Remembering The Cobbler

I went farther with my tin ceiling job after a longish delay. Rule 1: never do it without a scaffold. Rule 2: Never do it without a helper. This afternoon I finished the cornice, which is a lot more annoying than the ceiling itself. I gave myself a few very small cults and one fairly deep on my left-middle fingertip. After I bandaged them, my hands were extermely clumsy holding the little nails.

It reminded me of George Brown (1858-1915), an anarchist and a cobbler who I have literally dreamed I was talking to. Born in England to a shoemaking family, he was radicalized in the unions, then in the Free Thought movement, then by knowing workers in India where he staffed a boot factory. Then he made his way to Chicago, where he happened to be present when the eternally famous Haymarket Bomb exploded in 1886. That event and the hangings of four anarchists the following year brought George and many thousands of others to Anarchism.

He settled in Philadelphia and became the blue-collar face of the movement here, making soap-box speeches in places like Dilworth Plaza, which is now Occupied. He made shoes for a living, and freely for Coxey's Army, which began its trek to Washington about one block from where Occupy Philly now is.

George had a debate on unionism in 1900, which he won gloriously. "Surely there is something indisputable noble in the man who with one hand fends off from wife and child the gray wolf of hunger, and with the other strikes valiantly for the right to work and live." Here is another union piece by Brown.

But in 1903 he made a ridiculous spectacle of his views on Chastity. "Varietism [non-monogamy] looks to me to be a kind of 'scab' prostitution... To the poor prostitute, pity without end. To the chaste woman --the 'justified mother of men' --respect, honor, and love." Immediately he was getting hammered by his own partner, Mary Hansen, and other local comrades. He had no defenders. A good rule of thumb might be: If you want to preach a conservative line on sex, don't do it in Lucifer the Light-Bearer. Amusingly, Mary gave birth to her second child nine months and nine days later. Their first was eleven years old.

George Brown's colorful career bears many more delightful stories, showing him to be uncorruptable, and fiercely loyal to his friends and to Anarchism. But in his later years he lost his standing among his comrades, drinking more as time passed. But his grand performance, which brought on national headlines, was at Arden, Delaware in 1911. It involved disputes at that Single-tax colony between the poor and the affluent residents, with George as the anarchist "hornet." They had him jailed for disturbing the peace (over-speaking at meetings), and he had ten of them (including Upton Sinclair) jailed for playing baseball ("bad ball" in Brown's judgement) on Sunday. It's the funniest story I've ever found myself.

George was ostracized at Arden and did not return to his usual summer shack in its woods. A few years later he was helping a friend build a cabin there and took a splinter in his left hand. He carved it out with a pocket knife and then neglected it. In a painful irony for a man who personally knew several of Philadelphia's leading doctors, he developed gangrene, had the arm amputated, and then died three months after the injury. He was 56.

I'm 54. I identify with George Brown in several ways that are very vivd to me. The slash in my finger tip is probably the deepest cut I've sustained in thirty (pretty lucky) years. I'll go wash it out now and put a disinfectant on it.