December 14, 1997
Abraham Bluestein, 88, an Advocate of Anarchism
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr. Abraham Bluestein, who made his living as a social services administrator while devoting his life to keeping an old anarchist dream alive, died on Dec. 3 at a nursing home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.
He may not rank with Proudhon, Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin and other giants of anarchism who saw government as the inevitable enemy of freedom and freedom as the indispensable element of social harmony, but Bluestein was a believer, and over the better part of a half-century he turned out anarchist tracts.
In the 1930s he was an editor of the newspapers Vanguard and The Challenger, and long after anarchism had become archaic he was still at it, as a Libertarian Book Club editor in the 1970s and as co-editor of News From Libertarian Spain until 1980.
Along the way and afterward, he worked as director of the Sidney Hillman Health Center, as executive director of the New York Diabetes Association and as business manager of Co-Op City and of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx.
But for Bluestein those were merely jobs. Anarchism was his life.
If Bluestein wasn't a born anarchist, he came pretty close. His parents, immigrants from the disputed Russian-Polish borderland, had fled to the United States and settled in Philadelphia after his father killed a czar's soldier and anarchist literature was found in the Bluestein house.
Whatever his genetic disposition to anarchism, Bluestein, who was born in Philadelphia, began getting a full indoctrination early.
When he was 8, his parents, determined that their son would at least grow up free from the tyranny of the classroom, moved to the anarchist colony in Stelton, N.J., near New Brunswick, so Bluestein could attend the so-called Modern School, the centerpiece of the colony and its reason for being.
One of more than 20 such schools established in the United States in the early years of the century, the Stelton Modern bore little resemblance to traditional schools in the United States.
On the assumption that children would want to learn what they needed to learn when they learned that they needed to learn it, Modern's students were given almost total freedom.
Teachers at the school took the philosophy to such extremes that sometimes children as old as 10 had not bothered to learn to read. Sooner or later, however, they came around. In one celebrated instance in the silent-film era, a group of children, exercising their right to play hookey, hiked to a nearby movie theater and were so dismayed when they couldn't read the subtitles that they returned with a thirst for education.
For all its unorthodox teaching methods, the school, which ran through the eighth grade, seemed to work -- so well, in fact, that its graduates were regularly valedictorians and salutatorians at the nearby public high school before going to college and often to graduate school.
Many became teachers themselves, and for a while Bluestein, too, considered becoming a teacher. But after receiving a degree in education from City College he was soon caught up in the anarchist movement in New York, working as an editor, getting to know Emma Goldman, and falling in love with a young anarchist artist, Selma Cohen, a Bronx doctor's daughter.
To adherents of a movement that had been among the fiercest opponents of Communism in Russia, Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy and dictatorship in Spain, the Spanish Civil War proved an irresistible lure for many anarchists in the United States, among them Bluestein, who went to Spain as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Co., renewed his friendship with Emma Goldman and served informally as information officer for the National Confederation of Labor, an anarchist organization.
Returning to New York after Franco's victory, he began his career as a health administrator but never forgot his anarchist ideals.
Years after the Modern School at Stelton closed in 1951, Bluestein organized a series of reunions at the site and appeared in a public television documentary about the colony.
He grudgingly accepted life under government, but it wasn't until the 1970s that the lure of Social Security benefits finally induced him to marry Miss Cohen, who had lived with him as his wife for almost 40 years. The civil ceremony was performed on the steps of the Peekskill City Hall as their grandchildren looked on, and afterward the newlyweds took them to Carvel's for ice cream.
Bluestein, whose wife died in 1985, is survived by two of his four children, David, of Croton-on-Hudson, and Ilsie Vanderpot of Peekskill; a sister, Diana Slatin of Buffalo; 11 grandchildren, and 6 great-grandchildren.
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