Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (99 page)

Both Williams and Hutchinson were banished, but after the English Revolution the Quakers arrived with their contempt for man-made law, their refusal to make political oaths, their rejection of war, taxes, and military duty, and their unconventional behaviour. In 1682, William Penn might have solemnly prayed that the government of his colony be respected as ‘a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and its end’, but even he felt that earthly laws were superficial compared with the ‘fundamental laws’ revealed by conscience.
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The Protestant right of private judgement or conscience became an ineradicable part of American political culture, and formed the basis of the defence of freedom of thought and speech. It also accounts for the deeply ingrained sense of individualism in American society.

Whatever civic leaders might think or want, life in the New World was largely self-reliant and self-governing, based on mutual aid in difficult and often hostile circumstances. Vast areas were beyond the reach of government. The later expansion to the West was notoriously ‘lawless’, albeit distinguished by greed and injustice, especially from the indigenous peoples’ viewpoint. After the American War of Independence, the founding fathers of the new republic were convinced like Locke for the need for government to protect private property and the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet they were still keen to keep governmental interference to a minimum and adopted the principle of federation to spread political authority throughout the regions. Immediately after the American Revolution, the Articles of Confederation established a minimal government which was both libertarian and decentralized, although it powers were inexorably strengthened in the following decades.

The self-reliant settlers were well aware without reading Thomas Paine’s common-sense strictures on government that ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.’
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Indeed, life in the commonwealth passed off so quietly, and the people spent their time in such peaceful and productive activities that Benjamin Franklin apparently warned the delegates of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention not to stall in drawing up a new government: ‘Gentleman, you see that in the anarchy in which we live society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes last too long, that the people do not come to think that they can very easily do without us.’
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Although Franklin’s ideal was a free and educated people helping themselves and exchanging ideas and goods, he did not go beyond laissez-faire liberalism and question minimal government.

It was Thomas Jefferson who came closest to formulating an anarchist position at this time. He warned against the ‘wolfish’ instincts of the State and suggested that society without government ‘as among our Indians’ might be the happiest condition of humanity.
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The maxim attributed to him ‘That government is best which governs least’ did not appear in his writings, but it has been a rallying cry to libertarians down the centuries. In fact, Jefferson was principally interested in increasing popular participation in government through universal suffrage, not in abolishing political authority all together. ‘The influence over government must be shared among the people,’ he wrote. ‘If every individual which composes the mass participates in the ultimate authority, the government will be safe; because the corrupting of the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth.’
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In addition, as a member of the slave-owning landed gentry, he did not wish to rock the principal pillar of government: private property. But like Proudhon later, he felt that private property could ensure personal autonomy: he acquired the Louisiana Purchase in order to divide it into small farms as a mainstay of freedom.

In the nineteenth century, the indigenous anarchist tradition in the United States took a mainly individualist direction.
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Inspired by the libertarian ideals of Jefferson and Paine and Protestant Dissent, they rejected the State and wanted to turn American society into an association of voluntary agencies. But they did not question the market economy and saw like Proudhon that private property was a guarantee of personal independence. As such most American individualist anarchists might be called ‘right-libertarians’ since they felt capitalism would encourage anarchy.
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In the middle of the century, it was the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, and their kindred spirit Walt Whitman who expressed most keenly the libertarian ideal. Their independent stance directly inspired later anarchists and their combination of ‘transcendental individualism’ with a
search for a simple and creative life close to nature finds echoes this century. The first self-conscious American anarchist however was the musician and inventor Josiah Warren. He became a member of Robert Owen’s Utopian colony New Harmony, but left in 1827 convinced that it had failed. Dubbed the ‘American Proudhon’, he tried to realize a system of ‘equitable commerce’ in which goods are exchanged for the costs of production first in a Time Store and then in the Village of Equity in Ohio and Modern Times on Long Island. He influenced the individualists Stephen Pearl Andrews and Lysander Spooner. William B. Greene then engrafted Proudhon’s mutualism onto the native individualist tradition although the Proudhonians never made many converts.

The most outstanding American individualist anarchist was undoubtedly Benjamin R. Tucker whose journal
Liberty
lasted from 1881 to 1907. He combined Warren’s and Proudhon’s teachings but gave them his own personal stamp and made them applicable to capitalist America. Tucker translated Proudhon and Bakunin into English and supported Kropotkin during his trial at Lyon in 1883, while disagreeing with the declaration of the accused. He called anarchists ‘unterrified Jeffersonians’ and defined anarchism as complete laissez-faire or ‘consistent Manchesterism’. The subtitle of his journal however made sure that Proudhon’s maxim that ‘Order is the daughter of Liberty’ reached a wide audience.

While the indigenous American anarchist tradition was primarily individualist, there was a minority communitarian trend developed by Christian radicals like Adin Ballou and John Humphrey Noyes. They believed that respect for the authority of God meant rejecting the authority of human governments. Ballou advocated a voluntary ‘neighbourhood society’ while Noyes practised a form of communism in the Oneida community which he helped found.

Although Spooner and Greene were both members of the First International, there was no organized anarchist movement in the United States as in Europe until the arrival of anarchist immigrants at the end of the seventies. After the International Social Revolutionary Congress in 1881, two American federations formed. One was a group of Chicago-based Socialist Revolutionaries, made up mainly of immigrants from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They formed the International Working People’s Association (known as the Black International) which was committed to revolutionary action. Another group of Americans in San Francisco founded in the mean time a secret society called the International Workmen’s Association (known as the Red International) which was affiliated to the London International.

The new Europeans immigrants in the 1880s brought in a new wave of communitarian anarchism. Unlike the native American individualists,
who despised the State because it hindered the liberty of the individual and his property, the new left-libertarians attacked the State because it was the mainstay of property and privilege. Rather than stressing the liberty of the individual, they talked of the advantages of solidarity and community.

When Johann Most arrived in New York in 1882, and set up again his journal
Freiheit
, he attempted to channel and organize the energies of the brightly hopeful but desperate workers - with considerable success.
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He wished to unite revolutionaries in their opposition to State and capital. The centre of the anarchist movement remained in Chicago however, especially among the city’s German and Czech immigrants. They sent more delegates than any other city to the second congress of the International held in Pittsburgh in 1883, and made up half of the total American membership of six thousand. Three anarchist papers were published in Chicago alone and enjoyed a wide readership amongst the working class. Initially opposed to the call for an eight-hour day, from 1886 they supported it for tactical reasons, and matched police violence with worker violence.

The agitation reached its peak in Chicago in 1886. On 3 May the police fired on a crowd outside the McCormick Reaper Works which had locked out its men, killing several people. At a protest rally held the next day in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown from a side alley when two hundred police marched into the square as crowds were dispersing in the rain. In the shoot-out which followed seven policemen were killed and possibly three times as many demonstrators, along with sixty others wounded. There was a huge public outcry. Seven anarchists were accused, including Albert Parsons, editor of
Alarm
, and August Spies, one of the editors of
Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung
, despite the absence of evidence to link them to the bombing. One got fifteen years, the others the death penalty, although in the event two had their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. They were released a few years later when an inquiry ordered by Governor Altgeld concluded that the trial had been judicial murder. Of the five condemned to death, one committed suicide the night before the execution. The incident inspired Frank Harris’s novel
The Bomb
, and has been regarded as the greatest inquisition in America since the Salem witch trials.
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The general public really became aware of anarchism in 1886 when news of the Haymarket tragedy hit the headlines. The Chicago anarchists became martyrs for the labour movement, but demons for those in power. The new image of anarchism as a terrorist movement rather than the absurd creed of a few individualist cranks was confirmed when the Russian immigrant Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate in 1892 the financier Henry Clay Frick in revenge for the killing of workers during the Homestead steel strike. The assassination of President McKinley by a young Polish immigrant Leon Czolgosz in 1901 was the last straw. Theodore
Roosevelt, the new President, denounced anarchism in his message to Congress in December 1901 as ‘a crime against the whole human race,’ and urged that ‘all mankind should band against anarchists’. Two years later a law was passed banning alien anarchists and any person ‘who disbelieves in or is opposed to all organized governments’. The new wave of terror led Most to change his tack, since he realized that the masses were as alienated as the rulers by the violence.

The anarchist movement went into decline because of its violent reputation. Most died in 1906, and his
Freiheit
survived him by only four years. With the demise of Tucker’s journal
Liberty
in 1907, American home-grown individualist anarchism lost its principal voice. Primarily amongst the Jewish and Italian groups in the large cities did anarchism stay alive.
Mother Earth
, edited by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman among others, spread the anarchist message from 1906 to 1917. Berkman moved to San Francisco and brought out
Blast
during 1916 and 1917. During the First World War, they helped form the No Conscription League which was crushed in 1917. After the Russian Revolution, they went back with thousands of others to their country of origin, only to become rootless political refugees with the rise of Leninism. In 1919, 247 anarchists and socialists (including Goldman and Berkman) were deported, chiefly to Italy and Eastern Europe.

At the turn of the century, syndicalism began to take off in the American labour movement. Most had been advocating syndicalism and communism throughout the previous decade. In 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded. At first the majority of its delegates were anarchists, but they soon became outnumbered by socialists. The anarchists helped form the syndicalist wing led by ‘Big Bill’ Haywood which broke away from the reformist group led by the Marxist Daniel de Leon. The IWW, or Wobblies as they came to be called, attracted migrant workers in the mines and lumber camps of the West as well as in the factories of the East and Midwest which depended on cheap immigrant labour. They abolished the office of president and insisted that the ‘rank and file must conduct the affairs of the organization directly through an executive based on a central committee’.
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They departed however from the anarcho-syndicalist principle of federalism and tried to organize workers into a dozen or so national unions (although there was some provision for local industrial councils). Berkman lamented in October 1913
in Mother Earth
that the Wobblies had lost sight of the fact that ‘no organization of independent and self-reliant workers is thinkable without complete local autonomy’.
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The issue between local autonomy and central control remained unresolved. As a result, it has been argued on the one hand that syndicalism in America was ‘at most a parallel movement to anarchism’, and on the other, that it substituted ‘romantic
anarcho-utopianism for hard analysis of social and economic realities’.
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In fact, the IWW ended up as a curious blend of Marxism, syndicalism and anarchism.

Despite its impact during a wave of dramatic strikes in 1912 and 1913, it failed to develop in a revolutionary direction and was overtaken by the reformist American Federation of Labor. After the execution of the poet Joe Hill in 1915, it failed to maintain its momentum for long. The initial success of the Russian Revolution won over many of the more militant workers to communism.