There is an old counter to Sam’s critique: One may call it “the human nature” ploy. Human beings are by nature selfish, predatory, and often violent. Government is needed to keep the various factions from one another’s throats. It is needed, despite flaws and imperfections, to prevent descent into chaos and barbarism; it is necessary for the proper functioning of civilized society. This justification Sam held in contempt; because, he said, if human beings cannot be trusted to settle their own affairs rationally and peacefully, then certainly they cannot be trusted to elect others to do these things for them. The only solution is absolute tyranny imposed upon them, for the more freedom granted the greater the chaos and barbarism. However, a State-directed tyranny turns out in fact to be no solution to violence and chaos; for, far from preventing violence, the State monopolizes it in the form of police and the military, with disastrous results too numerous to mention. How can one deny this, Sam asked, when millions of WWI dead serve as a fresh example? Indeed, the authority of the State rests on violence. Threaten that authority and see how peacefully it responds! The young Sam, having knocked around more than most adults in a lifetime, having seen the best and the worst, did not take a simplistic view of human nature.
Economists, philosophers, and political scientists have made much of the differences between Capitalism—the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods and services motivated by profit—and the State. Sam chose to concentrate on their similarities. For arbitrary authority is at the core of each system. The typical capitalistic enterprise is an economic tyranny. The employee serves at the pleasure of the employer under his conditions and can be hired or fired at will. The worker has no say in the management of the enterprise or the dispersing of profit, which usually goes to absent shareholders who have not put in a day’s labor and have nothing to do with the enterprise. The entire business can be sold or closed down from under him without a whisper of consultation or even notice. If he doesn’t like the set-up he can quit—his sole “liberty”—and seek work elsewhere. If he has the wherewithal or good luck, he may better his lot, while the job he has left is filled by another slave. And a slave the worker remains, for he must submit to economic tyranny whether he stays or leaves.
“The essence of all slavery consists in taking another man’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.” These words are not Sam’s, but those of Leo Tolstoy. And Tolstoy was not alone in this view; it is why the radicals of his day referred to Capitalism as wage slavery. Sam came to view the whole of dominant society—the whole of centralized authority, be it the State, the Capitalist System, or organized hierarchal Religion—as a vast moral crime. And it is this moral crime that the dispossessed of the world must oppose.
These were not the beliefs of a good Socialist Party member, but Sam expressed them with accelerating vehemence and force, to the extent that the officers of the Party, and not a few rank-and-file members, accused him of disrupting the functioning of the organization. The upshot of Sam’s sojourn through the Party was that he was put on trial for insubordination and expelled. Decades later he would exclaim with a droll smile that the Party was right to do so—though not so much for his being insubordinate as for asking inconvenient questions. Hardly Galileo facing the hooded Inquisition, he welcomed the trial, because it gave him the opportunity to expound his views. “After the trial, one of the judges came up to me and said, ‘You know, you are not too bad. In fact you put up a pretty good defense, as far as things go, although your case is hopeless. I am going to give you a tip. You are not a socialist. You are an anarchist. You belong with the crazies.’ So I asked him, ‘What is their address?’”
I doubt the judge gave Sam an actual address, but he and a number of other failed YPSLs found their way to “a dingy little loft on Eighteenth Street and Broadway near Union Square,” headquarters of the anarchist periodical Road to Freedom. “We were heartily welcomed and without membership qualifications invited to attend group meetings and participate in all activities. I was overwhelmed to learn that there existed a different, anti-statist international…movement diametrically opposed to authoritarian Marxism.”
Sam had found his home.
6: An Interlude: I Take Sam to See Reds
Road to Freedom had a nominal co-editor who seldom showed up, and never worked. His name was Hippolyte Havel. Sam did not know him “at the height of his career as a militant anarchist writer, editor, close friend of Emma Goldman, and well-known member of the Greenwich Village Bohemian community.” When Sam knew him he was pretty much incapable of doing anything, was entirely supported by comrades and what he could cadge from gullible strangers passing through. Sam remembered him as “an ill tempered, abusive alcoholic, a paranoiac who regarded even the slightest difference of opinion as a personal affront. Nor could he carry on a discussion on any subject for more than a few minutes without constant interruptions, abruptly launching into a tirade on totally unrelated matters. It was most painful to witness the deterioration of a once vibrant personality.”
Many years later, in the 1940s, Sam attended The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s bitter commentary on lost illusions, cowardice, and betrayal. One of the characters spends the entire play sprawled across a table in Harry Hope’s funereal bar, drunk; every now and then he rises to spout something vehemently incomprehensible before collapsing again. “That’s Hippolyte Havel!” Sam exclaimed. There was no doubt!
Hippolyte Havel, flesh and blood human being, morphed into a character in an O’Neill play! That provides me the solution to a problem I have had. How to make accessible to people who were born after Sam died the breadth of his experience and the myriad people he knew so many years ago? Simple chronology—you know, first Sam did this, and then he said that—cannot convey to you the richness of Sam’s lifetime journey in the anarchist movement, which he embarked upon when he joined Road to Freedom. But we do have the movies, and a special one at that.
Reds was the film I dragged Sam to so many years later, in 1982, for he disliked going to the movies. The film was finishing a fairly long run and the only theater showing it was at a mall in Northern New Jersey. I had to drive him there. He insisted on paying for his own small paper cup of Coca-Cola in the lobby. “A buck fifty? Why you can’t be serious man! Maybe you should wear a mask and gun?” Sam growled. The young fellow behind the counter, probably a suburban high school kid born into an entirely different world, caught the glint of humor in Sam’s eyes and smiled indulgently. That was the last bit of indulgence he received as he proceeded to wreck the film for the sparse audience scattered throughout the dark cavernous space that mid-week afternoon.
Reds is a three-hour long, romanticized but fundamentally accurate depiction of the life and times of the brilliant American journalist John Reed (played by Warren Beatty). The man cut quite a figure. He rode with the Mexican bandit/revolutionary Pancho Villa. He was closely associated with the Wobblies and good friends with Big Bill Haywood. He was active in the rich New York radical/bohemian scene, knew everybody, was in on everything. He witnessed the Russian Revolution first hand; his Ten Days That Shook the World remains a classic account of that momentous event. He became a committed Bolshevik and was instrumental in founding the American Communist Party. He died young of a terrible illness, typhus, in Moscow where his remains were interred in the Kremlin Wall. Numerous old-time radicals and writers—themselves, not actors—appear throughout Reds and comment on the characters depicted in the film. I thought Sam would enjoy Reds and on the whole he did. (“Who ever thought Hollywood would make such a film?”)
The problem was in the details. Sam was nearly deaf at this stage so I had to trundle him up front, where, with his swollen belly, he sat on the edge of his too small seat, leaning forward on his wooden cane, breathing noisily, trying to catch the dialog. He knew personally or was familiar with nearly every character in Reds. This included many of the aged witnesses, who were, after all, his contemporaries. As the film got going, Sam became involved