Anarchism in the United States

Hutchins Hapgood was an American journalist, author, individualist anarchist and philosophical anarchist who was well known within the Bohemian environment of around the start of 20th-century New York City. He advocated free love and committed adultery frequently. Hapgood was a follower of the German philosophers Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche.^[22]

The mission of Lucifer the Lightbearer was, according to Harman, "to help woman to break the chains that for ages have bound her to the rack of man-made law, spiritual, economic, industrial, social and especially sexual, believing that until woman is roused to a sense of her own responsibility on all lines of human endeavor, and especially on lines of her special field, that of reproduction of the race, there will be little if any real advancement toward a higher and truer civilization." The name was chosen because "

Heywood's philosophy was instrumental in furthering individualist anarchist ideas through his extensive pamphleteering and reprinting of works of Josiah Warren, author of True Civilization (1869), and William B. Greene. At a 1872 convention of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston, Heywood introduced Greene and Warren to eventual Liberty publisher Benjamin Tucker. Heywood saw what he believed to be a disproportionate concentration of capital in the hands of a few as the result of a selective extension of government-backed privileges to certain individuals and organizations. The Word was an individualist anarchist free love magazine edited by Ezra Heywood and Angela Heywood, issued first from Princeton, Massachusetts; and then from Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[20] The Word was subtitled "A Monthly Journal of Reform", and it included contributions from Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and J.K. Ingalls. Initially, The Word presented free love as a minor theme which was expressed within a labor reform format. But the publication later evolved into an explicitly free love periodical.^[20] At some point Tucker became an important contributor but later became dissatisfied with the journal's focus on free love since he desired a concentration on economics. In contrast, Tucker's relationship with Heywood grew more distant. Yet, when Heywood was imprisoned for his pro-birth control stand from August to December 1878 under the Comstock laws, Tucker abandoned the Radical Review in order to assume editorship of Heywood's The Word. After Heywood's release from prison, The Word openly became a free love journal; it flouted the law by printing birth control material and openly discussing sexual matters. Tucker's disapproval of this policy stemmed from his conviction that "Liberty, to be effective, must find its first application in the realm of economics".^[20]

M. E. Lazarus was an American individualist anarchist from Guntersville, Alabama. He is the author of several essays and anarchist pamphlettes including Land Tenure: Anarchist View (1889). A famous quote from Lazarus is "Every vote for a governing office is an instrument for enslaving me." Lazarus was also an intellectual contributor to Fourierism and the Free Love movement of the 1850s, a social reform group that called for, in its extreme form, the abolition of institutionalized marriage.

Individualist anarchism found in the United States an important space of discussion and development within what is known as the Boston anarchists.

. Included in its masthead is a quote from Pierre Proudhon saying that liberty is "Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order."

Some of the American individualist anarchists later in this era such as Benjamin Tucker abandoned natural rights positions and converted to Max Stirner's egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said that there were only two rights, "the right of might" and "the right of contract." He also said, after converting to Egoist individualism, "In times past ... it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off ... Man's only right to land is his might over it."^[36] In adopting Stirnerite egoism (1886), Tucker rejected natural rights which had long been considered the foundation of libertarianism. This rejection galvanized the movement into fierce debates, with the natural rights proponents accusing the egoists of destroying libertarianism itself. So bitter was the conflict that a number of natural rights proponents withdrew from the pages of Liberty in protest even though they had hitherto been among its frequent contributors. Thereafter, Liberty championed egoism although its general content did not change significantly."^[37]

Several publications "were undoubtedly influenced by Liberty's presentation of egoism. They included: I published by C.L. Swartz, edited by W.E. Gordak and J.William Lloyd (all associates of Liberty); The Ego and The Egoist, both of which were edited by Edward H. Fulton. Among the egoist papers that Tucker followed were the German

Anarchism: Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy (also published by Dover with the title The Great Anarchists: Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers). James L. Walker (sometimes known by the pen name "Tak Kak") was one of the main contributors to Benjamin Tucker's Liberty. He published his major philosophical work called Philosophy of Egoism in the May 1890 to September 1891 in issues of the publication Egoism.^[39]

Early anarcho-communism

By the 1880s anarcho-communism was already present in the United States as can be seen in the publication of the journal Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly by Lucy Parsons and Lizzy Holmes.^[40] Lucy Parsons debated in her time in the US with fellow anarcha-communist Emma Goldman over issues of free love and feminism.^[40] Included in their debates over questions of gender, patriarchy, and free love were questions of homosexuality. Part of Goldman’s specific brand of anarchism was a belief that the state should be removed from interpersonal and sexual relationships. Freedom from state sexual control included, in Goldman’s view, the freedom to choose a sexual or romantic partner regardless of their gender. It was free-love anarchists like Goldman who, during this period, introduced the beginnings of a homosexual rights movement to the United States.^[41] Anarchists on this issue, however, were not united and many disagreed with Goldman’s inclusion of homosexuality and free love in an anarchist belief system.

Described by the

frame-up and which marked the beginning of May Day labor rallies in protest.^[42][43]

Another anarcho-communist journal called

Yiddish, German, or Russian, but Free Society was published in English, permitting the dissemination of anarchist communist thought to English-speaking populations in the United States.^[44] Around that time these American anarcho-communist sectors entered in debate with the individualist anarchist group around Benjamin Tucker.^[45] Encouraged by news of labor struggles and industrial disputes in the United States, the German anarchist Johann Most emigrated to the USA upon his release from prison in 1882. He promptly began agitating in his adopted land among other German émigrés. Among his associates was August Spies, one of the anarchists hanged for conspiracy in the Haymarket Square bombing, whose desk police found to contain an 1884 letter from Most promising a shipment of "medicine," his code word for dynamite.^[46] Most was famous for stating the concept of the propaganda of the deed, namely that "[t]he existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion."^[47] Most is best known for a pamphlet published in 1885: The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, a how-to manual on the subject of bomb-making which earned the author the moniker "Dynamost". He acquired his knowledge of explosives while working at an explosives plant in New Jersey.^[48] Most was described as "the most vilified social radical" of his time, a man whose profuse advocacy of social unrest and fascination with dramatic destruction eventually led Emma Goldman to denounce him as a recognized authoritarian.^[49]

A gifted orator, Most propagated these ideas throughout Marxist and anarchist circles in the United States and attracted many adherents, most notably Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In February 1888 Berkman left for the United States from his native Russia.^[50] Soon after his arrival in New York City, Berkman became an anarchist through his involvement with groups that had formed to campaign to free the men convicted of the 1886 Haymarket bombing.^[51] He, as well as Goldman, soon came under the influence of Johann Most, the best-known anarchist in the United States, and an advocate of propaganda of the deed—attentat, or violence carried out to encourage the masses to revolt.^[52][53][54] Berkman became a typesetter for Most's newspaper Freiheit.^[51]

Inspired by Most's theories of Attentat, Goldman and Berkman, enraged by the deaths of workers during the Homestead strike, put words into action with Berkman's attempted assassination of Homestead factory manager Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Berkman and Goldman were soon disillusioned as Most became one of Berkman's most outspoken critics. In Freiheit, Most attacked both Goldman and Berkman, implying Berkman's act was designed to arouse sympathy for Frick.^[55] Goldman's biographer Alice Wexler suggests that Most's criticisms may have been inspired by jealousy of Berkman.^[56] Goldman was enraged and demanded that Most prove his insinuations. When he refused to respond, she confronted him at next lecture.^[55] After he refused to speak to her, she lashed him across the face with a horsewhip, broke the whip over her knee, then threw the pieces at him.^[55] She later regretted her assault, confiding to a friend, "At the age of twenty-three, one does not reason."

Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in

free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers and denounced by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.^[58]

Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

Anarchism and the labor movement

Main articles: Anarcho-syndicalism and Industrial Workers of the World

The anti-authoritarian sections of the First International were the precursors of the anarcho-syndicalists, seeking to "replace the privilege and authority of the State" with the "free and spontaneous organization of labor."^[59]

After embracing anarchism Albert Parsons, husband of Lucy Parsons, turned his activity to the growing movement to establish the 8-hour day. In January 1880, the Eight-Hour League of Chicago sent Parsons to a national conference in Washington, D.C., a gathering which launched a national lobbying movement aimed at coordinating efforts of labor organizations to win and enforce the 8-hour workday.^[60] In the fall of 1884, Parsons launched a weekly anarchist newspaper in Chicago, The Alarm.^[61] The first issue was dated October 4, 1884, and was produced in a press run of 15,000 copies.^[62] The publication was a 4-page broadsheet with a cover price of 5 cents. The Alarm listed the IWPA as its publisher and touted itself as "A Socialistic Weekly" on its page 2 masthead.^[63]

On May 1, 1886, Parsons, with his wife Lucy and their two children, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, in what is regarded as the first-ever May Day Parade, in support of the eight-hour workday. Over the next few days 340,000 laborers joined the strike. Parsons, amidst the May Day Strike, found himself called to Cincinnati, where 300,000 workers had struck that Saturday afternoon. On that Sunday he addressed the rally in Cincinnati of the news from the "storm center" of the strike and participated in a second huge parade, led by 200 members of The Cincinnati Rifle Union, with certainty that victory was at hand. In 1886, the

better source needed] In the ensuing panic, police opened fire on the crowd and each other.^[68] Seven police officers and at least four workers were killed.^[69]

Eight anarchists directly and indirectly related to the organisers of the rally were arrested and charged with the murder of the deceased officer. The men became international political celebrities among the labor movement. Four of the men were executed and a fifth committed suicide prior to his own execution. The incident became known as the Haymarket affair and was a setback for the labor movement and the struggle for the eight-hour day. In 1890 a second attempt, this time international in scope, to organise for the eight-hour day was made. The event also had the secondary purpose of memorializing workers killed as a result of the Haymarket affair.[70] Although it had initially been conceived as a once-off event, by the following year the celebration of International Workers' Day on May Day had become firmly established as an international worker's holiday.^[64] Albert Parsons is best remembered as one of four Chicago radical leaders convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair. Emma Goldman, the activist and political theorist, was attracted to anarchism after reading about the incident and the executions, which she later described as "the events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth." She considered the Haymarket martyrs to be "the most decisive influence in my existence".^[71] Her associate, Alexander Berkman also described the Haymarket anarchists as "a potent and vital inspiration."^[72] Others whose commitment to anarchism crystallized as a result of the Haymarket affair included Voltairine de Cleyre and "Big Bill" Haywood, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World.^[72] Goldman wrote to historian, Max Nettlau, that the Haymarket affair had awakened the social consciousness of "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people".^[73]

Two individualist anarchists who wrote in Benjamin Tucker's Liberty were also important labor organizers of the time. Jo Labadie was an American labor organizer, individualist anarchist, social activist, printer, publisher, essayist, and poet. Without the oppression of the state, Labadie believed, humans would choose to harmonize with "the great natural laws ... without robbing [their] fellows through interest, profit, rent and taxes." However, he supported community cooperation, as he supported community control of water utilities, streets, and railroads.^[74] Although he did not support the militant anarchism of the Haymarket anarchists, he fought for the clemency of the accused because he did not believe they were the perpetrators. In 1888, Labadie organized the Michigan Federation of Labor, became its first president, and forged an alliance with Samuel Gompers.^[74]

Dyer Lum was a 19th-century American individualist anarchist

On September 6, 1901, the American anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated the President of the United States William McKinley. Emma Goldman was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the assassination but was released due to insufficient evidence. She later incurred a great deal of negative publicity when she published "The Tragedy at Buffalo". In the article, she compared Czolgosz to Marcus Junius Brutus, the killer of Julius Caesar, and called McKinley the "president of the money kings and trust magnates."^[88] Other anarchists and radicals were unwilling to support Goldman's effort to aid Czolgosz, believing that he had harmed the movement.^[89]

Luigi Galleani was an Italian anarchist active in the United States from 1901 to 1919, viewed by historians as an anarcho-communist and an insurrectionary anarchist. He is best known for his enthusiastic advocacy of "propaganda of the deed", i.e. the use of violence to eliminate "tyrants" and "oppressors" and to act as a catalyst to the overthrow of existing government institutions.^[90][91][92] From 1914 to 1932, Galleani's followers in the United States (known as Galleanists), carried out a series of bombings and assassination attempts against institutions and persons they viewed as class enemies.^[90] After Galleani was deported from the United States to Italy in June 1919, his followers are alleged to have executed the Wall Street bombing of 1920, which resulted in the deaths of 38 people. Galleani held forth at local anarchist meetings, assailed "timid" socialists, gave fire-breathing speeches, and continued to write essays and polemical treatises.The foremost proponent of "propaganda by the deed" in the United States, Galleani was the founder and editor of the anarchist newsletter Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), which he published and mailed from offices in Barre.^[91] Galleani published the anarchist newsletter for fifteen years until the United States government closed it down under the Sedition Act of 1918. Galleani attracted numerous radical friends and followers known as "Galleanists", including Frank Abarno, Gabriella Segata Antolini, Pietro Angelo, Luigi Bacchetti, Mario Buda also known as "Mike Boda", Carmine Carbone, Andrea Ciofalo, Ferrucio Coacci, Emilio Coda, Alfredo Conti, Nestor Dondoglioalso known as "Jean Crones", Roberto Elia, Luigi Falzini, Frank Mandese, Riccardo Orciani, Nicola Recchi, Giuseppe Sberna, Andrea Salsedo, Raffaele Schiavina, Carlo Valdinoci, and, most notably, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.^[90]

Sacco and Vanzetti were suspected anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during the 1920

After being arrested while picketing the State House, Edna St. Vincent Millay pleaded her case to the governor in person and then wrote an appeal: "I cry to you with a million voices: answer our doubt ... There is need in Massachusetts of a great man tonight."^[98] Others who wrote to Fuller or signed petitions included Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.^[99] The president of the American Federation of Labor cited "the long period of time intervening between the commission of the crime and the final decision of the Court" as well as "the mental and physical anguish which Sacco and Vanzetti must have undergone during the past seven years" in a telegram to the governor.^[100] In August 1927, the IWW called for a three-day nationwide walkout to protest the pending executions.^[101] The most notable response came in the Walsenburg coal district of Colorado, where 1,132 out of 1,167 miners participated, which led directly to the Colorado coal strike of 1927.^[102] Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, one of the most vocal supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti in Argentina, bombed the American embassy in Buenos Aires a few hours after Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned to death.^[103] A few days after the executions, Sacco's widow thanked Di Giovanni by letter for his support and added that the director of the tobacco firm Combinados had offered to produce a cigarette brand named "Sacco & Vanzetti".^[103] On November 26, 1927, Di Giovanni and others bombed a Combinados tobacco shop.^[103]

The

Anarchism proved to be influential also in the early environmentalist movement in the United States. Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) was an

).

Anarchists became more visible in the 1980s, as a result of publishing, protests and conventions. In 1980, the First International Symposium on Anarchism was held in Portland, Oregon.

anarcho-syndicalist political organization, the WSA published Ideas and Action and affiliated to the International Workers Association (IWA-AIT), an international federation of anarcho-syndicalist unions and groups.^[179]

In the late 1980s, Love and Rage started as a newspaper and in 1991 expanded into a continental federation. It brought new ideas to the movement's mainstream, such as

• 1827-1830: The Cincinnati Time Store is operated by Josiah Warren.
• 1872-1893: The individualist anarchist magazine The Word is published.
• 1880-1882: The New York Social Revolutionary Club is active.
• 1881-1908: The anarchist newspaper Liberty is active.
• 1884: Most–Grottkau debate
• 1886: Haymarket affair
• 1889: Yom Kippur balls celebrations are held by Jewish anarchists in New York city.
• 1890-1977: The anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor) is active.
• 1901: Leon Czolgosz assassinates President McKinley.
• 1903: The Immigration Act of 1903 bans anarchists from immigrating to the USA.
• 1906-1917: The magazine Mother Earth is published.
• 1908: Death of Lazarus Averbuch
• 1910: The Ferrer Center and Colony is founded.
• 1915: IWW member Joe Hill is executed in controversial circumstances.
• 1915: The anarchist Luisa Capetillo becomes the first woman to wear pants in public in Puerto Rico and is arrested.
• 1917: Bay View incident
• 1918: The Immigration Act of 1918 permits the US government to deport anarchists.
• 1918: Youngstown dynamite plot
• 1919: United States anarchist bombings
• 1919-1920: First Red Scare and Palmer Raids
• 1920: Anarchist Andrea Salsedo dies suspiciously while in custody of the BOI.
• 1927: Sacco and Vanzetti
• 1954-1965: The Libertarian Book Club and League are active in New York city.
• 1963: Anarchist and Catholic Worker Tom Cornell leads the first nationally televised protest against the Vietnam War in the USA.
• 1965: Tom Cornell leads the first public act of draft card burning in the USA to protest the Vietnam War.
• 1974: The Institute for Social Ecology is founded.
• 1975-1978: The anarchist guerilla group George Jackson Brigade is active.
• 1980-2016: The ABC No Rio social centre is active in New York city.
• 1984: The anarcho-syndicalist Workers' Solidarity Alliance is founded.
• 1986: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Review begins publication.
• 1987: AK Press is founded.
• 1996: CrimethInc. begins operation.
• 1996: The Institute for Anarchist Studies is formed.
• 1996-2006: The DUMBA social centre is active in New York city.
• 1999: Seattle WTO protests
• 2001: Katie Sierra free speech case
• 2004: Red Emma's is founded in Baltimore.
• 2011: Occupy Wall Street
• 2011-2019: Qilombo is active in California.
• 2017: Portland Anarchist Road Care is active.
• 2019: Tacoma attack - an anarchist attacks an ICE facility
• 2020: Capitol Hill Occupied Protest
• 2023: Killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán
• 2024: Self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell

See also

• American Left
• History of the socialist movement in the United States

References

Bibliography

• OCLC 68772773
  .
• Avrich, Paul (2005) [1980].
  OCLC 85828215
  .
• ISSN 1696-2060
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• OCLC 911230882
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Further reading

• Beswick, Spencer (2022). "From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)".
  S2CID 252748012
  .
• ISBN 978-1-4051-8464-9
  .
• Kuhn, Gabriel; Cohn, Jesse (2009). "Anarchism in the United States, 1946–present". In
  ISBN 978-1-4051-8464-9
  .
• Shaffer, Kirk (2010). "Tropical Libertarians: Anarchist Movements and Networks in the Caribbean, Southern United States, and Mexico, 1890s–1920s". In Hirsch, Steven; van der Walt, Lucien (eds.). Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940. Studies in Global Social History. Leiden: Brill. pp. 273–320.
  ISBN 978-90-04-18849-5
  .
• Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. 2012.^{[ISBN missing}
  ]
• Andrew Cornell. "A new anarchism emerges, 1940–1954" Archived July 21, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
• Andrew Cornell. "Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s." Perspectives 2009. Institute for Anarchist Studies.
• Cornell, Andrew (2016).
  ISBN 978-0-520-28675-7
  .
• James J. Martin Men Against the State: the State the Expositors of Individualist Anarchism. The Adrian Allen Associates, Dekalb, Illinois, 1953.
• Eunice Minette Schuster. Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism.
• Jessica Moran. "The Firebrand and the Forging of a New Anarchism: Anarchist Communism and Free Love Archived April 16, 2021, at the Wayback Machine".
• Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism. Freedom Press, 1996.
• William O. Reichert,
  Partisans of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976.^{[ISBN missing}
  ]
• Rocker, Rudolf. Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America. Rocker Publishing Committee. 1949.^{[ISBN missing]}
• Steve J. Shone. American Anarchism Archived August 13, 2021, at the Wayback Machine. Brill. Leiden and Boston. 2013.
• Kenyon Zimmer,
  Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. ^{[ISBN missing}
  ]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anarchism in the United States.

• "Anarchism in the United States". Spunk Library.
• Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
• Black Rose Anarchist Federation (BRRN).
• Common Ground Collective.
• First of May Anarchist Alliance.
• Institute for Anarchist Studies.
• Workers Solidarity Alliance.