The Second World War proved to be another turning point for the anarchist movement in the United States. After Vanguard and Man! ran aground in 1939, the Dolgoffs helped to launch the journal Why? in 1942, but withdrew from the project when the editors—some of whom had been mentored by the Vanguard Group while still in high school—took an anti-war position. As the decade progressed, anarchists associated with Why? (the title was changed to Resistance in 1947) formed alliances with radical pacifists, poets, and playwrights, including Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker group and members of the avant-garde Living Theatre troop.
This younger cohort, which included Paul Goodman and David Wieck, attempted to adapt anarchism to the rapidly changing postwar world, shifting focus from class exploitation to authoritarian social conditioning, sexual repression, racism, consumerism, and the destruction of the natural environment. Sam saw their attempts to address psychological aspects of power and to “live differently” as a self-absorbed abandonment of mass struggle; they saw him as living in the past, clinging to failed strategies. Neither approach made immediate headway in a period marked by the incorporation of the mainstream unions into the power structure, rising living standards for white workers, and intense Cold War anti-radicalism.
The Libertarian League, which the Dolgoffs founded with Russell Blackwell in 1954, kept the shaky flame of class-struggle anarchism burning in the United States. With the IWW flagging, it functioned as something of an international clearinghouse, providing U.S. Americans with translated news about the struggles of workers in South America and other places where revolutionary union federations remained mass phenomena. And it was there, able to serve as a point of connection to past struggles, when a new generation of civil rights and anti-war activists started becoming radicalized in the early 1960s.
The artist Ben Morea attended Libertarian League meetings before going on to launch the journal Black Mask in 1964 and Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers, a “street gang with an analysis,” in 1967. Through their early connections with the Situationist International, the Dutch Provos, and other countercultural militants in the United States and abroad, Morea and company served as an essential point of reference for the vast anarcho-punk culture that took shape in the 1970s. League meetings also provided stepping-stones for Murray Bookchin as he crossed over from Trotskyism to anarchism. Later in the decade, Bookchin formed the Anarchos Group, which published a journal and organized small discussion groups, as the Libertarian League had, but threw its chips in with the burgeoning ecology movement and the youth counter culture, while the Dolgoffs served as mentors to 1960s radicals eager to reinvigorate the IWW. These three tendencies, along with a distinct anarcha-feminist current that emerged in the early 1970s, shaped the complex terrain of contemporary anarchism as it developed in the final decades of the twentieth century. It is not an overstatement to say that Sam and Esther Dolgoff were crucial, directly and indirectly, to the revival of anarchism as a major vector of egalitarian struggle in the world today.
The later chapters of Left of the Left discuss Sam’s contributions to anarchist scholarship, such as his important books on Bakunin’s thought and the Spanish and Cuban revolutions. Sam taught himself to read multiple foreign languages to better understand international events and keep abreast of anarchist and labor struggles throughout the world. He penned prescient analyses of postcolonial governments, technological change, and the shortcomings of centrist labor unions, while providing crucial information to the historian Paul Avrich, to whom we owe much of what is known about pre-WWI U.S. anarchism. This production and preservation of fugitive knowledge, outside the university and other official channels, should be seen as another important form of activism, from which we, as readers, can learn and take inspiration. I am grateful that Anatole Dolgoff chose to follow in his parents’ footsteps, in this regard—to collect and protect the stories and the hard-won knowledge of earlier generations of radicals, knowing there would be a time, like now, when many people would be ready and eager to hear them.
1: Prologue: A Long Walk, 1944
I’m seventy-nine years old and remember clearly the joy I felt as a small boy when my father, having decided “to give the old woman a rest,” announced it was “time to visit the Five-Ten Hall.” When the three of us—my father, my brother Abraham, and I—survived Mother’s loving last-minute attentions, and escaped onto the still Sunday-morning street.
The Five-Ten Hall was at 134 Broad Street, a short block to Battery Park and South Ferry. We lived across town on the Lower East Side, in whichever tenement was cheapest, but as close as possible to the water; mother insisted on light and air. So, poor as we were, from our high bedroom window on Cherry Street, just a few hundred yards from the antiaircraft gun battery that commandeered a chunk of park along the East River, Abe and I could see clear across the flat water to the mysterious Brooklyn Navy Yard, where ant-like men labored over mountainous battleships.
Mother’s restrictions ensured that the straightest route to the Five-Ten Hall, the one we always followed, was west along South Street. Those Sunday mornings we were the only things moving. South Street belonged to us. At times Abe and I would forage ahead independently, secure as puppies on a long leash, only to fall back to our father’s side. If we listened carefully we could hear a soft melody exhale from deep within his chest: over and over, private, in step with his stride. There was no FDR overpass to divide us from the water then, and no thump of overhead traffic. The timber piers groaned and creaked in the waves.
We had our rituals. We never crossed extra wide, cobbled Pike Slip without paying homage to the raised stone vat in the center of the street. Too large for a bath tub, too small for a swimming pool, it was filled with the clearest, most bubbling water I had ever seen. I can still feel the delicious shock of that water as I dipped my face into it, eyes open.
“Why?” I asked the first time we stopped there.
“For the horses,” father said. “This is where the horses drink.”
But I did not see many horses, mostly cars and trucks.
“Think about Moishe’s horse!” Abe said.
And he was right. Moishe, the last true teamster, delivered massive blocks of ice from a horse-drawn cart to economic laggards like us who lacked refrigerators. At this late date of my life I can still see the steam rising from the exhausted animal’s hide as it drew to a slow halt in front of our building. I’d bolt down the stairs in time to catch Moishe lifting the ice block from the back of the cart onto his burlap-covered shoulder, using huge tongs, and then I’d follow him as he trudged the five flights to our kitchen, where, grunting, he fitted the block into the back of our ice box. The effort required skill and no small grace. Mother always had a few kind words in Yiddish for Moishe, and a glass of homebrewed tea, so he could catch his breath.
“The ice is heavy,” I said on Pike Slip to my father, who knew what I meant.
“You get used to it if you start young.”
Eight years old is young enough, which is the age my father began his working life, a few blocks from where we presently lived, delivering milk in the pre-dawn from a horse-drawn cart like Moishe’s. The driver needed a nimble kid to lug the full bottles into the dark hallways before the customers woke up and to haul back the empties of the previous day. That was 1910. Child labor was the norm. There were five children. The oldest son had to work.
A few years later grandfather Max delivered my father to his friend and fellow house painter with the following instructions, in Yiddish.
“This is my son Sam. Make him a painter. If he gives you trouble, kick him in the ass.”
My father told this story many times, never neglecting to add the little coda, “That was my life adjustment.” He had a deep voice that wheezed around the edges from emphysema—Paul Berman in his tribute to him upon his death called it a “broken cello”—and the ironic