[1] Goldstein was also a former organizer for the Socialist Labor Party of America who later became disenchanted with Marxism and worked against the spread of Socialism in the United States.
My parents and their four children had to be supported on the meagre earnings my father obtained from long hours of toil at the bench, making cigars.
His real education began here, from his fellow-workers, to people such as Samuel Gompers and Henry George, who the young Goldstein supported in his run for Mayor of New York City in 1886.
In 1888, Goldstein's family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where, inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, he decided to work in organized labor.
In response to the activities of the Christian Socialist George D. Herron, Goldstein gradually became disenchanted with what he saw as the irreligious and immoral implications of a Marxist society.
Herron abandoned his wife and children for another woman and began preaching free love, Goldstein became one of the defrocked clergyman's most vocal critics.
In 1902, the translation of Karl Marx's critique of family and marriage left Goldstein in no doubt about the real aims of the ideology he had served.
However, when it was favorably quoted by Theodore Roosevelt and senior officials of the American Federation of Labor, the book became a major bestseller.
As a socialist and a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, Goldstein quickly became a sensation in Catholic circles, and rose to become a prominent lecturer around the United States for the Militia of Christ.