Chaplin saw the inside of many a prison, most severely when he was sentenced to twenty years hard labor for violation of the Espionage Act and was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary along with one hundred other Wobblies in the wake of the disgraceful Chicago show trial of 1917. He served four years until he was released. The experience was wrenching, traumatic. What kept him sane, what kept him human was his art and poetry (see Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems).
So we have two men from opposite ends of the earth whose experiences of life were not so different after all. In the vein of the Russian anarchists, Chaplin distrusted the Bolsheviks’ centralized organizational structure from the start. He observed first hand the havoc they caused the Wobblies and the labor movement in general, and he knew them to be unprincipled and dangerous. As an experienced editor, he appreciated the quality of Maximoff’s manuscript—and he admired the man. Chaplin slaved over the book, shaped the translations into readable English, and sent the work on its way in publishable form.
All this I see in the preface and title page, reading between the lines. But one more item in the preface needs attention, a simple footnote: “As our book goes to press, war is raging in Europe and Stalin and Hitler have come to an amicable understanding. Poland has been divided, the territory of Russian terror enlarged, and the plight of the Russian political prisoners have become worse than tragic.”
Maximoff’s book did not see the light of day until 1940. Soon Stalin was to become our temporary friend, never mind his pact with Hitler. Seventy million people were to die. The Guillotine was ignored.
13: Sam Falls in Love
From our discourse on socialism, anarchism, the Wobblies, migratory labor, the Bolshevik betrayal of the Russian Revolution, the horrors of two World Wars, we turn to Sam’s sex life. You’d think this would be a subject of importance to Sam, but in contrast to the myriad things he talked to me about, he never spoke of the sexual side of his wild youth—assuming one could describe his adventures and knock-about travels as wild, rather than sad and searching.
I received no tales of cozying face to face with a rebel girl in Harry Meyers’s cozy coffin. No tales of youthful love lost. No free-love orgies on the April Farm, the disastrous experimental commune supposedly free of coercion and based on voluntary labor, where he lived for a year or two. Sam hung with skid-row Ben Reitman whose reputation as an undisciplined cock-smith was deserved, but no tales were forthcoming.
I suspect Sam left me with no direct knowledge of his youthful sex-life because there was little of it. His was a masculine world: Wobbly union halls, anarchist forums, skid row, hobo jungles. Women were a scarce commodity. In the main, however, I suspect Sam’s problem—and I am convinced there was a problem—was a feeling of personal unattractiveness that lay embedded in the core of his personality. I have seen photos of him as a young man and remember how he appeared to me when I was growing up and he was in his forties. He was wiry and well-muscled with powerful arms and shoulders and a flat stomach: “ripped” is the current word. That’s what hard labor and good genetics can do for you. He was not conventionally handsome, but he had a strong face, a rugged Russian Jewish face, wild black hair swept back, acute black eyes behind the glasses, a prominent nose. An interesting face. Another man, regarding himself in the mirror, might say “not a movie star, but not bad.” Throughout his life he would stare into that mirror and distort his features into grotesque shapes and say to his image with contempt, “A puss ugly enough to stop a clock!” One did not feel comfortable watching this display.
I would say the young Sam was exiled to the state of the perpetually horny—his need stronger than his technique, socially maladroit in the company of women, overly aggressive. Although, who knows? He had a certain charm.
The clearest image of Sam as a young man, say 1930 or so, comes from a delegate to the Anarchist Forum who volunteered to meet a speaker from the IWW on the steps of the Cleveland Public Library one afternoon. The speaker was over an hour late and apparently not showing up, and so the delegate began walking down the library steps to leave.
“But there was this homeless-looking fellow, filthy, who had been pacing up and down in front of the steps for about an hour. That couldn’t be him, I said to myself, but it was!”
Of course, the filthy “homeless” guy was my future father, who had ridden an overnight freight from Detroit to get there. The delegate was Esther Judith Miller, my mother-to-be. Esther was a proper young lady from a striving, high-achieving, first-generation immigrant family—well mannered, well spoken, and immaculately dressed. She took one look at filthy Sam and that was it. Something about him touched her heart.
Mother’s respectable siblings were scandalized that she—an educated young lady with an MA in English literature, and one of the first women to be admitted to her medical school—should run off with a Wobbly, a filthy hobo house painter! To live in poverty? It was perverse! When she had a violinist of the Cleveland Symphony, and a prominent rabbi, and a guy who owned seven drug stores interested in her? They never got over it completely, though Ida, my grandmother, had a different take. Old, and sick with heart trouble, she fell into deep conversation with Sam, in Yiddish.
That evening she told Mother, as they sat alone, in the kitchen: “You’re choosing a hard road for yourself, but you’ve chosen a Man.”
My parents remained together fifty-eight years until death did them part. She never once complained about money, our semi-poverty.
Not that Sam lacked rivals in those early days. For the forty-five years that I remember, he never missed the opportunity to mock Marcus Graham (real name Schmuel Marcus), a long dead anarchist of the individualist-vegetarian-anti-technology school. A lifestyle anarchist, and, as I learned later, a not inconsequential writer and thinker, Graham occupied a corner of the anarchist tent far from my syndicalist father. But why the vehemence, the sarcasm, and why bring him up all the time? It was only after Mother’s death in 1989 that Sam mentioned with his confidential wink, “You know, he was after your mother. It’s a good thing I fucked better!”
There is no doubt they were passionately in love and that it lasted an entire lifetime—though in the spirit of their generation nary a whisper of sexual matters between them ever reached Abe and me. Mother was not a woman! She was Mother! Never had I seen her in anything more revealing than a slip. Nevertheless, long after they were dead, just recently, with each of us in our seventies, Abe mentioned a few things. “Remember Saturdays?” he reminded me, wearing Sam’s confidential wink. “Remember, how she hustled us both out of the house after breakfast?”
Yes, I do remember: Abe off to his clarinet lesson on the Upper Westside and me to the local theater, The Palestine, which showed fifty cartoons and cliff-hangers. She even gave me fifty cents for lunch after at the local kosher deli on the corner of Henry and Clinton Streets in a store still there, but now a bodega owned by Pakistanis. It was enough for two hot-dogs; crisp hand-cut french fries; a Dr. Brown’s Celery Soda, and thirteen cents change. They were the best lunches I ever had!
“What do you think they were doing while we were out?” Abe asked in a tone that needed no answer. “Remember the flush in her face, the light step, the mood when she served the dinner? The old man ‘resting’?” he added with a chuckle.
Yes I do.
Though they never discussed their sex life in front of Abe or me, my sense is that they were totally and completely frank with one another in private, as they seemed to be in all other things. Yet Mother had no sense of the off-color or vulgar. She was impervious to sexual innuendo. Example: two or three rough Wobbly seamen are “over the house,” as Sam would say. Mother shows off her sons.
“This is my oldest” she says proudly, her arm around Abe, who is about eleven.
“Nice