Following my retirement, and during my involvement with the activist members of the Thomas Merton Center, I became aware of some people who identified themselves as “anarchists.” But who exactly are anarchists; what is their guiding ideology; what do they hope to accomplish? I admit to having no knowledge of how contemporary self-identified anarchists may resemble the historical variety described in Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Willrich focuses his book’s first half on Emma Goldman, perhaps the most famous of all American anarchists, and her one-time lover and lifetime collaborator Alexander Berkman, the guy who tried to kill Henry Clay Frick shortly after the suppression of the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike. But what I found most interesting is Willrich’s discussion of the theory that motivated so many people to embrace anarchism, how it differed from socialism and Marxism, and how it could diverge into camps that either used mass rallies, publication, and public speech to win followers or embraced violent resistance, usually in the form of bombs facilitated by Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite during the 1860s.
Anarchism could be considered an extreme form of the libertarianism that still has a degree of popularity among Americans today, a way of thinking about government, judicial systems, and corporate capitalism embraced by people so disenchanted with societal structures that they yearn for an imagined world, a dream world almost, in which those structures have disappeared and people live in small, self-sufficient communities, almost in a Rousseauian state of nature. Willrich explains that the English word “anarchy” derives from the Greek anarkhia, a state in which humans live without somebody being “in charge.” “During the movement’s heyday, which lasted from the 1871 Paris Commune through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, there were ‘mutualist’ anarchists, ‘communist’ anarchists, and ‘syndicalist’ anarchists. There were pacifist anarchists and outright terrorists. Some anarchists pursued social revolution through ‘direct action’: protests, strikes, and industrial sabotage. Others created newspapers, schools, and theatrical productions.”
Believing human nature to be essentially benign, anarchists dreamed of self-contained communities in which true equality ensured that individuals reached their destined potential. Governments, laws, monopolies, organized religions, and patriarchal family structures were all manifestations of coercion and “violence.” The brutality and exploitation characteristic of 19th-century capitalism demonstrated to anarchists that government and laws designed to protect private property had failed miserably to meet the basic economic and social needs of the majority of people. Where anarchists differed from Marxist socialism is that Marx thought a “period of centralized authority” (Willrich 26) was necessary. The Russian Mikhail Bakunin stated the anarchist position this way: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; but socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”
The paradox Willrich explores throughout the book is that, while anarchists thought the “rule of law” a ruse that actually created inequality, in the here and now anarchists found they had to constantly turn to the law and the courts to maintain their freedom to openly advocate for their vision of an ideal society, and to criticize the status quo. (Just as contemporary libertarians conveniently lean on government programs and subsidies that support their personal interests. But you can only carry the connection between anarchists and libertarians a short distance. Anarchists generally emerged among the dispossessed and wanted to be rid of government because they believed that government and laws perpetuated inequality and injustice. Modern-day American libertarians, on the other hand, tend to come from privileged backgrounds and regard governments, in their sporadic and often ineffectual attempts to reduce injustice and inequality, as attempting to diminish what they believe is their much-deserved position of superiority in society.) Willrich carefully traces the development of what is now known as the American Civil Liberties Union, especially through the efforts of lawyers who chose to defend anarchists and other dissenters against the suppression of criticism of America’s entry into and conduct of the First World War. That suppression was carried out both in local communities and courts and nationally through the Espionage Act of 1917, and its widespread nature required a network of lawyers to combat it. (The Espionage Act is still very much with us, and has featured prominently in the US government’s prosecution of WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange.)
The second half of Willrich’s book focuses on the period during and immediately following America’s direct involvement in World War I. This section dovetails in several ways with the material in the Hochschild book I posted about three months ago, describing the passage of the Espionage Act and a 1918 Immigration Law, the rise of the Bureau of Investigation and J. Edgar Hoover, the wave of bombings targeting federal and local officials in the spring of 1919 and the subsequent Palmer raids. Willrich’s book differs in its lengthy descriptions of two trials—that of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman for their opposition to the recently passed conscription law, and a second featuring the prosecution of several younger anarchists for distributing flyers criticizing US intervention in the Russian civil war.
As in the book’s first half, Willrich personalizes the historical material by exploring the idiosyncrasies of several key actors—Hoover, who drew on his earlier experience as a cataloger at the Library of Congress to refine his index card database of “subversives;” Harry Weinberger, a Jewish lawyer from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, who got his degree from NYU’s night law school and became a staunch defender of First and Fourth Amendment rights after being drawn into the anarchist sphere; and Mollie Steimer, a preternaturally self-possessed, ferociously loyal anarchist and talented propagandist who, as a young woman defendant, gained celebrity status during the aforementioned flyer distribution trial.
As I mentioned during my review of Hochschild’s book, it was the popularity of many socialist and anarchist ideas, especially within the more radical segments of the labor movement, that truly frightened American elites. In the case of the anarchists, the fact that so many of them were unnaturalized immigrants from Eastern European countries and Italy gave the authorities a weapon for diminishing their influence—deportation.
The actual “Palmer raids” took place the night of January 2, 1920. Hoover oversaw the raids, which sought to arrest and then deport non-naturalized US residents who belonged to the Communist Party of America or the Communist Labor Party, so-called “Reds.” While the government and their sympathetic news outlets chose to conflate alien communists and socialists with anarchists in the public mind, they also made no distinction between the pacifist, non-violent anarchists and the violent bombers, the “terroristic” anarchists. We’ve already noted that anarchists were quite different from socialists and communists in their thinking about the value of governments, and that there was a broad spectrum of approaches to “revolution” among the anarchists themselves. But government suppression of dissent ensured the public saw no differences among these varied individuals, and just one crucial similarity—they were all alien immigrants. In addition, a great many were Jews who had fled Tsarist Russia, and were therefore harboring sympathies for the Bolsheviks, the new rulers of Russia and deeply frightening to members of the American establishment.
The January 2nd raids used federal agents, state and local police forces, and private citizens under the guise of the American Protective League to arrest more than 2,500 people (some scholars estimate the number was much greater), including around 650 in New York City, 600 in Boston, and 800 in Detroit “held for six days in a big room with a single toilet.” One outside observer investigating the cases, a Methodist minister named Constantine Panunzio, found that the detainees were generally workers, “store-keepers, shoe-makers, carpenters, mechanics, unskilled laborers.” The majority had families, having lived in America for many years. Some had parented children who were citizens by birth. A significant number had bought Liberty Bonds, the main financial support for US participation in World War I, and a few “had even served in the US armed forces.”
The Department of Justice wanted to obtain deportation warrants for as many detainees as possible as quickly as possible but they were soon delayed by what Willrich calls the “cause lawyers” like Weinberger, who successfully fought to obtain writs of habeas corpus and reasonable bail. Moreover, Justice couldn’t deport people without approval of the Department of Labor and its acting Secretary, Louis F. Post. Post decided he needed to examine the thousands of cases closely. He ruled that intentional membership in illegal organizations had to be supported by evidence (many of the raids took place in what often functioned as service centers and social clubs for immigrants whose mother tongue was not English), which could not have been obtained by “arbitrary search and seizure or by the interrogation of a suspect who had been denied counsel.” Post ended up canceling around 75% of the deportation warrants in cases he reviewed.
Post also endured an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives, but he was 70 years old, a lifelong advocate for civil liberties, and obviously thought the stand he took was an appropriate way to end his public life. In April of 1920 he published an internal memo regarding the January 2nd detainees in which he bemoaned the months of suffering families had endured through “arbitrary arrest, long detention in default of bail beyond the means of hard-working wage-earners to give, for nothing more dangerous that affiliating with friends of their own race, country, and language, and without the slightest indication of sinister motive or any unlawful act within their knowledge or intention.” Public support for the mass deportations gradually waned, although the misplaced connection between anarchy and communism lingered. Republican Warren G. Harding was elected President and, a few years later, J. Edgar Hoover became Director of the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation, a position he held for nearly a half-a-century, until his death in 1972.
Meanwhile, Emma Goldman and her fellow deported anarchists quickly became disillusioned by the suppression of dissent in Bolshevik Russia, concluding that they were right all along about governments and laws, whether they were meant to protect private property or collectivist economies. Many soon exited for other parts of Europe, with Goldman herself eventually ending up in Canada before she died.
Very interesting history, thank you!