Biography
Ben Reitman was an American anarchist and physician — the self-styled "hobo doctor" and "King of the Hoboes" — who ministered to tramps, sex workers, and the poor, and who became the lover and manager of the anarchist Emma Goldman, whom he met in 1908. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a Russian Jewish family and raised in Chicago, he was a tireless agitator for free speech and for the birth-control movement. During the 1912 San Diego free-speech fight he was seized from his hotel by a vigilante mob, driven to the county line, beaten, stripped, tarred, burned with cigars, and branded with the letters "I.W.W." Twice he was jailed for distributing birth-control information in violation of the Comstock laws: he served roughly 60 days in New York in 1916, and, after being arrested in Cleveland on December 12, 1916 and convicted on January 17, 1917, he served a six-month sentence that was described as the longest ever served in the United States by a birth-control advocate. He later returned to medicine and social work in Chicago, wrote "Sister of the Road" and "The Second Oldest Profession," and died of a heart attack in Chicago on November 16, 1943. (Recorded as Ben Lewis Reitman)
The dictionary records Reitman’s medical degree at Chicago College of Medicine and his establishment of a venereal-disease clinic at Hobo College. Its entry spells his middle name Louis and gives November 16, 1942 as his death date; the existing profile records Lewis and November 16, 1943. These differences remain unresolved.
The Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography, printed page 511 (PDF page 506), entry for Ben Louis Reitman.
In chapter 34 of her memoir Living My Life, Emma Goldman recounts these distinct arrests during a lecture tour. These are her retrospective descriptions; the chapter does not independently give a full calendar date for each episode.
Goldman says Reitman and she were arrested in Seattle and released after payment of $1.50 for the broken hall lock. No individual criminal fine or exact custody endpoints are inferred.
Goldman identifies Dr. Ben L. Reitman as the co-arrestee jailed overnight in Bellingham before bail was arranged. The source reports a $5,000 bail order, not a fine or sentence.
Goldman reports that Reitman objected to the police clearing the Victory Theater and was arrested. Her account describes the two being prosecuted and eventually acquitted. Initial bail was $16,000 each; the later indictment carried $2,000 bail each. No exact physical discharge date or served duration is established.
Source: Emma Goldman, Living My Life, volume 1, chapter 34. Existing dates, custody periods and totals from other records remain unchanged.
PBS records Reitman’s August 6, 1915 Portland arrest for distributing birth-control information, followed by a $100 fine on August 7. He remained jailed after Goldman obtained bail; his release day is not supplied. This is separate from his 1916–17 prosecutions.
The contemporary account by Social Science League secretary Cassius V. Cook dates Goldman’s and Reitman’s San Francisco arrests to January 14, 1909, during the planned Victory Theater lecture series. It places Reitman’s arrest at the theater about 7 p.m. and Goldman’s arrest while approaching it about 8 p.m. Cook identifies attorneys King and Kirk as challenging the conspiracy charges and obtaining bail reductions, with C. T. Sprading supplying much of Goldman’s bail. He describes a later charge of holding meetings for unlawful purposes and a $500 bail requirement. A subsequent editorial in the delayed issue reports that Goldman, Reitman and Alexander Horr had been discharged by the local court after no offense was proved. The report supplies no exact final physical release day. This contemporary sequence differs in some details from Goldman’s later memoir, and concerns the San Francisco proceeding rather than their other arrests. Source: American Journal of Eugenics, volume II, nos. 10–11, January–February 1909, Cassius V. Cook’s January 22–23 letter, printed pages 250–251, and subsequent editorial, page 263.
