have often asked myself why a man able to destroy a trained trial lawyer in public debate was no match for a slumlord who wanted him on the cheap. Sam was incapable of bargaining effectively on his own behalf. They sensed his need. He always gave in, consistently underestimating the time element, especially in the winter months when pickings were lean. “Boys, go help your father,” Mother would say to us as he toiled late into the night. Abe and I would find him on the top floor of a forsaken tenement somewhere, a naked light bulb revealing him in coveralls on a rickety ladder, long shadows dancing across the walls. The wide open windows and the piercing cold did not hide the oily paint smell, which triggered my gag reflex, nor did it prevent choking from the fucking dust everywhere. I hated being in the room. But I can still sense my father’s simple pleasure at having his two boys, his sons, by his side in the night.
This lasted about three minutes. He did not want us anywhere near what he had to do. “Go home, boys,” he’d say. “Tell your mother, ‘Soon, not to worry.’”
“Soon” stretched to the incipient morning light.
In 1948, Sam painted the home of a Mrs. Harris, which required an interminable subway and bus journey “to the country”—that is, to far away Jamaica, Queens. I was dumbfounded that she and her family occupied an entire house, and that grass and trees grew in front and in back of the house! Every Saturday morning, for months after the agreed-upon work was completed, there came the dreaded Harris phone call in a whining, wheedling accent that grated like chalk on a blackboard:
“Sammy, pleees, one more thing…”
The woman was insatiable—a tapeworm of demands. Like shit on my poor father’s shoe, there was no shaking her off! Mother loathed her. Still, Mrs. Harris kept calling to extract every ounce of advantage from my father’s hide. She smelled his essential decency, his good heart, his inability to say “no.”
The Harris Job passed into family lore. Abe shared Sam’s mordant wit and it became a running joke, a bond of affection between them.
“Finish the Harris Job yet, Sam?” he’d ask whenever he came to town. (He lived first in Houston, Texas and then Chicago.)
“Just a few things, here and there,” Sam would answer, deadpan.
The joke went on like that forty years. Abe asked Sam about the Harris Job for the last time in the final weekend of Sam’s life, beside his hospital bed. Sam smiled “Just a bit here and there,” he answered, deadpan.
That is how he was. He and Abe spent their final Sunday afternoon together singing the old Wobbly songs. They are piercingly beautiful sung in the right spirit. I came the next morning to take him home by ambulance in a stretcher with oxygen tank. He was not supposed to die just then. Dr Inkles predicted he had a month or two. Sam knew better. “It’s getting dark. Turn on the lights,” he said as I eased him into bed.
“It is broad daylight,” I snapped.
“Give me the phone! I want to call Federico!”
Federico Arcos was an old and unrepentant anarchist, an autoworker in Windsor, Ontario. As a boy he had fought on the barricades of Barcelona with a rifle from the Crimean War that was taller than he was. My father loved Federico. I handed him the black rotary phone with the long cord. He insisted on dialing the number himself. I do not know where he got the breath to speak without panting.
“Hello Federico! Listen, I’m going to go soon. I wish you farewell. Keep up the fight, good comrade. Salud!” And he hung up.
He died that night.
4: Sam Becomes a Socialist
The Soapbox: you can say it transformed Sam’s life. Seventy years after the event, he recalled to me that moment when a man he never knew, speaking plainly and eloquently up on the box, set him on the revolutionary path. He spoke of Spartacus and the Slave Revolts that shook ancient Rome to its foundations. Sam, returning from work, stood transfixed. Naive fourteen-year-old that he was, he could not see where the basic power relations between Master and Slave, between Employer and Worker had changed at all. At the same time, he also saw that there existed a tradition of revolt.
The soapboxer recommended a book that had served as the basis of his speech: The Ancient Lowly, by Cyrenus Osborne Ward, with the lengthy subtitle: A History of the Ancient Working People from the Earliest Known Period to the Adoption of Christianity By Constantine. Sam devoured it. Surely he was not the first to be inspired by this nineteenth-century classic. “I was, by reason of harsh economic conditions, my bitter life as a low paid, exploited wage slave, and above all by my rebellious temperament, most receptive to the socialist message,” he said.
He took to attending—“haunting” was his word—Socialist Party meetings after work and on weekends, especially those of their youth branch, The Young People’s Socialist League (or YPSLs). He came early, before the audience: swept the floors; swabbed the toilet; arranged the chairs; cranked the mimeograph; distributed the leaflets; hung the signs; set the table, water pitcher, and lectern up on the small stage for the speakers and chairmen; circulated the cigar box to take up collections. For outdoor meetings, he lugged the portable platform. When, at times, the chairman failed to show, he stood up on the box and conducted the meeting, too. The Wobblies called all this “Jimmy Higgins work,” after the hard-working character in an Upton Sinclair novel: the unsung labor without which nothing gets done. Sam liked this work. He learned from it. It gave him purpose and confidence, and in any case—an awkward boy with poor eyesight and rudimentary schooling—he felt that was his station.
He also learned he was not a socialist, at least not in the sense of the socialism advocated by the Socialist Party. He came to this conclusion for political as well as personal reasons, and he made the crucial observation that the two were inseparable. Again, to simplify matters, there were two socialist parties living under the same roof. Each believed in using the electoral process and the machinery of government to abolish Capitalism. But for one group, which I call the reformers—others might say collaborationists—the abolition of Capitalism was a far away goal, receding ever into the distance, having about as much impact on their daily behavior as the “In God We Trust” motto on the dollar bill. They believed in specific, immediate demands designed to improve the lives of the poor: Better housing, milk for babies, job safety, medical care, a reformed Civil Service, improved education. Their unions, electoral politics, alliances were designed to reform the system respectfully, peacefully.
Let me say right now as the son of an anarchist and Wobbly that the things the reform-minded socialists advocated were all for the good. I live in a cooperative housing complex built by the old-time Social Democratic unionists and I am grateful to them for that. My young neighbors have little idea of how their nice apartments got built. They regard the faded mural of an industrial America in our lobby to be as quaint and irrelevant as a statue in the park grown green and coated with pigeon shit. Not me. But all this “good” also brought the “bad” for politics—the capture of state power—became the sole reason for the existence of the collaborative wing of the Socialist Party. Certain kinds of people were attracted to leadership roles within the party, which did not sit well with Sam: “The hair-splitting quarrels…about how the pronunciamentos of the high priests of the socialist church should be interpreted and the lust for power between sectarian political connivers repelled me. Thousands of sincere, intelligent young militants…left the movement altogether.… My estrangement from the Socialist Party came not from contact with leftist factions but from my disappointing experiences and observations. I joined the YPSL because I believed it fought for the overthrow of capitalism and the revolutionary transformation of society. But this was not the case.”
Sam began to notice other things, trivial
