Anarchism

views updated

ANARCHISM

American anarchism has a paradoxical history. It is often treated as foreign—theorized in Russia by Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and enacted in the United States by the Irish Molly Maguires, Germans such as Johann Most, eastern European Jews such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, and Italians such as Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were anarchist heroes, William James was influenced by anarchism, and both the American artist and critic Robert Henri and the philosopher Will Durant carried the anarchist teachings of the modern school into the mainstream of American culture.

American developments in the modern arts and progressive education before 1920 were deeply influenced by anarchism. Its history seems discontinuous, marked only by eruptions of violence—Haymarket, the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by the Polish anarchist Leon Czolgosz, the riots accompanying Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) direct action—yet anarchism may provide the cultural logic that joins late-nineteenth-century realism to early-twentieth-century modernism. Immigration, labor, reformist social movements, the addition of western voices to the national debate, and science's challenges to religion interacted with anarchist thinking during this period to inaugurate new freedoms and a sense of social upheaval that eventually suffered from a severe counterreaction at the end of World War I.

The most newsworthy events of anarchism in the United States before the 1960s occurred between the 1870s and the 1920s, but sensationalism gave misleading prominence to the violence linked with anarchism. This period, in which millions of European immigrants came to the United States, also saw the publication of a flood of anarchist books and pamphlets and visits by anarchists both prominent and obscure—influences that found a welcoming tradition of individualistic and libertarian impulses already established in a country whose intellectual roots in the Enlightenment were based on similar utopian thinking and whose Revolution of 1776 stood as a historical exemplar of democracy and revolutionary action. The best-known American anarchist, Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939), published the American anarchist journal Liberty from 1881 to 1908. He was perhaps more individualistic than Bakunin or Kropotkin and their followers, but he welcomed them and translated and published their writings. Anarchism located the history of the United States in an international context.

The following is an extract from Emma Goldman's "Patriotism."

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

Such is the logic of patriotism.

Emma Goldman, "Patriotism," in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 136. First published in 1917.

ANARCHISM IN AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY

The impact of anarchism on American culture was both direct and indirect, and it was substantial. The native tradition, from Josiah Warren and Benjamin Tucker on, was individualistic. When radical advocates of "propaganda by the deed" seized the center stage with dynamite and bombs, newspapers sensationalized the threat of wild-eyed foreigners. Newspaper accounts often made no clear distinctions among the various revolutionary and progressive groups, so the anarchist support of workers or craftspeople could seem a vague and arbitrary terrorism.

The Molly Maguires, for example, were an Irish group in the complicated setting of Pennsylvania mining, where immigrants came with their own traditions of secret societies and where the Irish in particular were subject to discrimination that limited their opportunities for economic advancement. The first violence occurred during the Civil War: between 1862 and 1868 the Molly Maguires assassinated six mine owners and superintendents over issues of draft resistance and labor organizing. The second wave of violence between 1874 and 1875, with eight more assassinations, was in opposition to another labor union. Distinctions disappeared in subsequent representations, and the term "Molly Maguires" labeled first all Irish labor unions and then all workers as anarchist/terrorist organizations.

The Haymarket affair left a lasting impression on the public. The unfairness of the events and the subsequent trial also radicalized those who were supportive of labor. On 4 May 1886 a meeting was called by labor leaders (many German immigrants) to protest the deaths of two strikers killed by police at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago the day before. A bomb exploded, killing a policeman. When the police then opened fire, six more policemen and others in the crowd were killed. Eight anarchist leaders were tried, and in spite of widespread conviction that they were not guilty, four were hanged and one died by suicide. However, three others were pardoned after serving six years because Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld thought the trial had been unjust. Again, the rhetorical legacy of the event endured and outstripped the facts, resulting both in public outrage over the treatment of workers and in public outcry against the violent foreigners.

Alexander Berkman (1870–1936) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940) were among those who found Haymarket a turning point in their convictions. Berkman subsequently attempted to assassinate Andrew Carnegie's associate Henry Clay Frick and was imprisoned, while Goldman carried on alone. She had arrived in the United States in 1885 and was deported in 1919. In those thirty-four years she risked jail again and again, speaking in support of labor and birth control and, later, against the war. Her journal, Mother Earth, argued that artists, educators, and activists should join in a common purpose. Another important woman, Voltairine de Cleyre, also promoted anarchist politics, tracing historical continuities in Anarchism and American Traditions (1908).

In 1905 in Chicago, Big Bill Haywood gaveled into order the first convention of the Industrial Workers of the World or "Wobblies." Their belief in "direct action" and the general strike rather than negotiation through leaders and contracts made them both feared and effective, even though smaller in number than other labor organizations. Their confrontations across the country left a legacy of struggle for free speech that endures, including Joe Hill's songs. Roger Baldwin founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 as a response to violations of civil liberties he saw during Emma Goldman's speaking tour with the IWW.

The year 1920 also saw the sensational trial of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, accused of two murders during a robbery. After their conviction, a bomb in Wall Street killed more than thirty and injured hundreds. Many believed that they were possibly innocent because fear of anarchy biased the procedures and denied them justice. Worldwide protests followed, involving many artists and writers—among them Edna St. Vincent Millay, who subsequently wrote a poem in protest, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts."

Far from being rejected, the anarchist philosophy of free speech, individual responsibility, and mutual aid in a small-scale community entered the mainstream of cultural traditions in the United States. A rich anarchist counterculture grew up in a number of American regions, with social activities, lectures, newspapers (more than five hundred between 1870 and 1940), dramatic societies and theater groups, unions, clubs, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, picnics, concerts, and Ferrer schools. Francisco Ferrer established Modern Schools in Spain according to anarchist principles of a community-centered education. These inspired the creation of similar Modern School experiments in the United States. There were memorials of Haymarket and the Paris Commune held during the year. The Paris Commune arose in 1871, when the Prussians invaded and the working people of the city seized power and installed popular governance for a brief period.

ANARCHISM AND THE ARTS

Anarchism also influenced the history of American literature and the arts in the development of a modernist—revolutionary—aesthetic, joining American innovations to the British and Continental avant-garde. Americans such as James Whistler and the critic Sadakichi Hartman (Sidney Allan) were part of Stéphane Mallarmé's circle, who identified themselves with anarchist politics as well as aesthetics (Louise Michel, the anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune, was considered an ally; she thought herself a poet of violence). Events in the 1880s prompted literary responses, including a major novel, The Princess Casamassima by Henry James (1843–1916), which ambiguously joined the question of international anarchic politics and the question of the artist as activist. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), like so many, found the Haymarket affair distressing, though he did not carry through with this idea in a particular work. Still, as Arthur Redding argues, perhaps the anarchist visions of August Spies or Johann Most influenced Howells's sympathetic portrayal of the socialist character Lindau in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). Howells printed Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist in the Atlantic Monthly.

James's The Princess Casamassima (first published in 1885–1886 in the Atlantic Monthly) tells the story of an anarchist group in London and the tragic involvement of the talented bookbinder Hyacinth Robinson. Hyacinth's death by suicide seems to demonstrate that the artist should not try to practice "propaganda of the deed." However, James's book does not seem entirely unfriendly to the anarchists, who include the appealing (and foreign) bookbinder Poupin and the determined professional anarchist Paul Muniment. James shows aspects of class structure, including the interest of aristocrats such as the Princess Casamassima, whose sympathy for the underclasses is represented with irony. Appearing at a time when the London Times equated the violence of Irish acts and news of anarchist organizations from the Continent, promoting a widespread fear of underground terrorist activities, the novel conveyed to readers of the Atlantic Monthly the internationalism of anarchist themes and perhaps an individualist or psychological perspective that would have been consonant with American habits of mind.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, visits to the United States by Kropotkin himself as well as traveling troupes presenting the latest plays by Henrik Ibsen and other Continental dramatists, spread the ideas of anarchism and the challenge to tradition not only in New York but also in small towns across the country—reaching even to North Dakota, for example. The ideas from urban working-class and communal anarchism intermingled with American agrarian populism and the immigrant populations of the Great Plains. Little theater groups, many prompted by anarchist advocates of Ferrer Center practices such as Emma Goldman, sprang up in many locations, accompanying not only social work in the cities, such as that of Jane Addams in Chicago, but also western encounters with Native American and Spanish cultures, such as that of Mary Austin in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

William James (1842–1910) was early interested in anarchism and praised the anarchist Morrison Swift. The intellectual and theoretical influence of anarchism on William James's pragmatism is significant. In particular, his ideas of a radical empiricism seem to take up the anarchist reliance not on authority but on the discovery of truth through individual observation. William James influenced key figures in modern poetry (T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens as well as the less-experimental Mary Austin) and in African American cultural history (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Zora Neale Hurston).

Modernist circles in the United States in the years leading up to 1920 included a number of anarchists. Alfred Stieglitz's 291 circle and his journal Camera Work promoted the work of a number of anarchist artists. Man Ray created covers for Goldman's Mother Earth. John Weichsel and Robert Henri were teachers at the Ferrer Center, and Weichsel established the People's Art Guild to allow artists to sell their works outside the markets. The sculptor Adolf Wolff advocated formalism as the method of achieving freedom for the individual artist. Randolph Bourne's idea of the "beloved community" was anarchist. Bourne, one of the Young American Critics (with Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford), envisioned a culture of democratic community rather than corporate individualism. Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, supported Goldman in its pages.

Anarchist principles affected American modernist aesthetics, but the political lineage ranged from the right to the left. Ezra Pound (1885–1972) energetically imported a Max Stirner–influenced version of an anarchist-individualist libertarianism that had grown up in Great Britain in the movement associated with Wyndham Lewis's Blast (1914 and 1915), Dora Marsden's Egoist (1914–1919), and the New Age (1907–1922). The Others circle—Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Mina Loy—all gathered at a Ridgefield, New Jersey, colony in 1915, and the journal was published by an anarchist printer. The anarchist Revolt group published its journal from January to March 1916; it included Hippolyte Havel, Neith Boyce, Margaret Sanger, Robert Minor, Hutchins Hapgood, and the artists Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz, and Ben Benn. The next-to-last issue was censored by the post office for immorality and violence, and almost all the copies were confiscated.

There may be an analogy between the federalist structure of anarchist political organization and the disjunctive structures of modernist aesthetics, a resistance to authoritarian history, narrative, and form. Ezra Pound's interest in Chinese ideogram and juxtaposition as a formal principle is an example. However, many have argued that the political implications of anarchism itself are lost in moving from propaganda of the deed to poetic practice. Can poetic language be revolutionary? This is an enduring critical issue that accompanies the influence of anarchism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Baldwin, Roger, ed. Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings. 1927. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

Capouya, Emile, and Keitha Tompkins, eds. The Essential Kropotkin. New York: Liveright, 1975.

Dolgoff, Sam, ed. Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism. New York: Knopf, 1972. Printed as Bakunin on Anarchism, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980.

Woodcock, George, ed. The Anarchist Reader. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1977.

Secondary Works

Antliff, Allan. Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Blatt, Martin Henry. Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Chicago Historical Society. "Evidence from the Haymarket Affair." Available at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ammemrr.

Coughlin, Michael E., Charles H. Hamilton, and Mark A. Sullivan, eds. Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of "Liberty": A Centenary Anthology. St. Paul, Minn.: Michael E. Coughlin and Mark Sullivan, 1986.

Crowder, George. Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

DeLeon, David. American as Anarchist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Joll, James. The Anarchists. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Kadlec, David. Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Miller, Martin A., ed. Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970.

Nelson, Bruce C. Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870–1900. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Redding, Arthur F. Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986.

Sonn, Richard D. Anarchism. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Tilley, W. H. The Background of "The Princess Casamassima." University of Florida Monograph 5. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960.