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Mollie Steimer
Mollie (or Molly) Steimer (November 21 1897 – July 23 1980) was born as Marthe Alperine in Tsarist Russia. She immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 15. She became an anarchist and activist who fought as a trade unionist, an anti-war activist and a free-speech campaigner.
Activism[edit]
Standing just 4'9", Steimer went to work in the garment factories of New York's Lower East Side. She soon became involved in trade union activities, and became interested in anarchism. She was influenced by 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 a friend of Emma Goldman's. Goldman described Steimer as "having an iron will and a tender heart".
In 1917, aged 19, Steimer helped 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 they renamed themselves 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 its 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 governs 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 1918 and May 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. [unverified]
Arrest[edit]
In the spring and early summer of 1918 American troops invaded Soviet Russia. Steimer and other members of Frayhayt saw this as a counter-revolutionary maneuver and resolved to stop it. They drafted two 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. Steimer was arrested by police who were aided by 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 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 and died of his injuries on October 14th.
Trial[edit]
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. In a passionate statement at her trial, she said she was willing to die for freedom and anarchism. 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 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.
Deportation[edit]
After their unsuccessful appeals, in 1923 the government ordered that Steimer and her co-defendants be deported. 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 off and Steimer was transported to Ellis Island. She was deported to her native Russia on November 1 1922 on the Estonia, and arrived in Moscow a month and a half later, on December 15.
Europe[edit]
Steimer saw the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a revolution that had taken a "wrong turn" and believed 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, Steimer was interned at Camp Gurs for six months before escaping to an unoccupied part of France, where she reunited with Fleshin. The couple soon moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Lipman killed by Stalin and Lachowsky killed by Nazis. Abrams settled in Mexico.
Later life[edit]
She eventually settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico with Fleshin, her lifelong companion, where they ran a photographic studio. Together they retired in 1963. She continued to advocate anarchist ideals and correspond with various comrades around the world.
In 1976 she was filmed by a Dutch television crew working on a documentary about Emma Goldman. She was also filmed and interviewed by Pacific Street Films for their project about Goldman, Anarchism in America. Steimer spoke briefly about Goldman, and at length about her own life and struggles.
Steimer died of heart failure in her Cuernavaca home on July 23 1980, aged 82.
References and footnotes[edit]
- Steimer interview at Anarchism in America (1983 film)
- 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 (2003) by Geoffrey R. Stone
- Spartacus School Net
- Women's History Collections at the International Institute of Social History: International Guide
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