Cornell Andrew - Left of the Left: my memories of Sam Dolgoff

by Andrew Cornell

Until very recently, the history of anarchism in the middle part of the twentieth century has remained frustratingly opaque. Anatole Dolgoffs memoir of his father, Sam, and the worlds of work and activism Sam inhabited, is a unique gift in that it sheds both light and warmth on this period. Readers learn not only who knew whom and how anarchists reacted to major historical events, but also gain real insight into the emotional and family lives, the motivations and coping strategies, of a network of stalwart radicals confronting the highs and lows of the American Century.

Sam Dolgoff was a house painter, a loving husband and father, a militant labor organizer, a powerful orator, and a self-taught public intellectual. He was not, perhaps, as daring and globetrotting a figure as Emma Goldman or the subjects of some other radical biographies. To hilarious and heart-breaking effect, Anatole describes the way Carlo Tresca and other mentors talked Sam out of joining street fights with Italian-American fascists or shipping out to fight in the Spanish Revolution, owing to his poor eyesight and family responsibilities. But Sam Dolgoff was heroic in a least one respect, and that was his tenacity.

Sam stuck to his bedrock beliefs that humans were capable of cooperating with one another, managing their own affairs, and sharing earths wealth equitably. For seven decades he continued to express these ideas in print and speech. And he continued to show upto demonstrations, to lightly attended forums, and to tedious meetingseven when many of his former collaborators had given up. In doing so he served as a connecting thread that stitched together generations of people invested in the project of human liberation. His willingness and ability to play this bridging role is powerfully exemplified in the story Anatole tells of Sam taking members of the countercultural Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers group to beg financial assistance from octogenarian friends of Sacco and Vanzetti in the late 1960s.

It also becomes readily apparent that Sam and his wife Esther truly lived the communal ethos they espoused. Hardly a chapter of this memoir passes without an account of old Wobblies camped out on the Dolgoffs living room sofa, or Sam giving away prized possessions to a new acquaintance. This spirit of selflessness is mirrored in the structure of the book, for Anatoles portrait of his father soon spins off to recount the stories of his mother (herself a dedicated anarchist organizer), other family members, and more than a dozen fascinating revolutionaries, such as Russell Blackwell, Ben Fletcher, Dorothy Day, and Federico Arcos, whose own stories and contributions are in danger of being lost to history. The book, then, serves as the collective biography of an entire milieu, echoing the fashion in which Goldman studded her own autobiography, Living My Life , with biographical sketches of comrades and lovers.

These stories are not always rousing. We meet aging seafarers and longshoremen grown cynical and lonely following the cascading catastrophes of the Red Scare, the repressive turn in world communism, and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. But that is part of what makes this book so fascinating; where else can one glimpse the interior life of old Wobblies still devoted to class war as they watch fellow workers embrace middle-class identities and the anarchist movement become overrun with college students? As these sections unfurled, I recognized the double entendre tucked into the books title; this is not only the story of a man who was more radical than many other rabble-rousers, but also an account of what remainedwhat was leftof the Left during the years that Anatole was growing up. That the book is, at other turns, incredibly funny testifies to the authors skills as a writer and raconteurespecially his ear for dialogue.

Since Anatoles narrative jumps forward and backwards in order to emphasize points and personalities, it may be useful to briefly review some context and chronology. Social anarchism emerged as a distinct tendency within the labor and socialist movements of the United States in the early 1880s, appealing primarily to immigrant laborers from eastern and southern Europe. The movement reached a peak of influence in the first two decades of the twentieth century, during Sams childhood and adolescence. In these years, anarchist newspapers published in English, Yiddish, Russian, Italian, and Spanish reached tens of thousands of people each month. Socialists, anarchists, and other labor militants launched the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)the organization that would long serve as Sams political homein 1905, three years after he was born. It grew in size and reputation over the next decade by leading a series of historic strikes in textile, mining, and other basic industries.

Anarchism was fertile enough during the Progressive Era to encompass competing strategic tendencies. Anarcho-syndicalists saw the IWW and other radical unions as vehicles to help workers win immediate improvements while preparing for a general strike that would usher in revolution. Another group, sometimes referred to as insurrectionary anarchists, believed that unions and anarchist federations would actually hinder the process of social conflict needed for change to occur. They promoted assassination and other forms of propaganda of the deed that they believed would spark off mass uprisings of the oppressed. Italian anarchists influenced by Luigi Galleani proved to be the most consistent advocates of the insurrectionary strategy in the United States between 1910 and the 1940s. (Though Anatole describes these anarchists as individualists, I consider the clunky term anti-organizationalist more precise, since adherents advocated for a communal future.) A third group of anarchists began attracting larger numbers of native born and middle-class supporters as they turned their attention to gender equality, free speech, progressive methods of education, and artthe transient issues Sam and Esther debate in Chapter 19.

Most U.S. anarchists and Wobblies opposed the First World War, and faced an avalanche of repression as a result. Government officials deported leaders, suppressed newspapers, and severely curtailed immigration, drying up an important pool of working people from which the movements had historically drawn recruits. A variety of foreign language anarchist journals survived this Red Scare (or quickly reconstituted themselves in its wake), but spoke to aging constituencies as assimilation and the use of English became increasingly common for the younger generation. Small groups that conducted meetings in English emerged in a few large cities by the mid-1920s. During these years, East Coast anarchists also developed the Stelton and Mohegan coloniesintentional communities of radicals centered on modern schoolsin which the Dolgoffs lived for a few years. Residents of the Stelton Colony launched The Road to Freedom , the first English-language anarchist newspaper of national scope to appear in the United States since the war. Sams first contributions to the anarchist press appeared in The Road to Freedom later in the decade.