Ben Reitman
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 1879 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.
