Rocker, Rudolf

ROCKER, RUDOLF (1873–1958). The leading anarchist intellectual of later decades in the immigrant milieus, and easily the most distinguished essayist within Yiddish anarchist circles, Rudolf Rocker was also the only gentile intellectual to become a leader of Jewish anarchists. Growing up an orphan in Mainz, Germany, he ran away from his Catholic orphanage several times, eventually to become an itinerant bookbinder. A self-educated anarchist, he became active in German circles and fled to Paris in 1892, just ahead of the police. From there he went on to London’s East End, where he completed his transition to “Yiddish” intellectual, to serve the largest available anarchist audience. He joined Morris Winchevsky at the Arbeter Fraint and eventually (after a brief and unsuccessful immigration to America in 1898) took over the paper as a center of working-class anarchist Jewish sentiment. Arrested in wartime, Rocker was forcibly returned to Germany, where in the Weimar years he wrote his major study, Nationalism and Culture. After Hitler’s rise to power, Rocker and his wife, activist Milly Witcop, made their way to the United States. He found anarchism faded but still holding on to its most treasured possession, the weekly Freie Arbeter Shtimme, which had had no notable intellectual leadership since the departure of Sh. Yanofsky to the mainstream labor press. Rocker suited the later phase of the Freie Arbeter Shtimme perfectly. It had moved from agitation to rumination, a mixture of historical introspection, anarchist interpretation of world events, and generalized free thought. He directed its last great public political effort, international relief to Spanish anarchists from the United States, with agitational tours and financial appeals. Rocker became the premier public figure known to outsiders (especially after the deaths of Emma Goldman and Carlo Tresca), the brilliant mind whose essays proved the veracity of anarchist analysis, the tireless speaker at banquets, and the lecturer whose road trips could bring large audiences to anarchist events.

Not surprisingly, remaining sections of Yiddish anarchists, often by this time affiliates of the Workmen’s Circle, put their energies into the Rocker Publications Committee, founded in Los Angeles to make Rocker’s work available. Perhaps no other section of the radical movement (not even the Communists with respect to Stalin nor the Trotskyist movement with respect to Trotsky) placed so much emphasis on the personality as well as ideas of its leader. He was, as English-language sympathizers observed, a last figure of the Enlightenment in his singular belief in freedom. His Pioneers of American Freedom (1949) hailed individualist anarchists and collectivists as part of a tradition of resistance against the tyrannies of the state and its overdetermining technological counterpart.

Konstan, P. [Ahrne Thorn]. “Rudolf Rocker: Der Eybik Yunger Kempfer.” Freie Arbeter Shtimme, April 10, 1953. (This anniversary issue features several other essays on Rocker.)

Reichert, William O. Partisans of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1966.

Rocker, Rudolf. In Shturem. London: London Group “Freie Arbeter Shtimme,” 1952.