knew Ben. So was Ben’s affair with Emma, whom he last saw in 1919, the year she was deported. It was an intense episode in a full life. He placed flowers on her grave the day of her burial next to the Haymarket martyrs in Waldheim Cemetery. Ben died three years later, in 1943. Sam missed him, would always speak of him with affection. “Reitman never turned down anyone seeking help,” he said.
It was rumored he left $1500 in his Will—a small fortune—for the bums on West Madison Street to drink to his memory. Sam had no doubt this was true.
Maximoff
The man who most influenced Sam’s adult life was of an entirely different sort: self-disciplined, ascetic, scientific, deeply intellectual, prolific scholar, writer; a person of impeccable ethical behavior, and courageous beyond imagination. His name was Gregorii Petrovich Maximoff: one of the great figures in the history of twentieth-century Russian anarchism. They met in 1926, two years after Maximoff’s arrival in Chicago and four years after he was expelled from the Soviet Union with the stipulation of summary execution should he return. He taught Sam many things, most importantly how to live…
Sam later wrote that “Maximoff’s pre-eminent place in this history of Russian anarchism rests upon his ability to adjust theory to the practical needs of the workers. He formulated workable, constructive libertarian alternatives to Bolshevism: free Soviets; grassroots housing and neighborhood committees; self-management of industry through federations of factory committees; industrial unions; agricultural collectives and communes; networks of non-interest, non-profit co-operative agencies for credit and exchange. He envisioned a vast network of voluntary organizations embracing the myriad operations of a complex society.”
In the spring of 1919 Maximoff went to Kharkov (a major center of steel production and heavy industry; you might call it the Pittsburgh of the Ukraine) to work in the statistics department of the Northern Bureau of the All Russian Union of Metal Workers. When the Bolsheviks conscripted him into the Red Army for propaganda work, he refused. Instead, he volunteered for something far more dangerous: frontline combat against the advancing White Guards, who had invaded Russia seeking to install the old regime… but on the condition that Lenin abolish the Cheka, stop breaking strikes and terrorizing the peasants, and restore civil liberties and power to the Soviets. Fat chance! Maximoff was arrested and summarily sentenced to death. He was saved from “the wall” by the Kharkov Steel Workers, who threatened a general strike; such was the standing of the man.
He remained in prison, however. He described that delightful experience in “One Day in the Cheka’s Cellars,” a chapter in his masterful The Guillotine at Work. Think of it as precursor to Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as Lenin was precursor to Stalin…
The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia is Maximoff’s masterpiece. Over six hundred pages, in two volumes, it stands after all these years as a searing indictment of Bolshevik rule, of Marxism, of the dangers of the concentration of state power. He lays the origin of that vast crime, the Soviet State, at the doorstep of Lenin, and not at his demented successor, Stalin, as apologists have done…
Sam for his part said many times that he knew the Bolsheviks were no good from the moment they slaughtered the Tsar and his wife and children, which he considered a profoundly immoral act.
Taking Down Shachtman
Sam had developed into a first-rate speaker at forums and street meetings by the time of his trip to the soft coal fields. He knew how to handle hostile crowds and he knew how to handle himself in debate–an art form, as he called it. There was the night he annihilated the well-dressed, sarcastically devastating trial lawyer Max Shachtman before an audience of several hundred people. The debate concerned the nature of the Soviet State, whether it was heading toward true communism. To a present-day audience
this might seem nonsensical, like a debate over whether the Pope is Catholic. But “communism” meant something else to a leftist audience of the late 1920s and early 1930’s; the issue was whether the Soviet Union would ever become a free and truly socialistic society under Bolshevik rule. Shachtman thought so fervently; he was an ardent supporter of Lenin’s right-hand man, Trotsky, who referred to the Soviet Union as a degenerate worker’s state but a worker’s state nonetheless. Sam answered to the contrary, and Shachtman, after calling Sam a political imbecile, proceeded to demolish his argument eloquently. Unbeknownst to him, Sam had quoted his answer verbatim from a revealing passage by Trotsky.
Sam, facing the audience, shrugged off the Shachtman’s contempt, and said pleasantly, “I happen to agree with you. Argue with Trotsky! He wrote it!”
“Prove it!”
As Sam proceeded with theatrical flourish to open the passage from Trotsky he had memorized, the lawyer, stung, lunged across the stage for the book. The audience roared. Sam moved away, shielding the book. “You can see it in a minute, but let me first read some more!” The man had been reduced to a clown. Nothing he said after that escaped without deflating chuckles coming from the audience.
With Tresca and the Italians
Two photographs in simple frames next to Sam’s typewriter. They are of the two men that he knew, and loved, above all others. One photograph is of gray-haired Gregorii Petrovich Maximoff, impeccably dressed and barbered, a dignified man in the old European style. The other is of Carlo Tresca in his wiry youth, perhaps his thirties: string tie, long face, prominent nose, goatee, dangerous dark eyes, charismatic. Carlo! Sam always referred to him like that, his voice upturned in an exclamation point. There would follow a low private chuckle of the deepest affection, infinitely sad.
There is another photograph of Tresca, taken by the celebrated crime photographer Weegee in 1943. It is of an overweight old man, gray haired, on his back in the night, a puddle of blood from his head staining the pavement: the victim of a classic Mafia “hit.” It is hard to believe the two photographs—the one on Sam’s desk and the one taken by Weegee for a New York tabloid—are of the same man. Tresca was celebrated in many circles, and the murder took place early in the evening on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street. A sensational crime, front page news: investigations were demanded, but interest faded and no one was prosecuted. War was blazing, men dying on two fronts. Tresca remained a forgotten figure for half a century save for the dwindling few, who, like Sam, knew and loved him, and now there are none who knew him left…
Carlo’s days as a key Wobbly organizer of great strikes and localized, short-lived social revolutions were long gone when he and Sam met in 1933 and immediately became fast friends. So, too, was Carlo’s key role in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, whom he knew well and struggled to save. But he was still battling the Fascists when Sam met him; he hadn’t given an inch since the early 1920s when Mussolini came to power. “With his comrades…he held antifascist street meetings in communities dominated by the Fascists, he raided Fascist headquarters, dispersed Fascist meetings and assemblies, and in the streets fought the Blackshirts in hand-to-hand combat.” The Fascists were fond of canes and umbrellas with razors attached to their tips and they would swing the damn things at your face and neck. A lifetime of encounters with all the right enemies had left their mark on Tresca and I am not speaking metaphorically. Sam said the man’s body was a canvas of cuts, broken bones, and bullet holes.
But Carlo was protective of Sam. He discouraged his participation in these scary affairs. “Sammy, we don’t need you here with you glasses, you can’t see nothing! We need you for other things,” he’d say in his impossible to transpose speech—described by Max Eastman as Italian spoken with English words.
Not that Sam was an armchair antifascist. There was plenty of work to go around. Besides the Blackshirts, you had the pro-Hitler German-American Bund, which held rallies in their strongholds, the Yorkville section of Manhattan and in parts of New Jersey. Then you had the native, homegrown fascists led by an awful individual named Art Smith. And there were others. Indeed, Mussolini was popular from the early 1920s up to the late 1930s; Cole Porter wrote a flattering lyric to him in his “You’re the Top,” which was cut on second thought. Many sympathetic American thought that Fascists were efficient, they got things done. Hitler was the strong leader Germany needed. He put people to work and tough measures were needed to handle the pushy Jews. Mussolini, Hitler these guys knew how to take care of the Commies, most of whom were Jews anyway! Sentiments like that were strong in big Eastern cities in the 1930s and the Fascists sought to dominate the street corners and parks where rallies were held.
Sam did most of his antifascist street work in collaboration with the IWW. It is a lost chapter in the history of that heroic organization. There were not many Wobblies in NY at that time—perhaps several hundred or so if you took into account the Finns, and other ethnic groups—and most were not active at the same times. Some belonged to MTW (the seafarer’s local) and some, like Sam, did other work. But they joined forces to hold open air rallies—rallies designed to take back the streets from the fascists. They were not genteel affairs…
But let’s return to Tresca.
Mother remembered him with deep affection and equally deep exasperation: the affection because his charm was irresistible, the exasperation because he’d steal her husband without warning. Any time, any day, no matter if Sam was working, or had other obligations, there came that dreaded blast of an automobile horn from the street below. No need for Sam to look out the window, he would simply stop whatever he was doing and vanish for an evening, or days on end. Mother never knew, because Sam never knew; at least that is what he said racing out the door. Carlo would come up to the apartment to recruit Sam on occasion, especially if it involved an extended absence, probably as a put-up job initiated by Sam.
“Don’t worry, Mother,” he’d say,” I bring him home!” And Mother was left with the babies.
Their destination: Philadelphia, Boston, the mining towns of the Lehigh valley of Pennsylvania, the factory towns of Connecticut and Massachusetts—wherever there were knots of working-class Italians waiting for Carlo. Forty years later Sam would shake his head in admiration of Carlo. “He didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. But he had this car and this half crazy chauffer; Carlo couldn’t drive.”
These journeys often acquired an Odyssean quality. You got to Boston, for example, on Highway 1, the old single lane Boston Post Road that ran through every town and village along the way. There were no superhighways and Interstates then. And, of course, Carlo knew a comrade in every one of these towns and villages. Or so it seemed. “We pass Ruggiero (or whomever)! If he find out we don’t say hello, you make him insulted!”
And so it was wine and pasta with Ruggiero (or whomever) in every town and village from NY to Boston. It was amazing. The comrades never seemed to know he was coming but were always ready for him. Warm, wonderful people! The problem was a five-hour drive turned into a fifteen-hour fiasco, with Sam and Carlo and the chauffer—who was more friend than chauffer—arriving soaked in wine and stuffed to the gills, and the meeting long dispersed. No harm; his hosts seemed to be used to it, and the audience returned.
The size of the audience never fazed him. He told Sam of a winter night in a southern Illinois coal town. The hall he was scheduled to speak in turned up empty, save for three or four miners. Carlo starts his speech, by rote, mechanically. Three of the men promptly fall asleep, a trio of snores at different pitch. The hall is drafty, the wind is howling outside, a blizzard is starting up. Carlo wants to go home. But his audience of one gestures he should go on. At length, Carlo says in Italian, “Son of a bitch, its cold. Let me go home!” “Not yet,” the lone miner says. “What you say is interesting!” And so Carlo proceeds for another hour to expound on the principles of anarcho-syndicalism and the need for the IWW. Finally, the miner shakes Carlo’s hand and says simply, “You will hear from me.”
“Turns out he was my best man,” Carlo said to Sam.
That man became a key organizer of the militant Progressive Mine Workers Union, an affiliate of the IWW. He single-handedly lined-up hundreds of men. The PMWU supported the Spanish Revolution. They assessed their members thousands of dollars which they sent to the Spanish anarchists. Carlo’s moral, which he passed on to Sam: the success of a meeting depends not on the size of the audience, but on the few that are impressed with your message.
Of charismatic people, my old friend Herb Miller cautioned, “Charm is suspect. It is seduction.” Carlo was seductive and, at times insensitive and a bit ruthless when it served his purpose. I am thinking of a minor incident Sam never forgave him for until after his death, upon which he forgave him everything. They were scheduled at a large meeting in Philadelphia: perhaps 150 people in attendance, all Italians. On the drive down, Carlo asks Sam what he’s going to say. The event is an important occasion for Sam and he has devoted time and energy to his address. He takes his outline from his shirt pocket and proceeds in detail to give Carlo his hour-long meditation: on the rise of fascism, on Stalinism, on the conniving and jockeying of the United States, France, and England, on the impotence of the labor movement—and, finally, on what should be the anarchist response to all this in the face of the oncoming war. Carlo listens intently. “That’s a good speech, Sammy. Good!”
Up on the platform, Carlo proceeds to give Sam’s speech. In Italian. To thunderous applause! Sam follows. Undercut, he has nothing substantive to say, and settles for ten minutes of clichés to polite clapping. Sam is hurt by what he considers Carlo’s betrayal. Carlo understands this and speaks to Sam on the drive back to NY.
“Sam, you see me? The glasses, the goatee, the black string tie, the black suit, the big black hat? I know these people! I am the professore! They come to see me! To me they listen. They don’t listen to you. American speaks English. They know you, good anarchist, Carlo’s friend, fight for Sacco, Vanzetti. But they come for Carlo.”
Sam had to admit Carlo was correct. His was a movement held together by the strength of his personality, courage, and commitment. There was purpose to the impromptu visits, the long dinners, the costume, the theatrical behavior. That is what mobilized the troops to fight the fascists in the streets. His followers believed in him…
I save for last the day Tresca brought Freddie Miller home. It was Mother’s fondest memory of Carlo; she glowed when she spoke of it. I include a photo of Freddie in this book. He is wearing a suit and overcoat and is cradling the infant me in his arms as we stare out across an expanse of Manhattan harbour into the distance…Freddie looks healthy, even a tad prosperous, but that is not how he appeared the day Carlo brought him home. A Wobbly from a Pennsylvania mining town, who spoke with a distinctive small-town accent, Freddie was an ex-marine, and he knew how to handle a rifle. He had taken that knowledge to Spain where he fought on the side of the anarchists in the Durruti Column, until he was captured and spent a year or so—I do not know precisely how long—in a Franco prison camp. Not a health spa. He was starved, lost his teeth, was beaten with chains. He was among the last prisoners exchanged (Mother said the last) between Franco and the United States following the fall of Spain. He had fought bravely and survived.
Mother remembered Freddie entering through the door of our home: frighteningly thin, looking half dead, with that large head and shining eyes starved people get. Carlo’s arm is wrapped around him as he enters, as if he is guarding something precious. Carlo, Freddie and the half-dozen happy Wobblies that came with them find places around the dining table. Mother sets out the food. She would never forget the expression on Carlo’s face, the joy. He sat next to Freddie, one arm loosely around his shoulder. Carlo’s other arm was beneath the table and he kept talking so as not to embarrass Freddie as he slipped him a wad of bills thick enough to bulge his pocket.
Spain in Our Hearts
Better than trying to describe precisely what The National Confederation of Labor—known by all as the CNT—meant to Sam, I can tell you Sam’s favorite story regarding that great union. It is several years before the Spanish Revolution and the government has decided to build a new prison. Which it does. However, the last phase involves installing the iron bars. But, you see the iron workers are members of the CNT; they do not believe in prisons. So, you wound up with a brand-new prison devoid of bars! Which rendered it useless, of course. I can still see that mischievous light in Sam’s eyes. As with the IWW, the spirit of independence pulsed through arteries of the CNT. The CNT was an anarchist union. Nobody gave these men orders…
I remember Federico Arcos up on the platform at Sam’s memorial service in 1990 as he struggled to convey to a modern New York audience what it was like to live through a genuine and complete social revolution. Federico is a short, solidly built gray haired man, wears glasses. He speaks softly, his cadence more Spanish than English, and you can sense his frustration getting the right words across. Finally, he faces us square on, leans forward with clenched fist, his voice rising in exaltation, “You have no idea what truly free feels like. No authority above you, no one below you. To walk down the street and meet each man’s eye.”
Federico was speaking of the streets of Barcelona, his boyhood home. Many people have described what that special freedom feels like, of course. There’s a famous passage from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that brings it home to me…Orwell is describing his impressions of Barcelona. But the revolution went deeper and was more transformative. This passage from the historian Gaston Laval, a close observer and participant, gives a sense of its scope:
In Spain during almost three years, despite a civil war that took a million lives, despite the opposition of the political parties (republicans, left and right Catalan separatists, socialists, Communists, Basque and Valencian regionalists, petty bourgeoisie, etc.), this idea of libertarian communism was put into effect. Very quickly more than 60% of the land was collectively cultivated by the peasants themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without instituting capitalist competition to spur production. In almost all the industries, factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public services, and utilities, the rank and file workers, their revolutionary committees, and their syndicates reorganized and administered production, distribution, and public services without capitalists, high salaried managers, or the authority of the state.
Even more: the various agrarian and industrial collectives immediately instituted economic equality in accordance with the essential principle of communism, “From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” They coordinated their efforts through free association in whole regions, created new wealth, increased production (especially in agriculture), built more schools, and bettered public services. They instituted not bourgeois formal democracy but genuine grassroots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life. They replaced the war between men, “survival of the fittest,” by the universal practice of mutual aid, and replaced rivalry by the principle of solidarity…. This experience, in which about eight million people directly or indirectly participated, opened a new way of life to those who sought an alternative to anti-social capitalism on the one hand, and totalitarian state bogus socialism on the other.
War between men replaced by the universal practice of mutual aid, rivalry replaced by the principle of solidarity: These are the things that gave meaning to Sam’s life, and to Mother’s as well…
I have heard and read innumerable discussions of Spain and the Revolution down through the years. Save for Sam’s The Anarchist Collectives, published in 1974, few were devoted to the constructive work that went on. Instead they turn on this question: In the face of Franco’s invasion, was the anarchist leadership correct in joining the Republican Government, as they did, or should they have stayed out and fought the fascists independently? It is a sulfurous argument…
Sam did not like the idea of scapegoating and slandering people, many of whom were not in the position to answer. Was it wrong to join the government? Probably. Was it wrong not to join the government? Probably. Sam’s overarching view from the perspective of many years after the event was deeply pessimistic: The Revolution was doomed from the start. The Western Democracies were not going to intervene to save the Republic. And suppose, by some miracle, the Revolution survived. Does anyone seriously believe England, France, and the United States would tolerate an anarchist society in their midst? They’d rather have the fascists!
The Commies
The true betrayal of Spain came from Stalin and his followers. Or is “worshipers” the better word? The record is absolutely clear. [See] The Spanish Revolution Revisited by Russell Blackwell, written in 1968, the year before he died. He and his wife Edna were close friends of my parents. I shared the same bed on occasion with their eldest, Steve, at an age when we were barely toilet trained, and Russell remained a fixture in my life into my twenties. It is tempting at this point for me to go on about Russell. His life could comfortably fill three novels: his youth in the 1920s as an organizer for the Communist Party in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras; his middle period when he stowed away on the French luxury liner the Normandy to get to Spain, hooked up with the POUM, switched to the anarchists, was wounded on the barricades of Barcelona, and barely escaped execution by the GPU at the intervention of the US Secretary of State; and his later period, when he and my parents founded the Libertarian League; and a hell of a lot more. Yes, it is tempting to go on about Russell…
I feel a swell of emotion when I see his picture on the Internet. It is all there: the patrician WASP manner; tall, slightly stooped posture; the thread-bare gray suit and vest he seemed always to wear; the large nose and large hat from the 1940s that seem of one piece; the kindly face, the charm of the man. You have probably gathered by this time that Russell was not easily silenced. He spoke out against the role of the Communists in Spain immediately upon returning to the States. The domestic Communists did not like what he had to say. And, please, these were not the gentle Jewish “misguided” Communists of a “red diaper baby” memoir—the kind of people Vivian Gornick and Carl Bernstein describe. These were a different breed. So this is how they replied to the man. They attacked from behind while he was out walking one day. They punched and kicked him until he lay on the pavement semi-conscious. But one should not conclude from this that they lacked compassion, because Steve was left unharmed in the baby-carriage Russell was pushing at the time.
This is not an “objective” memoir. I have warned you of that from the beginning. So, bear with me while I ventilate on a subject dear to my spleen: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I have seen its veterans over the years taking credit as the brave antifascists, lone defenders of the Spanish Republic. I have seen them hijack public meetings, basking in the applause of an ignorant audience. I have seen the documentaries; the panels; the symposiums. Their exploits have passed into myth. And please do not misread my intentions.
Many of these men were indeed brave and idealistic. Why, after all, would one go? Nor do I object to an old-timer, so few of them left, getting his moment in the sun. At some place, at some time, however, reality must enter the picture. The Lincoln Brigade was part of the International Brigades, an organization founded, controlled, and dominated by the Soviet Union…
Those in the Lincoln Brigades who did not submit to discipline were severely punished. And punished is a kind word. Many were hunted down and assassinated; the GPU was relentless. The victim need not have been a Wobbly or a Socialist. Some were simply men of good will who came to Spain to fight fascists. My colleague, Harold Lipson, was one of these. “It was a reign of terror,” he said, and he fled from the Brigade—alone, knowing little Spanish, and broke. He believed to the day of his death years later in New York, that he owed his life to a brave Spanish lady, who, understanding his desperation hid him out until he could escape. So spare me the Lincoln Brigades! As for their parent outfit, the International Brigades, I mention again Russell Blackwell’s account that “The Stalinist International Brigades were taken into Aragon to smash the peasant collectives by force of arms.” A Brigade capable of that is capable of anything.
A Drinking Life
I have put off discussing Sam’s ugly side. It is painful. However, I have committed myself to telling the truth about his life and times; biased, but the truth nonetheless. My father was a drunk. I prefer not to use the word alcoholic. His mid-thirties and forties bore the brunt of it, and, although he had relapses, he tapered off to the point where he hardly drank at all his last forty years. Nevertheless, that hard drinking mid-period had a near devastating impact…
I do not know precisely what caused Sam to drink so hard for so long: I suspect there is no “precisely.”
He enjoyed it. He might have picked up the habit in a hobo jungle or on that ship to Shanghai he took after he ran away from home. Ben Reitman wrote him prescriptions for booze in prohibition Chicago. The Wobbly seamen of the Five-Ten Hall and of the Newark New Jersey branch, whom he hung with quite a bit, were, with notable exceptions, a drinking crowd. Getting drunk to many of them was simply life…Sam liked to drink, probably in the same way that young people today enjoy getting high…
Sam’s drinking had somehow fused with his egalitarian, communal philosophy. It was an obligation willingly assumed by my parents that no “fellow worker,” no “comrade,” no one of the “movement” be denied a “flop,” a meal, a warm welcome—no matter how poor we were or how cramped our apartment. This insured Wobblies were all over my life as a boy, not always to wholesome effect. Hardly a day or week passed without waking up to a Wobbly snoring on our sagging couch or stretched out on our living room floor in underwear and stinking socks. Often Abe and I would come home from school to find complete strangers around our dinner table acting as if they owned it. Then there were the late nights Abe and I were awakened to Wobblies escorting Sam home drunk bellowing revolutionary songs.
What is worse for a boy to see: His father reduced to a fool or his mother’s anguish?
Sam’s drunkenness carried over to public places. He had a genius for making a spectacle of himself at the large, dignified gatherings of the Finns, Hungarians and other “ethnic” Wobblies. It may surprise you, for example, that the Finns owned their own building in the nineteen thirties and could draw crowds of over five hundred at annual events for class war prisoners and the like. When I knew them in the late forties the crowds were down to one hundred and fifty or so. Sam spoke at these events and was well received. But he invariably got plastered afterward. “Friends” egged him on and he’d start singing and rumbling about like a dancing bear to their amusement in full view of the same audience that had applauded him earlier in the evening…
Now I should clarify things. Sam was not always drunk at public meetings, mostly not. He never drank at home; rather he would return home drunk, which was bad enough. He was never violent toward mother or Abe and I. He did not drink continuously or most of the time, and in the time he was not drinking, a boy could not ask for a better father. These mitigating factors had the perverse effect of making matters worse when he was drinking, for the contrast was stark and the adjustment more difficult.
Sam’s drinking nearly destroyed us. The intervening years—all the events of a life between then and now—have no effect on the clarity of my misery. I remember lying in bed in the little room Abe and I shared, listening in the dark for him to stumble home, while Mother waited for him at the kitchen table in a state of wretchedness and fury. Her shouts, her screams, her sarcasm echoed down the halls of our apartment house and out the windows onto the street, while Sam played the bass part to her tortured melody, mumbling semi-apologies. Finally, he would calm her down to muffled whimpers and sobs. Probably they had sex, although I did not know of such things then, for they usually woke the next morning in a more cheerful mood.
In the Street
My world was expanding along with my body. I was required to walk a greater distance to school, to navigate unfamiliar streets and neighborhoods, on my own. I learned not everyone in the world was Jewish. We lived close to the waterfront and in those days working men tended to live close to where they worked. So I ran with the children of longshoreman—mostly Italian and Irish longshoreman: Tommy May, Spud Gerry, Jim Cody, Eddie Falco, Frank (Chico) Carbone. We got along fine except when we did not and I had to learn to take care of myself in those times, too: whom to fight and whom to avoid, when to be a lion and when a fox. I learned that most fights were not fair and that most bullies contrary to moralistic folklore were not cowards.
Richie Carlson was an early nemesis. Two years older, four inches taller, and twenty pounds heavier, he knew my schedule and lay in waiting for me to show up at school where he emptied my pockets and confiscated my sandwich. He pulled this on the other smaller kids as well; a shakedown artist in miniature. It got so I was afraid to show up. Finally, desperate, I did what I promised myself I would not do: I whined to Sam about it.
Sam gave me a bit of advice no doubt learned the hard way. “Hurt him! Think of nothing but that. It doesn’t matter how.” So the next day, shivering fear, I would not let him put his hands in my pocket. He punched me in the face, my nose bled, but I locked on to a single thing. I bent back the pinky finger of his left hand full force gripping it in both my hands. I would not let go. I attached myself to him, followed him wherever he squirmed, until he howled in pain and begged me to stop. He said I was a little prick, that I fought like a girl. He ridiculed me in front of his friends or, I should say, those he intimidated into acting as if they were. All of that. But he kept his hands out of my pockets and I ate my own sandwich.
On the Waterfront
I remember Jack Walsh vividly: a thin man, sharp featured, white hair impeccably combed. He wore neatly pressed jeans and a tweed jacket over an open blue work shirt. Today this is the standard uniform of the university professor but in those times jeans and a jacket were an anachronism—a statement of eccentricity or in Jack’s case, poverty. He came across as a man of intelligence, with the pointed, biting turn of phrase typical of many Wobblies. And he proceeded to give a lecture on the history of the Philadelphia waterfront worthy of the best university professor. The usual eleven people were present, three of whom were certifiable, and one in from the cold. The rest of us witnessed a bygone age come to life.
Jack described in detail in that sparse, tiny room the full spectrum of power the ship owners and stevedoring firms employed to crush the revolutionary union: goons to intimidate the men; police and courts to beat and jail organizers and strikers; “scab labor” to break strikes and usurp jobs; the press to lie about the men and impugn the motivations of the Wobblies; and, to this list, add the special services of the Mafia. The Wobblies answered back, and though I remember no specifics from sixty-odd years ago, this I do recall:
The Mafia, at the behest of the ship owners carried out a systematic campaign of terror against Wobbly organizers and the longshoremen they tried to reach on the docks. They would break up the crowds around Wobbly soap boxers by clubbing listeners and were especially vicious toward those who took Wobbly leaflets. Some of the speakers they beat until near death. But—to use a phrase alien to the Jack Walsh vocabulary—this time the Mafia fucked with the wrong bunch.
As Jack described it, the Wobblies were cool and measured in their response. They observed carefully the Mafia chain of command: who the errand boys were, to whom they reported, and so on up. It took a while. Then, when they were ready, they pounced, grabbed a Mafia boss—not a low level guy—and dragged him to the Wobbly hall where they proceeded in silence to beat him to a pulp.
The moment before tossing him out onto the gutter, they gave him an instruction: “Tell this to your friends: ‘For every one of us, two of you!’”
Jack called it the work of the “Education Committee.”
The Mafia lay off. They were nothing if not businessmen.
It is a colorful story, but I hesitate telling it, because it seems to reinforce the stereotype that union people, and the Wobblies in particular, were a violent bunch—an impression that is to me laughable in view of the violence, state-sponsored and otherwise, that they were up against. The Wobblies were determined men who lived in a hard world. But the record is clear that their “violence” amounted to self-defense in response to deliberate provocation.
On the Waterfront II
By the time I got to know him a bit, in the mid 1950’s, Dave Baer had graduated to executive status. He was vice president of Maritime Overseas, a shipping corporation. He’d come over on a Saturday or Sunday and rail away for several hours at the “woiking class.” He was a good mimic, especially of Yiddish accents, and he cut deep in the manner of comedians like George Carlin. Towards the end he would set his sights on Sam and abuse him personally. “Look at how you live! For what! The ‘woikers?’ Do they give a shit about you? When will you give up? Still slinging a brush in your fifties! You look like shit!”
Sam took it all, each visit. Finally, after one particularly lacerating session, I asked, “Why do you let him speak to you like that?” Sam answered simply, “He keeps coming around, though.”
Sam saw into Dave’s heart. I’ll skip ahead four or five years to 1958. I’m accepted to graduate school, in Ohio. Scholarship money has not yet come through. I need cash. And for that Sam broke a cardinal rule.
Up until this point I had never heard him ask a personal favor of anyone. Never! The act was foreign to his nature. But he broke down for my sake and asked Dave to get me seamen’s papers and help me to ship out. It was more money than I could possibly make otherwise short of armed robbery.
“I’m not promising, but give me a week or two. I’ll see what I can do!”
Ten days later I’m in Dave’s dingy office on lower Broadway near the Battery. Dave, looking small and not well, flips me an envelope from behind his desk: my papers. “Hold on to this. Not easy to get!”
Then he dials the phone and proves he’s an equal opportunity abuser. He calls Paul Hall, President of the Seafarers International Union (SIU), a labor leader of the Jimmy Hoffa school.
“Paul, this is Dave, Dave Baer! Listen I got a kid… No, No Paul, he’s not a Congressman’s son, he’s not a businessman’s son… Paul, Paul, listen: HE CAN’T DO ANYTHING FOR YOU! Guess what, he’s a woikin’ man’s son. You’re the head of a fuckin’ union? How ‘bout givin’ a woikin’ man’s son a break!”
I could hear laughter on the other end. Send him over! Dave rises from behind his desk and does a shocking thing: he hugs me. “Take care of yourself.”
I checked in at the SIU Hall on Fourth Avenue near the Brooklyn waterfront where I was ushered me in through a side entrance to the back room. Facing me was Paul Hall, a physically powerful man and a fearsome guy. Five goons encircled him. He barely acknowledged me. I was not to see such an arrangement again until thirty-two years later when, walking on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, I saw Mafioso John Gotti exit Benito’s restaurant, goons first. I remember the incident vividly because Gotti’s fleshy face leered at my wife. It amazes me that Dave—or anyone—would have the balls to speak to Hall directly the way he did.
Cuban Shit Sandwich
In early 1957, the New York Times has just carried the first of Herbert Matthews’ articles on Fidel Castro, front page. Matthews had interviewed Fidel at his camp in the Sierra Maestro, and a more fawning, uncritical piece of writing about a human being you will not find short of a press agent. The articles had a huge impact, far better than paid propaganda. Che Guevara said later that the article was worth more than winning battles; in 1997 Fidel had a plaque commemorating the interview installed where it took place.
But some of us knew better. A year before Matthews idolized Castro in print, I remember sitting with Russell and Sam at the far end of the SIA hall around the edge of one of the long tables. Next to us is an elderly Cuban gentleman, whose name, though I have racked my brain and enquired about it, I cannot remember. He speaks no English. “What about this Fidel?” Russell asks him. The old man shakes his head slowly while waving two fingers in a gesture that means no good. “El Caudillo” was all he would say: The chief, the charismatic leader, the man on the white horse, the plague of Latin America. Sam and Russell exchanged significant glances. That is all they had to know.
Later Russell told me the old man’s son had fought with Fidel and Che in the Sierra Maestro: “fought,” in both senses of the word. He found them too dominating and left. Several years later, after the collapse of the Batista regime, Fidel and his men came down from the mountains and made their way methodically across Cuba to Havana, stopping in every town. The purpose was to eliminate potential opposition. In each town, Fidel had to approve a list of those to be executed. The old man’s son was on one of the lists. But in a display of princely compassion, Fidel crossed his name off. Before being sent into permanent exile he was made to sign a statement that he would never publicly criticize the Castro Government.
Room with a View
The League sponsored “Forums” every Friday night. Invited speakers or in-house League members would address the audience, followed up with questions and back-and-forth debate. On a good night maybe twenty people would attend; on a poor night eight or ten. As often as not, I found the Forums tedious: a group of tired people—some dedicated and some with nowhere else to go—going through the motions. So why write about them? Because just as often they were remarkable. I marvel at the quality of many of the speakers and of those who showed up to listen. They came out of respect for Sam and Russell and the Spanish anarchists. They came because they could say what was on their mind without the need to pull punches. They came to try out new ideas, new theories. The place to be for a time in the 1950s and early 1960s was at the Forums of the Libertarian League.
There were nights historical figures—men who made history—told you things only they witnessed. Case in point: The night I.N. Steinberg, People’s Commissar of Justice in the Soviet government from December 1917 to March 1918 and a central figure in the drafting of the Soviet Constitution, came to tell us of his private, face-to-face meeting with Lenin in that sparsely furnished Kremlin room where he forged the communist state. Steinberg had been there to protest the vicious crackdown of the Cheka on all dissent and suspected dissenters. Vanishing people, torture, murder—all without trial or even a hearing—and that he, as People’s Commissar of Justice, was being ignored.
It was late in the afternoon. Lenin stared up at him from behind his simple desk and greeted him warmly. He appeared tired. He denied none of Steinberg’s charges. He shook his head sadly: “Yes, yes comrade, but these are special times. We have many enemies. Steps must be taken.” Steinberg was not having it. He mentioned victims of the Cheka who were loyal revolutionists. “Why call me Commissar of Social Justice? Why not Commissar of Social Extermination?” Steinberg asked, exasperated. Lenin peered forward, smiled ambiguously: “That’s it!” he said, waving his arms, “but we can’t say it!” And he kept his eyes on Steinberg. Was it his ironic humor? Steinberg felt a chill; he knew he was on the list, or would be sooner or later, and went into exile.
Where do you learn things like that? Steinberg went on to say Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades were not monsters in the conventional sense. They were not sadists and took no satisfaction in the imprisonment and murder of others. Nor were they corrupt; they sacrificed hugely for their ideals and truly felt they were the vanguard of a new era for humanity. But, you see, they were history’s instrument. Their decisions were governed by the unbending logic of a Marxist dialectic that led to the inevitability of the Communist State. Certain acts were an historical necessity—a necessity that transcended mere morality or personal loyalty.
Mother expressed the matter metaphorically. “Nice men! They’ll serve you tea and sponge cake while they explain to you the historical necessity of keeping their old friend chained in the basement.”
Anonymous Wisdom
I’ll skip five years ahead, circa 1961, and recount to you an incident about a dreary evening at the League Forum, half dozen in attendance.
Clump. Clump. Feet struggle up the wooden stairs to the Hall. In walks a smallish, elderly Chinese man—well-dressed in suit and tie. At his side is a hulking young American man, sloppily dressed, in need of a haircut. They sit down politely and wait for the meeting to dribble to an end.
The elderly Chinese man holds a copy of Views and Comments. “Can you tell me who wrote this, please?” It is an article on Mao’s China, specifically about the regimentation of Chinese society, and the disastrous effects of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It lays the blame squarely on Mao and the Communist Party, and it eviscerates sympathetic press agents like Herbert Read who travel the length of China and are blind to what is happening.
“It is the best article I have read in English on the situation in China,” the elderly man says. “Can you tell me who wrote it? (Views articles were unsigned.)
“I wrote it,” Sam says, pleased.
“And with what university are you affiliated?”
“None.”
“And how do you earn your living?”
“I’m a house painter.”
The old man is visibly stunned. So is his young companion. He is a professor at the University of Delaware or some such place, and he is accompanied by his graduate student who is also looking after him. They traveled all the way to New York by bus to meet the author. The visit turns into a love-fest and it goes on into the night. They wait while Sam and Mother close the Hall.
“Have you eaten?” Mother asks.
No.
“Do you have a place to stay?”
They haven’t thought about it.
“Well, come home with us.” And so the four of them take the subway back to our apartment at 481 Van Buren St. buried in the Bushwick/Bed Stuy section of Brooklyn. Mother goes to sleep. Sam and the old man and the bleary-eyed grad student talk the night away. The old man tells Sam some amazing stories. Seems he has known Mao since childhood. They were class-mates! He is not the least bit in awe of him. Rather he holds Mao in contempt. He remembers that when the teacher left the room and the children acted up, maybe did some mischief, Mao stood up and denounced them when the teacher returned.
“Mao, the class snitch!” Sam exclaims, delighted.
“Yes indeed.” The old man says.
The old man’s analysis of Mao went far deeper than that. He was a serious scholar of anarchistic bent.
What was his name, I asked Mother and Sam. Where exactly did he live? Work? Do you have his phone number? Nothing? Maddening! My parents were often that way.
Cuba Redux
Sam considered it a form of blindness that some of our allegedly leftist comrades are incapable of distinguishing true revolution from the capture of state power. Especially so if those seizing state power spout the correct—that is Marxist—rhetoric. Sam considered this blindness to be the “triumph” of the Bolshevik interpretation of Marxism in the twentieth century. The brutality of the victorious “revolutionary” regime is denied or explained away as necessary to protect the supposed revolution—which is in fact a counterrevolution. The civil libertarian critics, including the anarchists, are derided as impractical—and I guess they are if your aim is to multiply state power. An unconscious lust for power or the urge to be close to power does not improve the eyesight of these alleged comrades, especially those of intellectual bent useful to the regime.
Sam saw the pattern repeat upon the overthrow of Batista’s Cuba. The tyranny was installed. There was the cult of the Godlike leader, Castro this time rather than Stalin. The anarchists and other’s concerned with liberty were knifed in the back. Sam had information from the underground in Cuba and from exiles at the SIA Hall. He had his eyes and ears and his own instincts. His “blood was up.” He was not going to sit by while the anarchists were persecuted once again. He was going to challenge the regime’s intellectual myth-makers and apologists. His challenge turned into a fifteen-year war against the pro-Castro Left. His enemies were influential. Substitute Cuba for Russia and Castro for Stalin and it was the thirties all over again in miniature. It was a lonely time in some ways for Sam and the few comrades at his side, but it did not bother him one little bit. He relished the isolation…
Sam’s book on the Cuban Revolution was published in 1976. I find the proof-reading terrible, the mechanical editing poor, and the layout confusing. All this makes for a difficult read in places. In spite of these shortcomings it is a groundbreaking work, in my opinion a classic. Frank Fernandez noted in Cuban Anarchism that “publication in 1976 of The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective, by Sam Dolgoff, …had a demolishing impact among the left in general and anarchists in particular. It was the most cutting critique Castroism had received in these years.”
I can still see Sam sitting in his vakokta shorts at his self-made desk in his bedroom on East Broadway as he hunted and pecked the keys of his ancient typewriter: articles in Spanish all over the place, cut-out strips of paper all over the place, writing his heart out.
The Student Sixties
Sam’s objection to most of the young radicals went deeper than language and lifestyle. He distrusted their politics. He blamed “ambitious, power-hungry, young Lenins who…were reenacting the same [Stalinist/Trotskyist] scenario that I witnessed thirty years before” and precipitating the collapse of the Students for A Democratic Society (SDS). He reached this conclusion after a heated meeting at Hamilton Hall of Columbia University.
Now Sam was eighty-three years old when he wrote of that meeting. His memory may have failed him a bit or maybe he did not regard the circumstances of his visit to Hamilton Hall as important. But he recounted to me at the time that several students came for him—I suppose he knew at least one—and said “you will have to trust us.” They drove Sam around for a while and then blindfolded him; they led him by the hand and did not remove the blindfold until he found himself facing an eager group inside Hamilton Hall.
The students were occupying the Hall. It was during the great Columbia University student revolt of 1968. There was bedlam outside. They had heard of Sam the anarchist-Wobbly and sat back waiting to bask in his praise.
They were disappointed. He did praise them highly for their struggle to ban the military and secret government work from campus. He also praised them for their sincerity and courage. However, he said there is a huge difference between a revolution and a coup. They were a attempting to seize power and bend the huge college community to their will—a community that included faculty and administrators as well as students, of which they were a minority. That to him was a coup. When he asked the students their program for running Columbia University in a capitalist economy—in other words their constructive plans—he was greeted with hisses and catcalls.
Get the old bastard out of here!
Sam chuckled as he told the story. “I kiss no one’s ass.”
Frankly, I found Sam’s remark uncharacteristically smug and I called him on it. How does not being an ass-kisser justify being tone deaf, I asked him. You say the students have engineered a coup when in fact they have spear-headed a revolt against the very things you praise them for opposing. They are not living in Russia 1917 or Spain 1936. They are living in NYC 1968. What exactly are these miniature Lenins going to take over? Columbia University? The student body? Have they a secret police—perhaps the janitors—at their disposal? Then you chastise a group of twenty-year olds for not having at their finger-tips a detailed proposal for running Columbia University. No wonder they booed you! As Sam listened to me beat up on him his weathered face took on the expression of a small boy being scolded by his teacher for wetting his pants.
Of course my parents were in sympathy with the students and antiwar activists. My parents carried signs in parades, spoke at meetings on campuses, followed events closely. The sight of the police attacking demonstrators in the streets during the Democratic Convention later that year sent Sam into a rage. Then he grew saddened at the sight of the bloodied young people who had come to Chicago with a noble aim in mind. Brother Abe, who lived in Chicago, happened to be visiting us in NY at the time. He sat in Mother and Sam’s living room and watched the same TV images that we all did: only he came to a different conclusion.
…“You don’t understand! You will never understand! These people are having the time of their lives. They will never forget this. They’ll tell it to their grandchildren. They are middle class! They have credit cards! They fly! Their parents pay the bills! Do you think they have felt the lash like you, forced into slavery at the age of eight?” His rage subsided. “Exempt them from the draft, you watch!”…
I’ll skip ahead to the early seventies. I’m on the ground floor of my school outside the lunch room.
“Professor Dolgoff!” I turn to the voice and find a light-skinned black kid with glasses. He’s huge, three-hundred pounds. His face is familiar but I cannot place him. “You don’t remember me. Greene!” he says, giving his last name. “I was in your four o’clock lab.”
I remember now. It was maybe five years ago. Greene was a skinny kid. Now he is bloated. “What the hell happened to you? You got fat!” I had that direct way of speaking, inherited from Sam.
“Yeah, I got shot up,” he says, “and he lifts his trouser to show me his plastic leg.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” I say.
“That’s ok. I’m back. Remember Moore and Rafael? The three musketeers? In the back row? We liked to break your balls?” he adds, joking.
I remember. Their young faces return to me, piercingly.
“We all enlisted!”
“What the hell did you do that for?”
Greene shrugs, as if my question is of no consequence at this late date. “I ran out of money. We had to drop out. Well, Moore, he bought it. I don’t know what happened to Rafael.”
Three poor kids from Brooklyn. But Nixon abolished the draft.
Nevertheless, self-interest is not a crime. The student revolts at Berkeley and Columbia sparked a series of campus riots that hastened the end of the Viet Nam War. Student uprisings in Paris led to the demise of the De Gaulle government. You have to go back many decades to find a mass movement to match what the students accomplished.
Paleo-Radical
He had been watching a TV documentary on the Sacco and Vanzetti case and on the screen, for a split second, there flashed the grainy image of an outdoor mass meeting somewhere: Union Square? Boston? High on the platform a speaker was haranguing the crowd, tiny as an ant. And it was Sam!
“It was me! Sixty years ago! My life, where did it go? So many years! A different person, but me! What should I say to that person if I met him now? Would he know me? Am I anyone he expected to be?”
He fell despondent. “I’m a fossil, a living fossil.”
He had devoted his life to the shrinking world of the IWW and the anarchist movement, while the wider world expanded. He had dealt with this reality like an unrepentant warrior forced to give an opponent his due. Example: We are walking together in front of our building; his steps and his breath short. Three teenagers approach and pass: six feet, husky, a spring to their stride.
Sam smiles at them, says to me ruefully, “They grow ‘em big under capitalism, don’t they?”
Marxist, anarchist, whomever—the radicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries underestimated capitalism, Sam said when in an analytical mood. Conditions were so horrible, the contradictions so glaring, the capitalists so stupid it seemed obvious the system was on its last legs. ”We all thought it was going to collapse. A matter of time. We underestimated the capacity of the system to make adjustments. We gave little thought to the middle class, how it stabilized things. And we did not understand the workers! We thought that if they learned the value of solidarity they’d become
more militant, overthrow the system. Instead they became less militant. So long as they got enough. That one man lives in luxury while another man breaks his back for him they do not see as an injustice! They view it as the accidents of life!” At this Sam would turn away in disgust.
His life! Where did it go? He spoke only to me of the sadness that washed over him at times.
Motherlode
Spanish Anarchist Maria Gil Maria encouraged Mother to be more assertive. She felt Mother was too much in Sam’s shadow. So she arranged for her to address a group of radical-liberal students at Vassar College in upstate Poughkeepsie, New York—a bit risky considering her bad heart. I was not present; it was an all-woman thing. But I gather Mother’s speech could have gone better. She had grown hesitant speaking in public since her stroke and perhaps the room full of young self-assured females with faculty looking on intimidated her. However, Mother sprung to life when an insistent student kept hammering away at her anarchism. She invariably prefaced her remarks with “Marx says this” and “according to Marx”—as if that clinched the argument. Finally, Mother had enough.
“Marx, Marx!”, she interrupted, with a wave of the hand. ”Who was Marx? He was a man who lived in the nineteenth century. He was a brilliant man, for sure. Some of the things he said are of value today; others not so much. Why do you feel the need to refer to him always? Why don’t you stand up, think for yourself, and say what it is you want to say!” She received enthusiastic applause!
Sam’s End
Let me tell you of the night the night he was awarded his Nobel Prize. The ceremony took place in a dim, cavernous Irish bar in New York’s Meat Packing District at the far end of West Fourteenth Street hard against the Hudson River. Today the Meat Packing District is a theme park for upper-middle-class tourists, the quaint nineteenth-century structures and cobbled streets a pleasant stage set. Every old city has that kind of place. But in 1985, the year of Sam’s Nobel Prize, they still packed meat in the Meat Packing District. It was a coarse, working-class neighborhood, a remnant of the old days: winos and dingbats and truck drivers and meat packers, rather than the chic people.
Early1985 would come to mark a sad occasion for the union movement. Margaret Thatcher had finally broken the two-year strike of the British coal miners. “The enemy within,” she had called them and claimed they were “a mob” that did not share the values of other British people. On 29 May 1984, five thousand pickets clashed violently with police. Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Coal Miners, described the battle this way: “We’ve had riot shields, we’ve had riot gear, we’ve had police on horseback charging into our people, we’ve had people hit with truncheons and people kicked to the ground. The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.” (As if violence is contrary to British tradition!)
And so, to the huzzahs of the British and American conservatives, Thatcher broke the strike and obliterated a working class culture, and consigned thousands of proud men and their families to poverty.
I do not know the details, but Sam was asked to address a delegation of Welsh coal miners who in desperation had come to the United States in search of funds and support. Sam still got around reasonably well but his step was shaky and his breath short and so Martin Pine and I brought him to the cavernous Irish Bar on Fourteenth Street. The regulars up front let their turned heads follow us as we made our way to the back room.
I was a bit startled by what I saw. The room was larger than I expected and so was the crowd. Perhaps one hundred people, it was hard for me to tell, but certainly not the twenty or so on a good night that I remember about the old IWW meetings. And the men were seated silently and expectantly in waiting; we were a bit late.
As Sam put it later, what was there to say? My father stood before these roughly dressed miners, with their gnarled faces—even the younger among them—and big hands. Years ago, I had seen the John Ford classic How Green was My Valley, about Welsh miners, but no actor is capable of capturing the expressions of these men, their eyes, and their sadness. Perhaps Sam saw before him the Wobbly miners, gandy dancers , seamen, and lumber jacks of his youth. I wonder what the Welsh miners must have thought at the sight of the old man facing them: thick shouldered, wild hair, emphysema stout—the Jewish face, the checkered shirt, the suspenders, the white socks showing beneath the cuffs of his wrinkled pants. As it turned out none of that stuff mattered.
What was there to say? The strike was lost. Words were insufficient. A long pause as Sam stood before them. If there was nothing to say, why say it? Without a plan, in the moment, Sam raised his right arm high in a fist. And then he sang-croaked in his gravel baritone the old English strike song he was sure the men knew:
Hold the fort for we are coming
Union men be strong….
It was a Wobbly favorite.
The room exploded! Martin said later he never saw anything like it. I certainly hadn’t, this release of emotion, the entire room thundering Hold the fort for we are coming/union men be strong/ side by side we’ll battle onward/ victory is ours.
Finally the room went quiet and Sam said simply that no strike is really lost. The men had stood up for their rights, their dignity, and that is something never lost.
And now, at last, Sam’s Nobel Prize. The men of the dark, crowded bar out front had heard the explosion, the songs, and Sam’s short speech. They fell silent as Martin and I helped Sam navigate past them to the street.
“You kin drink here any time you like!” the bartender called out to Sam in Irish tribute.
I wish I had words to describe to you Sam’s face: Pride, self-deprecating humor, irony, a complete understanding of the human condition:
“You know,” he said solemnly, “that’s the highest compliment!”