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Unruly Equality

U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Anarchist Apogee, 1916

In the United States, the social anarchist movement reached a historical apogee in the years just before the First World War, measured by newspaper circulation figures, scope of public activities, and intellectual perspicacity. In 1916, anarchists could be found leading strikes of midwestern miners, distributing illegal birth-control information to poor women, teaching avant-garde art techniques to factory workers, and threatening to incinerate the homes of the upper class if they continued to resist demands to share their wealth and decision-making power. The ameliorative reforms championed by settlement house workers and progressive politicians in these years did not go nearly far enough, in their eyes. Accordingly, anarchists seized on a widely felt need for change and attempted to push it in a revolutionary direction. They were so feared, such a presence in the culture, that well-heeled parents turned the most notorious among them, Emma Goldman, into a bogeyman to discipline their children: "Go to bed, or Red Emma is going to get you!"

It would be misleading to speak of anarchists as succeeding in these years, since anarchism was then, as always, a marginal political current. Because they eschewed formal organizations that maintained membership rosters, it is difficult to accurately gauge how many people counted themselves as anarchists at a given moment. However, newspaper circulation records and lecture receipts suggest there were between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand adherents in 1915 — a tiny but vociferous and daring portion of the country's 100 million residents. Nevertheless, it is fair to discuss the relative success of the movement during the second decade of the twentieth century, owing to the fact that it was growing in numbers, establishing coalitions with new allies, and shaping public discourse more than it ever had before or has since. The gains anarchists made during the Progressive Era are attributable to a set of favorable social trends and to what the movement made of these conditions.

Anarchism provided participants with a broad worldview that helped them make sense of their daily lives. Despite these shared beliefs, early-twentieth-century anarchists disagreed on matters of strategy and which issues to prioritize. In the years before the First World War, three strategic tendencies — insurrectionary, syndicalist, and bohemian anarchism — distinguished themselves and sometimes clashed with one another. Language and ethnic diff erences also cleaved the movement in complicated patterns. Mapping the movement in such a way helps explain the various ways anarchists reacted to the crisis surrounding the First World War, as well as the complex trajectories in which their ideas, strategies, and organizational forms evolved over the decades that followed.

A TIME OF TENSION

Progressive Era anarchists saw themselves as partisans in a war with employers, government officials ensconced in the bosses' pockets, and ministers who sanctified inequality while shaming those seeking a bit of pleasure in their lives and bodies. This war was at times bloody and at other times more muted. It was expressed daily as a struggle of wills over work practices and pay rates that frequently spilled out into lopsided armed conflict: police, Pinkertons, militias, and vigilantes suppressing strikes by force of arms, with an occasional guerilla riposte targeting elite property or persons. Beneath the violence lay an incessant battle of words and images. While the mainstream press mastered the art of depicting anarchists as animalistic and mentally unsound, anarchists contributed greatly to the enduring image of the monopoly capitalist as a hog in coattails, belly so large as to render his legs virtually useless. Demographics help explain the extent of this enmity.

Since its inception in the 1880s, the U.S. anarchist movement had been primarily composed of European immigrants. In the early twentieth century, anarchists remained more likely to speak and write Yiddish, Italian, Russian, or Spanish, rather than English, as a primary language. These radicals constituted a subset of the approximately 20 million people — mostly from southern and eastern Europe but also from Asia and Mexico — who had migrated to the United States since 1880.2 Nudged out of their home countries by religious violence and conflicts rooted in the growth pangs of bourgeois society, many were drawn to North America by recruiters who sought low-wage laborers to build the cities and staff the factories that had sprung up after the Civil War. By the turn of the twentieth century, the gross domestic product of the United States had outstripped those of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined, but this newfound wealth was in no way evenly distributed. A new class fraction of industrial and banking elites joined the older merchant and planter families that had long dominated national politics. Although many immigrants were shifting from near-feudal conditions to urban industrial settings, class disparities remained glaring. As a teenager, Lucy Robins Lang was easily converted to anarchism by coworkers in a garment factory after she migrated with her family from a Russian shtetl to a grim basement in a Chicago ghetto.

The upper class was, in reality, buffered socially by professionals and a growing stratum of English-speakers delegated clerical and managerial responsibilities as companies shift ed manual tasks to foreign-born newcomers. However, such distinctions could easily slip from view in what was oft en experienced as a Manichean world of employers and employees. Immigrants with skills in mining and logging went to work in rudimentary camps where the superintendent's home was set off from the workers' shacks like officers' quarters from army barracks. Laborers died routinely in preventable industrial accidents that plagued mines and factories alike. While the spread of tenements, child labor, and smoke-blackened skies convinced many in the middle class of the need for new regulations and forms of assistance, others sought more transformative solutions. At least one survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory fire, Mary Abrams, became a revolutionary anarchist. For Abrams and others like her, the possibility of improving one's life by voting seemed laughable.

Many immigrant shop hands came from countries in which working people had not yet gained the vote. In the United States, they encountered a baffling array of suffrage laws. Owning property was not required in order to cast a ballot, but men had to first become citizens. Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship on racial grounds and, therefore, prevented from voting. Native Americans, overwhelmingly confined to isolated reservations, would not gain full citizenship rights until 1924. Black men were supposedly entitled to vote, but were largely prevented from doing so in the southern states, where nine out of ten of them lived. Women not otherwise disqualified could vote only in certain elections in a few western states. This miasma of disqualifications created a situation in which the majority of the people living in the United States were ineligible to vote for representatives, much less seek office themselves. Nevertheless, the disenfranchised were inventing new ways of exercising power.

W. E. B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, and their allies launched the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 with the aim of leveraging educational programs and litigation to win respect, voting rights, and access to jobs for African Americans. Meanwhile, independent black-owned newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, encouraged African Americans to move north, where they could organize more openly. Campaigns to expand the rights of women were simultaneously on the rise, with Margaret Sanger opening the country's first birth-control clinic in 1916 and suffragists building the organizational clout needed to win passage of the Nineteenth Amendment by the end of the decade.

In the same years, wage laborers fought stridently to improve pay and job conditions. Trade union membership nearly quadrupled, to approximately million between 1900 and 1917, and worker militancy increased as employers responded to strikes with violence. The majority joined moderate craft specific unions grouped under the American Federation of Labor, but after 1905 the anticapitalist Industrial Workers of the World expanded rapidly, aided by anarchists and other radicals. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, upward of twenty thousand textile workers struck in 1912, holding out against freezing temperatures and billy-club-wielding police to win most of their demands. The following year, thousands of silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, struck for six months despite nearly two thousand arrests. Farther west the response to labor organizing was even more draconian. The Colorado National Guard infamously killed eleven children and nine adults when it set fire to an encampment of striking miners in 1914.

The poor also organized politically. The Socialist Party united midwestern farmers with immigrant factory hands and urbane intellectuals, publishing more than three hundred newspapers and capturing 6 percent of the vote in the presidential election of 1912. Socialists sought to eventually replace capitalism by organizing trade unions and electing party candidates to office. Although anarchists disagreed with strategies focused on winning voting rights, the diverse struggles to downwardly redistribute power, wealth, and dignity that began to coalesce in these years created a climate in which anarchists were able to gain greater traction and to branch out from the constituencies and issues on which they had focused since the early 1880s.

The anticapitalist anarchist movement had arisen in the United States alongside the growth of wage labor and mass migration from Europe. Its first generation consisted of exiled German socialists, such as Johann Most and August Spies, and their acolytes, who began calling for armed insurrection after losing faith in electoral strategies. By 1886, Chicago anarchists had built a militant labor federation of some fifty thousand manual workers, while anarchist newspapers, beer halls, and singing societies proliferated in New York and other cities. Anarchism became a household term — of opprobrium — in May of that year, when six anarchist firebrands were convicted of conspiracy after a bomb killed policemen sent to disperse a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket district. h e movement waxed and waned over the next two decades as sympathizers attracted to the anarchists' "beautiful ideal" were repeatedly driven away by police crackdowns or their own misgivings about political violence.

The movement's fortunes began to change in the early twentieth century, as national politics shift ed left ward and a new generation of talented anarchist organizers, such as Saul Yanovsky, Carlo Tresca, and Ricardo Flores Magón, came to the fore. By the second decade of the twentieth century, anarchists lived in coastal and midwestern industrial cities, inland mining towns, and the occasional rural commune, such as the Home Colony on the Puget Sound. Most worked for wages in garment or cigar factories, mines or lumber camps, or as unwaged homemakers, attending meetings after putting in ten hours on the job. Those living in cities resided in working-class neighborhoods, usually amid people who shared their primary language and country of origin. Despite anarchists' notoriety as advocates of "free love," historian Jennifer Guglielmo notes, "the anarchist movement was centered on families." Most anarchists lived as monogamous couples raising children together, although many chose not to legally marry, rejecting the idea that either a church or government should regulate their emotional bonds. Families oft en kept bachelors as boarders, and some anarchists experimented with collective living in apartments or row houses.

Although anarchists rejected loyalty to political states, ties of language and culture influenced the political tasks they prioritized. They balanced the need to organize their own ethnic communities with the desire to collaborate with other nearby anarchists, all the while remaining attentive to developments overseas — sending funds, writing articles, and demonstrating support for comrades abroad.

Rather than joining a unified political party, anarchists belonged to a series of overlapping organizations linked by a broader cultural milieu. When Morris Greenshner immigrated to New York in 1909, his cousin took him to a meeting of the Workmen's Circle, a self-help organization that paid out sick benefits and doubled as a social club. There he met a friend who encouraged him to join the Anarchist Red Cross, an organization that sent money and letters of support to anarchists imprisoned in Russia. After finding a job, Greenshner joined the anarchist Union of Russian Workers. Movement work oft en led to romance as well. Greenshner later recalled, "I met my wife Becky in 1910 at a May First Demonstration. Becky and I attended anarchist meetings and lectures." The couple also socialized at fund-raising balls and organized a "literary anarchist group" that sold European periodicals and sent the proceeds back across the Atlantic. The Greenshners's story, and schedule, was typical for anarchist militants of their day.

In this networked political and social milieu, newspapers and journals served as de facto political centers — means of grouping anarchists by language and strategic orientation. Publishers of periodicals routinely sponsored lecture series and distributed books and pamphlets by mail. Typically, editors were revered figures who wrote much of the copy and doubled as powerful orators. When conflicts emerged, anarchists lined up according to which newspaper's editorial line they supported. In this way, publishers such as Luigi Galleani, Pedro Esteve, Alexander Berkman, and others became unofficial leaders and spokespeople of the movement. Whether delivered in print, in speeches, or through theatrical productions, anarchist theory explained why the world contained so much misery and confidently assured those who would listen that it was possible for humans to live much freer, more enjoyable lives.

FUNDAMENTALS OF THE ANARCHIST WORLDVIEW

Between 1900 and 1916, U.S. anarchists continued to derive the fundamentals of their worldview from writings produced in the second half of the previous century by European anarchist militant-intellectuals such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, and Errico Malatesta. These thinkers launched their inquiry into the world from the perspective of propertyless peasants and wage laborers living under conditions of scarcity during the tumult of the industrial revolution in Europe. Anarchists built on the insights of the radical republican and utopian socialist movements to insist upon broader and deeper application of the principles of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity (the latter oft en articulated in the more encompassing term solidarity). Anarchists stridently opposed capitalism, political states, and religion because they saw these institutions as inimical to the rights of all people to well-being, free expression, and the full realization of their potential.

Anarchist economic analysis adopted the critique of property relations and the labor theory of value expounded by Karl Marx. From this perspective, a small minority of people monopolized ownership of factories and fertile land, thereby coercing the majority to work for them. Paying wages lower than the total value of the commodities workers produced, the owners became rich off of others' toil. This is what led the first self-identified anarchist, Proudhon, to proclaim, "Property is theft!" Appropriation of surplus value was the original and constantly reiterated injustice that structured life and fueled the rage burning within social anarchists. "Many are the lies that pass for truths," explained the Russian American anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1916. "But the greatest and most pernicious of them all is the cunning insistence on 'harmony between capital and labor.' It is the 'harmony' of inevitable, eternal discord, the symphony of master and slave, the love of the jackal for its prey."

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Excerpted from Unruly Equality by Andrew Cornell. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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