Fellow Worker Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990)

Anatole Dolgoff, Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.

Andrew Cornell, "A History of Vanguard". libcom.org.


But we have a glowing dream
Of how fair the world will seem
When each man can live his life secure and free;
When the earth is owned by labor
and there's joy and peace for all
In the Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.

the chorus of Ralph Chaplin's song "Commonwealth of Toil", 1923

Sam Dolgoff was an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) lifer. He discovered anarchism after being expelled from the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL, aka Yipsels) as a teen. He joined the IWW in 1922 and was an active member until his death in 1990. His son Anatole Durruti Dolgoff has written a loving portrait of Sam and the small vibrant anarchist milieu in the US during the 20th century, which also provided my political education. The title Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff is taken from Paul Berman's obituary for Sam in the Village Voice on November 13, 1990. He quotes Sam: "You always need a left. And within the left, you need a left. And within the left of the left, you need a left. And in that left, you need a left. And that left is me!" Sam was a little tipsy, but that was Sam Dolgoff. Sam remained faithful to the classic anarcho-syndicalist principles of IWW and the IWA (International Worker Association, the anarcho-syndicalist international) all his life despite the changing fashions on the left.

Sam Dolgoff was born in the shtetl of Ostrovno in present-day Belarus in 1902. His family immigrated to NYC in 1905, where he lived in the Bronx and the Manhattan Lower East Side most his life. Sam was apprenticed to a house painter at age 11, a profession he remained in his entire life ("a doctor of smearology" in Sam's words). He hated school, and in those days of child labor, had to support his family. The IWW and anarchist movement became his university, like so many working-class intellectuals on the left. He could have become professional organizer or union bureaucrat for District 9 of the Painter's Union, but instead chose to be a common worker and IWW evangelist. He would not become a boss, nor reconcile himself with AFL business unionism. Anatole Dolgoff reports that the IWW reached a maximum membership of 100,000 in 1923; by 1930 its numbers had declined to 10,000. Its last stronghold was the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTW-IWW) which represented seamen throughout the Americas 1913-1950.

Sam contributed to an unending string of anarchist publications and organizations over his lifetime: the Road to Freedom journal in NYC and the Chicago Free Society Group in the 1920s; the Vanguard group and journal in NYC in the 1930s; the Spanish Revolution monthly 1936-38; the Libertarian League and its journal Views and Comments in the 1950s; the Libertarian Book Club 1946-present; and the Libertarian Labor Review later renamed Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 1986-present.

As an independent scholar, after a long day of physical labor, he produced four well regarded books: Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (1974) ; The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (1974); and Fragments: A Memoir (1986). His Cuba book criticizes Castro's repression of Cuban anarchists and dissidents, displeasing the New Left and some of his old comrades, like Dave Dellinger and David Wieck. His Spain book documents the grassroots social revolution during the Spanish Civil War. It also recounts the role of Russian GPU agents in murdering POUM leader Andres Nin, anti-Stalinist Marxists, and anarchist militants. These were Sam's comrades and friends, and he wanted the facts known. Consequently he was not romantic about the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, which was largely a Communist Party outfit. This may disturb some leftish readers.

I met Sam and his wife Esther Dolgoff in the 1970s. Our group Philadelphia Solidarity, and later Wooden Shoe Bookstore, was friendly with the NYC IWW, which included Sam and Esther, the Living Theatre troupe, and journalist Mel Most who became a good friend. We hosted a performance of the Living Theatre at the Christian Association on Penn campus in the early 1970s. 

In 1980 Esther translated Joseph J. Cohen's The Jewish Anarchist Movement in the United States: A Historical Review and Personal Reminiscence (Philadelphia: Radical Library, 1945) from Yiddish. Cohen lived in Philadelphia and was the editor of the anarchist newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme. The book included lots of Philadelphia radical history. We made an unsuccessful effort to publish her translation, which was a great disappointment to Esther. We were too disorganized and too broke. I sent her manuscript to the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan a few years ago. We did reprint a couple chapters which I'm trying to recover. 

I always enjoyed visiting them at their cozy coop apartment on East Broadway overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge on the East River. They were always entertaining young radicals, their habit of a lifetime.

As an older person myself now, I appreciated Anatole's human account of Sam and Esther's last years. It is a dilemma we all face. Anatole and his friends organized an around-the-clock cadre to care for his parents in their last few years. When Esther died, Sam would not move, and Anatole did not want to disrupt Sam's life unnecessarily.  At this moment, an old friend of the Dolgoff's and long-time activist with the Catholic Worker, Roger O'Neill, volunteered to move in and care for Sam. There is something poetic about this. Sam was an old bohemian friend of Dorothy Day, often spoke at the Friday Night Meetings at the Catholic Worker House, and occasionally sparred with her about the authoritarian, hierarchical Catholic Church. So, the last year of his life, he was cared for by a Catholic anarchist from the Catholic Worker, who didn't care that Sam was a principled atheist. This was the informal anarchist community that surrounded Sam and Esther all their lives. The IWW and the Catholic Worker still exist; that anarchist community probably does not.

Thank you Anotole Dolgoff for this beautiful homage to your parents. Yours for OBU (One Big Union), Frank Gerould.

The New Left in Philadelphia 1960-1970

Lyons, Paul. The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

“The people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities” (C. Wright Mills words) are the subject of Paul Lyon's study of the New Left in the 1960s Philadelphia. Mills felt the early focus on alienation, community, and meaning evident in The Port Huron Statement (1962) distinguished the New Left from the Old Left, with its rigid socialist and communist doctrines. Paul Lyons chronicles the distinctive New Left community that blossomed in Philadelphia and nearby suburbs during the 1960s. He argues the New Left was less sectarian and more ecumenical here due to the dominant influence of the Quakers, in the form of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and the Quaker schools and colleges. The Quaker institutions remain central to social justice activities in the Philadelphia to this day. The religious institutions have held up better than the New Left, needless to say.

Author Paul Lyons was a member and observer of the New Left in Philadelphia. He was a history instructor at Temple University from 1967-71, and then taught high school history at Miquon Upper School (now called Crefield School), a private school in Philadelphia until 1980. He received his PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1980 in social work, and then taught history, social welfare policy, and Holocaust studies for many years at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. His dissertation became his first book, Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). He has also written about the New Right, also born in the 1960s, and conservatism, which pervades the American landscape today. Lyon's was a much beloved professor at Stockton who died too young in 2009. The college has since established the annual Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture in American Studies in his honor.

The People of This Generation is a fun book for alumni of the New Left in Philadelphia. I found many old friends and adversaries scattered throughout Paul Lyon's account. I arrived in Philadelphia in Fall 1971, a little after Lyon's timeline in the aftermath of the 1960s. One of my close friends was Carl Gilbert, who informed Lyons about campus politics at Temple University 1960-1968. Temple was a subway commuter school, often regarded like City University of New York, with a large compliment of red diaper babies enrolled. Carl, also a red diaper baby, became chairperson of Student Peace Union chapter (SPU), and later a leader of Students for a Democratic Society chapter (SDS) when it formed in 1965. Carl had one foot in the Old Left, and one foot in the New Left. He was a member of Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL aka Yipsels), the youth group of the Socialist Party, which controlled SPU. Carl was already a Marxist and anti-Stalinist in high school, conversant with the ideological debates within the Old Left. At Temple he embarked on the New Left with SPU and SDS. SPU brought issues and prominent speakers to campus, volunteered in local public schools, joined with Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in civil rights protests in Philadelphia and the South. The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (aka SANE) and W.E.B. DuBois Club (led by English graduate student Jim Quinn), the youth group of the Communist Party, were also important actors at Temple. By 1966 the central issue for the New Left became the Vietnam War and the draft. Students and some faculty joined in campus speak-outs on the war, and marches on Washington. Temple never became host to a big student strike like the University of Pennsylvania in February 1969. The most serious Temple activists enlisted in various socialist and communist organizations after the collapse of SDS in 1968. My friend Carl Gilbert left Temple for a graduate program in 1967. His Temple Master's Thesis From “Integration” to “Black Power”: The Civil Rights Movement in the City of Philadelphia, 1960-67 was his account of those years.

Philadelphia Resistance Print Shop 1969

Paul Lyons regards the antiwar and anti-draft Philadelphia Resistance and the antiracist People for Human Rights (PHR) as the most successful New Left organizations of the 1960s in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Resistance organized draft resistance locally and nationally. They also founded Philadelphia Resistance Print Shop as a movement and commercial union printer. I spent many hours at their print shop over the years as a customer, a union official, and fellow printer. PHR was founded by Episcopal priest Rev. David M. Gracie in 1967 as an interracial support group advocating for school funding, housing, health care, and employment in the city. Episcopal priests Rev. Paul M. Washington at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, and Rev. John M. Scott at St. Mary's at the University of Pennsylvania were also prominent voices for racial justice in the 1960s and many years thereafter.

Rev. David M. Gracie

Rev.Paul M. Washington

Many in Lyon's The People of This Generation got their political education in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Some still live here, making the City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love home.


Gilbert, Carl. From “Integration” to “Black Power”: The Civil Rights Movement in the City of Philadelphia, 1960-67. Master's Thesis, Temple University, 1967.

The Early Years of the National Caucus of Labor Committees 1966-1971

Hedgehog, Hylozoic. How It All Began: Origins and History of the National Caucus of Labor Committees in New York and Philadelphia (1966-1971). c. 2013. 

I confess. I have a morbid fascination with the history of the Left in the US. Originally I wanted to read about my Old Left socialist, communist, and anarchist forebears, their successes and failures, and learn from their experience. Now I have moved on to my own New Left generation, now 50 years past. As a young and inexperienced student radical in the late 60s, I was mostly unaware of the ideological disputes between different Left groups of the time. The predominant Left group in my college years at Purdue University 1967-1969 was Student Peace Union. I now know SPU was founded by ban-the-bomb pacifists in the 1950s, and in the 1960s came under sway of the Young People's Socialist League (aka Yipsels), then dominated by the Shachtmanites, a Trotskyist sect. As “Third camp” socialists they rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism as equally imperialist. It turns out, this political current was also the source of Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), subject of Hylozoic Hedgehog's ebook, How It All Began: Origins and History of the National Caucus of Labor Committees in New York and Philadelphia (1966-1971). Hylozoic Hedgehog is the nom de guerre of a former NCLC member from 1971-1979. He also published a companion ebook Smiling Man from a Dead Planet: The Mystery of Lyndon LaRouche (2009) which I have not yet read.

Lyndon  LaRouche, Jr. (aka Lyn Marcus) 1974

I can't vouch for the accuracy of HH's history. My LeftBook comrade Bert Schultz, who was fellow traveler of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in NYC during this period, disputes the details and interpretation around NCLC's exit from PLP after the Columbia University student strike in April 1968. The facts seem murky enough to invite many histories. This account largely predates my involvement on the left, and my arrival in Philadelphia in Fall 1971. It shows NCLC was legitimate player in the New Left from 1966-1971 before it turned crazy a few years later. When I first encountered NCLC in Philadelphia they were disrupting public meetings with long harangues and were regarded as fascist thugs by most of the left. But it didn't start out that way.

Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. founded NCLC in 1968, and still remains its leader today at age 93 (now named the LaRouche movement). He grew up in a Quaker family, and served as a non-combatant in India during WWII. After the war and college, he joined the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP), assuming the party name “Lyn Marcus” for his political work. In 1964 he broke with the SWP and wandered through various left formations in NYC.

In summer 1966 LaRouche began teaching an idiosyncratic “Elementary Course in Marxist Economics” at the Free University of New York in a loft just off Union Square which attracted students from Columbia University and City College of New York. Some of these students joined LaRouche in forming the West Village Committee for Independent Action (CIPA) and later the NCLC. CIPA supported an effort to revive socialist electoral politics in NYC and nationally. Former Communist Party member James Weinstein was running for Congress in the liberal Upper West Side, and similar efforts were organized by Stanley Aronowitz on the Lower East Side. LaRouche offered a distinctive Marxist perspective. Invoking the mass strike ideas of Rosa Luxemburg and Industrial Workers of the World, LaRouche emphasized organizing different groups of people into united efforts rather than single issue campaigns. He advocated a larger programmatic class unity which transcended race, sex, trade union, or any particular or parochial group identity. LaRouche also asserted that capitalism was facing crisis in the 60s, and that Keynesian measures couldn't fix the economy. He proposed some sort of socialist reinvestment in technology and infrastructure, including nuclear fusion technology, which became a big theme for LaRouche years later.

LaRouche and his cohorts entered PLP in 1968, which he considered the most coherent Marxist faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It is interesting -- both PLP and NCLC came out of the Old Left. PLP was founded in 1962 as a split from the Communist Party. Its leader, Milt Rosen, was the same age as LaRouche, a middle-aged communist leading college revolutionaries. Many leaders of the New Left in the 60s were also Red Diaper babies. There was more continuity between the Old Left and New Left than most realize. LaRouche entered PLP and SDS just as the Columbia University student strike began in April 1968, and the later NYC public school teachers strike against the Board of Education from May-November 1968. LaRouche's group became major players in both events. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) strike was particularly contentious. The new community-controlled school board in the largely black Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn fired a group of white unionized teachers, and the UFT went on strike. Ninety-three percent of the city's 58,000 teachers walked out. The left divided on the strike--some supporting black community control, and others supporting organized labor. NCLC supported the union; most of the New Left supported local community control and called the UFT racist. This was one of the defining moments of the New Left. It may be the birthplace of identity politics that followed the demise of the New Left. There is a huge academic literature on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict.

United Federation of Teachers (UFT) strike
the NYC School Board 1968

NCLC is one of the few groups that grew in the aftermath of the collapse of SDS in 1968. They claimed to have 1000 members in 1973, perhaps its zenith. Some of that history was in my hometown of Philadelphia, which I recounted in my book review of Steve Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. Fraser was the local leader of NCLC in Philadelphia from 1967-1971. NCLC was most active at Temple University, Swarthmore College, and University of Pennsylvania, and made efforts reach Philadelphia high school students. They held their founding national conference at the University of Pennsylvania in March 1969, after participating in the six-day student strike at Penn in February 1969 opposing the new University City Science Center in West Philadelphia. Paul Lyon's The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (2003) covers this local history in more detail. In February 1971 Steve Fraser broke with the NCLC, and took one-third of the membership with him to form a new organization, which did not last long. Fraser felt LaRouche was not effectively supporting his legal defense against charges of a bomb plot. He did not want to go to jail as a NCLC martyr. Fraser wanted to engage a broad left coalition in his legal case, and pursue a pluralist non-sectarian brand of socialism. LaRouche took NCLC in a different direction, attacking rival New Left groups (“mop-up the left”) and swinging to the right.

Herein How It All Began concludes. NCLC attracted many talented activists in these early years. The author HH vividly describes the hothouse atmosphere in the student New Left as I remember it. Just like the 1930s, revolutionary change seemed just around the corner. It also portrays the insular life in a left sect, or cult, which is the sad fate of too many socialist organizations.

The Two Gilded Ages in America

 Fraser, Steve, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner named the post-Civil War era of waste and excess “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The term derives from Shakespeare's King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” It was Mark Twain's first best seller, but rarely read today. It's probably time for a revival.

Now we live in the second Gilded Age in America. Labor historian Steve Fraser compares the two gilded ages, the first 1865-1932 and the second 1970 to the present, in his recent The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. The interlude in between saw FDR's New Deal and the golden age of capitalism post-WWII with the growth of labor unions and a modest welfare state (Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Keynesian economics). Evidently Thomas Piketty charts the same developments in his opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  Both gilded ages saw growing wealth and income inequality. Steve Fraser argues the marked difference between the two periods- the first engendered intense class warfare, socialist parties, and rising living standards, whereas in our present gilded age, the working class has acquiesced to austerity and insecurity. Most young people do not expect to do as well as their parents. Fraser paints a gloomy picture.

Steve Fraser

Fraser knows how to write. He was an editor at Basic Books and other publishing houses, and guest scholar at a bunch of universities. He studied labor history at Rutgers with my LeftBook comrade Murray Sklar in the mid 1970s. He also has a colorful Philadelphia connection. As a young student  revolutionary, he was sent to Temple University to found a chapter of Progressive Labor Party in Fall 1967. He subsequently broke with, or was expelled from PLP, for joining Lyndon LaRouche's (aka Lyn Marcus) faction then called the SDS Labor Committee, later known as the National Caucus of Labor Committees, and became its local leader in Philadelphia. Fraser had his moment in the spotlight in those turbulent years when Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo raided his apartment in April 1969, and charged him and his roommate with a bomb plot. Fraser and co-defendant Richard Borgmann were ably defended by Philadelphia legal luminaries Bernard Segal and David Rudovsky. Charges were dropped in 1971, the same year Rizzo was elected Mayor of Philadelphia. Fraser then left the Labor Committee in a split in 1971, which exonerates him from the LaRouche craziness that followed. Details of this episode can be found in How it all Began: The Origins and History of the National Caucus of Labor Committees in New York and Philadelphia (1966-1971), by Hylozoic Hedgehog, the nom de guerre of a former NCLC member on the LaRouche Planet website. These years surely gave Fraser a thorough Marxist education, for better or worse.

Fraser's account of the first gilded age highlights the working class resistance to waged labor, or “wage slavery” according to the nascent socialist movement. He observes that 80% of Americans were self-employed in 1820. By 1940, the self-employed constituted only 20% of workers. The disappearance of the artisan tradition and its replacement with waged labor during the long 19th century was tumultuous. Before the Civil War Harriet Beecher Stowe saw the emancipation of the slaves and the working classes as one: “the war for the rights of the working classes of mankind as against the usurpations of privileged aristocracies.” Workers fought over wages, the length of the workday, and union representation. Between 1886 and 1893 state governments would call out the National Guard more than 100 times to deal with labor turmoil. Fraser surmises the bloody labor confrontations at Homestead, Ludlow, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, et al threatened a second Civil War. It generated socialist politics and unions, and eventually social concessions from the bosses and the state during the Progressive Era pre-WW1 and the New Deal.

Today we live in the new gilded age, with equally extreme economic inequality. Fraser recounts the deindustrialization of US economy, the eclipse of the labor movement, growth of casual sweatshop labor, and the erosion of pensions and the social safety net since 1970. He says, “National politics over the last half century has polarized between efforts to defend and restore the New Deal order, and relentless attempts to repeal and replace it with something even older.” Whereas in the first gilded age capitalism was ascendant, now it is decaying. Capitalist assets are sold off, mortgaged, or moved to low wage countries. Marxist economist Paul Mattick Jr. sees in the years following the golden age of capitalism (1945-1970), the classic Marxian case of a declining rate of profit. The usual Keynesian nostrums for managing the economy and securing full employment have not worked. Wages and benefits have been cut steadily hollowing out the middle class. Rich conservatives have promoted laissez-faire economics, revanchist patriotism, religious fundamentalism, and nativism as the magic solution to every problem. In Tea Party patron saint Ayn Rand's immortal words, “Booty is truth.” Money rules.

Steve Fraser doesn't have any remedies to offer us. He is nostalgic about the class conscious workers in the 19th century America, the pre-WWI Socialist Party, and victories during the New Deal. Perhaps the  Fortress Walmart associates, retail and fast-food workers, adjunct university teachers, and immigrants will revolt against austerity and decline. Perhaps something unexpected will occur, like the civil rights revolution in the 50s and 60s, the LGBT and woman's movement, the CIO in the 30s, something unforeseen. Bernie Sanders unexpected success running as a socialist in the Democratic primaries could become such a movement. 

But the left also needs self-examination. Communism in the former Soviet Union and Social Democracy in Europe do not offer attractive models for socialism here. The left needs fresh creative thinking that may diverge from the master thinkers of the 19th century. We have a rich tradition, but shouldn't be captivated by it. We need to offer practical solutions for the world we live in today. For example, Finland is launching an experiment in guaranteed basic income, and eliminating much welfare state bureaucracy. This is not socialism, but merits attention. While we're waiting for the glorious non-violent social revolution, waiting for the Messiah, we could indulge in speculative thinking and experiments in democratic socialism, or libertarian communism if you like. Fraser notes the fervor of 19th century radicals produced innumerable utopian colonies and cooperatives, and a best selling utopian literature that converted many to labor's cause. Laurence Gronlund Cooperative Commonwealth, Edward Bellamy Looking Backward, and Henry George Progress and Poverty reached a mass audience in the 1890s. Socialist doctrine was not yet set in stone. There were many socialist schools of thought. We need to recover that sentiment.

Despite Steve Fraser's often gloomy history, as socialists we believe there is an alternative to capitalism. In Sidney Hillman's words in 1918, “[we] can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer… Labor will rule and the World will be free.” We will not be dismayed.