Benjamin Harrison Wilder

Name: Benjamin Harrison Wilder
Birthdate: February 13, 1899
Hometown: Worcester, Massachusetts
Occupation: Political Activist

Biography:

Ben Wilder's life had an inauspicious beginning. An only child, he was born during the Great Blizzard of 1899 - a storm that covered everything east of the Mississippi in record snowfall for three days - and delivered in his parents' bedroom by lamplight. And his father, a successful surgeon already in his 40's at the time of Ben's birth, wallowed in alcoholism to numb the stress and grisly human reality of his occupation. When Ben was still very young, his father literally drank himself to death, leaving him in the sole custody of his doting mother--a woman fifteen years younger than her husband. Though he was too young to remember it, the spectre of his father's death lurks somewhere deep in the dark places of his mind.

Nevertheless, Benjamin was a precocious child. His youth was spent delving into classic literature, philosophy, and history; as though, even as a child, he was searching for something more than the world seemingly had to offer. This insatiable hunger for knowledge did not end with adolescence: he entered college at 15 and graduated with dual degrees in Economics and Political Science at 18. He is fluent in English, Latin, and German to varying degrees of proficiency.

When he entered college, the first World War had just begun - robbing humanity of the last of its innocence - and revolution was catching like a virulent disease. It was during this time he was first exposed to Marxism; he was instantly smitten. And then 1917: The Russian Revolution trumpeted the arrival of Communism to the world and the United States entered the war - for the benefit of bankers and war-profiteers. Benjamin's meteoric rise in academia was abruptly cut short by several arrests while participating in peaceful anti-war, anti-capitalist protests and public meetings of the Socialist Labor Party.

Freed (or more bluntly, barred) from the pomp and vanity of the academic world, Benjamin turned to far more urgent and universal concerns: The Great War was the most horrifying event in human history to that point, and in his heart, he knew that many more wars would come, each successively more gruesome and costly than the last. Man must cast away his greed, ignorance, and faith to false beliefs and be empowered by the knowledge that he is alone in an indifferent universe - that we have only each other and our own might and intellect with which to survive. Young and idealistic, and charged with the zeal of his cause and the growing expansion of Communism worldwide, Benjamin has taken this task upon himself. Guided by his former professor Dr. Henry Richtor, a dabbler in the dark secrets of the world, he searches for proof of the death of God or some sign of the dormant strength in Man, natural or supernatural - anything that might be our salvation.

Ben's Character Sheet