Anarchism

Anarchism. Anarchist rejection of centralized government and preference for direct democracy and voluntary associations is deeply rooted in American historical experience. Idealization of nature as an alternative to the depravity of modern civilization runs equally deep, as in the work of Henry David Thoreau, for example.

Most native‐born, individualist anarchists of the nineteenth century shared the Jeffersonian preference for artisans and small farmers over an industrial economy. Some tried to supplant the state with utopian communities. Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939), whose journal Liberty (1881–1908) espoused total individual sovereignty, illustrates this tradition. Also an anarchist, Tucker rejected violence and favored education to spread his ideas.

The Haymarket affair of 1886 was a watershed event marking the shift from individualist to European‐inspired collectivist and revolutionary anarchism associated with such figures as the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). The Haymarket affair, in which eight men (mostly German immigrants) were condemned on little evidence for complicity in the throwing of a bomb at an anarchist‐sponsored labor rally that killed seven Chicago policemen, galvanized the anarchist movement. The Russian‐Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman, editor of Mother Earth (1906–1917), dated her conversion to the cause from this event. The execution of labor organizer Joe Hill in 1915 and of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 furnished further martyrs for the movement. At the same time, these events, as well as Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of Carnegie Steel executive Henry Clay Frick during the 1892 Homestead lockout and the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, linked anarchism with terrorism in most Americans' minds. In 1903, Congress barred “persons opposed to all organized governments” from entering the United States.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, was part of a trend away from terrorism and toward organizing anarchist unions. The IWW enjoyed some success organizing miners and textile workers, but government repression during and after World War I took its toll. IWW leader Bill Haywood was imprisoned and in 1921 fled to Bolshevik Russia, following Goldman, Berkman, and other radicals already deported as radicals.

The counterculture of the 1960s showed the persistence of many anarchist values: direct democracy, back‐to‐nature communalism, alternative education, sexual liberation, and opposition to war and the draft. After the 1960s, radical environmentalists such as Earth First! demonstrated anarchists' preference for direct action, and anarcha‐feminists exposed the patriarchal nature of power.
See also Sacco and Vanzetti Case; Sixties, The; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

David De Leon , The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism, 1978.
Paul Avrich , The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States, 1980.
Paul Avrich , Anarchist Portraits, 1988.

Richard D. Sonn