Source on Mollie Steimer

“There is a sharp contrast between Marie Ganz's brief and flamboyant career in the anarchist movement and the sustained dedication of Mollie Steimer (1897-1980). Steimer emigrated with her family from the Ukraine in 1912. One of six children, she described her life in a New York ghetto as typical of "most poor Jewish immigrants." Her father was a laborer, her mother took in boarders, and she worked in various factories. Her formal schooling having been limited by her poverty, Steimer, like Ganz and numerous others, received her education in the radical youth groups where literature and philosophy received almost as much attention as ideas for the creation of the new world. Inspired by Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, she joined the anarchist group Freedom in 1917. She could not have chosen a more unpropitious time to become an anarchist. The United States, having recently entered World War I, was increasingly intolerant of radicals.”

“Mollie Steimer was sentenced to fifteen years for proclaiming: "The tyrants of the world fight each other until they see a common enemy-WORKING CLASS ENLIGHTENMENT. As soon as they find a common enemy they combine to crush it."”

“It is difficult not to be overwhelmed by Mollie Steimer's fidelity to principle throughout decades of persecution. Whether such constancy is a virtue or a flaw may be argued; nevertheless, despite an almost identical sociocultural background to Marie Ganz, Steimer was inspired by intellectual, social, and psychological forces that profoundly distinguished her from the more changeable Ganz. Steimer's conversion to anarchism derived less from an emotional response to a crisis situation than from her acceptance of the basic tenets of anarchist ideology. As a disciple of Kropotkin, Steimer possessed an intellectual and moral vision of the future.”

“Mollie Steimer resembled Emma Goldman or Voltairine de Cleyre in the strength of her commitment more than she did Marie Ganz or Margaret Anderson.”

“Mollie Steimer, who was harassed, imprisoned, and finally deported for her support of the Bolshevik Revolution, believed at the time that only through revolution could capitalism be overthrown. She later supported the equally direct, but less overtly violent, concept of the general strike as the most effective revolutionary tool.”