Fanya Stein

Fanya Stein is a wealthy pacifist and political supporter of Ben Compton whose devotion to peace and to the radical movement becomes inseparable from her private attachment to him. She helps carry him between protest meetings, mourns the United States’ entry into the war, and eventually takes him into her home and nurses him through influenza and double pneumonia.

Background and Political Commitments

Fanya is Morris Stein’s sister, described as thin, dark, wealthy, and about thirty-five. Her money and mobility give practical force to her convictions: she contributes to women’s peace organizations and sometimes drives Ben around town when he has several meetings in one evening. Her pacifism is intellectual as well as organizational. She makes him read Tolstoy and Kropotkin, introducing him to writers whose opposition to violence accompanies her own faith that the country can remain outside the European war.

That hope is tied to Woodrow Wilson. Fanya believes he will keep the United States out of the conflict, and her peace work includes trying to reach him directly. Her confidence is therefore not merely abstract: it rests on an expectation that organized appeals can still affect national policy. When events defeat that expectation, the political reversal registers as a personal blow.

Supporting Ben’s Agitation

Fanya’s connection with Ben develops amid his work against the Everett massacre. He earns his living as a clerk in Morris Stein’s law office and spends his evenings addressing protest meetings. Fanya helps him get from one engagement to the next, moving between the practical demands of the campaign and its public speeches. The audiences range from garment and waterfront workers to workers in Newark plants and political crowds in Manhattan; she is present around a movement that brings together people across occupations and social groups.

She also sees the cost of speaking for Ben. Before an address he can be overwhelmed by the crowd, and afterward he is shaky, awkwardly conscious of his tall, gangling frame, and has to wipe his misted glasses. Fanya praises his speech with shining eyes and, when the meeting is in Manhattan, takes him for supper at the Brevoort basement or the Cosmopolitan Café before he travels home to Brooklyn. Her encouragement is affectionate, but their conversations rarely stray far from the movement. Ben knows she loves him; political purpose is the ground they share most consistently.

The War Breaks Her Hopes

The April declaration of war shatters Fanya’s confidence in Wilson’s restraint. She goes to bed in a hysterical crying fit after returning from Washington, where she had joined a women’s peace delegation trying to see the President. Detectives drove the women from the White House lawn, and several girls were arrested. The failed visit gives a concrete shape to the defeat: the women who came to petition the government were turned away, while the country entered the conflict they had sought to prevent.

Ben goes to see her at the Riverside Drive apartment she shares with Morris Stein and his wife. Fanya insists that the capitalists want the war and predicts that revolution will follow from what they have set in motion. She begs Ben to stay with her, but he leaves for The Call, saying he has to go there. On his way out he catches himself making a spitting noise like his father and tells himself he will never go there again. The scene places Fanya’s urgent appeal beside Ben’s commitment to political work: she wants him beside her in private distress, while he turns back toward the movement even as their shared political hopes have collapsed.

Intimacy and Care

Fanya’s love becomes explicit and physical when she pulls Ben down onto her bed, strokes his forehead, and asks him to think of her. She offers to help him in the movement and postpones further discussion until the following day; he lets her untie his necktie. The moment joins tenderness to political allegiance rather than resolving the tension between them. Her devotion is directed both toward Ben as a person and toward the cause that occupies so much of their time together.

After the armistice, Fanya tells people that she and Ben are married and takes him to live with her in her studio apartment on 8th Street. The account establishes her public claim and their shared living arrangement, not the circumstances of a formal marriage. When Ben falls ill with influenza and double pneumonia, she nurses him. On the first day the doctor allows him to go out, she drives him up the Hudson in her Buick sedan. Her care is sustained and concrete: it continues through serious illness and into his first permitted outing.

The Sentence and Their Unequal Prospects

Their domestic interlude is interrupted by news of Ben’s appeal. Morris brings a special-delivery letter reporting that the circuit court has denied the appeal but reduced the sentence to ten years. Ben must report the following day to be delivered by his bondsmen into the custody of the United States District Court, and Atlanta is the likely destination. Fanya breaks down and cries hysterically; Morris appears pale. Her response echoes her earlier collapse at the declaration of war, but now the immediate threat is Ben’s imprisonment.

Morris says they will take the case to the President and suggests that, with the war over, the liberal press can no longer be kept muzzled. Ben answers that it is better to know the worst. The passage ends with the sentence still ahead, not with a reprieve or reunion. Fanya’s arc has moved from financing peace work and supporting Ben’s speeches to trying to hold him close, caring for him through illness, and confronting the prospect of his confinement. Her political idealism and private attachment remain intertwined, but neither can prevent the consequences of the political struggle they share.