Chicago, 1952

“Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town.
Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around,”

—“Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)”
Written by Fred Fisher

So it was during January I hit my new destination in Chicago. I was again car-less as I’d sold my Chevy in Southbridge, figuring a huge metropolis would have adequate public transportation to get around. I rented a cheap one-room housekeeping apartment in Hyde Park in the University of Chicago area. where I wanted to locate as I would be entering school there in the fall. Then came the job hunt as I needed one fast that paid decent money until September. I visited all three metro dailies, Sun-Times, Daily News and Tribune, none of which were hiring in their editorial rooms. I then noticed an ad for copy readers at the Commerce Clearing House, a major publisher in the downtown Loop. Since the Korean War was going on full bore there was Federal rationing going on for many commodities for which there were consumer shortages: Tires, auto parts, gasoline, etc, as military needs had priority. CCH produced daily booklets with specifics mandated by the Office of Price Stabilization. in Washington. All listings needed to be printed daily as changes were constant. These reports were typeset in the CCH composing room and run off daily in the pressroom. Reams and reams of paper with only a short shelf life. The composing and pressrooms were union, the vast editorial work room was not.

I had no trouble getting hired as a copy reader and the pay was decent. But everything was more formal in those days so the several hundred copy readers and editors had to wear suits and ties with the women dressed accordingly. After all, we were “ladies and gentlemen” so we had to look and be the part. We all sat at large desks arranged in departmental blocks to fill the room, each OPS commodity specialty having its own block. Directly behind each row was our immediate supervisor who had our backs at all times. Behind them was another higher supervisorial rank who oversaw several blocks, with the general manager by himself at the rear overseeing all of us and staring at our necks.. The work was boring and tedious, enough to drive us white collar proles up the wall. We worked the swing shift so we’d have all the copy editing work done for the mechanical trades who worked graveyard to get the reports out.

Nobody ever said a harsh word to anyone from the top and were all smiles although probably just as bored. At the back of my section and of three others the supervisor was named Mr. Palmer. It seemed every time I turned my head to the rear there was Mr. Palmer smiling and looking me directly in the eye. It was creepy. So of course, the office water coolers up front were very popular with us readers. It was a relief from the ennui to go and get a drink every so often or hit the bathrooms. But nobody ever said anything negative from the managerial categories. Smiles and courtesy were the norm. There were even colorful posters of bluebirds on the walls reminding us to be of good cheer at all times. We all had one-hour dinner times and three of us who got to know each other better would have our evening meals at some middle-brow Loop restaurant.

My companions were both graduates of Northwestern University nearby and were liberal Democrats. They and I included at that point favored the candidacy of Governor Adlai Stevenson, a centrist liberal, who was running for the Democratic Party nomination later that year, with General Dwight D. Eisenhower the odds-on favorite to get the GOP nod. Although isolationist Sen. Robert Taft (co-author of the infamous anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act) was expected to give Ike a tough tussle for the Republican nomination. November, 1952 would decide who would succeed President Harry S. Truman in Washington.

EXPLORING UC CAMPUS POLITICS

Weekday mornings before work I’d often frequent the library at the Student Union on the UChi campus to look over what was happening with the radical press. I read my cousin’s SWP Militant quite copiously, coming to the conclusion that her brand of Leninist politics could not be mine. “Democratic centralist” party discipline is something I couldn’t abide with again. Sorry, Lempi. The Schachthanite ISL paper “Labor Action” appealed to me more although their Leninism foxed me out, too. However, their “Third Camp” politics held appeal for me, as they rejected both Washington’s and Moscow’s imperialist policies in favor of an independent democratic socialist working class option to the polar identities of East and West. The other Third Camp publication at the library was the Anvil and Student Partisan I’ve mentioned in an earlier installment, which featured independent radical voices like environmentalist Ernest Callenbach still living in Chicago before his move to Berkeley. ISLer Julius Jacobson was still editor of the A&SP and his wife Phyllis was a frequent contributor. An excellent editor for Labor Action was Gordon Haskell which included the prolific writings of Hal Draper who was to the left of Max Schachtman.

SOCIALIST YOUTH LEAGUE (SYL) MEETINGS

Both Labor Action and posted flyers on campus announced Sunday afternoon meetings of the ISL’s youth organization Socialist Youth League (SYL). They would feature speakers who would be of interest to the non-CP Left. Another campus group similar to SYL and was the Politics Club, also with a Third Camp orientation and dominated by SYL, sponsored some of the student campus meetings. These monthly affairs included ISL’s literary maven Irving Howe of Brandeis University, Prof. Kermit Eby of the Chicago campus, Jerzy Glicksmann, a Polish socialist survivor of Stalin’s slave labor camps and an author of the book “Tell the West” about the horrors of the Soviet police state, and Louis Fraina, one of the founders of the early Communist movement in the United States and now teaching at Antioch College as a social democrat under the name Lewis Corey. I can recall the meeting for Howe who was in Chicago to lecture on Southern writer William Faulkner, a literary specialty of his. I’d forgotten what has subject was for his talk for the SYL, except that it dealt with the Leninist early phase of the Bolshevik Revolution. Howe was immediately challenged in the question and comment period by a man who had a major impact on my later political life. He was Dr. Virgil J. Vogel (1918–1994), a key figure in the Libertarian Socialist League, a Luxemburgist split from the Socialist Party, USA of around 1950.

Vogel challenged Howe on the role of the minority Bolshevik core which broke up the multi-party Constituent Assembly trying to draw up a new Constitution for Russia after the fall of the interim Kerensky government. The Social Revolutionaries had the biggest single bloc at the Assembly which also included representation from the Mensheviks and other democratic elements, As it was, this maneuver by Lenin and his supporters killed the Assembly and any chance of a democratic option in Russia as the Bolsheviks seized absolute power shortly thereafter. Howe did not respond to the question but deferred it to a blue collar ISLer who worked as a machinist named Leon. Leon’s lame answer was that Lenin thought the Bolsheviks had the majority of the Assembly, which was a load of crap. I didn’t talk to Vogel at that meeting but his comments whetted my appetite to learn more about him and his LSL.

SYL SOCIAL LIFE

Deborah Meier / Educator

My relationships with the SYL and the Politics Club which it dominated on campus wasn’t confined to public meetings butt I also became involved with their social life. The only names I recall here were SYL key members Deborah (Debby) and Fred Meier, and Scott Arden. Debby and Fred were a young married couple with an infant child, with Fred working and Debby studying at the University. In later years Debby became a noted innovative educator in New York City and a key member of the social democratic Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and is on the editorial board of DISSENT Magazine. Very decent hospitable folks whose politics were in many ways compatible to me. Scott Arden had the reputation of being a “horizontal recruiter.” He was a handsome young man who proved attractive to pretty young female students; some of with whom he slept were recruited into SYL. Occasionally Debby and Fred invited some of their comrades to their flat to post-Sunday meeting dinners, which also included me as a potential recruit. They were generally warm, friendly gatherings, but when I questioned Fred about their Leninist discipline he concurred this was true. I then lost all interest in joining them although we were always on friendly terms as allies.

GOODBYE CCH, HELLO RAILWAY EXPRESS

Finally I got my fill of the boring routine of copy editing at CCH, and the overly stifling paternalistic work environment. I quit with the intention of shipping out on the Great Lakes ASAP. The idea of physical work appealed to me again. But meantime anti-communism had reached a new dimension, and everyone with a seaman’s card had to take it to the nearest Coast Guard Station for a security check. Mine came back with the words”Security Risk” stamped on it as well as to hundreds of other CP-suspected lefties in the country. So my recent past had caught up with me. After the worst heat of McCarthyism and the Cold War abated in the 1960s, a class action suit by appellants of this decision had prevailed and seamen’s card holders were reinstated enabling them to work again on US vessels. But by that time I was into other things and never tried to have my card validated.

My next job was that of a freight handler with Railway Express on the graveyard shift at one of Chicago’s several railway yards near the Loop. I was finally able to put muscles to work on the job again. Yet it was liberation over the stifling environment of the CCH office complex. The pay was good and the work force was quite diverse in character. Except I don’t recall any blacks or Asians. Racism was the unstated rule. One of my favorites was a Chicago stiff in his forties who had ridden the freights all over the country seeking work during the 1930s and had been an itinerant IWW card holder. He said that on some boxcars or “side door Pullmans” you’d be asked to show your IWW membership card. If you didn’t have one there’d be an IWW delegate aboard to line you up in the One Big Union and collect your dues if you had any bucks on you. Unless you were a Ku Klux Klan member and they’d throw your butt over the side. If you boarded a box car run by the KKK and was suspected of being a Wobbly or anti-Klan working stiff you’d suffer the same fate. So working class militants and the racist KKKs had some code to determine who was the occupying force in a given freight train. Also the Wobs knew where the receptive hobo jungles were along the railroads where they would be pot of Mulligan stew and a slug of black coffee waiting for you at the campsite.

I remember two young Ukrainian displaced persons or DPs in our freight crew. They had fled the Red Army but were deployed as slave laborers on farms by the Nazis in Germany until they were liberated by Allied forces and languished in some DP camp until being sponsored as refugees to the United States. These guys spoke very limited English with little formal education. They were generally good natured. The other workers named them “Molotov” and “Vishinsky” but they understood this American working class sense of humor and even began to call each other by these names. Their favorite lunch time amusement came in beating the hell out of each other in the locker room where we ate our night time lunches. One would think they were out to kill each other but when time came to go back to work they’d knock it off and began laughing like hell.

The most tragic figure we had on our crew was a young combat fighter pilot who had just returned from Korea and had been in the midst of numerous air battles. He had a hideous case of PTSD and had just been turned loose on a Section 8 discharge. His nerves were a total disaster and he carried a half-pint of whisky which he’d snort from time to time. This he’d replenish at lunch hour at a late night street corner liquor joint. Sometimes he’d go into hysterics and cry or rage during the night at work. Then at times he’d pass out and we’d lay him out on a locker room bench. and bury him under a number of newspapers so the boss wouldn’t spot him. He had no business on the job but deserved in-patient care at some VA hospital or rehab facility. Seeing this poor wretch in his agonies made me more anti-war than ever.

We moved all kinds of merchandise from the Railway Express car onto trucks and the reverse. Sometimes an order of gold bars or precious jewelry would come in for us to unload. Our labor was very closely scrutinized by armed guards who came with the load watching our every move like hawks. But the worst was on Thursday nights when crates of fresh frozen fish would come in large wooden containers from Boston for the Friday sales for the enormous Roman Catholic population of Chicago. There were leaks in these crates with smelly slime oozing over the floor of the railway car and onto our work clothes and gloves making it slippery and dangerous for us to work as it took a man on both ends of the crate to do the heavy lifting. Sometimes a crate would break open and we’d see a large frozen fish pop out and slide all over the floor. We’d have to scramble after it and try to shove it back into the box as best we could. We’d reek all over when we’d leave work at daybreak. I’d take the El to a 63rd Street stop in Hyde Park to walk home. My fellow passengers avoided me and were glad to see this grimy, smelly creature get off the train on Friday mornings.

I DISCOVER ROBERT MICHELS

Robert Michels / political theorist

Working graveyard I was able to attend some of the lectures on campus as an observer during the daytime hours. My most profound experience was attending a lecture by some professor whose name has long vanished from my mind who talked about the theories of a 19th Century German scholar Robert Michels (1876–1936) who established “The Iron Law of Oligarchy” in academic circles. His theories were developed in a book entitled “Political Parties.” He studied the German Social Democratic Party as the prime example of this “Iron Law,” He argued that no matter how democratic or idealistic an organization is in its aims and tasks was at its outset, hierarchy inevitably develops which eats away at the democracy replaced by an increasingly authoritarian leadership to effectively control the process. This occurs in political parties as well as trade unions. This is in the very nature of social organization in modern industrial society. My recent experience in the CP and observations of the Soviet Union indicated that theirs would be the most extreme example of the Iron Law. The lecturer tried to counter this inevitability talking about a democratic election within the United Auto Workers Union where a corrupt local or regional administration was replaced by a caucus of progressive union insurgents. Yet under the Reuther administration as it developed after tossing the CP elements out of effective power positions became a virtual one-party state in itself. Although it’s argued that UAW is among the most democratic unions in the country by its apologists in academia and the labor movement itself. I’ve spent many ensuing years in the American trade union movement and have always acted in an anti-authoritarian role to encounter hierarchy, hence my anarch-syndicalist underpinning. As the ACLU motto goes: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” But everyone should be aware of Michels’ theories, as they contain a lot of obvious validity. (Michels, initially a socialist, later in life became a fascist and lived in Mussolini’s Italy.)

WHITMAN HOUSE CO-OP

Dick Fredericksen / YPSL Chair

One night while at work, my apartment and several others were broken into and robbed. I lost $40 I thought I’d hidden safely away. So I thought it was time to move to more secure lodgings. Debby and Fred had told me about Whitman Co-op at 5721 Kenwood in Hyde Park and that there was a Third Camp YPSL and Socialist Party member named Dick Fredericksen, a Chicago University student, living there. They considered him a decent guy and easy to work with although not quite of their own then-political persuasion. So why not pay Whitman a visit as a potential place to hang my hat? My memories of Howland House as my home at Michigan State as a co-op man spoke well in its favor. It was an easy choice and I was voted in at the next house meeting, particularly since there were vacancies and some turnover. So I moved in as soon as my rent was up at my old place.

Whitman had a voluntary meal program for breakfasts and dinners The place was self-managed as well as the meal program and anyone who ate there was expected to work a few hours a week to help out. We had our own food buyer, at that time an African-American woman Gladys Scott, a wonderful lady who was also a member of the Hyde Park Co-op Food Market, an easy walking distance away, which even had its own credit union like the Finns did in Fitchburg. Residents weren’t all students as we had single working people living there who were full-fledged members. Another category of membership were people who lived in rented rooms elsewhere in Hyde Park but ate their evening meals at Whitman.

Small-town Michigan was a more conservative place so Michigan State student co-ops were segregated by sex, all male or all female. But not in liberal-progressive Hyde Park. At Whitman we were co-ed. At one time there were a number of resident owned co-ops in Hyde Park, all co-ed during the progressive chancellorship of eminent scholar Dr. Robert Hutchins, (1899–1997) who celebrated and endorsed this kind of residential freedom. Hutchins left Chicago in 1951 and eventually landed at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Santa Barbara, California. A more conservative Chancellor had been picked and our more free bohemian days would take a jolt. There were only three housing co-ops left in Hyde Park, when I moved into Whitman. It wasn’t easy for resident operated housing to function on a vast scale. Now we had only two houses left under the United Cooperative Projects, Inc.,the legal umbrella organization which oversaw our capital finance and overall legal administrative functions. Whitman House and Ingleside House were the only UCP entities left. Another independent co-op, Southard House operated north of us a few blocks away. Whitman and Southard were for single residents and Ingleside for married couples. Because of frequent domestic disputes at Ingleside, it was commonly called Freud House.

We not only had University of Chicago students living at Whitman, but some like a good buddy Gene Zweig from Roosevelt College downtown, and architecture student John Ottenheimer of the Illinois Institute of Technology who later went to study with Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona. During their work semesters we’d have students living with us from places like Antioch and Oberlin Colleges in Ohio.

A SOCIALIST PARTY/YPSL HOTBED

Dick Fredericksen wasn’t the only Socialist Party and Yipsel member living at Whitman, we had six. Dick, a native of Humboldt, Iowa was an undergrad at Chicago and National Chair of the Young Peoples Socialist League. Rafael (Rafe) Ezekiel was Jewish and another Chicago undergrad majoring in psychology. Erica Enzer, a pacifist, was a Czech Jew who fled the Old Country with her parents and sister in Hitler’s time, was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and worked as a chemist in Chicago. Lois Jones had finished at Chicago and was planning to go to Grad School at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.. Mars Hill was an African-American native of Chicago, a WWII vet who was studying architecture at the University of Illinois in Champaign and lived at Whitman while working in construction during his summer vacations, building Frank Lloyd Wright specialty concrete blocks for Bob Swann, Wright’s Midwest contractor. These were the people I shared most with in values and politics and had no problem in signing up with both the SP and YPSL shortly after I moved in. When I wrote Mamma that I had joined the Socialist Party, she responded in a letter saying in essence how glad she was to hear this: “You’re now marching in the ranks of the movement your father supported all his life.” Obviously, she hadn’t been happy about the previous political affiliations she had suspected me of having.

TWO SP LOCALS IN CHICAGO

Usually, the Socialist Party was confined to having one party local in a county to conform with election laws should the SP have a candidate on the ballot. Since the SP hadn’t run a political candidate in Cook County in many years, and couldn’t meet the stiff standards to placed a Presidential candidate on the ballot in terms of the impossibly large number of voter signatures required to meet that standard, so the National Office in New York had approved two Locals in Chicago. One was the traditional electorally-oriented entity that didn’t want to support candidates of either major capitalist party that met monthly downtown. Key members of that local include longtime stalwart Janet Miller who was in her early forties then, Ben Williger an elder who lived in Winnetka, and a few other old-timers in his age bracket. It also included two inactive attorney members. One was Albert Goldman, (1897–1960) who represented the SWP leaders during their WWII period Smith Act trials and had served prison time himself as an SWP member. He later jumped to the Workers Party but left them when he and Chicago writer James T. Farrell urged the WP to support the Marshall Plan and Norman Thomas’s Presidential candidacy in 1948. That failed and Goldman joined the SP in 1949, in which he remained a nominal member. The other was attorney Francis Heisler, who became a celebrity in Chicago when he confronted the violently anti-union head of Montgomery Ward Corporation during a union organizational drive during WWII which ended with the Army temporarily occupying the plant. I can still recall the news photos showing soldiers carrying away Heisler from the scene. Heisler had been cited for bravery as a combat soldier in the first World War, but soon after became a pacifist. He was the attorney for more than 2000 conscientious objectors in three wars, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. He was an inactive SP member and spend the bulk of his time in lawyering for unions and the ACLU.

Maynard C. Krueger / 1940 VP candidate

Norman Thomas / Presidential candidate

The other Local was led by Professor Maynard Krueger, an academic who had been Norman Thomas’s vice-presidential running mate in the 1940 elections, and Martin (Marty) Diamond, a former Trotskyist, who then headed the Labor Studies Program at Roosevelt College. Krueger and Diamond had concluded that it was futile for the SP to run candidates any more but should just back liberal Democratic Party politicians as the only realistic option.. It was an easy decision for us Third Camp SPers at Whitman House to be part of the Downtown Local as we considered the Krueger affiliate too right-wing and pro-US foreign policy in regard to the Soviet bloc whereas we were opposed to both imperialist power blocs in favor of an independent Democratic Socialist option. During the summer another young SPer moved to Hyde Park from Albany, NY and ate at Whitman House named Leonard Koblenz. He was an admirer of the historic revisionary social democrat Edward Bernstein in Germany who said: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” Lenny’s politics were more in line with those of the Krueger-Diamond Local than with us Third Campers. He considered himself more of a John Dewey humanist-pragmatist than a Marxist. He was an omnivorous talker and liked to wax philosophically at length than be an activist.

WHITMAN HOUSE BOHEMIA

It was fun living at Whitman House. We partied a lot as well as engaged in work parties on weekends to maintain the house. Being co-ed there was an easy permissiveness toward an active sex life for some although our Saturday night parties never ended in orgies. But the general atmosphere was loose and anarchic. There were some quieter sorts that went to work or school as serious students every day who liked to keep regular hours, sing songs together in the evenings, and volunteer for all details to keep the Co-op going and humming along. They were called the Rosy Cheek Society. Then there were the boozers and party animals who might only work part-time or on temp jobs and hang out at the popular Jimmy’s Bar or Woodlawn Tap at 55th Street and Woodlawn and getting smashed a lot. They were known as the Sallow Jowl Society. I spanned both groups as Jimmy’s was my own favorite watering hole in Chicago but yet I also stayed active in the affairs of the Co-op to make it a better place for all. We needed a new president for UCP which handled basic policy, dealt with larger purchases and finances for Whitman and Ingleside. A young Whitman resident, a Chi student named Leroy Montague, a World Federalist activist in his teens, wanted the job as he was most interested in serving UCP, but was too young to legally serve as President, so I, then at 26 was elected to the spot with Leroy as Vice. Gene Zweig, a math major at Roosevelt, was voted in as treasurer. Attorney for UCP was Leon Despres, a well known progressive in Hyde Park, who was later elected to serve many years on the Chicago City Council as a Reform Democrat and opponent of Mayor Richard Daley’s Democratic Party machine which controlled Cook County politics. Leroy and I visited Despres to get a better picture of the legal status of UCP.

ANARCHISTS, WOBBLIES, LIB-SOCS

Joffrey Stewart /anarcho-pacifist poet

Being the free and open space that Whitman was, we had frequent visitors from the Chicago radical community. Best known was Joffre Stewart, an African-American anarchist, pacifist, poet and pamphleteer who visited us almost every night. He was quiet; soft-spoken and gentle and was the first acknowledged anarchist I’d ever met. A WWII Army vet, his last stretch in that service was one of total silence in protest of war and militarism which ended in his discharge under Section 8 mental disability reasons. He had just received his BA from Roosevelt and lived with his mother in Chicago’s West Side Black Belt. He refused to work at any job because that would mean paying taxes to the state . Yet he lived on a disability service allowance which seems a contradiction to his beliefs. Yet his mother had insisted they send the check to her, as she gave her son a place to live and to see there’d be food on the table for him at home. He’d trudge every night to Hyde Park on foot from his home about eight miles away to visit friends, including an hour or two at Whitman. Then the long walk home in the middle of the night. He’d dress in old Army castoffs, and wore shorts in the warmer months and open-toed sandals. He always carried a big leather bag of papers and pamphlets he’d give to people. That would make him a prime target for arrest by the white racist cops in Hyde Park, and being true to his non-violent Gandhian nonviolent principles and would fall limp the minute a cop laid a hand on him and they’d have to carry him to the Hyde Park police station lockup. He’d generally be released in the morning without charges but sometimes the word would spread in Hyde Park that “Joffrey had been busted again” and a delegation would take off from Whitman to bail him out, But the racist harassment of Joffre would never stop in the then almost completely white enclave of the University area. When Joffrey arrived at Whitman he’d hand me and others copies of “Freedom,” the historic little newspaper of the British anarchist movement or a hand-written pamphlet he’d written himself in block letters as he had no typewriter. We all were fond of him and to my knowledge he’s till alive in 2015, the year of this writing, and regularly reads his poetry at literary events in Chicago. He is mentioned in Alan Ginsberg’s famous work “Howl.”

Art Castillo was another free-spirited hanger-on rebel who used to hang out with us and was a talented cartoonist and caricaturist who frequently portrayed Whitman residents in his drawings. There is a composite drawing that may still be posted in Jimmy’s Bar that shows me, June Greenlief and Julie Zell sitting at a table in nearby Steinway’s Cafeteria with a bomb in the middle of it. In 1973 Castillo was caught stealing food from a kitchen cupboard at Whitman and was barred forever from its premises. He may have been hungry but the evolving membership had lost all patience with him.

WOBBLIES AND LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISTS

Supporters of the anti-authoritarian left stopped by at Whitman to see their friends. Best known was Virgil J. Vogel, dual member of the IWW and Libertarian Socialist League who until recently had been an SP member. While National Secretary of YPSL in 1948, he wrote a biography of libertarian Marxist Rosa Luxemburg in pamphlet form which introduced me to her writings and she remains my favorite Marxist intellectual opposed to both Leninist vanguardism and reformist social democracy. “The liberation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves,” Red Rosa argued. Vogel had split from SP/YPSL and helped form the LSL when a group of young ex-Trotskyists known as the “Shermanites” joined and essentially took over YPSL. The Shermanites had originally been organized as “YPSL-Fourth International” and had originally joined the Workers Party split from the SWP. They were primarily City College of New York radicals who met in the so-called First Alcove of the CCNY dining hall. Their association with the WP proved short-lived as in 1940 “Sherman,” the party name for Phillip Selznick, introduced the group to the writings of Robert Michels. They had soon identified the entire Leninist tradition as being the worst possible example of “the iron law of oligarchy,” and resigned from the WP because of its neo-Trotskyist Bolshevik tradition. in 1940. The WP itself expelled the Shermanites after the fact. They decided to join the SP’s Yipsels as more in line with democratic process. Selznick later became a sociology prof at the University of California in Berkeley. Another noted Shermanite was Irving Kristol who married his comrade Gertrude Himmelfarb, who early on earned the enmity of Vogel as “elitist,” although they soon veered into the far right American neo-conservative ideology. Their son, editor William Kristol, became the USA’s most prominent neo-con Republican, a role he plays today. Another Shermanite Martin Diamond, Maynard Krueger’s SP associate, also went eventually to the Far Right, becoming Barry Goldwater’s main speech writer in the 1964, and ended up on the editorial board of William Buckley’s ultra-right National Review before his death. Another publically prominent ex-Shermanite was noted sociologist Professor Seymour Martin Lipset, who stayed in the SP until 1960, when he was later attacked as a neo-con as well. Although Lipset never went as far as the Kristols or Diamond politically, he served as an adviser in Bill Clinton’s first Presidential campaign, the candidate of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party’s Democratic Leadership Council. So Virgil Vogel’s fears about the Shermanites was not that far off base.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

OTHER WOBS, LIBS

Other Wobblies and Libertarian Socialists (frequently dual members), included IWW veteran organizer, historian and teacher, Fred Thompson who was a class war prisoner at San Quentin for “criminal syndicalism” following WWI. Fred had a Finnish wife Aino who I met. Burt Rosen was an LSL regular who did time in a Federal pen as a Korean War draft resister. Chicago anarchist John Forbes also did a prison hitch for refusing to soldier in Korea. Chuck Doehrer was the full-time editor of the Industrial Worker, official newspaper of the IWW. Chuck had formerly been a member of the Socialist Party of Los Angeles before becoming an LSLer and Wobbly. He had a tough time trying to support his wife Elly Doehrer and their two young children on what the IWW paid him. Marty Ptachek was a union pressman and a Wob loyalist who had joined YPSL as a teenager in Milwaukee but who joined Vogel and Rosen in the LSL split. Anarchist Eddie Adamowitz was a machinist by trade who spent WWII in a Sandstone, MN Federal labor camp for conscientious objectors. The only women LSLers I recall in Hyde Park were Janet Johnstone, a daughter of a prominent Chicago criminal lawyer and a talented artist and poet, and Syd Gold, a Jewish bohemian street rebel who ironically worked as a copy reader at the Chicago office of the Wall Street Journal. Noted IWW activists on the near North Side were an older couple named Jack and Ruth Sheridan. Ruth is still alive in her late 90s and lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

1952 SOCIALIST PARTY CONVENTION

The 1952 Socialist Party Convention, scheduled for Cleveland, Ohio is something I didn’t want to miss. I no longer worked at American Express at the time but may have been working as a freight handler at the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad depot in the Loop where we got paid in cash in the morning daily after finishing our shifts. Most of us were temp laborers so weren’t the steady man payroll so nobody missed us if we took time off the job. That was true of the dozens of Madison Street winos who were on the daily draw and didn’t shape up to work again until they’d blown all their pay on rot gut Sneaky Pete.

Dick Fredericksen and I rode the train to Cleveland together and Dick regaled me with stories of Socialist Summer in Reading, PA in 1951 where a contingent of college-age Yipsels had worked in factories and became familiar first hand with blue collar unionism and trying to spread a little Socialist propaganda. He had earlier told me about Niilo Koponen, a Finnish-American Yipsel who was the progeny of Finnish SP parents active at the famous Fifth Avenue Finnish Federation Socialist Hall in New York City. Niilo had worked in Reading all that summer and was a humor-filled story teller about Finnish-American Socialism. After Socialist Summer Niilo and his young wife Joan moved to Alaska to become homesteaders on Chena Ridge in Fairbanks. So he wouldn’t be at the Convention. (Eventually Niilo, about three years my junior, became a lifelong best friend and the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother.) Dick enjoyed talking about a Peck’s bad boy Yipsel rebel Bogdan Denitch, a young Serbian immigrant radical whose father had fought with General Mihailovich’s guerrillas against the German occupation of Yugoslavia. and his mother became Minister of Education in Tito’s Communist government. Bogdan, a well-versed Third Camper, delighted in upsetting some of the older New York Party members with some outrageous statements and pranks, He and several of his East Village YPSL comrades consolidated themselves in a branch they called the “Luxemburg Tendency.” We were sure to meet Bogdan in Cleveland. Chicago delegates to the Convention also included Erica Enzer and Ben Williger.

The SP Convention was held at the Hotel Hollenden, the same site where the stormy American Veterans Committee meeting took place three years before. Not as dramatic but discussion was plenty lively. Debate centered mostly about whether the Party should field a slate for the 1952 Presidential election. Norman Thomas, the candidate in 1948 and some of his co-thinkers thought it didn’t make sense that such a tiny party with insufficient financial or organizational resources should bother with something so ambitious but concentrate on educational and other community activist projects to spread the word. But the majority of the convention thought otherwise, saying that the best public educational work we could do would be through a Presidential race. This current was led by the strong Reading, PA delegation which had had considerable electoral success in the 1920s and 1930s; California, which had the strongest Left local in the party in Los Angeles, represented at the convention by Bill Briggs, a powerful orator; and Denver, led by veteran attorney Carl Whitehead and is wife Aileen. Yipsels favored the electoral option, mostly on principle, and tactically by some like the enfant terrible Bogdan Denitch, who wanted to give the more reformist right-wingers a hard time.

Darlington Hoopes / Presidential candidate

Then came the question: “Who will be our nominees?” The principle contenders were Bill Briggs, California Party chair and Darlington Hoopes, a Reading attorney who had served two terms as a Pennsylvania state Assemblyman on the SP electoral ticket and had introduced the first state child labor law which had carried. Chief spokesperson for Briggs was YPSL National Secretary Vern Davidson, a Californian who was posted in New York for his own elected tenure. Bill Briggs was in his early 30s and was noted for his activist role in the Oakland General Strike of 1947, then a shoe salesman in one of the city’s striking department stores. Hoopes, in his 50s, had the solid backing of his Reading comrades who included Elwood Keppley, editor of the excellent weekly Reading Labor Advocate newspaper which I preferred in quality to the official SP national magazine, The Socialist Call. Also Mark Brown, president of an Eastern Pennsylvania Steelworkers local backed his Reading’s. choice. The Convention majority chose Hoopes who represented a more left centrist politics compared to the more Third Campish stance of Local Los Angeles. Elected as Vice-Presidential nominee was veteran New York school teacher Samuel H. Friedman who was pro-US foreign policy and NATO but a solid socialist on social ownership of the basic industries, distribution and exchange and an outspoken opponent of Tammany Hall.

Samuel H. Friedman / VP candidate

Probably the most contentious issue the Party faced at the Convention was foreign policy. The Third Camp adherents, mostly Yipsel, spoke in favor of the Third Camp: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but an anti-imperialist Third Camp of Democratic Socialism,” was our argument. Unfortunately most social democratic member parties of the Socialist (2nd) International, including the majority of the SP membership were aligned with the bourgeois democratic capitalist West, however critically, against Soviet and Chinese Communist totalitarianism as well as Fascist powers like in Spain. Third Campers like Bogdan and the Reverend William Shirley argued eloquently, but the majority voted for the pro-West stance as the “lesser evil.” Yet strong positions were taken condemning the existence of House and Senate Un-American Activities Committees and the Smith Act.

Talk about the Rev. Bill Shirley (also a Yipsel), I was surprised to learn there were a number of clergymen who were SP members. I can recall in our Finnish immigrant socialist community most had abandoned the Lutheran Church and considered themselves atheists or agnostics with considerable anti-clericism. Norman Thomas was an ordained Protestant minister but who now devoted the brunt of his time to socialism rather than religion. Rev. Jesse Cavalier of Local Cleveland was a key organizer of this convention. Rev. John McCartney, a Party member and formerly YPSL who had a Methodist church in Kansas was a convention regular. So the tradition of Christian Socialism was new to me. We also were represented by more than a few practicing Jews, including Zionist supporters of the newly established state of Israel, especially of the collectivist kibbutz phenomenon. We did have members who belonged to the secular Jewish Labor Bund prominent once in Eastern Europe who were anti-Zionist and argued that working class Jews should build for socialism in their countries of origin rather than create a separate Jewish state. Many comrades became increasingly concerned about the fate of the native Palestinians in Israel who were being brutally dispossessed and mistreated by the Zionist government.

I made a number of new friends at the Convention including YPSL National Secretary Vern Davidson and his then wife Margaret Davidson, who were both from Los Angeles, as well as Bill Briggs who became later a close friend and comrade. I was impressed by hard-working National Secretary Robin Myers who had been an activist since her Yipsel days. I liked the down-to-earth blue collar comrades from the industrial city of Reading, PA, who I’ve cited earlier, as well as machinist Hans Peter, a European immigrant socialist who would lead the convention in song of labor and revolutionary favorites.

Ending the convention was the annual banquet with powerful speeches to support our Socialist candidates in the fall elections, climaxed by the group singing of the “Internationale.” (I had never heard it sung earlier at CP gatherings.) I heard later that our banquet servers (all black) were laughing their heads off in the back, as we well-fed mostly middle aged all-white delegates stood belting out: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation .....!” Dick Fredericksen, Ben Williger, a Unitarian theology student from Chicago. and I rode back to the Windy City with Rev. John MCartney who would continue on to his small-town parish in Kansas. We sang labor and revolutionary songs all the way back, with John being as loud as all of us. No problem for John, as there would be plenty of hymn singing in his congregation the coming Sunday.

“SPIKE IKE, SHAFT TAFT — VOTE SOCIALIST”

Both Republican and Democratic Parties held their 1952 National Conventions in Chicago to nominate their Presidential slates. Sessions of both conventions were held at the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue near the Lakefront opposite Grant Park. Our Yipsel branch in Hyde Park thought this a great opportunity to demonstrate a socialist presence at the conventions. We made picket signs at Whitman House and Dick Fredericksen came up with an idea to produce batches of small adhesive stickers to plaster on walls all over Hyde Park and along the corridors of the hotel we dubbed as the “Comrade Hilton.” The GOP event took place first so our paste-on stickers read: “Spike Ike, Shaft Taft — Vote Socialist.” So right after opening day a bunch of us gathered with our signs and stickers at Grant Park, across the street from the Comrade Hilton. All our Yipsels were there as well as other Hyde Park dissidents who thought this would be great fun. There wasn’t a cop in sight as we walked with our signs across the street to enter the lobby. Bogdan Denich in New York thought this an innovative stunt and came to Chicago to join us. There was a large piano in the grand lobby and Dick Fredericksen immediately pounced on it and began to bang out the great anthem of the working class “The Internationale.” We surrounded him and lustily sang the lyrics of which we and most radicals knew only the first verse. We took the whole lobby by surprise as the staff and delegates hanging around didn’t know what we were about. We pressed our advantage without ado and fanned out along the corridors pasting up our catchy stickers. The operation was executed quickly and we returned to the lobby and marched out into the street signs aloft.

Like a miracle a large empty wooden platform loomed outside on the sidewalk on Michigan Avenue right near the front entrance. A perfect soapbox! So Bogdan climbed on top of it to harangue passsersby in his heavily accented English. Soon some delegates showed up on the sidewalk in shirt-sleeves wearing VOTE ROBERT TAFT stiff straw hats and badges. As a crowd gathered to hear Bogdan’s exhortations, one Taft delegate shouted, hearing his accent: “Why don’t you go back where you came from!” Always ready with instant retort, Bogdan responded: “I can’t for I come from Yugoslavia and Truman is sending arms to support Tito’s dictatorship and I would lose my freedom if I tried to go back!” “By God, he’s right!” the delegate called to his fellow Taft cohort.” And so it went for awhile, red-baiting interspersed with socialist oration from the platform. Yet no signs of cops. No violence from the crowd. Most of this time a red-faced young marine in full dress uniform bedecked with combat insignia and citations, stood at attention grimly facing the crowd with his back to the platform. As soon as Bogdan finished and came down, the marine told us: “Do you know why I was standing here all this time? I just came back from combat in Korea and I felt my mission there was to protect the right of free speech for people like you, whose thinking I have no use for. If this crowd had tried to physically attack you, they would have had to do it over my dead body!”

Our people showed up the next day to take advantage of the outdoor speaker’s platform which stood there through both conventions. One difference was that our paste-on sticker for the Democrats wasn’t as catchy: “Ike for General, Adlai for Governor — Vote Socialist.” We remember more recent Republican and Democratic Conventions like the ones held in the Twin Cities in 2008 when the police functioned like a lethally-equipped massive army combat force crushing potentially nonviolent demonstrations and marches arresting and beating up protesters like in some full-scale war zone. Activists from the small FBI-infiltrated Maoist group Freedom Road were arrested for “terrorism” at their operating headquarters before they even hit the streets. But we were in a more innocent age with our genuinely fun show in Chicago in 1952. Nothing was ever the same after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention where the streets and parks downtown were turned into a raging battlefield between the cops and antiwar and radical demonstrators. An official report on the violence placed the blame mostly on the police, which enraged Mayor Richard Daley. The American version of fascism has become the norm today, as street dissent is badly stifled like during the 2011 popular Occupy movement.

CO-ED CO-OPS BARRED BY UNIVERSITY BRASS

It was probably inevitable but when the Lawrence Kimpton Administration replaced the liberal humanist tenure of Robert Hutchins, the operation of the University of Chicago tightened up to conform with the more conservative norms of most other institutes of higher education. One day that summer I was asked to meet with the Dean of Students as President of United Cooperative Projects to hear the Administration’s new edict on our co-op housing. So VP Leroy Montague and I met with the dean, an older woman whose name I’ve forgotten and her assistant, a rather stuffy former UC student called Carl Grip. She announced Kimpton’s non-negotiable edict that Whitman could no longer function as a coed housing unit for registered students effective the fall of 1952. We asked why and the reply was that in some of the earlier UCP singles houses, parents had complained that their daughters had been seduced by male students and that sex was contrary to school policy. We argued that this was not true of Whitman, that we were mature responsible adults and knew we had to be on our best behavior as unmarried students. (This was a blatant lie as the night before I had been kept awake for hours as my upper bunk Whitman room mate had been moaning and groaning for hours with his high society girl friend from the North Shore in an obviously consensual sexual tryst. We had plenty of such couplings at Whitman as we were all adults in various states of horniness following our natural desires.) But no negotiations were possible as the University was adamant and would only consider Whitman as acceptable housing for students of one gender or another but not both. This was unacceptable for us and we had no legal ground to challenge the new policy, which meant that I at age 26 and other students enrolled for the fall would have to move from our beloved Whitman. We soon found out that Chicago was collaborating with Roosevelt College, IIT and other institutions of higher learning in Chicago so that their students wouldn’t be able to live at Whitman. Further, work-exchange students from Oberlin or Antioch who were living in Chicago fell under the same ban. Since non-students also lived at Whitman it would continue as co-op housing but its colorful mix of diversity would be lost. Both Gene Zweig and myself resigned from our UCP offices. Fortunately, my old Howland House buddy Hank Sirlin had graduated with a Masters in Planning from UC, and he and his wife classical piano talent Rosalie moved to New Jersey where Hank had been offered a city planner’s job. So Gene and I decided to be roommates in their old apartment just south of the Midway divider closer to 63rd Street. CURRENT 2015 SIDE NOTE. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the current Democratic Socialist candidate for the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency, is a University of Chicago graduate., When he enrolled in 1961 he joined and became active in YPSL, the same as I had done nine years earlier. One of his campaigns was to end segregation in University housing. Even then I don’t know if this meant racial segregation which should by then had been resolved on campus. If that involved segregation by gender, the battle UCP had lost during my time in 1952 on coed co-op housing, I would hope he and the 1961 YPSL was successful in reversing that policy. These days in many public universities even dormitory housing is integrated by gender. Common sense policies have prevailed.

GRADUATE SCHOOL DISASTER

Graduate school for me proved a total flop. I signed up for three courses one of which was a compulsory one in statistics. I don’t know if it was my mental obtuseness to the subject or the instructor was totally inept in teaching it. He had me baffled from Day One. I never got the slightest idea of what he was talking about. So I dropped it after a couple of weeks and got a partial rebate on my tuition costs for it. It was downhill for me the rest of the way. Another course I have no memory of I dropped soon after. The one that interested me most for which I never missed a lecture was offered by a sociologist, Dr. Fred Harbison, who specialized in labor-management studies with a strong background in the labor movement. The only grade for the course came in the final of a paper we each developed on some major aspect of the material covered. I did most of the reading for it but never wrote the paper and ended up with an Incomplete for my one and remaining course. Thus ended my attempt at graduate school at Chicago. Was it that I was incapable of being a serious academic? Maybe. Or was it that my alcohol addiction by now had assumed a serious priority in my life?

Many’s the evening when Gene and I were absorbed in our class reading at the apartment when I’d pop the question: “Let’s go down to Jimmy’s Bar and check out the action and have a quick beer.” Sometimes he’d say OK, at others, “No,” as he had a math test the next morning at Roosevelt College. Gene never was that big a boozer. So often I’d stop at Whitman on the way to the 55th and Woodlawn watering hole and see if anybody would like to join me for a few brewskies. So quite often I wouldn’t get home until after midnight somewhat worse for the wear. It was always easy to get into bull sessions at Jimmy’s, a favorite hangout for students, college dropouts, bohemians and working stiffs. I was told that some years before Saul Bellow, James T. Farrell, and an ISL Trotskyist named Dan Schelley I got to know later in Los Angeles, had a special table at the Woodlawn Tap as regulars.

Dick and I and a few others on campus registered YPSL as a regular student club that fall on campus, along with a faculty adviser. The only notable evening meeting we sponsored during our tenure featured Samuel H. Friedman, the SP’s Vice Presidential candidate on his campaign tour of the Midwest. Sam was an articulate orator with a booming voice who knew how to work an audience from many years of soap-boxing in New York City where he’d been a perennial candidate for Governor, Mayor and many other posts, with nary an election win. Even close. We had a fair-sized crowd in the auditorium that night but Sam only had one serious challenge during the question and answer period. He was another SP member, Hank Braun who had just returned from the Army in Korea where he’d been awarded a battlefield commission for bravery. There was even an attempt by sone Army brass to drum him out of the military for being a Socialist, which failed. I remember a press quote he’d made over the incident: “Those sure weren’t capitalist bullets flying at me at the front.” Hank challenged Comrade Friedman and the SP as being too enfeebled to run a serious campaign for a minuscule number of votes, and urged the audience to vote for Adlai Stevenson. Sam, an old pro in Socialist electoral politics, stressed that SP campaigns were not about the number of votes, but to spread our message against that of the two capitalist parties as we worked to educate toward a socialist society. I met Hank years later as he was attempting to organize a Socialist Party Local in Marin County in 1960, the year I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. At that time he was enthused about the popular radical reforms that Pope John XXIII was attempting in the Catholic Church during the early 1960s. He considered John as the “first socialist pope.” Hank and his wife even converted to Catholicism as a result.

Since at the time laws generally forbade students from voting in the campus communities where they lived but only in the home towns that served as their permanent domiciles. So I voted an absentee ballot I sent to Fitchburg with my write-in votes for Hoopes and Friedman. On election night a number of us gathered in Lenny Koblenz’s room in Hyde Park to listen to the 1952 Presidential and other vote results on his radio. Relatively few people had television sets at the time, particularly us “starving students.” Lenny and several others in the room were Stevenson supporters. As the results poured in it was obvious quite early that Eisenhower would be the easy winner. Hyde Park lefty Jerry Lewis reflected the views of some that USA would certainly go fascist now and he’d go down to apply for a passport while he still could and leave the country. We were all depressed, that things would go from bad to worst. Although Eisenhower was a conservative he wasn’t extreme enough to be a fascist and not as vicious as Richard Nixon. As the French began to lose control in Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh’s Communist insurgency, Eisenhower resisted dragging as into a major ground war in Southeast Asia. It was Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon who involved us in a big way in a murderous wholesale war in Vietnam which the US eventually lost. Eisenhower had many faults which we’ll cite later on in these Memoirs, but who can forget his farewell speech after his final term in which he warned us to “beware the military-industrial complex.”

MOP-UP FOR 1952 IN CHICAGO

Jim Sinkule. my old Howland House roomie, had just gotten an early discharge from the Army and was staying temporarily with his parents in Mishawaka, Indiana. He popped in to see us one weekend. The Army had let him and other WWII vets who had been called up for the Korean “police action” go early because of their alleged bad influence on younger draftees just out of high school as graduates or dropouts. He had been stationed in Texas just across the border from Nuevo Laredo in Mexico getting training as a medic as he had been turned down as a cryptologist as a security risk for subscribing to the magazine “Soviet Russia Today” while in college. He spent most free evenings sloshing it up in the cantinas across the border and cavorting with the young hookers in their back rooms. He dozed through most of his daytime classes on the base. So the Army decided to let these WWII slackers go because of their negative impact on the young rookies in basic training. There was plenty of fresh cannon fodder to be drafted as the war churned on, more susceptible to brainwashing than the older cynics.

Gene had teamed up with Jerry Lewis to move to New York after the end of the fall term at Roosevelt to work and study. So I would be out of someone to share the rent with after the holiday break, since I knew by then I wouldn’t return to the University in January, and Jim had no other immediate plans he decided to move to Chicago and look for work as I would and we’d find an apartment to share somewhere else in Hyde Park. I doubt if our landlord Mr. Sussman would want me as a tenant after my present arrangement because of an incident earlier that fall.

Gene and I had invited Gladys Scott, one of our black housemates at Whitman to come join us for dinner one evening at our digs. Gladys was a delight to be around and we enjoyed dinner and good conversation for a nice visit. A few days later Sussman came by all apologetic with a pained look on his face. This was a neighborhood in transition and the few blocks north of 63rd Street below the Midway divider; the apartment buildings only rented to white tenants, So some of our neighbors saw Gladys dining with us through a ground floor window and complained to our landlord. Racism was pervasive all around us with fear of an imminent black invasion of this still all-white bastion. Sussman tried to assure us he was a UC graduate and a liberal but the neighborhood heat was too much for him to bear. So another phony liberal showed his true colors in trying to protect his precious property values.

So Jim, Gene and I stopped by Whitman on the Saturday night of Jim’s visit on our way to Jimmy’s to heist a pitcher or two of suds. We ran into Syd Gold, the Libertarian Socialist League Wall Street Journal female scribe, who joined the fun with some saucy talk. Next day us guys were figuring what to do that day as Jim was going to return home to Indiana that evening. Syd then decided to drop in and began to climb all over me, pinching and feeling me up. She obviously had a surge of hots for me. So Jim and Gene saw the obvious and discreetly walked away for the rest of the day. So we had one of the wildest sexual romps of the day I’d ever experienced, with me the more passive partner to her aggressive voluptuary initiatives. Toward dark we walked up to Whitman where I left Syd and went on to Jimmy’s where I met my roommate and our guest.

MAX BODENHEIM AND RUTH FAGAN TRAGEDY

A late fall surprise was the visit of aging poet/novelist of the 1920s–’30s Maxwell Bodenheim (1892–1954) and his recent bride, 26-years younger Ruth Fagan (1918–1954) , the notorious classroom lecture crasher of my Michigan State days. Both had seen better days, particularly Max who was a hopeless drunkard hitting bottom. They had somehow gotten to Chicago from New York where they were often homeless sleeping on park benches with Ruth engaging in prostitution to survive and Max hanging around sleezebag bars writing poems on scraps of paper and peddling them for a fiver or so or for free drinks to other patrons, They’d probably hit the end of the line in New York and were trying to find ways to survive in Chicago. Ruth told me she and Max were both members of the Libertarian Socialist League who had probably worn out their welcome with their New York comrades and came to check out the Chicago Libs and IWWs for support.

Bodenheim had been famous in Chicago literary circles in the ’20s and ’30s as a successful writer. He had teamed up with his friend Ben Hecht to produce a briefly successful journal “Chicago Literary Times” which had included work of notable writers like Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Floyd Dell and Sherwood Anderson, according to Wikipedia. Married twice earlier and paramour to many, Bodenbheim was the ultimate bohemian and went downhill fast over the years in the haze of heavy constant boozing and partying. Now he had reached his nadir and clung to his new soulmate Ruth in a pitiful co-existence. They tried crashing at Whitman first as they’d been told that it was a refuge for all the “wretched of the earth” and lost souls. They never bathed and smelled bad, laying about cadging for food and booze money. They were soon given the boot from there.

They later visited the editorial room of the Chicago Tribune where Max played on his old friendship with the famous Ben Hecht. The newsroom staff took up a collection to give them a couple of nights in some downtown fleabag hotel, but most of the money went down their throats at the lowest life gin mills. I used to see Ruth walking down the street in Hyde Park with Max helplessly stumbling after her as she played the stern Mommy figure to her precious pet mutt. The Chicago LSLers were stable working people and soon lost all sympathy for their plight, except for Syd Gold, my recent weekend lover, who was basically a street person herself although she was gainfully employed by the Wall Street Journal at the time. Somehow Ruth and Max managed to bum some money for Greyhound tickets back to New York and Chicago saw the last of them.

In early February, 1954, just before I took off to live in Los Angeles, I read some dreadful news in the papers that Max and Ruth had been murdered in some drunken flophouse triad in New York by some deranged psychopath. Further details revealed that they had met a part-time dishwasher named Charlie Weinberg, 25, in a skid row bar where they’d gotten drunk together and had left to continue their party. Wikipedia reports they had engaged a flophouse room where Max had immediately passed out on the bunk. He woke up to see Weinberg and Ruth getting it on sexually. A fight ensued between the two men and younger pulled out a gun and shot Max to death. He then turned to beat Ruth and stabbed her six times in the back to kill her. He told the law that he deserved a medal as he had “just killed two Communists.” Weinberg ended up in a prison for the criminally insane. That’s how two initially creative and highly intelligent people met their sordid, tragic ends. Decades later Ruth’s attorney sister Anne Fagan Ginger, told me in Berkeley, CA that their elderly mother Sarah Fagan had to travel from East Lansing to New York to identify her daughter’s body.

So that pretty well ended the year 1952. I don’t recall whether I went East to spend the holidays with my family but knew that a job hunt would begin for me in Chicago after New Year’s. My own alcohol addiction got worse during 1952 but it never occurred to me that the same fate might befall me as did Maxwell Bodenheim. After all, I was young and could quit drinking and smoking any time that I wanted, cold turkey. So strong was the element of denial for someone increasingly a prisoner of this form of drug addiction.

End of Installment 16