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 out 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 not hurt, but 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.
Sam was always pulling surprises like that. He did not think that knowing famous people was important. Sometime later, I mentioned a PBS documentary on Diego Rivera. Sam smiled and said simply, “Diego was a good guy. You couldn’t help but like him.” They had met several times in the early ’30s at radical meeting halls on lower Broadway and at a Union Square diner so infested with communists it was called The Kremlin.
As I’ve mentioned, the purpose of my autobiographical, cinematic diversion is to make accessible the richness of Sam’s life nearly a century ago. He came to know personally virtually everyone who mattered in the radical movement of his day or he came to know of them intimately through their friends and enemies. Not that he thought his life was rich; it was simply his life.
7: Back to Road to Freedom
At Road to Freedom Sam was taken under-wing by Walter Starrett Van Valkenburgh, universally known as “Van”—the first of his many colorful mentors. He was a close friend of Emma Goldman, and had come to New York City via upstate Schenectady where, years earlier, he had lost a leg in a railroad accident. Normally Van got around on a crutch, but before a street demonstration—picture this—he would strap on his wooden leg and use the crutch to flail away at the cops, communists, and other enemies. What impressed Sam most, however, was the man’s almost infinite tolerance, and his kindness. He would publish almost anything of an anarchistic flavor, no matter how outrageous, with perhaps a single line at the bottom saying it was not necessarily the view of the editor. There were no qualifications for membership; all were welcome. Total strangers passing through had voice equal to “old-timers.” Impossible, you say? And yet the little group somehow functioned by mysterious consensus and put out the paper—although Van worked full time elsewhere and came in evenings and weekends.
Not that Road to Freedom at all times resembled the Peaceable Kingdom. Archie Turner was an Englishman of no trade or special talent save as a ladies man—an anarchist Don Juan. He had a way of getting under one’s skin. Van detested him. The two were fire and water until Van boiled up one day and theatrically pulled a gun on him. Sam calmly took it away.
Theatrics aside, “Van” did a great thing for my father. He watched him, each night and weekends month after month, carry out the same menial tasks he had performed for the Socialist Party. Then, from nowhere, one day he said to him firmly: “You are writing an article for the paper. Next issue!” It was as close to a command as this gentle man was capable of generating.
“Me?” Sam asked, shocked.
“You can do this,” Van said, and that was that. He insisted Sam sign his name to it, and he did, calling himself “Sam Weiner,” a pen name he used for many years for inexplicable reasons; surely he was not fooling anyone.
“How do you like seeing your name in print?” Van asked after the paper came out.
It was a sense of pride Sam never forgot, although he did not remember the article too well maybe sixty years later. “I think I called Gandhi a bourgeois reformer,” he said with characteristic self-mocking smile. Van’s kindness had recast his self-image.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to define anarchism for it has bearing on the next stage of Sam’s life. The word stems directly from the ancient Greek: an—without, and arche—realm or sovereignty. You can also substitute arkhos—leader or ruler. A society without a Ruler be it an individual or an institution, such as the State: that is what anarchists advocate, at least those who take the trouble to advocate. They do not believe in disorder, merely the type of “order” or rule imposed from above, the so-called hierarchal order one is forced to obey. Voluntary organization, voluntary association, the freedom to join or leave, mutual obligation free of coercion—this is anarchist order.
Anarchism is a wide tent; all kinds of people come in from the rain: from individualists who regard any conversation between three or more people as an authoritarian conspiracy to tightly organized communalists; from lifestyle anarchists who believe no restrictions should be placed on their behavior to traditionalists whose personal behavior is a model of Calvinist rectitude. Road to Freedom attracted anarchists of all kinds and not a few plain, old-fashioned nut-cases—the categories being not mutually exclusive.
I remember some of the people from Sam’s early years; they still came to anarchist meetings in the 1950s—older, balder, but according to Sam spouting the same stuff. One fellow, Sid Wright, offered a singular solution to the world’s problems. It was self-evident to him that all evil, aggression, and drive for power and domination exhibited by the human race stemmed from the same root cause: children are conceived clandestinely, in the dark, clothed in guilt. Children should be made in the open, in the fields, in the park, in sunlight, man and woman fucking naked for all to see. Then they would be born devoid of shame, full of hope and possibility, and free of the crippling neuroses that shackles the world. A return to the Garden of Eden, although you better not mention that corrupt document, the Bible, to him. He advanced his theory in an impeccable, scholarly English accent, with his wife, a most dowdy and respectable lady, looking on approvingly. There was a certain cockeyed logic to it if you forgot all about genetics and embraced idiocy.
Road to Freedom attracted far too many people like that for Sam to hang around long—though he enjoyed the company of many of these eccentrics and remained friends with them throughout life. Those anarchists in Road to Freedom who were not crazy (and to be fair that was most of them) were difficult to organize—like herding cats. Sam had the idea of a regional anarchist convention so that groups of whatever stripe would have an opportunity to express their views and know each other. “Not possible,” said one comrade who liked the idea in the abstract. “The Italians do not believe in conventions and the two Jews are not on speaking terms.”
Road to Freedom was a debating society made impotent by its lack of structure. The place was not for him. He wanted to put his energy into things that matter, such as the fight against Capitalism and the domination of the State. These institutions he felt in his bones. He had no illusions he would be successful, but the struggle was what mattered to him. That struggle was best accomplished through revolutionary unions that had economic impact, that organized workers at the point of production, that had the power to demand changes in the System. Van agreed that Sam was not a Road to Freedom type. “You are an anarcho-syndicalist. You are an IWW, a Wobbly!”
“What’s their address?”
8: With the Wobblies – On the Bum – Chicago
So Sam became a Wobbly—an anarchist Wobbly—the rest of his life. He joined and founded other groups as well, but his sense of belonging, his deepest affection, his love for the IWW never abated—even as the One Big Union faded to a few old-timers such as himself. The reasons were social as well as ideological. He joined as a young man, a “working stiff” in Wobbly terms, sometime in the early- to mid-1920s—his early membership probably overlapping with his time at Road to Freedom. The Wobbly greeting,
