men who had paid a hard, heavy price.
Indeed, the reward for many a Wobbly was a tragic life. I think of J. B. Chiles, the lonely man who sent Abe postcards from around the world when he was a boy. He was Secretary of the Five-Ten Hall, which in reality meant he slept there in return for managing things and keeping the place clean. Chiles’s skull had been cracked open in the 1920s by California prison guards in whose loving care he had spent five years for fomenting strikes. Slowly, gradually, Chiles went mad and as he grew old found himself committed to an upstate “nut house.” Abe would take the long train ride to visit him there, until one day he was told that his old friend had wandered off the grounds. He was never heard from again.
There is an old Wobbly song that comes to mind as I write this: My Wandering Boy (A Mother’s Lament), to the tune of the famous Offenbach aria. The author of the lyric is unknown, which seems altogether fitting. The elderly men I remember at reunions sang it sardonically, with a cruel edge, perhaps to ward off messy emotions. But I never took it that way.
Where is my wandering boy tonight?
The boy of his mother’s pride?
He’s counting the ties with his bed on his back,
Or else he is bumming a ride.
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
He’s on the head end of an overland train,
That’s where your boy is tonight.
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
The chilly wind blows, to the lock-up he goes,
That’s where your boy is tonight
As a child I was of course unaware of the sad, glorious history of the Wobblies. In truth, with no one remotely my age, time dragged at the Five-Ten Hall after an hour or two. What rescued the afternoon was lunch at the Bean Pot Cafeteria around the corner, which faced South Ferry, Battery Park, and the Statue of Liberty which was the size of a toy far out in the harbor. Grease all over the place, dirty plates—the decrepit Bean Pot catered to seamen, floor moppers, and various others who sweated for their money. A nice contrast to this description would be that the food was hearty workingman’s fare. In fact it was terrible. What did I know or care? The chunky soiled man behind the counter ladled me a bowl of split pea soup and white bread. For dessert—always dessert!—there was lemon meringue pie so gritty you spat out the sugar grains.
Nevertheless, I stood at the side of my father, my older brother Abe, and the Wobblies at the Bean Pot. It was as if I had been initiated into an exclusive club. After the Bean Pot, tired now, came the long walk back to Cherry Street in the fading light.
2: Durruti and Me
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 policemen 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, 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 could. 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 descendant of the Haymarket anarchists and all who knew him well had no doubt that he was.
April 8, 1937, followed the death of Buenaventura Durruti by a few months. 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.
Durruti: the son of a railway worker, short, stocky, and very strong; a kind man, “with a Herculean body, the eyes of a child in a half-savage face.”
Durruti: a man who “laughed like a child and wept before the human tragedy.”
Durruti: his coffin carried aloft by comrades through the streets of Barcelona, his path attended by over five hundred thousand mourners.
Durruti: whose “Column,” noted a comrade, “is neither militarily nor bureaucratically organized. It has grown organically. It is a social revolutionary movement.… The foundation of the Column is voluntary self-discipline. At the end its activity is nothing less than libertarian communism.”
Durruti: who said, “We carry a new world here, in our hearts.”
That was the essence of my father. He carried a new world in his heart—in the words of James P. Thompson “a world without a master and without a slave.” Call it foolish, call it hopelessly naive, call it visionary: that was the cause to which he dedicated his life.
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. How to do this? I will never be the man Buenaventura Durruti was, nor, frankly, the man my father was—warts and all. I am also not a professional historian. What I can do is tell stories: of my parents and their world, which spans seventy years of revolutionary activity; of the Wobblies and anarchists of my childhood—a colorful lot; of what it was like to grow up in a family whose ethics and politics ran against the grain. Hopefully it will add up to a history of sorts—one you will enjoy. Do not look for “objectivity.” To hell with it. I have read many such “objective” accounts of the anarchists and Wobblies, and few of them bear any resemblance to the flesh-and-blood human beings who broke bread with us or snored on our sagging couch. I’ve opted for the truth instead.
3: Sam’s Personality – Early Life – Other
