Anarchism and Beer Halls

Tom Goyens

ANARCHISM AND BEER HALLS. The first public advocacy of anarchism as an independent philosophy may have taken place in the late 1870s in a basement saloon on the Lower East Side of New York called Liberty Hall, run by Justus Schwab. Born in 1847 in Frankfurt, Germany, and a son of a Fortyeighter, Schwab learned the trade of mason. At age twenty-two he came to New York and joined the German Workingmen’s Association. When a severe depression hit, Schwab became more militant. He was arrested for inciting to riot in 1874 and joined the Socialist party. A year later Schwab married and became a saloonkeeper, first on Clinton Street, then at 50 First Street where he welcomed radicals of all stripes. A Viking-like figure, Schwab exuded a spirit of militancy and merriment that not only attracted French communards and Russian revolutionaries, but also writers like Ambrose Bierce and James Huneker. It was Schwab who converted laborite John Swinton to socialism. When Schwab died in 1900, some 2,000 people showed up for his funeral procession.

Anarchists and socialists drew on a long tradition of the symbiosis between drinking places and radical politics going back to the late eighteenth century. Coffeehouses in Britain, taverns in the American colonies, and cafés in Paris developed into relatively autonomous spaces within the public sphere but beyond royal and clerical authority, and so became places of social exchange and subversive expression.

Why were beerhalls and other autonomous meeting places so vital to the anarchist movement in particular? Within the Left, the anarchists are unique in that their movement neither participates in electoral politics nor seeks to maintain a formal party infrastructure and must therefore cultivate other semi-public forums to live and express its ideals. More than socialists, anarchists conceive of their meeting places as a miniature anarchist society albeit surrounded by a dominant capitalist one. While this premium on club life reflected anarchism’s core tenets of decentralization and prefigurative politics, it could also foster petty turf wars and political isolation. Schwab’s was only the best known among hundreds of alternative spaces dotted across the urban landscape, usually clustered in immigrant neighborhoods. It was the original radical-bohemian watering-hole that became a mainstay in proletarian New York until his death in 1900.

French and German radicals were the first to nurture a social-revolutionary and later anarchist movement in the United States, and they brought their spirited sociability with them. Finding suitable locales (Lokalfrage in German) had been essential for the fledgling German and French socialist movements during the nineteenth century. In the United States, beerhalls and restaurants served as a springboard for anarchist propaganda efforts in the cities as well as in remote mining areas. French-speaking anarchist coal miners of Spring Valley, Illinois organized at Théodore Boulard’s saloon. French communards, social-revolutionaries and anarchists in Lower Manhattan tended to congregate at Schwab’s or Beethoven Hall on East 5th Street, with its bowling alley and restaurant.

It was the Germans, and to some extent Bohemian (Czech), anarchists who built an extensive and durable network of urban beerhalls during the 1870s and 1880s, which literally put the growing anarchist movement on the map. In the greater New York area alone some 200 beerhalls associated with the German anarchist movement have been identified for the period from 1880 to 1914. The German beerhalls and gardens tended to be better lit and more family-friendly compared with the Irish saloons. Like the Bohemian anarchists, the Yiddish comrades settled near the older German enclave both in New York and Philadelphia. Jewish anarchists in New York from 1890 on began meeting at Golden Rule Hall on Rivington, at Sachs’ café, or at a dive on Pike Street. When the Jewish anarchists of the East Coast held their annual convention in 1894, they reserved Paul Wilzig’s spacious beerhall at 85 East 4th Street in the heart of New York’s Little Germany.

Anarchist beerhalls served as headquarters of various propaganda groups, singing societies, publishing associations, rifle clubs, and labor unions, often designated as “Arbeiterhalle” or Labor Hall. From 1883 until the late 1890s, most of these groups were affiliated with the International Working People’s Association, the first American anarchist federation. The backrooms were not only used for affinity groups to meet in private and for union organizing, but also for conducting interest meetings and public lectures. In Philadelphia, Matthias Diehl’s saloon on Girard Avenue was a major meeting place for the German movement, while the Jewish comrades met at Odd Fellow’s Hall on South St. August Schlag’s saloon on East 5th Street in New York was the employment clearinghouse for German carpenters and bakers. Several blocks away was Felix Brecht’s Sängerhalle, a beerhall with a basement and a third floor widely known as the rehearsal site for several anarchist singing societies. In Chicago, German and other radicals conducted their business in the backrooms of Greif’s and Neff’s saloons.

Commemorative and festive gatherings such as the annual Commune Fest or the commemoration of the Haymarket executions were typically held in large public venues featuring music, dance, declamations and drinking. More than 3,000 people from different ethnic groups could listen to speeches in several languages in Germania Assembly Hall or Cooper Union, or at the hall of the local Turnverein (gymnastics club). Anarchists would temporarily decorate these halls with red and black flags and portraits of fallen comrades. Sometimes more incendiary speeches were held in the relative safety of the backroom of a saloon to a crowd of one or two hundred, but even these were shadowed by detectives. Johann Most, the most famous anarchist in America during the 1880s, was well known to the authorities. On two occasions, in 1886 and 1887, Most was arrested and imprisoned after giving a speech in a beerhall in German calling for workers to arm themselves.

Anarchist groups selected their favorite beerhalls depending on the political commitments of the proprietors such as serving only union-brewed beer. Saloonkeeper Paul Wilzig, who was a member of the Bartenders’ Union, pushed for a boycott against George Theiss, owner of an entertainment hall. The boycott was sanctioned by New York’s Central Labor Union, but Wilzig was indicted and sentenced to two years for extortion.

Italian anarchists built their own groups or circles (circoli) and frequented their own drinking places, mostly cafés and restaurants located in the larger Italian ethnic neighborhoods. John Pucciatti’s place on East 12th Street in Manhattan evoked the spirit of Schwab’s as “the favorite meeting place of free thinkers of all nationalities.” Italian anarchists of East Harlem enjoyed a cheap meal and plenty of radical debate at Vesuvio’s restaurant on 3rd Avenue. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Italian anarchist silk weavers of Paterson, New Jersey did much of their political organizing at the backroom bar of Bartoldi’s Hotel on Straight Avenue, or at Camillo Tua’s and Tony Ramella’s saloons.

From the outside, these radical bars looked unremarkable and featured a typical layout of a narrow barroom and a backroom or a basement meeting room. If the keeper was closely linked to the anarchist or labor movement, radical groups used the backrooms rent-free in exchange for a steady consumption of beer. Interiors were decorated with symbols and imagery of the radical left tradition; in other words, those ordinary places were conceptualized as countercultural spaces replete with alternative media, music, and mores. They served as locales for political education where patrons availed themselves of radical newspapers, sometimes a small lending library, or partook in subversive discussions on the latest in philosophy, theater, literature, sociology, and politics. The writer James Huneker first heard Nietzsche discussed at Schwab’s. Greenberg’s restaurant, a hangout for English-speaking anarchists in Boston, advertised that it had “radical literature always on hand.” Bookstores, while not drinking places, also functioned as crucial meeting places and media distribution centers for the urban anarchist movement, especially after 1900. Noteworthy are Isidore Rudash’s and Max Maisel’s bookshops on New York’s East Side, Firmino Gallo’s Libreria Sociologico in Paterson, and especially Philadelphia’s Radical Library, established in 1905 by the Jewish anarchist Joseph Cohen.

The anarchists’ rejection of capitalism and electoral politics combined with their penchant for gathering in drinking places confirmed for many Americans the stereotype of anarchists as foreign, beer-swilling schemers. In the wake of the assassination of President William McKinley by a self-professed anarchist, Hugh Crozier published The Saloon and Anarchy: the Two Worst Things in the World, versus the United States. The saloon in general had been under attack from temperance advocates and later the Anti-Saloon League. These reformers often displayed a not so subtle nativist prejudice. Immigrant anarchists were in the forefront of the opposition to temperance and other Victorian obsessions. Schwab, Brecht, and Gottlieb Wolf were just a few anarchist saloonkeepers indicted for serving lager on Sundays.

As the German and Bohemian anarchist movement grew more insulated during the 1890s, some criticized the movement’s reliance on beerhalls and non-English propaganda. Saloons tended to harden ethnic insularity, they believed. Some in the anarchist movement pointed to the fact that, in the end, saloons constituted a capitalist-commercial space where the proprietor sometimes turned out to be an opportunist with no commitment to anarchism at all. Younger immigrant activists like Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Claus Timmermann, Hans Koch, Anna Riedel, Hippolyte Havel, Abe Isaak, Rudolf Grossmann, and August Lott among others succeeded in breaking out of their ethnic confines (like the ethnic saloon) and embraced written and spoken propaganda in English as well as modern causes like sexual liberation, free speech, birth control, and modernist literature.

Prohibition destroyed the American saloon and contributed to the growth of the American state and nativist sentiment during the 1920s. During World War I and the red scare that followed the Left’s meeting places were raided and, in many cases, destroyed. Persecution and deportations greatly diminished the anarchist movement, but it survived. English-speaking and immigrant groups in the larger cities continued to meet in restaurants, bookstores, or community centers like the Workers’ Centre on Second Avenue in New York, or Averill Hall in San Francisco. During the late 1930s, a small German-American anarchist antifascist milieu existed in the Yorkville section of Manhattan where they met in beerhalls and organizing dances.

By World War II, anarchism in the United States had moved beyond its working-class and immigrant stage and was in the process of re-inventing itself as a countercultural movement beyond the categories of class and ethnicity. Increasingly, worker-owned radical bookstores and cultural centers became the preferred meeting spaces. They formed the precursor to today’s infoshops and coffee/sandwich shops and collectives like Baltimore’s Red Emma’s, Bluestockings on Manhattan’s East Side, San Francisco’s Bound Together Bookstore, Monkeywrench Books in Austin, Texas.

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Anarchism and Beer Halls

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