ONE Anarchist Apogee, 1916 In the United States, the social anarchist movement reached a historical apo- gee 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, distrib- uting 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 settle- ment 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 anar- chists at a given moment. However, newspaper circulation records and lec- ture receipts suggest there were between fifty thousand and a hundred thou- sand adherents in 1915—a tiny but vociferous and daring portion of the country’s 100 million residents.1 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 21 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 21 28/07/15 8:09 PM 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—distin- guished themselves and sometimes clashed with one another. Language and ethnic differences also cleaved the movement in complicated patterns. Mapping the movement in such a way helps explain the various ways anar- chists 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 employ- ers, 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 occa- sional guerilla riposte targeting elite property or persons. Beneath the vio- lence 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 consti- tuted a subset of the approximately 20 million people—mostly from south- ern 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 soci- 22 • ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 22 28/07/15 8:09 PM ety, 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.3 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.4 A new class fraction of industrial and banking elites joined the older merchant and planter families that had long dominated national poli- tics. 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 gar- ment factory after she migrated with her family from a Russian shtetl to a grim basement in a Chicago ghetto.5 The upper class was, in reality, buffered socially by professionals and a growing stratum of English-speakers delegated clerical and managerial responsibilities as companies shifted manual tasks to foreign-born newcom- ers.6 However, such distinctions could easily slip from view in what was often 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 indus- trial 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 revo- lutionary anarchist.7 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 peo- ple 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 disquali- fied could vote only in certain elections in a few western states.8 This miasma of disqualifications created a situation in which the majority of the people ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 • 23 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 23 28/07/15 8:09 PM 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.9 Campaigns to expand the rights of women were simultane- ously 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.10 In the same years, wage laborers fought stridently to improve pay and job conditions. Trade union membership nearly quadrupled, to approximately 3 million between 1900 and 1917, and worker militancy increased as employ- ers responded to strikes with violence.11 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.12 In Lawrence, Massachusetts, upward of twenty thousand textile workers struck in 1912, holding out against freez- ing 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 1914.13 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 capi- talism by organizing trade unions and electing party candidates to office.14 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 anar- chists were able to gain greater traction and to branch out from the constitu- encies and issues on which they had focused since the early 1880s. 24 • ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 24 28/07/15 8:09 PM 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 anar- chist 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.15 The movement waxed and waned over the next two decades as sym- pathizers 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 shifted leftward and a new generation of talented anar- chist 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.16 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.17 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 cen- tered on families.”18 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 often kept bachelors as boarders, and some anarchists experi- mented with collective living in apartments or row houses.19 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 develop- ments overseas—sending funds, writing articles, and demonstrating support for comrades abroad.20 Rather than joining a unified political party, anarchists belonged to a series of overlapping organizations linked by a broader cultural milieu. When ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 • 25 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 25 28/07/15 8:09 PM 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 often 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.21 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 lan- guage 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 unof- ficial leaders and spokespeople of the movement.22 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 fundamen- tals of their worldview from writings produced in the second half of the pre- vious century by European anarchist militant-intellectuals such as Pierre- Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, and Errico Malatesta.23 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 uto- pian socialist movements to insist upon broader and deeper application of the 26 • ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 26 28/07/15 8:09 PM principles of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity (the lat- ter often articulated in the more encompassing term solidarity).24 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 perspec- tive, 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 anar- chist, Proudhon, to proclaim, “Property is theft!”25 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 ‘har- mony’ of inevitable, eternal discord, the symphony of master and slave, the love of the jackal for its prey.”26 Anarchists recognized deep-seated connections between the power of the owners of productive property, church officials, and government authorities. Religion was odious to them because it preached doctrines of original sin that depicted humans as inherently dangerous to themselves and others, necessitating their submission to supernatural authority. “God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power and life,” thundered Bakunin, “man is false- hood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave.”27 The hierarchy of God clergy laymen normalized hierarchical relations in other aspects of life, while religious authorities counseled respect for the existing social order. “The Church with its hoary superstitions is one of the great factors that keep the workers in obedience and submission,” maintained Berkman. “Throughout history the priest—of all denomina- tions—has always sided with King and Master. He has kept the eyes of the people riveted upon ‘heavenly things’ while the exploiters were despoiling them of their earthly possessions.”28 Anarchists saw not only the church but also the governments of their day as tools wielded by the owning class—likewise, the major political parties, news- papers, and public schools.29 They argued that parliamentary governments, even those granting universal suffrage, differed little in intention or outcome ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 • 27 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 27 28/07/15 8:09 PM from monarchies or other authoritarian systems. Anarchists criticized political states in three main ways. First, they believed all existing states were organized to defend class privilege, which was unjustified and harmful to working people. Second, they argued that imposing laws on people, for purposes of domination or not, constituted a suffocating and unjustifiable violation of human liberty. This tenet led the anarchists to reject, a priori, the legitimacy of any form of potential socialist state as well as the use of electoral strategies to create change. Emma Goldman, for example, criticized the movement for women’s suffrage by rhetorically asking, “Is it not the most brutal imposition for one set of people to make laws that another set is coerced by force to obey? Yet woman clamors for that ‘golden opportunity’ that has wrought so much misery in the world, and robbed man of his integrity and self-reliance.”30 Finally, anarchists argued that, without fail, power corrupted those who held positions of authority. Such corruption inevitably led officials to prioritize the expansion of institutional power and their personal privileges over all other concerns.31 Liberals theorists too, of course, warned of the defects of parliamentary systems and acknowledged that sovereign states impede the absolute liberty of citizens, leading some to declare government a “necessary evil.” The classi- cal anarchist theorists differed from liberals precisely in their belief that government was not only unjust but also unnecessary.32 Social anarchists based this faith on their view of human nature and their interpretation of recent social trends. Pushing back against social Darwinist ideas that saw life as an unrelenting battle between classes and races, Kropotkin sought to prove that “mutual aid” among members of the same species was as impor- tant as competition in the struggle to survive in nature—and thus concern for others was equally a part of the human condition.33 Drawing on Enlightenment thought and on the nineteenth century’s scientific optimism, anarchists insisted that humans were perfecting their use of reason and thereby discovering “laws of nature” that ordered the physical environment. Similarly, natural laws could harmoniously order human soci- ety if they were widely known. Anarchists believed that people would increasingly come to practice “moral self-government” in accordance with these laws, removing the need for external authority.34 To detractors who saw this as dangerously naive, the anarchists argued that social context signifi- cantly shaped human behavior. The inequitable social order in which they currently lived exacerbated humans’ antisocial tendencies, but an egalitarian society would reduce such impulses to a minimum. In their view, humans were not solely and essentially altruistic, but had unrealized potential for 28 • ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 28 28/07/15 8:09 PM kindness and cooperation that was held in check by a social system that need- lessly created false scarcity and violent conflict.35 Anarchists pointed to the growth of institutions such as libraries, scientific societies, and social clubs as indicators that humans were increasingly organizing themselves, voluntarily, to accomplish their goals.36 In place of sovereign states, the anarchists agreed, workers should collec- tively self-manage their economic enterprises. From Proudhon forward, anar- chists touted the benefits of a “federal” structure, in which workplaces or small communities would agree on how to run their affairs and then contract agree- ments with similar workgroups and communities further afield to accomplish tasks requiring more people or resources not locally available, always reserving a right to secede and go it on their own. Contrary to popular assumptions, then, anarchist theorists believed organizations to be necessary. However, they asserted that voluntary organizations were sufficient and suggested that respon- sibilities should be dispersed, rotated, or otherwise made accountable to the whole, as a means of minimizing the corrupting power of authority.37 As early as the 1870s, they sought to practice these principles in their own organizations. Referring to the International Workingmen’s Association— which he was struggling, against Karl Marx, to lead—Bakunin wrote, “How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning towards authority and dictatorship.”38 Anarchists touted the benefits of free agreement, but said little about how disagreement would be managed. Since they saw repression as government’s overriding task, most viewed democratic deliberation as unnecessary. Imagining a postrevolutionary society, the German American anarchist Max Baginski asserted, “From the governing mania the foundation will be withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production. They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited.”39 Moreover, nineteenth-century anarchists paid little attention to international relations beyond calling for the dissolution of borders. Though they denounced imperialism, they did not offer a systematic account of the ways in which power functioned at scales greater than the nation- state, nor did they indicate how an anarchist society might defend itself against external attack.40 As we will see, anarchist analysis of sexual and racial oppres- sion remained skeletal until the early twentieth century. ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 • 29 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 29 28/07/15 8:09 PM Given these goals and these views on human nature, what was to be done? The anarchists’ strategic thinking was informed by the restiveness of the poor in Europe and Russia during the nineteenth century, and by the modes of revolutionary action common to the French Revolution of 1789, the revolu- tions of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871. Each of these momentous events was characterized by a semispontaneous insurrection in which poor people used weapons to disrupt daily life in cities and to attack police and institutions of authority.41 Anarchists also found inspiration in the late- nineteenth-century Russian nihilists and populists who, operating under conditions of extreme repression, organized conspiratorial cells that assidu- ously plotted to assassinate the czar and his officials, with hopes that such attacks would inspire, or “trigger,” peasant uprisings. When mass uprisings did occur, they frequently caught radicals off guard, but nevertheless buoyed their hopes and structured the ways they anticipated change would occur.42 Anarchists analogized revolutions to weather pat- terns, which were hard to forecast with any precision. Yet because they believed inequality was increasing and workers were steadily becoming aware of alternatives, they firmly held that revolution would break out soon— within a few years. When it did, they were sure, life would change quickly and dramatically. This instilled a strategic and temporal imagination that implicitly divided anarchists’ lives into three periods—before, during, and after the revolution—and provided a sense of real hope that, despite current sorrows, things would soon be better. Expressive of this faith, Lucy Robins Lang titled her autobiography Tomorrow Is Beautiful. It was the responsibility of anarchists, then, to speed along the process of the poor becoming conscious and overcoming their fears. When the time came they would, according to the plan, steer the course of the revolutionary upheaval around pitfalls that had mired previous upsurges. Despite this focus on confrontation, many anarchists continued to see a role for the types of cooperative enterprises and intentional communities promoted by utopian socialists in the first half of the nineteenth century. This reflected the abiding influence of Proudhon, who hoped the creation of parallel institutions, such as a Bank of the People, could offset workers’ dependence on capitalist institutions, draining the latter of their power. Anarchists believed that cooperatives and “colonies” could prove to fellow workers that, in contempo- rary parlance, “another world is possible.” Given these models, early- twentieth-century U.S. anarchists generally agreed that they should practice mutual aid in their personal lives while working to convince their 30 • ANARCHIST APOgEE, 1916 Cornell - 9780520286733.indd 30 28/07/15 8:09 PM