122. When Emma Goldman Met Ben Reitman—with Silent Generation

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.