Response: “Shhh!”
An aged lady I do not remember appears on screen.
Sam: “Her!”
Response: “Quiet!”
The scene shifts to Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Sam: “Him I can respect. That’s more like it.”
Response: An intolerant “HISSS!”
Big Bill Haywood shows up in little more than a bit part for a line or two. Sam waves his hand in disgust at the actor. “Nothing like him! The man has no stature. Haywood had stature! Haywood had one eye, but he never wore a patch like this fella!”
Response: “Shut the fuck up! Call the manager!”
Later on, an appealing scene, in which after a fight Warren Beatty brings flowers, a box of chocolate, AND a puppy to Diane Keaton (who plays Louise Bryant, Reed’s lover).
Sam chuckles to himself, whispers loudly to me: “Reed was a hard drinker, rode with Pancho Villa. Flowers? The back of his hand!”
Response: “Jesus Christ!!”
Then, toward the end, there is the touching if slightly absurd montage of the devoted Diane Keaton, in the attempt to reach the dying Beatty, hiking through the Soviet snow in a blizzard. Apparently, she is not allowed to enter Moscow directly.
Sam: “Now that is ridiculous. Those days anyone could get in! The regime was looking for support. Did you know that Bryant married the American Ambassador after Reed died?”
The audience response ends here; instead a flash light skips through the darkness and two young ushers find us up front. “Sir, we must ask you to leave!”
“Why? What did we do?”
“Come on, it is almost over anyway,” I say.
Outside, in the bright sunlight of the parking lot, some of the film’s patrons can barely contain spitting at us; seeing an old man in suspenders with white socks showing beneath the cuffs of his pants made them angrier. Their fury was directed at a character that could have walked directly out of the film.
On the way home, in the car, I search for something about which Sam and I can agree. “How did you like the guy who plays Eugene O’Neill?” It was Jack Nicholson, who has an affair with Bryant in the film. I enjoyed his performance.
“No good!”
“No good? I thought he was very good. Why?”
“Too gloomy.”
“Well, O’Neill must have been a gloomy guy, right? Look at his plays!”
“But he was not gloomy in that way.” Sam insisted, “He was a good fella to have a drink with. He had that Irish wit. He didn’t wear his troubles in public like a hair shirt, going around depressing everybody!”
Their paths had intersected in the radical, artistic, bohemian circles of the time. Early on O’Neill had shipped-out—that is, worked as a merchant seaman—and had been a Wobbly, and hung out with anarchists. He was not yet Eugene O’Neill.
Sam’s off-hand comment surprised me. “You know that? You knew Eugene O’Neill? You drank with him? Why didn’t you tell me?” I felt not hurt, but put-out.
“Why should I tell you? What earthly difference does it make if I knew Eugene O’Neill?”
I suppose he was right in the scheme of things.
Sam was always pulling surprises like that. He did not think that knowing famous people was important. Sometime later, I mentioned a PBS documentary on Diego Rivera. Sam smiled and said simply, “Diego was a good guy. You couldn’t help but like him.” They had met several times in the early ’30s at radical meeting halls on lower Broadway and at a Union Square diner so infested with communists it was called The Kremlin.
As I’ve mentioned, the purpose of my autobiographical, cinematic diversion is to make accessible the richness of Sam’s life nearly a century ago. He came to know personally virtually everyone who mattered in the radical movement of his day or he came to know of them intimately through their friends and enemies. Not that he thought his life was rich; it was simply his life.
7: Back to Road to Freedom
At Road to Freedom Sam was taken under-wing by Walter Starrett Van Valkenburgh, universally known as “Van”—the first of his many colorful mentors. He was a close friend of Emma Goldman, and had come to New York City via upstate Schenectady where, years earlier, he had lost a leg in a railroad accident. Normally Van got around on a crutch, but before a street demonstration—picture this—he would strap on his wooden leg and use the crutch to flail away at the cops, communists, and other enemies. What impressed Sam most, however, was the man’s almost infinite tolerance, and his kindness. He would publish almost anything of an anarchistic flavor, no matter how outrageous, with perhaps a single line at the bottom saying it was not necessarily the view of the editor. There were no qualifications for membership; all were welcome. Total strangers passing through had voice equal to “old-timers.” Impossible, you say? And yet the little group somehow functioned by mysterious consensus and put out the paper—although Van worked full time elsewhere and came in evenings and weekends.
Not that Road to Freedom at all times resembled the Peaceable Kingdom. Archie Turner was an Englishman of no trade or special talent save as a ladies man—an anarchist Don Juan. He had a way of getting under one’s skin. Van detested him. The two were fire and water until Van boiled up one day and theatrically pulled a gun on him. Sam calmly took it away.
Theatrics aside, “Van” did a great thing for my father. He watched him, each night and weekends month after month, carry out the same menial tasks he had performed for the Socialist Party. Then, from nowhere, one day he said to him firmly: “You are writing an article for the paper. Next issue!” It was as close to a command as this gentle man was capable of generating.
“Me?” Sam asked, shocked.
“You can do this,” Van said, and that was that. He insisted Sam sign his name to it, and he did, calling himself “Sam Weiner,” a pen name he used for many years for inexplicable reasons; surely he was not fooling anyone.
“How do you like seeing your name in print?” Van asked after the paper came out.
It was a sense of pride Sam never forgot, although he did not remember the article too well maybe sixty years later. “I think I called Gandhi a bourgeois reformer,” he said with characteristic self-mocking smile. Van’s kindness had recast his self-image.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to define anarchism for it has bearing on the next stage of Sam’s life. The word stems directly from the ancient Greek: an—without, and arche—realm or sovereignty. You can also substitute arkhos—leader or ruler. A society without a Ruler be it an individual or an institution, such as the State: that is what anarchists advocate, at least those who take the trouble to advocate. They do not believe in disorder, merely the type of “order” or rule imposed from above, the so-called hierarchal order one is forced to obey. Voluntary organization, voluntary association, the freedom to join or leave, mutual obligation free of coercion—this is anarchist order.
Anarchism is a wide tent; all kinds of people come in from the rain: from individualists who regard any conversation between three or more people as an authoritarian conspiracy to tightly organized communalists; from lifestyle anarchists who believe no restrictions should be placed on their behavior to traditionalists whose personal behavior is a model of Calvinist rectitude. Road to Freedom attracted anarchists of all kinds and not a few plain, old-fashioned nut-cases—the categories being not mutually exclusive.
I remember some of the people from Sam’s early years; they still came to anarchist meetings