Samuel H. Gordon

Samuel H. Gordon (1871–1906) was a Russian American physician. Having emigrated to the United States in the early 1890s, he joined the Jewish anarchist movement in Philadelphia and began taking lessons in the English language from Voltairine de Cleyre. Before long, he was engaged in a romantic relationship with her and participated in her anarchist activism, but their relationship quickly became strained after she rejected his marriage proposal. de Cleyre herself paid his way through medical school and he graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1898, after which he left the anarchist movement and broke up with de Cleyre. When de Cleyre was hospitalized by an assassination attempt in 1902, he refused to help her, which ostracized him further from the anarchist movement. Gordon died from gastritis in 1906.