Anarchism

ANARCHISM. Anarchy translates as “without a ruler,” but for centuries the term has been better known as a synonym for chaos and disorder. In the late nineteenth century, Johann Most, the fiery German-American anarchist, described the popular stereotype of the anarchist: “A dagger in one hand, a torch in the other, and all his pockets brim-full with dynamite bombs -- that is the picture of the Anarchist, such as it has been drawn by his enemies. They look at him simply as a mixture of a fool and a knave, whose sole purpose is a universal topsy-turvey, and whose only means to that purpose is to slay anyone and everyone who differs from him.” Comparable to contemporary diatribes on anarchists, the caricature described by Most operated both as perceived fact and as a metaphor for social tumult. The reality of anarchism in the United States suggests a more complicated picture.

Like the American public at large, the anarchist movement was varied in composition, embracing both native-born and immigrant anarchists, and its philosophical roots were a hybrid of European and American thought. The French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon coined the name of the movement in his 1840 description of a society without government that was designed to preserve individual freedom. The Russian Michael Bakunin championed revolution and “propaganda of the deed” in the movement to realize social change, whereas his compatriot Prince Peter Kropotkin stressed the approach of voluntary cooperation or “mutual aid.” At the same time, anarchists in the United States were influenced by indigenous forms of individualism espoused by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, as seen in the anarchist writings of Stephen Pearl Andrews, Josiah Warren, and Lysander Spooner. Native-born and immigrant anarchists drew from this Americanism while adopting the philosophy of European anarchists to create their own movement.

In the United States, anarchism comprised two primary strands that divided over the issues of competition and cooperation: a libertarianism firmly grounded in American individualism known as individualist anarchism, which championed personal freedom in social and economic realms while opposing most collective organizations and the use of force; and a working-class activism termed communist anarchism, a more revolutionary ideology that favored communal social and economic organization (a third group, anarcho-syndicalism, looked to federation among workers’ organizations to realize revolution, and overlapped with communist anarchism). Communist anarchism inspired the International Working Peoples’ Association (IWPA) and found particular resonance among immigrant anarchists in urban centers. Chicago became the center of this latter group, and as the site of the Haymarket affair helped to chart the future course of American anarchism.

On May 4, 1886, the IWPA called a meeting at Haymarket Square to protest the attack on strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works the previous day. Someone threw a bomb and the police began shooting, resulting in the deaths of seven policemen and an unknown number of protestors. In the aftermath, eight Chicago anarchists were tried and convicted of murder, four of whom were executed.

Haymarket was a watershed moment in the history of American anarchism. Despite the paucity of evidence used to convict the defendants, the trial secured the connection between anarchism and violence. It also gave rise to the first major red scare in American history, as Henry David observed in his classic study of the Haymarket affair. Anarchist leaders were imprisoned and some executed, publications suppressed, and followers frightened away. Nevertheless, the anarchist movement survived. Immigrant anarchists, particularly Germans, Italians, and Jews, sustained a lively dialogue through their publications including Freiheit, La Questione Sociale, and Freie Arbeter Shtimme. At the same time, the English-language anarchist press flourished, producing Free Society, Freedom, Liberty, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Mother Earth, and The Blast, among many others.

While some anarchists took pains to eschew violence in the aftermath of Haymarket, others continued to embrace it as a tool to secure socioeconomic change. In 1892 Alexander Berkman tried to kill Henry Clay Frick, the chairman of Carnegie Steel, after the shooting of workers at the Homestead steel mills. Frick survived, and Berkman spent the next fourteen years in prison. Leon Czolgosz, an admirer of Emma Goldman, assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. McKinley’s assassination unleashed another round of anti-anarchist sentiment, and anarchists throughout the United States again found themselves on the defensive.

In this milieu American anarchism took new shape, and many adherents complemented their focus on revolution, reform, and economics with an embrace of cultural politics. Anarchists emphasized their concern with issues of sex and gender, private roles and relationships, art and literature, and lifestyle and community. Understanding that hierarchies based upon sex and gender mirrored the relationship between the individual and the state, many anarchists championed an individualism that encouraged immediate, personal change even in the absence of a larger revolution. These actions came at a cost, however, and numerous anarchist editors (including Ezra Heywood of The Word; Moses Harman of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer; Lois Waisbrooker of Clothed With the Sun; Abe Isaak, Henry Addis, and Abner J. Pope of The Firebrand; and Charles Govan of Discontent: Mother of Progress) were charged with circulating “obscene” literature, events that led to American anarchists emerging as foremost advocates of free speech.

At the same time, anarchists championed art, theater, and education as realms through which anarchist philosophies could be shared. Mother Earth carried the work of such artists as Man Ray, Robert Minor, and the French artist Grandjouan. Anarchist journals regularly published and promoted poetry and literature. New York anarchists established the Ferrer Association in 1910 in honor of Francisco Ferrer, the Spanish educator and anarchist who was executed in 1909. This led to the Modern School Movement, which accentuated experience and individual initiative in its educational approach.

Anarchists also attempted to realize anarchism in practice. Inspired by the proliferation of utopian novels and speculative discussions in their journals, American anarchists were eager to participate in communitarian efforts. They did this at Home, an anarchist colony founded in 1896 in Washington state, which was designed to be not a communal colony but a community of individuals. Within the next ten years Home would become one of the most successful communitarian experiments of its day. Anarchist supporters of the Modern School Movement established a colony in Stelton, New Jersey, in 1914. It was joined in 1923 by an anarchist-inspired intentional community in Mohegan, New York. “We make no claim to saving the world; we are but trying to save our own ‘souls,’” acknowledged Harry Kelly, who was instrumental in creating the colonies of Stelton and Mohegan. “If we have not reached the promised land, we have at least stumbled into one of its by-paths, and that is something.”

By the 1910s, fissures began to appear in the American anarchist movement. Beleaguered by years of free speech fights, various anarchist editors suspended publication of the newspapers and journals that linked the anarchist movement before the Espionage and Sedition Acts forced many other radical publications to do so. At the same time, several of the components of anarchist cultural politics, particularly birth control and free speech, became such popular causes that anarchists’ contributions to the subjects were overshadowed. Some anarchists questioned the movement’s emphasis on cultural politics. A number sought a return to class politics that focused less on the individual and more on the transformation of society through a class-conscious, organized movement, and many -- including Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons -- actively supported the Industrial Workers of the World.

The year 1914 witnessed the now-familiar association of anarchism with violence when a bomb exploded in a Lexington Avenue tenement on the Fourth of July. A group of anarchists associated with Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth and the Ferrer Center had constructed it with the intention of planting it at John D. Rockefeller’s mansion in retaliation for the Ludlow Massacre; however, it exploded prematurely, killing three anarchists and one neighbor. The plot’s strategist was Alexander Berkman.

Following the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1914, American radicals were divided over the war. Anarchists’ anti-militarist proclamations received little support amidst the patriotic fervor that encompassed the nation. Congress deemed opposition to the war a threat to the nation and passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to curb Americans’ expressions of dissent. Both acts were used to silence radicalism in the United States, an effort enhanced by legislation in 1918 to reinforce earlier alien anarchist statutes aimed at deportation.

Despite these restrictions, the immediate post-war period appeared to many to be a time when radicalism was on the rise, as demonstrated by labor unrest and excitement regarding the Bolshevik Revolution. Fear of radicals was bolstered in April 1919 with the discovery of thirty-six mail bombs intended for foes of the left, including the Postmaster General, Commissioner General of Immigration, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (whose home was later the target of another anarchist’s bomb), John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. Palmer spearheaded an effort to curb American radicalism, culminating in the infamous Palmer raids and the deportation of hundreds of anarchists, particularly those from Eastern Europe and Italy. Two of those deported in 1919 were the anarchist leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.

This was an uncertain time for anarchists in the United States. The Russian Revolution had offered inspiration, but radicals found their hopes unrealized, as seen in Emma Goldman’s 1923 book, My Disillusionment in Russia. Domestically, anti-radicalism flourished in the Red Scare. In 1920 two Italian-American anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for a robbery in which a security guard was killed. The men were both followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who embraced propaganda by the deed. Other Galleanists had been involved in the 1919 mail bomb campaign, and they responded to the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti with a bombing of Wall Street, which killed thirty-eight people and wounded well over a hundred. The Sacco-Vanzetti case quickly revealed itself to be more about political ideology than evidence; as Vanzetti wrote, “I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian and indeed I am an Italian.” Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial garnered international attention, and protests were held around the world. Despite this outcry, both men were executed in 1927.

By the Great Depression, anarchism in the United States was less visible than it had been at the century’s outset, and again the anarchist press helped to maintain the movement. Some of the stalwarts championed their cause in The Road to Freedom, Hippolyte Havel’s journal that he hoped would fill the void left by Mother Earth. The Galleani-inspired publication L’Adunata dei refrattari, edited by Osvaldo Maraviglia, circulated among the Italian anarchist community. The Yiddish Freie Arbeter Shtimme continued to shine as the major newspaper of anarchism in the United States and engaged in fundraising for the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. These publications were joined by The Catholic Worker in 1933. Overseen by Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy, the publication and its corresponding movement borrowed from Catholic theology to promote an anarchism that advocated nonviolent activism and the establishment of Houses of Hospitality to feed and shelter the poor. This theme of pacifism was taken up by other anarchists during and after the World War II.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

DeLeon, David. The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Reichert, William O. Partisans of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976.

Woodcock, George. Anarchism. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Anarchy Archives. An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism.