status? The man hung wall paper. It was a trade he was taught by his close friend Boris Yelensky, an earlier arrived exile. Yelensky was the main reason he settled in Chicago, long a magnet for Slavic immigrants. Olga found work in a Loop department store, and that is how they lived. Physically. Spiritually, emotionally, intellectually it did not matter where or how they lived once they were expelled from Russia. Their life was anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism, social justice, history. They were a couple of immense erudition; spoke English fluently despite having arrived but a short time ago. The year was 1926 when Sam met him, as I have mentioned, a foot-loose twenty-four-year-old kid, leading a raffish semi-skid-row existence. Maximoff saw potential there, took him under wing. As Sam put it, “He taught me to read and write.” Before long, Sam found himself the irascible pet of Maximoff, Yelensky—“a man born with boxing gloves on”—and a handful of other Russian anarchist exiles: “They were my university!” Sam recalled fondly.
Sam thought he was hot stuff when he met Maximoff. He had written a few articles, made some speeches, ran with the anarchists and Wobblies. Maximoff saw things differently. “You are bright, but you do not know anything. You lack an education. What have you read?”
So, he and the other Russian comrades proceeded to tutor him. They had him read the classical anarchists: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Reclus, Malatesta, and Rocker, of course. But they did not stop there. They had Sam read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky (“How do you know if you agree or disagree if you do not know what they said?”). They had him read Adam Smith, of all people, for whom he acquired a lifelong respect. (“Most of the things they claim he said, he never said or they’ve twisted. Modern capitalism would make him turn over in his grave.”) They also had him read authors you would not expect. (“You need to be a rounded person. What do you know of poetry? Here, take this!”) And it could be Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Pushkin, or the novels of Tolstoy, or Mark Twain. You get the idea.
Maximoff—and comrades—did not let him off the hook by simply giving him things to read. They proceeded to grill him like a rabbi working over a lazy student of the Talmud.
“The ‘Communist Manifesto’ is at heart a reactionary document—never mind the rhetoric. Am I an idiot to say this? Where is the evidence?”
“What do you think of Marx’s use of Hegel’s categories? Was capitalism inevitable?”
It was never a question of indoctrination. Maximoff NEVER asked him to change an opinion, merely to defend it. He was a great teacher.
From Maximoff Sam acquired the life-long habit of devouring books. You would find his greasy thumbprints all over the pages; he had no respect for books as aesthetic objects, only for their print. Wherever he was, whenever he was not slinging a brush he would read—although it is plain to me that Maximoff’s influence on Sam went deeper than books.
“You are twenty-five years old,” he would say to him, with feeling. “What kind of man are you? How do you live? Is this the man you intend to be?” Sam came to see that, like Maximoff, it was necessary to lead a life that you, yourself, can respect. And Sam sincerely attempted to live that way, especially in his later years. But—then—there was the irrepressible, irreverent side to him. He loved to run with the Ben Reitmans and Harry Meyers of the world. He never lost that sly humor, that sense of the human.
I remember discussing the Cuban Revolution with him in the 1980s. He had written an important book on the subject years earlier, a critique of the Castro regime from the anarchist perspective. The conversation drifted to Batista’s Havana: of the gambling, prostitution, and corruption that existed there, pre-Castro. Sam readily agreed. “It was awful,” he said, very serious. Then his voice dropped and he added with a mischievous wink, “But, you know, people had a hell of a good time!”
12: The Fate of The Guillotine
Maximoff went on to write a number of books and articles, all of them at night and weekends after hard manual work. I think we underestimate how difficult this is. Roger Baldwin, Harvard graduate, briefly a Wobbly, and founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was fond of quoting Clearance Darrow to the effect that “it was a lot easier being a friend of labor than a laborer.” In this, as in many things, Sam was to follow Maximoff’s example, working and writing.
The preface and title page of The Guillotine provide an interesting sub-plot to Maximoff’s book. The title page lists the Alexander Berkman Fund as publisher—in memory of the courageous anarchist who, suffering from depression and incurable cancer, had recently committed suicide. No mainline publisher would touch the book. Who cared to hear what an obscure anarchist had to say about Bolshevik rule? The sycophancy of the Stalin lovers, so influential in publishing circles, bordered on the erotic. Funding of the book came from the meager contributions of thousands of working-class comrades the world over, funneled through their unions and cultural organizations. It was the middle of the Depression. No grants or fellowships for Maximoff, who continued to hang wallpaper.
The address listed on the opening page of the book was in fact the national headquarters of the IWW: 2422 North Halsted Street, Chicago, Illinois. There follows an item listed in the publisher’s preface: “The Berkman Fund acknowledges its special gratitude to Ralph Chaplin, proletarian poet, (and to) Carl Keller, editor of the Industrial Worker, the weekly organ of the IWW.” The Fund does not mention Chaplin was a Wobbly; it was a fact deemed obvious at the time. In other words, the IWW was instrumental in publishing The Guillotine, and thus at an early date exposing the nature of the Soviet state.
I know little of Carl Keller and have no doubt he was a fine, able man. But Sam spoke often and with feeling of Chaplin. His great anthem of labor, “Solidarity Forever,” is sung at union halls, protest meetings, and picket lines around the country, and the world over. Was it coincidence that the Gdansk shipyard workers of the 1980s, who rose up in revolt against Soviet rule, called their movement Solidarity? Yet Chaplin remains one of the unsung heroes of American Labor, if you will grant me the pun. As American to the bone as Maximoff was Russian, the two men were nevertheless brothers under the skin, revolutionists to the core.
Chaplin became a rebel at the age of seven after seeing a worker shot to death during the Pullman strike of 1893. Later, having moved to Mexico he became a supporter of Emiliano Zapata. Back in the U.S. he worked with Mother Jones for two years and served with her during the bloody West Virginia coal mine strikes of 1912–13. It was in the name of the miners that he wrote poems, one of which, set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” became “Solidarity Forever.”
Chaplin then joined the IWW and became a Wobbly through and through. A talented illustrator, he was responsible for the distinctive style of Wobbly art: the heroic figure of a laborer, his sleeves rolled to reveal brawny arms, leaning forward as if rising from the very earth; the strong face peering at you from behind prison bars, his hands gripping the bars, looking much like a self-portrait of Chaplin himself; the arched black cat in the night, hair raised stiff, to this day the anarcho-syndicalist symbol of revolt. The man was also a talented journalist and essayist; for years he was editor of the IWW paper Solidarity, and later the Industrial Worker.
He knew the great Wobblies and socialists close up and personal; indeed he was one of them: Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Vincent St. John, James P. Thompson, Father Haggerty. And last but certainly not least, there was his closest friend, Frank Little; some would say he was the toughest Wobbly of them all. Born 1879 in the Indian Territory that was to become Oklahoma, the son of a white Quaker father and a Cherokee Indian mother, he was a slight man, had but one eye, and was crippled from beatings incurred during strikes and demonstrations. Yet the man was fearless; his body meant nothing to him. No law, no threat, no person could stop him until his luck ran out in 1917, and he was hanged from a railroad trestle in the dead of night while on a trip to organize the copper miners of Butte, Montana. Chaplin had begged Little not to go there, alone,
