Hi guys, it's Kel. What you're about to hear is a
super special bonus episode. It's a little different from our
others. Mel and Kate are not here today,
sadly, but I had the chance to sit down with Nathan from Silent
Generation, which is one of my favorite podcasts.
Seriously, I'm not just saying that.
Silent Generation is a chicago-based cultural analysis
podcast hosted by Nathan and Joseph.
They talk about topics in art, fashion, music, urbanism,
history. Their conversations are really
in depth and curious, but it's relaxing and fun to listen to.
Anyway, I had the chance to meet Nathan and Joseph in Chicago
this past week and record this episode with Nathan.
And I'm also in a Silent Generation episode on Manoush
Jazz, which is a part of their three-part series on
bohemianism. Definitely check that out if
you're interested in looking for a new podcast.
So without further ado, here's the episode.
Are you long time tonight? Do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart? Hey guys, welcome to Significant
lovers. Today it is just Kelly.
I am not with Mel and Caitlin, which is a bit strange, but we
have with us Nathan from podcast.
I love that I listen to genuinely, and I just followed
you guys on Instagram and then we connected.
So we have Nathan here today to tell a really interesting love
story a little different from some of our others.
So, Nathan, thanks for joining us.
Yeah, thank you for having me on what we do at Silent Generation,
it's a lot of cultural analysis. And as you might be able to
infer from the name, we do like more historical episodes pretty
often, and this one is going to cover a couple that dated in the
early 20th century, so it's Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman.
Emma Goldman 1869 to 1940 was a Russian born anarchist political
activist and writer who played an instrumental role in shaping
the American radical left. And Ben Reitman, 1879 to 1943
was a quote UN quote hobo Doctor Who served the poor and founded
a college for hobos in Chicago. And then Ben dated for nine
years after initially meeting in 1908 and their relationship was
as unique as the rest of their lives.
They toured the country espousing anarchism, free
speech, workers rights, free love and birth control before
their relationship ended in 1917.
Yeah, and you guys on Silent Generation, I was going to say
significant lovers, you had an episode about hobos which I
loved and that might some kind of random to our listeners, but
it's really interesting. And I think I mistakenly was one
of those people that thought hobos was synonymous with
homeless person, but you guys taught me that's not true.
It was more mostly men that travelled for work and I don't
know how would you describe. Yeah, so today the term hobo, it
gets used to just say homeless. It's used you openly to refer to
homeless people. Mm, hmm.
But hobos were itinerant workers that would travel during the
time when manual labor was more needed across the economy,
across the country. So they would go to one region
of the country, you know, during harvest season to harvest wheat.
And then they might go to go mine at a different time of the
year. It was really hard to find work,
but they would have to travel really long distances to get it.
And yeah, they would take trains to get from place to place
illegally. Yeah.
But yeah, that was one of. That was a fun episode.
It's over an hour long, but yeah, some of that information
on hobos will definitely get incorporated throughout this
episode with Ben Reitman. Cool.
Yeah. I just want to say, guys, I love
Silent Generation. I loved the Is it utopian?
Scholastic. That was more recent.
You guys just cover these. Interesting subcultures or sub
music genres or fashion trends, things that you've probably seen
before, heard about but maybe didn't think too hard on, and
you guys just dive into it. Listen to the Yuppies episode.
Yeah, those are all classics, and I've listened to a few of
yours. I really like the Gypsy Rose
Blanchard one. Quite a bit.
Cool. I'll tell him.
I'll. That was her episode.
But yeah, I I read a little bit about Emma Goldman and Ben
Reitman. You showed me an excerpt from a
book and I loved it. I thought it was so interesting.
And I was actually freaking out writing notes because I printed
out in the margins and I hadn't heard of them before he
introduced me to them. But I think you guys listening
are really going to enjoy this. So if you had to describe this
couple in three words, what would you say?
The three words I would use are radical, passionate and
unfaithful. That last 1 is really one sided.
On behalf of Ben Well. Unfortunately all too common on
significant lovers. But cool.
So who are Emma and Ben? Yeah, we'll start out with Emma
and talk about her life up until meeting Ben.
So Emma was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the
Russian Empire, when the Russian Empire wasn't communist yet
because the Bolshevik Revolution happened in 1917.
And her mother had two prior daughters with a man who died of
tuberculosis. And so before Emma was born, she
was kind of like depressed. She never really recovered fully
from the death of her first husband and then her second
husband, who is the father of Emma Abraham Goldman.
He was very strict. And Emma's later distaste for
authority and love of anarchism probably was rooted in her kind
of hatred of her dad because her father was pretty violent with
her and his other children. Like he would actually used a
literal whip on Emma. Oh my gosh.
And he also had like pretty sex issues as well.
Like he was once quoted as saying, girls do not have much
to learn. All the Jewish daughter needs to
know is how to prepare Gillette fish, cut noodles fine, and give
the men plenty of children. Wow.
So yeah, this definitely shaped some of her views later on.
Yeah, it sounds like the complete opposite of the life
she goes on to live. So.
Yeah. And then she had, like other
formative experiences that shaped her later political
beliefs, the Russian Empire. It was a pretty oppressive place
that eventually led to the Russian solution.
She witnessed A peasant getting whipped with an out in public as
a child and that traumatized her and her father actually wanted
her to marry. He tried to set her up into an
arranged marriage at the age of 15, which is customary in the
Orthodox Jewish community as she was in at the time, but she
refused and this caused a lot of contention between her and her
father. Like he burned one of her French
grammar books saying that she didn't need to learn and she
should just try to be a wife. So sad and traumatic some of
these older episodes we do. The back stories are so brutal.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, both Emma and Bens
biographies are incredibly complex.
They're some of the most complex ones I've ever encountered.
Yeah, so so that what happened to young Emma.
So she was trying to get away from her family.
She didn't want to get into an arranged marriage.
Her older sister Helena, who was actually sort of a maternal
figure for her because her mom would, didn't play a very active
role in her life. But her sister had moved to
Rochester, NY along with her husband, so she then got the
opportunity to move with her or to move there with her other
sister to join their third sister.
Mm hmm. Initially her father disallowed
it, but then permitted Emma to go after she said she would kill
herself if you didn't let her by throwing herself into the Neba
River. Oh my gosh.
OK. So that's how she got to move to
the United States, but she didn't initially like it.
When she got there, she found the working conditions even
worse than Russia. When she got there, there were
there even more sweatshop like she was working in a glove
factory. I hate, I feel like there's so
many words where people immigrated here thinking it was
going to be wonderful, you know, streets paved with gold.
And then life is actually so hard, maybe even harder than
what they left. So it's sad to hear.
Yeah, she did end up loving the United States, and she viewed it
as the perfect place to be a political radical.
The initially she didn't like it very much, but she met someone
who was very important to her during the her first few years
in the United States. That was Jacob Kirchner.
So while she was working at the club factory, this fellow
worker, they bonded over their shared love of books and their
shared hatred of their boss. And then after a couple of
months, Jared convinced her to marry her, even though she
wasn't really feeling it. It was really just because he
was the only kind of friend she had in this new country she just
immigrated to. Interesting.
So then they got married. Yeah, but it lasted less than a
year here because upon their wedding night, Emma discovered
that he was impotent. How do we know this?
She wrote about it. She left a really long biography
behind where she didn't leave that many details, but she was
not happy about that. And then afterwards she realized
that he was kind of depressed and that he was kind of trying
to trick her into this marriage in order to make his life more
exciting. And she was really not happy
with that. So she ran away and divorced
him, which her family didn't like.
So they convinced her to remarry him, but then she just divorced
him anyways. So she divorced him two times,
and this actually set the stage for her eventually espousing
free love after getting married twice and divorcing twice.
She was like, I don't believe in the institution of marriage.
And this was sort of one of the things that led her to
anarchism. I mean, it's funny, like when is
this all happening? They got married in 1887. 1887
yeah and people think of free love as being like such a modern
concept, you know, maybe just coming about in the 1960s, but
here we are in the 1800s and I know we didn't.
Episode about Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, and her
parents who lived during the 1700s were also into free love,
so the concept's been around for a while.
Yeah, I think it was common within artistic and literary
circles amongst bohemians at the time.
For her, it was coming from more of a personal place.
It wasn't actually getting. She wasn't as influenced by the
people around her. It was her getting married at 18
and really regretting it that shaped her view on it and.
Thinking like, I'm done with this.
Yeah, OK, so she swore off marriage as an institution, but.
She later did actually get married to a Scottish anarchist
named James Colton. I didn't think she ever probably
did get remarried based off of what I was reading about her,
but she did it for citizenship reasons.
She later on in the story, she gets supported to Russia and
then in order to have like Peace of Mind and the ability to
continue to do her political work, she wanted to get British
citizens citizenship because Scotland was part of the British
Commonwealth. She could go to Canada to give
her speeches if she got it. So that's why she married James
Colton. Did they have a relationship or
it was just kind of? I didn't read too much into it,
but yeah, it was really, I mean, she was kind of a modern woman,
like, more like people today than the people that she was
around back then. Because I find that people of
her generation who doubt the institution of marriage, the one
reason they are willing to send him to it is just to gain
citizenship. Yeah.
Definitely. I've heard a lot of people say
things like that, like, oh, just marrying this.
Or usually it's hypothetical, like maybe I'll just marry this
person for citizenship. And yeah, so she was willing to
get married for that reason. She's definitely more of a free
spirit. Yeah, and her.
Parents would like. Around this time she's living
with her sisters in upstate New York.
Her parents actually come to live with them as well because
there is anti-Semitism pretty prevalent in the Russian Empire.
So they are sharing a home with her.
And during that time, Emma sort of has her first big radical
moment, and it's in response to the Haymarket affair.
Have you ever heard of it before?
I think I have, but yeah. Not it happened in Chicago,
where we are right now, actually.
Wow. Can you give us a refresher on
what happened? Yeah, so the Haymarket affair
was a protest for an 8 hour work day at a particular plant, but
it was part of nationwide protests.
I believe over 500,000 workers went on strike in a sort of
general strike because they said that if Congress didn't act and
institute an 8 hour work day, that there's going to be 1.
So this happened on May 4th, the Haymarket affair, a few days
after those protests started on May 1st.
It was part of May Day. And so prior to the Haymarket
affair, which was a bombing, there were protesters killed the
night before. Police were trying to break up a
protest the following day. And then someone they never
really figured out who threw a bomb at a group of police
officers. Seven of them were killed.
I believe four were also like 4 civilians were also killed in
the bomb blast. But this was a really big deal.
I mean, if you think about this event and if it happened today,
if seven police officers got killed in a bombing, it would be
in the news for years. And that was the case with this
as well. Wow, so she heard about this.
Yeah. So her initial reaction to it
wasn't as important as the trial that happened because there were
a group of men who were pinned as having committed the bombing.
And it's widely assumed by historians that they weren't
responsible for this because I believe only 6, like 6 of the 8
weren't even at Haymarket Square when the bombing happened.
So only two were there. They really didn't have evidence
to prove that they were the ones that threw the bomb.
And then several of them were executed for this crime that
they didn't even commit. And this was a really big deal
to Emma. She was so upset.
On the day of the execution, she was talking to her family.
They, one of her, like, distant relatives, said something like,
why do you care about them if they're guilty?
She threatened to kill him and then threw a glass of water at
another family member's face. And this was like a breaking
point for her where she described it as being like, the
events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth.
They're really important to her and founded.
They're the foundation for her anarchism.
But it was kind of like, do you know what the Dreyfus affair is?
That rings a bell, I'm sure. Yeah, it does, but I'm I'm not
sure. But if you just think of, like,
political trials within your lifetime, where the news
coverage around them is in the news longer than the event
itself, yeah, like, endured. That's sort of what it was for
them. And it caused people to feel
real deep indignation towards the state because even people
like the general American public, they didn't believe that
these men were guilty during the time of the trial.
That was what really like radicalized her.
Wow, so I'm curious, what do you think of anarchism as a concept?
I've come to find that it's more of a legitimate political
ideology than I initially thought because I associated
with youth. And I don't think it's ever
really been tried and tried and tested.
But there's this really great book, The Dawn of Everything by
David Graeber, and it talks about how people throughout
prehistory, they had the ability, they had the right to
sort of actively reinterpret their political systems and they
had a active part in that. And so anarchism, it has
existed, it's been successful for different groups of people
and even with them as own lifetime.
The Spanish Civil War, which she later got involved in, it was
between, I believe, fascist, communist and anarchist.
So it was more of like a real thing during her lifetime than
it is today. Definitely.
It's hard to, I guess I don't know a ton about it.
I've done a little bit of research.
I don't it's hard to figure out how it would work in our modern
society. I have a friend who was calling
herself a pacifist anarchist a couple years ago, but I feel
like it would only work if everybody was a pacifist
anarchist. So.
Yeah, no, she definitely was not a pacifist because, as we're
gonna get to, she was a believer in political violence.
But before that, so she ended up leaving her family in upstate
New York shortly after the men in the Haymarket affair were
executed. She moved straight to New York
City and she brought with her $5 in a sewing machine and she went
to the offices of Freyhead, which was an anarchist magazine.
So by the time she moves to NYC, her anarchist beliefs are fully
formed because while she was in upstate New York, there were
like political activists. She was meeting both socialists
and anarchists, but she's described it as being like the
anarchists made her feel more alive.
That's why she gravitated towards that over socialism and
communism or Marxism. I feel like that's such a
classic thing. People move to New York with
only $5 ready to make a name for themselves.
Yeah, we're going to gloss over a ton of events in our political
life since we're focusing on our personal life.
But one place where those few things were really merged was
with Alexander Berkman. So this was the most significant
relationship she had prior to when she met Ben Reitman.
They met in 1889 on the day that she actually moved to New York
City at a cafe. That day.
Yeah, I don't think either of them were like, like in love
upon, you know, seeing each other.
And they actually weren't each other's biggest loves because
they're, they had a long relationship, but it was more or
less platonic for like 90% of it.
They were like romantically and sexually involved at one point,
but that ended pretty quickly. OK, there's more.
More of a friendship that just lasted longer than.
Yeah, Ben was a much more like passionate love in her life, but
Alexander Berkwyn was more of a stable, consistent 1.
So Alexander Berkman, he shared her anarchist beliefs.
They were like pretty much eye to eye on most political views.
Around this time. They were both really
invigorated by what happened with the Haymarket affair.
Another sort of contemporaneous political event was when Henry
Clay Frick shut down a steel mill plant that he was managing
on behalf of Andrew Carnegie in Homestead, PA.
There was an existing seeing labor union that he refused to
negotiate a contract with. He stopped recognizing them, and
then he closed the plant, laid off all the workers, evicted
their families from company housing and told them that they
would have to play individually for their jobs if they ever
wanted to come back. And so even people who are more
conservative in America at the time, they were like, this guy
is bad. Yeah.
He was not a beloved person in America at the time.
And so both Emma and Alexander Berkman, they identified him as
someone who would be palatable to assassinate.
Oh. My God.
OK. They thought that his death
would like inspire the general public and bring about the
revolution that they envisioned because everyone just hated him
so much. Oh my gosh.
OK, so Emma's OK with murder? Yeah, No, she believed in
political violence, at least when she was younger.
Yeah. So they started to envision this
assassination. They thought that they would
execute it through a bombing. Yeah, that proved to be
expensive and that they didn't have the, like, knowledge of how
to build bombs. And they weren't even sure how
they were going to get the money to do it.
So this is something interesting.
I encountered. Emma, actually, at one point,
tried to do sex work in order to raise the funds to assassinate
Henry Clay Flick. But the first night she tried
to, she met a potential client. Like, they talked for a bit, and
he was like, this isn't for you. Don't do this.
And he gave her $10 and she never went through with it.
That was nice of that guy. Yeah, so eventually they did get
the funds. It was decided that Alexander
Berkman was going to commit the assassination on his own.
Emma would stay behind in order to provide cover and explain
what happened if need be. So he went on his own with a gun
and knife. He shot Henry Clay Frick 3 times
and stabbed him in the leg, but it wasn't enough to kill him.
Oh my gosh, I know it. Probably.
They were probably so disappointed he didn't die, but
it was a good thing because Alexander Berkman was
immediately apprehended, and if he was successful in the
assassination, he would have definitely been executed.
So he was saved. He'd ended up going to prison
for I think 18 years, over a decade, but he didn't get
executed while he was there at least.
That's good. Oh my gosh, we just did Bonnie
and Clyde, actually, and it's kind of reminding me of that.
Yeah, no, they were. They weren't like aiming to be
criminals. It was for a political, a
political vision that they had. But I mean, it's notable anytime
a woman wants to commit murder or does commit murder.
So this garnered a lot of national attention for Emma.
This was when she became a public figure that was a
household name. Wow, wasn't she called like the
most notorious women? I mean, I think that was later.
The most dangerous woman in America.
And I think that she really garnered that nicknamed later in
her life around when she was romantically involved with Ben.
But yeah, I mean, people knew that she was bad news or not bad
news. But like, if she wanted to go to
a city to speak, authorities always tried to prevent it
because they were like, you're going to incite a riot sometimes
she kind of did. So they were always nervous
about that. So there's a 16 year gap in
between the assassination attempt and her meeting Ben
Reitman. She spent most of that time
touring the country and giving lectures.
But these are the formative experiences that shaped Emma and
turned her into the public figure that, you know, was known
to everyone, including Ben, before they met.
And that's eventually how they did.
But now we can sort of start to talk about Ben Reitman and
discuss his biography more. Yeah, who is Ben?
So I was familiar with him before doing research for this
topic because I knew about him for the Hobos episode.
But I also knew him because he's famous to local Chicagoans.
I mean, mostly the people who know more about history, but
he's one of the most eccentric people do have ever lived and
especially here. Yeah, definitely.
But I did more research on him this week, mostly through a book
that I want to highlight really quickly.
It's called No Regrets, Doctor Ben Reitman and the Woman Who
Loved Him by Mecker Reitman Carpenter.
As you can probably guess from the name, it's written by
someone related to him. It's the third of his six
children, one of his daughters. And it was just like such an
amazing book because I didn't even realize it existed.
I went to the Chicago Public Library to pull his main
biography off the off the shelf. It was the damnedest radical.
Right next to it, there was this book, No Regrets.
And I opened it up. And then on the inside there's
literally a like chart of every major relationship he's had.
So you sent me what, like 40 pages of it?
The. 1st 44. And I read them on the plane and
it's so cool that they did that. They like a timeline of his
relationship. I wish that existed for
everybody that we cover. And it goes through all his
relationships. It's so cool.
Yeah, how often is it that there's literally a book on a
couple's relationship it. Happens for some of the more
famous older ones. Like I read 1 about Elizabeth
Taylor and Richard Burton. There's one about King Charles
and Camilla and like, you know, really famous people like that,
but it's not too common, So. And I hadn't heard of Ben
Reitman, I must admit, growing up in Massachusetts, it just, I
don't know, it didn't come up in our history.
So I'm surprised as well that that book existed.
Just, I mean, it's by his daughter, but about his love
life. Yeah.
It was pretty cool. Because he kind of is more
famous to most people for being Emma Goldman's boyfriend.
Wow. Which is something later on.
Like he didn't actually like that.
He didn't like living in the shadow and that was part of the
reason they broke up. But yeah, he did plenty of
things in his own lifetime, and there's plenty of reasons why he
was famous of his own accord. But I love that book a lot
because it was written by his daughter.
And it's one of the few cases where, like, something that's
nonfiction, the person writing it, like, actually has the
authority to make moral judgments about her dad's
actions. True.
And she's actually very endearing towards him and very
kind and gentle to how flat he was.
She doesn't usually, like, berate him for what he did,
which is funny that she could, but yeah, it's just like really
great insight into who he was as a person.
But it doesn't feel like she's, you know, cutting out the less.
What am I trying to say she? Doesn't cut out anything.
Yeah, she she doesn't try to make her dad look better than he
was, basically like she, she tells the truth.
But she does have affection for him so.
I mean, she includes excerpts from his, like, sexual letters
to Emma, which are very graphic. Yeah.
She learned things about her dad that few people would want to.
Seriously. Yeah.
So who's Ben Reitman? Where did he come from?
So he was born in St. Paul, MN and spent most of his
childhood and adult life in Chicago.
He grew up in a Jewish family, but later converted to
Protestantism. Most people find it surprising
that he was so religious, given that he was pretty free with his
sexuality. But for him, he described his
religiosity as being because he loved to serve others.
Yeah, in the book, I remember he said he kind of said something
like people don't understand my religious ways, but yeah, I get
it. Yeah, he wrote a biography that
was never completed, but in it he devotes a lot of it to
describing his religious beliefs because he thinks that's the
side of him that people were the most confused by.
So Ben's family, his dad shocked me, Right, man?
He later abandoned his family when Benjamin was only one and
his brother Lewis was three. He provided no further support
to his family and later divorced Ida, and Ben described this as
later attributing to his own family responsibilities.
And Mecca said in her book that Ben often referred to his
father's attitude towards family responsibilities as a precedent
for his own. And I think it is kind of a, you
know, her people hurt other people kind of thing, right,
Right. And then Ben's mother, Ida
played a really significant role in his life.
Their relationship was a bit strange and unhealthy.
Like Ben once wrote in a letter that every man ought to be
faithful to one woman. I've chosen my mother.
Yeah, No. It sounds endearing, but it was
kind of odd. Like she enabled Ben's behavior
by never really disciplining him or holding him accountable for
bad behavior. It then wronged a woman.
I'd often would soothe Ben and tell him that it was the woman's
fault. Oh my.
Gosh, that's just what a man needs.
Yeah, Mecca described it as like Ida having an enduring belief
that nothing Ben could do is wrong.
And so it's kind of interesting that Ben eventually stumbled
upon anarchism and had this very, like, vibrant, carefree
life in a similar manner to Emma.
But Emma was coming from a authoritarian household, a very
strict 1, and then Ben was coming from one with a very
permissive mother who had the exact opposite parenting style.
That is interesting. I feel like we could really
analyze that for a while. Like maybe it's just male female
dynamics to father mother, I don't know.
No, it's wild that you can, like, again, have, like,
complete opposite childhoods, end up in the same place.
And so after Ida got abandoned by Ben's father, she was in a
really tough spot. She at one point almost gave up
her two sons to a Jewish orphanage, but a charity
intervened and gave her a train ticket to Chicago, and she moved
there and upon getting there, lived in the red light district.
So Ben was around, you know, unsavory characters as a kid.
He would go fetch beers for local criminals is like a way to
earn money for his mom. Wow.
Because her mom kind of relied on both Ben and his brother
financially and then also emotionally in this way.
That was kind of the inverse of what, like, a parent child
relationship should be. Yeah.
I don't think it was very good for his development.
He's like 6 years old doing this.
Younger. Wow.
Yeah, that it's not healthy. Yeah, I mean, it's tough.
She's a single mom, but you should be the parent.
Yeah, the only way that she was sort of serving that parental
role was through cooking. He oftentimes described how he
loved her, like good Jewish cooking.
But yeah, other than that, I don't think she did much as a
parent. So while he was living in that,
growing up in the red light district, he actually, in
addition to doing like small tasks to get money for
criminals, he did it for prostitutes as well.
They started a lifelong relationship with them.
He later frequented prostitutes as a young man and as an adult
man. And then when he became a
doctor, he would treat them for venereal disease.
And he was actually pretty good at it because at this time, the
treatment for syphilis, you'd inject like toxic metal
compounds into your body, which could kill you.
Oh my gosh. But he like, apparently for like
long stretches would go without killing any of his patients
because he was so experienced with treating people for
venereal disease. Wow.
So Ben spent a lot of his childhood growing up in the red
light district. He the railroad tracks were kind
of his playground. He would go there to have fun
with other kids. He would also collect coal that
would fall off of railroad cars and bring it home.
Chicago, it's super cold in the winter.
I mean, it's normal here for it to be 0° a couple of days of the
year. So he needed to bring home coal,
otherwise their home wouldn't have heat at night.
Yeah, there's one account where like the first time he ever got
in trouble with the railroad police, the police that would
get hobos off of cars was actually as a young kid, 'cause
he went on top of 1 to throw coal off the top because there
wasn't enough on the side of the tracks to bring home that night.
And he actually got arrested and his mom had to come get him.
Wow, and how old was he when this happened?
Get to guess. This was before he started
hoboing so it must have been like before.
He was probably 7. Oh my gosh.
Yeah. Different time, different time.
Yeah no, we had a ton of freedom growing up.
So what exactly is a hobo? Cuz he started to ride freight
cars pretty young. Before he could even get up by
himself, he'd have other boys drag him up because he wasn't
even tall enough to get on the trains himself.
So hobos as you, we talked about their attendant workers.
There's this really great quote from Ben where he said that a
hobo works and wanders. A tramp dreams and wanders.
Nabum drinks and wanders. A more succinct way to say this
is a hobo travels and work works.
A tramp travels but does not work.
And Nabum never neither travels or works.
And Ben was the quote UN quote hobo king of Chicago.
But he was actually a bit more of a tramp than I think
biographies sort of explicitly say because he was really good
at panhandling. He would beg for money as a
young kid when he would go on trains and end up in the middle
of his another town. And he'd say like, oh, I'm from
Chicago, I don't know how to get back.
And then people would give him money.
So he didn't work quite as much as some of the other hobos did,
I would say. OK, kind of more of a triumph.
Although he did become a doctor at a young age, so I should take
that back. But he dropped out of school of
10 and then his first true like hobo journey happened at the age
of 12. He went to Cleveland and upon
returning home, his enabling permissive mother didn't like
get mad at him at all. According to him, Ben's mother
offered him a delicious dinner without a scolding.
The pattern of unconditional love and a good Jewish cooking
from Ida would persist throughout his life. 12 years
old it I'm just picturing like black and white movies or little
rascals or something like kids just going off being crazy.
It's it's so different from today, you would never see.
Yeah, no hope. Someone letting a 12 year old.
Just Hobush on average did hover on the age of like 18 into their
20s. There were like older more
experienced ones. But hoboing was a really good
option for young boys to escape broken homes at the time as a
way to get out. And there were more male than
female hobos because if you're a woman, it was easier to get
factory work because you fetched lower wages and you could get a
job. It was harder for men, young
men, to find work at the time. That blew my mind in your
episode. I think when we think of women
starting to work in the factories, I thought of it as
just like, oh, empowering women are getting in the workforce and
to realize like actually just because they could pay you less,
Pretty depressing. And children, too.
Yeah, factory owners preferred hiring children because they
could pay them the least. And then that's why there were
all these men that had nowhere to go and no jobs.
It's it's crazy. I know it is wild.
So after the age of 12, after completing his first hoboing
journey, Piquima Hobo shortly after that, but he would
frequently come back to Chicago to spend some time at home, see
his mom, because Chicago is, was and is the freight capital of
the nation. Most rail lines connect here.
It's a really good midpoint. So we could go anywhere and also
come back. And also during this time,
before the age of 18, he spent time working as a sailor on a
ship. And so he actually went to other
countries in Europe and Asia and he was very well travelled by
the time he was 18. Oh, in our show, we always play
a little drinking game. We've come up with like a list
of reoccurring things that happen when the people that we
cover and one of them is moves around a lot.
So take a drink of water. Yeah, I know.
I mean, I don't know if they're like there's very few places.
I feel like you never went. It's a pretty expensive place.
Wow, usually the people we cover it's because their parents were
moving. I think this is the first time
I've had a hobo kid just moving around on their own accord, but
it's a common theme on the show for some reason.
Notable people seem to move around a lot in their childhood
anyway. So Ben, he later starts medical
school in 1899. He started working as a janitor
and then as a laboratory assistant.
One of the physicians there recognized he had talent and
offered to pay for his first year.
So that's how we got into medical school.
This was during a time where, like, you didn't need to be as
credentialed. Like, again, he dropped out of
school at 10. He also wasn't even really all
that literate. Everything he published, he
needed help from you would request help from the women that
he dated. He had help writing the books
that he wrote. But yeah, he started medical
school and he spent most of his career again, serving social
outcasts. So prostitutes, hobos, tramps,
bums and anyone in need. And unlike a lot of other
doctors, he wasn't that wealthy because he more or less
exclusively saw clients that didn't have a lot of money and
he oftentimes would help him out of the goodness of his heart.
That is so caring. Yeah, that's amazing.
Now he had a lot of love for his fellow man.
That's one of the good things you can say about him.
What about his love life? OK, that's where you can say
things that are not good. So during his first year of
medical school, he had his first attempted marriage.
And this is one of the craziest stories about him.
So he met a woman in Sunday school, which, according to
Mackerite man Carpenter, was one of his most productive hunting
grounds. He would go meet religious women
who didn't assume that he was trying to, like, sleep around
and then successfully slipped around with them.
But yeah, he met this woman there.
And then he liked her enough. They decided to get married.
And then at the ceremony, he sees the woman's sister.
He thinks she's really hot. And then he's like, he has this
change of mind and heart, and it's like, I shouldn't get
married right now. And then in order to get out of
it, he bites the pasture on the neck.
And that's how he gets out of getting married.
I the part in the book when I read that I wrote like Oh my God
lol yeah that is insane behavior.
I mean, think about, do you know any men in your life who would
be that crazy that they would bite someone on the neck in
order to get out of a wedding? Like this is like a exceptional
person. Yes, I can kind of picture the
type of man who might do that, but I feel like they're in
prison and I don't know then. Yeah, no, I can't.
Not that far. I can think of someone just
running out of the room or something, but that's another
level. So clearly he probably shouldn't
get married. But unfortunately, he did get
married shortly after that to May Schwartz Reitman.
This was his first wife, and this he shouldn't have got
married to her either. He apparently didn't really have
strong feelings towards her, but he decided to do it for some
reason. And then afterwards, on a
honeymoon in Europe, he went with May, decided he wanted to
get out of it. He left her in Prague with only
$200 and then hoboed his way back to America.
Unbeknownst to him, she was pregnant with his first child.
This was Helen Reitman. She later changed her name to
Jan Gay. But yeah, Maya Schwartz Reitman
was so distressed by being abandoned by her recent husband
and then, like, giving birth to a daughter without him that she
went kind of insane and had to be committed to a mental
institution. She was that distraught.
Oh my gosh. He literally sent a woman into
the mental institution. OK, not directly, but then.
Yeah, no, this was one of the moments where Mecca Rightman's
Carpenter like, moral authority really shined through because
she said that of all the women's stories in my father's life, the
one of me and her baby always struck me as the saddest.
It's just like on it. It was incredibly cruel and
though well, like Ben's life was characterized by the title of
the book no regrets, he did actually often call his
desertion of Mae and her baby brutal later on as an adult once
he had other children realized what he did more.
But something outside of that book that encountered in his
main biography is that he actually, of the many topics he
would give speeches on, he would speak to audiences where he'd
say, like, if you are a man, you need to financially support your
child, regardless of the relationship with a mother.
And I actually appreciated that because I think it's better to
sort of enforce, you know, those decent, like, having decent
morals rather than just saying, oh, let's like, normalize this
run, stigmatize that. Like, he wanted to preserve
these like, moral codes that he wasn't following.
And I actually appreciated that about him.
Yeah, that is honorable. Yeah.
Did he actually support her financially, his first wife?
No. No, he only learned that she was
targeting and had a daughter later.
He didn't play a role in their lives ever.
He later did connect with Helen Reitman or Jan Gay, his
daughter, as an adult. So when he opened up the Hobo
College, she once hitchhiked her way to Chicago, attended one of
his lectures, and then, like, went up to him afterwards.
And then they got to meet and they formed a connection in
adulthood. She later lived with him for a
period of time. Oh, wow.
But yeah, she's really fascinating too 'cause I know
the rough biographies of three of Ben's six children.
OK, She's probably the coolest 'cause she was like, a lesbian.
I wrote a book on nudism. Whoa.
She was also like a pioneering researcher on same sex
relations. Wow.
Like her Wikipedia page is roughly as wrong as long as her
dad's like she didn't just as much and then also like on her
lake. Trek to reach Chicago.
She did it all in like a soldiers uniform and so she
showed up meeting Ben like dressed like a soldier, like she
just seemed really cool. Yeah, wow, there were such cool
people back then. I hate how everyone thinks of
the past. Everyone was so stuffy and
proper and you know, the same. Yeah, it's not true.
And it's nice being able to, like, learn about people from so
long ago because you can look at the entire biographies of his
kids because most of them have been dead for a long time.
And you can see that they were just as like vivacious as he
was. What a family.
So that hobo college, how did that happen?
This was one of Ben's biggest achievements.
He opened a hobo College in 1907.
It existed for I think one or two decades, but it had to move
every couple of years. Something I had my out for this
week with research was like, where was the hobo college?
Because I didn't know I live in Chicago.
Like where was it? It actually had to move every
like year or two because like, it was constantly getting shut
down by police. The neighbors didn't like it.
But yeah, he was inspired by someone else in their project
with a similar hobo College in another city, I believe.
But it was a place for Hobo's to convene and they could attend
lectures on high minded topics like philosophy, literature and
religion. But there are also lectures
tailored to the practical needs of the hobo lifestyle, like
lectures and vagrancy laws, the legal status of hobos in other
States, and venereal disease. So nice.
Was it free? No, they would be asked to.
They'd be asked to give contributions at the end.
Hobos were very poor. They didn't have a lot of money,
but Ben was very good at stifling them into being like,
no, no, no, you came like you need to give like a penny.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's he has to run it somehow, so yeah,
that's nice though. Yeah, this hobo college, it
provided the first opportunity for Ben and Emma to meet.
Yeah. Ben met Emma.
Oh my gosh, how did it happen? So it happened in 1908, and Ben
reached out to Emma because she was in Chicago.
She was hoping to give a political speech of one sort or
another. But the day or two before there
was like, political turmoil in the city, all the like, public
halls were shut down. There was no place for her to do
it. So Ben tried to get Emma to do
it at his hobo college. That didn't end up happening,
but he delivered the bad news in person and that was the first
time meeting. And I think we should read off
their first impressions. I can do Ben's and then do you
want to do Emma's? Yeah.
Sure. So Ben's first impression of
Emma was she had a powerful face, beautiful strong clear
blue eyes, a nose that was not Jewish, and a strong, firm jaw.
She was somewhat nearsighted and wore heavy glasses.
Her hair was blonde and silken, and she wore it in a simple knot
on the back of her head. And then Emma's first
impression. My visitor was a tall man with
finely shaped head, covered by a massive black curly hair, which
had evidently not been washed for some time.
His eyes were brown, large and dreamy.
His lips, disclosing beautiful teeth when he smiled, were full
and passionate. He looked a handsome brute.
I could not take my eyes off his hands.
A strange charm seemed to emanate from them, caressing and
stirring. I love how you put both their
impressions back-to-back. Yeah, I might steal that.
Yeah. I mean, I can see the attraction
in both of theirs, but I think it was a bit stronger on Emma's
side, the way she described him. Yes, yeah, She seems captivated
by him, like right away. Yeah, he he seems to be like,
oh, she was pretty, looked smart, but I don't think he was
like, Oh my God, who is this? Yeah, I do think they're
ultimately the love of each other's lives.
Ben had more loves. And yeah, Ben was a more central
figure in Emma's life than the reverse.
Yeah, but OK, so they met Ben, delivered the bad news about the
hall. They then had intercourse pretty
quickly after that, I think. But their relationship had a
bump in the road pretty early on because Emma saw him talking to
cops in a friendly way. Oh yeah.
Yeah, and so she didn't like that at all, because to her, as
an anarchist, the police were like enemy #1 like, what was he
doing? So she then didn't want to talk
to Ben after she left Chicago, but he kept sending her letters.
She didn't want to hear it. It was explanations for why I
talked to police. But then she had a dream about
him, where fire was emanating from his hands.
What does that mean? Well, it comes back to the
description where I guess she found his hands very lively and
captivating. Yes, yeah.
So then she thought, OK, I need to see this guy again.
Yeah. So that's how they ended up
getting back together. And then the relationship of 10
years started after that. She took him back and then they
started their political excapades together.
So Emma had already been touring the country and giving public
speeches. That was a bit new for Ben.
He did do that at his hobo college.
He did do it place to place, but she would have cracked crowds of
thousands. She was like a household name
everywhere you went. So Ben really enjoyed the
excitement and controversy that he and Emma generated.
Ben once said that before Emma Goldman, most of my crimes were
vagrancy, riding on freight trains without permission and
panhandling. With Emma Goldman, I was often
arrested, charged with anarchy, denouncing the government as a
necessary, speaking without a permit, and conspiracy to
destroy the government. It was really exciting for him.
Yeah, I bet. Well, is he very political
before or more just trying to help people and like, I guess
help people get through life in the system or outside of it?
But was he? Did he have like political
ambitions before meeting Emma? They were less clearly defined.
They were not coming from like reading manifestos like they
were for Emma. Emma's anarchist friends
actually disliked him because they could tell he wasn't really
committed to the 'cause they oftentimes question like why
they were together. But they eventually did find a
shared issue with birth control, which we'll get to towards the
end of the relationship. And initially they weren't
talking about that publicly because the Comstocked Act was
really strictly enforced and they actually did get there's
most severe consequences we're talking about sex in public.
But this brings us to a good moment where we can kind of tie
this episode into the episode we just recorded before this on
Manoush Jazz and what we'll be doing on Silent Generation over
the coming weeks. Because we're doing a three-part
series on bohemianism and we're exploring what the term means
today and what it meant historically.
And back in the day, it used to have this really strong
political connotation. It was associated with
radicalism. And so both Emma and Ben are
really great examples of bohemians.
I'm sure newspapers back in the day called them that because
they kind of were. Yeah, it is.
So I know you're going to get more into it in your episode,
but it is so fascinating how much the connotation has
changed. You really don't associate
bohemians. I mean, I was going to say with
political advocacy and getting arrested, and I mean, maybe
there's a little overlap, but it's more seen now as like a
style or, yeah, being artistic. Yeah, yeah.
It's just that someone is like, mildly eccentric.
It doesn't have to do with them, you know, standing on a soapbox
and telling thousands of people to destroy the government.
Like, that's very different than what it was back then.
But I think the kind of like the term bohemian kind of fits.
I meant Ben in different ways. I think Emma came from a very
intellectual circle of writers. And that's one way that she was
more bohemian than for Ben. I think it was his, like,
transitory lifestyle. Although Emma wasn't really
homebound either. But, I mean, he would just,
like, leave his medical office in the middle of the week,
decide, like, I'm not seeing patients for now.
I need to get, you know, this out of my system.
He would just hop on a train anywhere like that was far more
bohemian than what she was doing, which was like
intentionally touring the country, right?
Trying to espouse her anarchist beliefs.
Yeah, it's just living, living on his own time, living his own
lifestyle. Yeah, and then I want to talk
about the mommy nickname. OK.
So Ben was 10 years younger than Emma.
As discussed, he had a kind of strange relationship with his
mom. I didn't encounter anything to
just to suggest that he was like sexually attracted to his mom,
but their relationship was weird and he liked to call Emma mommy
for some reason but pretty much everyone is kind of grossed out
by. I feel like it's not that
uncommon though, really. Yeah.
Oh, I guess like Mamacita. Is.
Kind of equivalent. It is still weird.
Yeah. I mean, there's we've talked
about this wasn't the Bonnie and Clyde one actually do that?
Bonnie called Clyde Daddy. OK.
Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's maybe
more palatable and socially acceptable to say the reverse,
which is daddy, because it's more permittable for like age
gap relationships to be with an older man, right?
Yeah. But it's basically the same.
I guess so. I've never encountered it
though, but yeah. So she would call him dearest
Hobo or my hobo. He would call her Mommy.
Hobo, I thought that was cute. It is cute.
Yeah, I like that one. And then they also had, like, a
lot of nicknames for, like, each other's private parts and sexual
innuendos because a lot of the time they weren't in the same
place. She was touring someplace.
Ben was either in Chicago, working as a doctor or hoboing
around. They weren't together all the
time. And so correspondence over
letters was really important to the relationship and they would
express their like sexual attraction through their letters
during the time of the Comstock to act.
So they had these nicknames. I don't actually want to say
them. They're not that bad, but like
it feels kind of, I don't want to.
And then in regards to their sexuality.
So both of them on paper believed in free love.
As explained with Emma, she had had that failed marriage where
like she got married to a guy who was impotent, didn't know
it. She believed that like people
should be freely free to leave relationships when they're when
they're ready. They shouldn't be stuck in a
marriage their entire life if they didn't want to be.
She thought that that was the anarchist's way to do things.
But upon meeting Ben, her beliefs were really put to the
test because he was not monogamous in the slightest.
I encountered nothing. And it the course of his life
that indicated he even tried. Yeah, but she didn't know this
initially. So during the first tour, he was
sleeping with like women he would meet that came to see Ms.
Peak and then have like casual sexual encounters with them.
And then Emma didn't know until Ben wrote a letter where he laid
it all out. And then this really distressed
her. She described it as like making
her feel numb. And this is something she never
really was able to reconcile because she was just really hurt
by Ben's infidelity and that she was never enough for him.
It's tough like she wanted it seems like she wanted to believe
in nominog me free love, but then when she and it seems like
her previous marriage is in relationship, she maybe wasn't
super in love with the guys. So maybe it was easy to say
that. But now that she actually is so
in love with Ben, like you said, it's being put to the test.
Realizing this actually hurts so much, and it's easier said than
done to say that Oh yeah, everyone can just do whatever
they want, you know? Yeah, there was a distinction in
her head that she was making between sacred and profane love.
I described, I saw in the book, like another anarchist said,
that Ben didn't do that, and anarchist did.
Like they did believe in free love, but it wasn't like
sleeping with any woman. They could, which is pretty much
what Ben was doing. Right, Yeah.
I mean, I guess for anarchy to work, there does have to be some
like self regulation of your behaviour so that you're not
causing harm to people that would cause strife and violence
and stuff. So that kind of makes sense that
they would say that that like, OK, yes, you can have free love,
but it should be meaningful. Like there should be some order
even though they don't want obviously a government, there
needs to be order among the people, so.
Yeah. The only thing I can say to
Ben's credit is that I like, upon reading like several books
on him, I never encountered even the slightest hint of jealousy.
I never read about any of the women he was with that he was
especially in love with, in particular like sleeping with
other men. But I from what I can tell, and
there's like, knowing him more or less after all this research,
he would not have been bothered by it.
He never had to encounter it. But like, I think he did view
sex in this very freeway where it didn't mean very much to him.
That's good, I guess, because we've seen, especially in
historic relationships where the man will have affairs, he thinks
it's fine, he justifies it. But then if the woman does, he's
like, what? No, it's only a thing when I do
it, you know, so. Yeah, I'm in my own views on
like not a monogamy or that I don't like it.
I think that it like you can't abandoned this like social
institution that your ancestors have done for generations
because it was a successful cultural innovation and then
expect to reinvent the wheel in your own lifetime.
I think that the sexual revolution has been kind of
harmful for women. Like, have you ever heard of
Luis Perry or her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution?
I've heard that title. Yeah, I have.
It's a very good book. I recommend it for any of your
listeners. But yeah, it's like very clear
just from this one relationship and all the other like non
monogamy ones I've heard about. But I'll reference this meme.
It's this one that says like I've.
Definitely seen this. When you see two people in an
open relationship, it's like which one of you came up with
the idea and which one of you cries to sleep every night?
Like I think they both came up with the idea but then there is
one definitely crying themselves to sleep at night and that was
Emma. Yes, so sad.
Yeah. But I, I'm sure it works for
some people. But I do feel like often times
there is one person who is compromising and just going
along with it just because they love the other person so much
and they don't want to lose them.
And I think it's worth it, but it's not what they want.
And yeah, they are. They are crying themselves to
sleep at night and. I do encounter this in the gay
community too. I'm gay and like, like non
monogamy is pretty common amongst non amongst gay men,
more so than it is for heterosexual people.
And I often times do encounter gay guys who feel like they have
to be flexible and they can't really negotiate monogamy,
especially because the way like a lot of gay relationships, the
way they start is through like casual sexual encounters.
And then they just keep doing it.
And then eventually they're like, oh, we spent so much time
together, like, why not be boyfriends?
And so they never had that conversation of like, I want you
to be committed, I'll be committed.
And they can never really have it.
So anyway. Do you think there's like
pressure to be in open relationship?
Do you feel like? I think it is harder to get into
a relationship if that's, yeah, the flexibility is going to help
you get a boyfriend more so. But yeah, it's not something I
like, yeah. I'm always afraid of upsetting
people. But I I, I agree with what
you're saying, though. I think I heard this quoted from
someone else talking about monogamy that was saying like,
it's not perfect, but it's the best system we have.
Like, yeah, there's, I mean, nothing's going to be perfect on
Earth, I don't think. But it has been going on for
centuries, so. Yeah, like I heard an interview
with Luis Perry on low society where the interviewer is
Nigerian and they were talking about how in Nigeria you have a
culture of society where there is monogamy, non monogamy being
practiced side by side because Christians are monogamous and
Muslims are free to practice polygamy.
And there it's like very unstable.
Like you can see the benefits when you compare the two side by
side. Yeah, I mean it is dangerous for
women to be having casual sex, you know, literally could get.
Pregnant or yeah, the consequences of STD's are much
more harmful. Yeah, so it isn't really.
I don't think people should treat it so laissez faire, like,
OK, there actually are consequences to sleeping around
with a ton of people or you don't know what your partner's
doing, you know, so. Yeah, and you know, on a
personal note too, I oftentimes through dating, I like suspect
that like I want her boyfriend. I want to be in relationships
more than average because my mom passed away when I was a kid.
And I've always just assumed that like people have parents
and don't want to date others as much because they have this like
core figure in their lives. And with Ben, with Ben to the
extreme degree. And I think that was part of why
he acted the way he did because he always had this mother to
come back to. The lobby felt probably wasn't
sexual, but it like entered this territory that was like closer
to a relationship with a woman than it should be.
Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah.
He didn't feel like he needed that in a wife.
Really. Yeah.
He just didn't need relationships as much because he
always had this mother to return to.
But yeah, that's something that I have.
I mean, that's definitely not going on with like the people I
talked to who goes to me, but I oftentimes am like, OK, I
clearly want this more than other people and this is
probably why. That's so insightful in
yourself. Yeah.
And so, OK, back to the relationship.
They're touring the country. They're generating a lot of
controversy. A major event happens, and it
was the San Diego Free speech fight.
This happened in 1912. So in San Diego, there was labor
activity happening with the IWW, which was a labor organization
that was trying to create one big union for all, all workers
in the entire country to join. So basically the means of
production, the centralized power that the capitalist class
had, it would be stripped away and given purely to workers
once, once like there was this massive union that everyone
could participate in. Is this still going on?
No. OK, it wasn't.
Successful. I swear today I saw something in
a store window or something that said IWW and it had like protest
type signage. Yeah.
Do you think that's possible? It might be like historical, but
I don't think that UW still exists.
Because I mean, you covered this, but I did read that book
and I think I came that excerpt of the book and I came across
that. And so I saw that and I couldn't
believe it because we're recording this today and I was
like, what the heck? I mean, I'm going to go back
over there later, so I'll check it out to see what that window
was. But.
Yeah. I wonder what it was.
Yeah, So in San Diego, there was a wobbly IWW member who was
killed through mob violence in 1912.
And then the following day, Ben and Emma, they travel from Los
Angeles to San Diego into the city, and things are like fever
pitch in terms of political turmoil.
They get separated. Ben gets kidnapped by a group of
men. They can do desert.
They assault him and torture him for several hours.
They do things like burn IWW into his butt with a lit cigar.
And so it's like a really traumatizing incident because
for something to be traumatic, you're faced with the literal
threat of annihilation. And someone was killed through
mob violence the day before. I mean, this could have ended
with him getting shot. Yeah.
And he ended up surviving, But he was really shaken up by this.
Emma, this is like one of the few cases where I'm like, OK,
she was kind of bogus. Like, she was the less good
partner for this, but she kind of got the ick after seeing him
traumatized. Like he was shaking.
Terrible. Yeah, right, Emma, come on.
I know it's like it's very understandable for someone do
not be the same after they almost die.
Yeah, what the heck? OK, that, Yeah.
So this was the first sort of bump.
I mean, prior to this, Emma is like aware that Ben is having
sex with other women and hurt by it, but this is the first thing
that sort of set things into motion for their relationship to
eventually end. So after this, Ben and Emma,
they start to speak more openly in birth control.
Ben was really in his element with this because he was a
Doctor Who worked in public health clinics.
He was an expert on venereal disease and was very passionate
about it. So he loved it.
This was one of the most exciting times for him.
But as I mentioned, it was like amongst the most controversial
things for them to publicly speak about.
They would use, they would talk about like sex and safe sex
without any euphemisms, any innuendos.
They would just say like wear a condom.
And this was like very anathema at the time.
So he got hit with a fine in Cleveland of $1000 and served a
six month prison sentence, which was the longest sentence given
to someone for social agitation around sexuality at the time.
Just for speaking about this. Yeah, isn't that wild?
Yeah. And then I encountered something
really interesting in the book that I want to bring out.
OK, as a gay guy I'm always fascinated when I encounter
situational homosexuality. Oh yeah, yeah.
Because, you know, historically, like in ancient Rome, like, same
sex attraction is a lot was a lot more common than it is
today. And then when you read about
people like Ben Reitman doing gay stuff in prison, it really
kind of breaks your brain. Yeah.
It like makes you reevaluate if what straight men say about
their sexualities is really true.
Right. But yeah, I read in his book
that Macarette Mccarpenter wrote that he said, if nobody's
looking, I can tell you I enjoyed a few of the male
homosexuals. Yes, I took my my fun and I
found it. And I've denied myself nothing.
Well, all right. It's just as crazy to read about
like this historical figure I'd looked up to you for quite a
while. Yeah, I had no idea that he was
just like, sure, I'm down. Yeah.
Wow. I mean, he really did everything
OK so. He did everything.
Shortly after prison, they did some political activism together
where they encouraged people to dodge the draft.
After the onset of World War One, this was a big deal.
This is what eventually got Emma deported.
But around this time, Ben started to fantasize about a
life with the next significant love in his life, which was Anna
Martindale. She was eventually the mother of
his one and only son Brutus, and he like more or less the reason
why the relationship ended on his end was because he wanted to
like have a child with Anna and then he had a happier life for
that period without Emma raising Brutus along with Anna.
Was there some overlap with Emma?
They were talking beforehand. OK, there's overlap with all of
the women, though. I mean, later on after the
relationship ended, he continues to talk to to Emma when he's
with other women that he loves and often times he is sexually
active with, you know them before or after.
And anyway, very complex. The chart at the beginning of
the book is not so cut through. OK, I see.
Yeah, OK, so that's why it sort of ended on Ben's end.
But why did it end on Emma's end?
It was really because of the non monogamy that was like breaking
her heart. It was really deeply affecting
her and her well-being. There's also a period of time
where Ida and Ben lived with Emma.
His mom. And if you can imagine what it
was like to live with Ida, she was like the worst in law you
can imagine. I think Emma had to like throw a
chair at them to get them to leave her house.
Oh my gosh, I mean, that must have been so frustrating to deal
with that she's living with his mother and then he can't even
keep his hands off other women. I can imagine eventually feeling
like, why am I putting up with this?
Like this sucks and you're not even committed to me, you know?
Yeah, so that was like, hard. But yeah, they drifted apart.
It was really more so Ben's decision to go and settle down
with Anna and Martindale because they lived in the same house.
He's was pretty stable for that period of time.
Like the most stable he was over the course of his life because
he he was actually like helping raise his son.
He was living with Anna, wasn't monogamous, but was, like,
pretty committed to her and to the extent that he could be.
And then he was actually, like, making money for as a doctor.
Like, that was the only time during his life that he was
actually pretty solvent. Yeah.
Kind of got his shit together. For.
A period for a period. But after they broke up, Emma
and Ben continued to write each other.
They Ben did preposition her at one point to become lovers later
on, but she was like, it would break me.
I can't ever do that again. But most of their correspondence
it had to do with like Emma and him writing their own
biographies or books. Then would write to Emma and be
like can you help me with my biography?
Wow. That's, that's kind of
interesting because I'm assuming he mentioned her and other women
maybe And then for her to work on that.
Wow. Yeah, I mean, he read her whole
biography because his never got published.
Ms. did. And within it he was, she was
not very kind to him. She kind of described him as
being not a villain in her life, but pretty close at times.
And he was so upset by her portrayal of him that he lost 20
lbs. Oh.
My gosh, I've been there. Not 20 lbs, but yeah.
Yeah, So what were their lives like during their later years?
So Emma did publish that biography.
She later got deported to Russia because Alexander Berkman's
citizenship was revoked upon his release from prison.
He was no longer an American citizen, so she was legally like
a Russian citizen. She got sent back to the Russian
Empire, but by that point, the Bolshevik Revolution had
happened, and she was actually not very happy upon getting to
Russia. She thought she liked it from a
distance, but she described it as being kind of like,
uninspiring to have seen the revolution finally come.
Wow, she was. She wanted.
She liked the fervor of like, wanting it, not actually seeing
the aftermath. It was kind of boring.
I can't believe that. Yeah, I guess that happens.
It's it's all about the chase, the energy to make it happen.
And then, then what do you do? But also, I mean, Communist
Russia wasn't the same as an anarchist society.
The state was very central and had a lot of control.
So she actually, I think she wrote a book or a paper about
how much she disliked Russia, which was lifted up in the West
in America as an example of like a Red Scare propaganda, right?
Yeah, look at this. This Russian who is denouncing
her own country. Yeah.
And then her biography is long and it continues.
She gets involved with this, the Spanish Civil War.
It's very complex. But she never really gets to
spend that much time in the US that you wouldn't let her back
in the country because they thought her ideas were too
radical. But I think I remember reading
in the book that she did, she and Ben did meet face to face at
least one more time. Wow, yeah, that must have been
intense. Yeah, I imagine being like when
Marina Abramovic and like, what was his name?
Ulay. I think that was his name.
Matt, do you know that couple? No.
She was, she's the most famous living performance artist and
she did a lot of her early work with her I think.
I don't think they were married, but her long time partner Ulay,
I believe his name was. But then they they actually had
to part ways because Ulay was not faithful.
Wow. And they then eventually did
meet face to face during one of the Marina Abramovic's
performances where she was sitting down across from people
and making eye contact for 5 minutes.
I did see this, yeah. I didn't know their names, but
yes. And then he sits down.
Yeah. Imagine it having that intensity
where it's like they had the capacity to love each other
forever, but again, the men and their relationships, infidelity
was what really prohibited that from happening.
Yeah, intense. So what happened to Ben in the
later years? So he continued being a doctor,
serving the poor. He never finished his biography,
but he did read. He did write.
He never finished his autobiography, but he did write
several books, largely with the help of some of the other women
he loved because he he don't go to school at 10.
He needed them to help write like proper sentences.
So Anna Martindale, the woman he left MO for, they had their son
Brutus. Anna Martindale died when like
Brutus was 10 or 12. And then Brutus himself died
pretty young at the age of 25, a year after his father passed
away. But he his wife was pregnant at
the time of his death. So there is like a paternal,
right, man like his son had a son.
So there's a great grandson out there, I believe.
And then Medina Oliver, that's the mother of Mecca Reitman
Carpenter. A lot of the book Mecca is
referring back to her mother's perspective on Ben.
And she was just very straightforward about who like
Ben Reitman was as a person. It was a very conscious thing of
like, this will be the father of my my children.
And she ended up having four with him.
And yeah, the last one was actually conceived before Ben
died and then was born after he did.
So that was like a final gift or present, she described it as
being. I think I remember in the
passage I read that she was very different from Emma, like she
wasn't very political right. Yeah, she wasn't.
I think that she did attend one of Emma's lectures, and I'd
actually read her biography, Living My Life, I think it's
called. But yeah, she didn't really
share the same political fervor that either had.
That's always interesting when someone's in a relationship with
one person that you know very much one way and then their next
partner is really not like that at all.
Have you ever heard the phrase kismogenesis?
I don't know. I describes some group of people
react against each other, like say one group of people wears
blue, the other words red. It's the process by which people
are intentionally different. And it's often described on like
the cultural level of groups. But I oftentimes think it
happens on a personal level too, where when you're side by side
with someone, the ways that you're different become more
extreme. And then if you were someone
else, you might actually find like.
Anyway, those things can get amplified depending on who
you're with. Yeah, for sure, I get what you
mean. Yeah.
And definitely, I think the more emotional the relationship
between two people might be or the fallout that could shift the
the change between who they're with next or yeah, yeah.
And then did you want to share any thoughts on Emma Goldman or
Ben Reitman before you kind of round things out?
How did they stack up compared to all the other couples you
talk about? I found them so interesting and
messy and I I'm really interested in Emma because she
seems like such a strong willed, tough woman that, you know,
people would put on feminist mugs or something today.
But she's it seems like she was sensitive deep down and romantic
and wanted to just have a pure love.
And that's really endearing to me.
I I think that she had seemingly a harder exterior, like when she
was down for political violence and things like that.
But I find that kind of heart warming.
And it's, it's sad too, because Ben couldn't really give her
that. But yeah, I just want to
touching learning about their story.
And a lot of, we do a lot of modern couples, you know, But I
find with all the historical ones we've done, the people just
had such complex, crazy lives I think that are even more
interesting than most modern people for whatever reason.
So yeah. I mean, I find it interesting to
learn that like a lot of Ben's relationships would start with
women purely overriding first because I often times find like
online messaging has been an important part of my
relationships as a gay guy. Like it's harder to meet people
in real life, and that's usually a minus started.
But yeah, it's it sort of affirms my own like romantic
history in a way, because it's like if this guy's this famous
and like she's this famous and virtual or not virtual but
analog correspondence is this important?
I think it says a lot. Yeah, true.
I always talk about that with my sister because yeah, people do
put down text messaging, emails, whatever.
Like you shouldn't shouldn't start a relationship over texts
or you shouldn't break up over an e-mail or whatever or or that
you shouldn't be afraid to talk on the phone or whatever.
I've always been a shy phone talker.
I've gotten better, but when I was younger I was very shy.
But I mean if you think about it, the phone hasn't even
existed for that long and people back in the day they would
literally propose marriage like in letters.
So it's actually nothing new to be sharing emotional messages
and important things over writing.
Yeah, and it's nice that they did because we were able to talk
about the relationship in depth because he left behind so many
letters. He once said like I will be
remembered by my carbons, and he is.
Yeah, wow. But I have a particular thing I
kind of want to round out with, and it's really analyzing the
title of Mecca Rightman Carpenter's book, No Regrets.
I find this really interesting because I think the phrase No
regrets, it has a lot of meaning for people who had flawed
parents. But before I get to that, do you
think Ben was a good person? That's that's a tough one.
I think overall, yes, I think it seemed like he had good
intentions and wanted to help people.
I know that's the tough thing is people seem to segment their
love life sometimes or compartmentalize it from the
rest of their their lives. So was he a good lover or good
partner? I don't think so, but I think
seems like he was a good person. What do you think?
Yeah, I think more than most people, it would be really
interesting to try to theoretically tally up like the
good and the bad because the amount of people he helped
through medicine, the number of hobos he helped through welfare
programs, Yeah, like he helped thousands.
But then I think there are these cases where like, one person was
like severely harmed by his actions and that I don't know if
how you'd weigh those out or if you could.
But he once said about himself, and I'm going to truncate this
quote because it's too long. OK.
But you said that I've been a liar, a thief, a cheat, a pimp,
an adulterer, a robber of innocent women, a drunkard, a
dope fiend, A pervert, A hypocrite, and the list goes on.
And then he says at the end, I have never denied any of the
charges. Wow.
OK, so in his own mind, I don't think he was really concerned
with that question. But I find it interesting
because through this episode, in the research, I was just as
interested in Ben's relationship with Emma as I was with his
daughter, Mecca Rettman Carpenter, because her decision
to write this book is fascinating.
I took a ton of research and it was really an effort of love.
But I don't think she had this image of her dad of being a bad
person, in part because her dad died when she was pretty young,
at six years old. And then her mother took great
efforts to preserve this image of her dad as being this larger
than life Magnum Minius figure. And so I don't think she viewed
him as being bad. But I've known several people
where like they ever had a parent who is like abusive or
neglectful and they said that like the worst thing they've
ever said to them is like, Oh, I have no regrets.
I you know, I wouldn't do anything differently if I could.
And the adult child would be like, you wouldn't have raised
me differently or like done XY or Z.
And then they're like, no, that's like the worst thing they
could say. And so upon starting this book,
I was like, is she grappling with that question of like, she
sees him, sees him as being this really flawed person and like
she's really trying to grapple with if he was or not?
And was she grappling with that question?
What's interesting is the answer is that Mecca considers herself
amongst the women who have loved Ben.
There's this quote in the book where he says like the kind of
thing God has ever done for me is give me all these women who
have loved me throughout my life and supported me.
Like, that's the sign that there's a God in my life.
And she, like, intentionally inserts herself in that list.
In a platonic way, obviously. Yeah.
Not in a weird sexual way, like, all of the sexual relationships
he had. But she described it as being,
like, all of the other women in her father's life.
My favorite of his love stories was how he came to fall in love
with me. And I just think like men who
are especially passionate, who are like given to their own
will, who achieve greatness, there oftentimes is this like
dark side or this chaotic side to them.
Are you familiar with Camille Paglia?
A. Little bit.
I've never read any of her stuff, but I've heard of it,
yeah. She's a controversial figure.
She's not popular in feminist circles.
She has this quote that I've often thought about in
relationship to Ben Reitman. And she once said that there's
no female Mozart because there's no female Jack Thripper.
That quote, it was intended to be a commentary on women.
But if you strip down the gendered language and apply it
to just humanity in general, I think that duality is necessary
oftentimes in order to do great things.
You need to be willing to give in to your passions, your
emotions in order to drive forward and, you know, set up a
hobo college or become a doctor or do all these things that Ben
did. And so I have, I can kind of see
from a distance, like how Ben was easy to love.
I'm not in love with him, obviously, but I, I imagine
myself, if I ever met him in person, being equally as
entranced by like, how lively he was, how vivacious.
And yeah, even his daughter is like sort of grappling with that
image, too. Yeah, there there is something
about a passionate man, like you said, like someone that just
throws themselves completely into whether it's music or
murdering people or whatever. I I kind of get what she's
saying that. Yeah, I think it's easier to
feel emotions for people who are emotional because like emotions
are like a tool of correspondence of sort.
The reason to feel them is to communicate with others.
I know I but hopefully that wasn't like a crazy way to round
things. No, no.
I just think it is really profound of like, why did so
many people love him? Why am I so fascinated with him?
Why was his daughter so fascinated with him?
Because I think there was something about his spirit that
attracted Emma and all these other people to him.
Yeah, I mean, he seems like he had this confidence in himself.
He just felt content to live the way he wanted to.
And I think people just want a part of that and they just think
being close to that, oh, maybe give them some of that freedom,
that special quality, you know? So even if he might kind of
treat you like crap, you feel. Like you are him in a way just
to know him, you know? Yeah, and Medina Oliver being so
level headed and pretty rational and just being like my children
should be half him. It's just fascinating.
It is what a guy. Yeah, well, thank you for
inviting me on. I had a lot of fun.
Thank you for coming, this was so interesting and cool and
weird. Also because I listen to your
podcast, so it's crazy to meet you and be here, but it's really
cool. Thank you.
Thank you Have. A good day, bye everyone.
Yeah, thanks for listening. Is your heart filled with pain?
Shall I come back again? Tell me, dear heart you Lord.