In keeping with his communal-anarchistic philosophy, and also because he had many friends there, he became active in the IWW Unemployed Union. We are skipping ahead to the pit of the depression, 1931 or so, before the New Deal reforms, when the capitalist economy teetered on collapse. Millions were living on the street and lining up for bread. You must be made of stone not to admire what the IWW did.
As Sam described it, “The Unemployed Union at 2005 West Harrison Street collected food from markets and large wholesalers to sustain unemployed members. If an unemployed worker found himself and family on the street for non-payment of rent, Union members would pack up their belongings and go right back into their home with them; let the land-lord think twice before throwing them out again.” The food gathering procedure was equally direct. “An unemployed worker joining the Union was welcomed to free lodging and food, no questions asked. After two or three days he was given an empty sack after breakfast and told he would get no more help if he did not collect food before supper.” The Unemployed Union distributed thousands of their popular leaflet Bread Lines or Picket Lines, which reminded those with jobs that all workers were in the same leaky boat. It urged them to help their unemployed brothers: not to work overtime, not to scab, to strike for shorter hours, to join with the unemployed in demanding cash allotments and unemployed benefits, to stage demonstrations outside plants and picket to publicize demands.
It is interesting from the perspective of our “individualistic”—synonym for selfish?—age that thousands of people with jobs helped the Unemployed Union.
9: The Clap Doctor from Chi
Sam was fortunate to form close friendships with a number of colorful 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 boxcars at age ten. Though Reitman was able to get training, and became a doctor, each man was restless, rebellious, difficult, and tenderhearted.
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 him.”
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, and 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 he 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 $1,500 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.
10: The Russian Anarchists – 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.
We need historical context to appreciate this remark.
Maximoff was born in 1893 in the village of Matyushenko, Smolensk Province. His parents sent him to Seminary to study for the priesthood, but he renounced religion the year before his ordination and switched to the study of science instead. He graduated Petrograd Agricultural Academy as a qualified agronomist in 1915. That same year he was required to fulfill his military obligation; educated and privileged, he was of course to be sent to officer’s training school. But Maximoff turned that down, preferring to serve as a common soldier.
The Tsarist regime was crumbling, the German’s were invading on the western front, conditions in the countryside and the cities were deteriorating rapidly, the nation was in turmoil, there was general agreement that something had to be done. Maximoff applied his rational self to the problem. He delved deeply into the radical literature of the period, trying to determine which ideas best applied to the Russian situation. He was urgently concerned with the kind of society that would emerge after the fall of the Tsar. The ideas that most impressed him were expressed by two Russian anarchists of markedly different temperaments: Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin—the latter was a prince, who hated that title, and threw it all away for a stay in the Tsar’s dungeon, the same residence Bakunin had occupied a generation earlier, chained to a wall. Maximoff became an anarcho-communist (or communalist, as he sometimes described his credo).
To simplify a complex relationship, the Bolsheviks and anarchists were genetic enemies. The Bolsheviks, from their first moment, were dedicated to establishing a totalitarian State. The anarchists for their part did not believe in the State, certainly not in the exercise of centralized State power by the Communist Party, itself centralized into the authority of one individual—namely Lenin. They believed power should rest in freely associating committees of workers, peasants, and soldiers: naturally evolved societal units, such as on-the-job unions and farm cooperatives, whose representatives are freely elected, rotated, and given no special privileges. These grass-roots structures, which grew organically in the course of the Revolution, were the Soviets.
“All
