Mollie Steimer
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Mollie Steimer (November 21, 1897 - July 23, 1980) also spelled Molly Steimer, was was born Marthe Alperine in the village of Dunaevtsky in southwestern Russia. She immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 15. She became an anarchist and activist who fought for as a trade unionist, an anti-war activist and a freed speech campaigner.
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[edit] Activism
Standing just 4 feet 9 inches at age fifteen, Steimer went to work in the garment factories of New York's Lower East Side. She soon became involved in trade union activities, and interested in anarchism. She was influenced by the works such as August Bebel's Women and Socialism, Mikhail Bakunin's Statehood and Anarchy, Peter Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays. She later became an friend of Emma Goldman's. Goldman described Steimer as "having an iron will and a tender heart."
In 1917, at the age of 20, Steimer help to form a clandestine collective called Der Shturm (The Storm) with other Jewish anarchists. Several of the members, including Steimer, shared a six-room apartment at 5 East 104th Street in Harlem where they held meetings. After reconciling their internal conflicts Frayhayt reinvented themselves as Frayhayt (Freedom) They published a journal of the same name out of the 104th St. apartment with the aid of a hand press.
Frayhayt was distributed in secret, because it had been outlawed by the federal government for it's opposition to the American war effort. The masthead read "The only just war is social revolution." The motto was a Henry David Thoreau quote: "That government is best which govern not at all" (in Yiddish: " Yene regirung iz di beste, velke regirt in gantsn nit." Copies of the paper were tightly folded and stuffed into mailboxes, around the city, after dark. Between January and May of 1918 the group published five issues with cartoons by Robert Minor and articles by Maria Goldsmith, and Georg Brandes among others.
Federal authorities were aware of the group and their publication but were unable to discover who the members were and track them down.
[edit] Arrest
In the spring and early summer of 1918 American troops invaded Soviet Russia. Stiemer and other members of Frayhayt saw this as a counterrevolutionary manuever and resolved to stop it. They drafted to leaflets on the subject, one in English and one in Yiddish, calling on American workers to take part in a general strike.
Shortly after throwing a bundle of flyers from the upper floor of a factory in lower Manhattan. Stiemer was arrested by police who had the aid of a recent recruit turned informer Hyman Rosansky. She was arrested for distributing leaflets under the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a criminal offense to criticize the U.S. federal government. She had helped write and print the handbills which condemned President Woodrow Wilson for sending American troops to fight in Soviet Russia. The leaflets read AWAKE! AWAKE, YOU WORKERS OF THE WORLD! REVOLUTIONISTS. One of her co-defendants Jacob Schwartz, was brutally beaten by police. He succumbed to his injuries on October 14th.
[edit] Trial
Steimer and three others, Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachowsky, and Samuel Lipman, were convicted of violating the U.S. Espionage Act and sentenced to serve 15 years in the Federal Penitentiary in Jefferson City Missouri. At the trial she made a passionate statement about freedom and anarchism, which she said she would die for. She was allowed out on bail while her appeal went to the U.S. Supreme Court in Abrams v. United States. During that time she was arrested seven times but after being held in various prisons was always released without charge. On October 30, 1919, she was again arrested and taken to Blackwell Island. While there the Supreme Court upheld her conviction under the Espionage Act, and she was transferred to the Jefferson City Prison in Missouri.
[edit] Deportation
After their unsuccessful appeals the government decided to be rid of Steimer and her co-defendants and ordered that they be deported in 1923. Initially she refused to leave her cell and said that she would not leave until all political prisoners were free. Eventually she relented, but again refused to be transported to Ellis Island until a railroad strike was resolved. Ten days later the strike was called of and Steimer was transported to Ellis Island. She was deported to her native Russia on November 1, 1922 Estonia. Steimer arrived in Moscow on December 15, 1921.
[edit] Europe
She saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a Revolution that had taken a "wrong turn" and that the anarchists would need to continue the struggle. While in Russia she met fellow anarchist Senya Fleshin who had recently been released from prison. He had been arrested for criticizing the new Bolshevik government. Fleshin and Steimer were soon re-arrested and charged with aiding criminal elements in Russia. The following year they were deported to Germany where they joined Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in Berlin. When Hitler came to power Steimer and Fleshin were forced to flee to Paris. When France was invaded by the German Army the couple moved to Mexico.
[edit] Later life
She eventually settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico with her life long companion Senya Fleshin, where they ran a photographic studio. Together they retired in 1963. She continued to advocate anarchist ideals stayed in correspondence with various comrades around the world. In 1976 she was filmed by a Dutch television crew working on a documentary about Emma Goldman. Again she was filmed by Pacific Street Films for their project Anarchism in America. She spoke briefly about Goldman and at length about her own life and struggles to create revolution. Deeply saddened by the January 1978 death of her friend Mary Abrams, Steimer died of heart failure in her Cuernava, Mexico, home on 23rd July, 1980.
[edit] References and footnotes
- Steimer, Molly, Interview in Anarchism in America . [1] (1983)
- Mollie Steimer: An Anarchist Life By Paul Avrich
- Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism [2] (2004) by Geoffrey R. Stone
- Spartacus School Net
- Women's History Collections at the International Institute of Social History: International Guide
