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American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
A timely new history of America’s anarchist movement and the government’s tireless efforts to destroy it
In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. American Anarchy tells the gripping tale of the anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles over freedom and power still shape our public life.
In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. American Anarchy tells the gripping tale of the anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles over freedom and power still shape our public life.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2023
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July 4, 2024
Just finished:
"American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century"
By: Michael Willrich
New York: Basic Books, 2023.
The book looks at foreign born anarchists during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He compares government response to them like the government's response to terrorists in the early 21st century.
While the book focuses primarily on Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, it looks at the Haymarket Riot, the Abrams case, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and the Red Scare after WWI, and the formation of the FBI and ACLU.
Initially I thought it was just going about Goldman and Berkman but it had more in store. Eventually the press, public, and some members of the government. I thought the book has a good interplay between the the power of government and the rights of citizens.
"American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century"
By: Michael Willrich
New York: Basic Books, 2023.
The book looks at foreign born anarchists during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He compares government response to them like the government's response to terrorists in the early 21st century.
While the book focuses primarily on Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, it looks at the Haymarket Riot, the Abrams case, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and the Red Scare after WWI, and the formation of the FBI and ACLU.
Initially I thought it was just going about Goldman and Berkman but it had more in store. Eventually the press, public, and some members of the government. I thought the book has a good interplay between the the power of government and the rights of citizens.
March 21, 2024
An impulse grab off the "New Nonfiction" table of the Portsmouth Public Library. Hey, I'm an American! And (some days) I am (kind of) an anarchist! When I read about Biden, Trump, various Congressional clowns, … could anarchy possibly be worse? Then I read about Haiti, Somalia, … yeah, I think probably it could.
The author, Michael Willrich, is a history prof at Brandeis.
Coincidentally, I'm also reading The Individualists by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, an intellectual history of libertarianism, which includes the anarchist flavor of libertarianism. So far, there's not a lot of overlap! Willrich mentions (briefly) Henry George and Benjamin Tucker, that's about it. If you want to read about Lysander Spooner or Albert Jay Nock, you'll have to go elsewhere. (Like The Individualists; it's really very good.)
Willrich concentrates on Emma Goldman and her ideological soulmates, mostly immigrants, many of them Jewish exiles from Tsarist Russia. To the extent they had a coherent philosophy, it was in the mode of Pierre-Joseph "Property is Theft" Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin.
Goldman and her ideological cohort were bitter foes of capitalism; one of Emma's early efforts at "activism" was in plotting the murder of Carnegie Steel's VP, Henry Clay Frick. Her boyfriend, Alexander Berkman, made the attempt, but Frick survived. He went to jail, she didn't. At least not for that.
At the time, US authorities were quite concerned with the possibility of labor unrest mixed with the communistic philosophies of the anarchists giving rise to violent revolution, like in Russia. That fear was not totally unfounded. Fun fact: Wikipedia has a "category" page devoted to anarchist assassins. Thirty-five of them, including (of course) Leon Czolgosz, who did in President McKinley. Czolgosz claimed to have been "set on fire" by a speech he attended, given by, yup, Emma Goldman.
(Willrich barely mentions anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, convicted and excecuted in proceedings largely considered unfair. He doesn't go into whether they were actually guilty. They probably were.)
That fear of anarchist activity quickly turned into the authorities trampling on all kinds of civil liberties, paired with law enforcement's proclivity to thuggish tactics. And that combined with America's entry into World War I; anarchists quickly painted this as a war designed by capitalist plutocrats to defend their ill-gotten privileges. Legislation was passed to (essentially) outlaw dissent, and the anarchists were judged to have run afoul of it. The net was cast wide; to get in legal trouble, you just had to have (at some point) joined an organization whose leadership arguably held (at some point) unacceptable beliefs. You didn't actually need to have expressed those beliefs yourself.
Some non-anarchists were aghast. Others not. After a massive raid carried out by Woodrow Wilson's Department of Justice, the Washington Post regretted the legal hoops law enforcement had to jump through to get these pesky anarchists, and opined "A firing squad would be much more effective and impressive."
Bottom line: many of those anarchists, including Goldman, were eventually deported off to the fledgeling Soviet Union. Not that the USSR was any more congenial to their beliefs. Goldman was surprised and disappointed by Lenin's totalitarianism; he was even more intolerant of anarchist dissent than the American authorities. (I know, quelle surprise, right? I live in the future too.) She wound up bounced out of Russia, living her remaining life in more capitalist countries.
New Hampshire's own Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is a relatively minor character in the book. Willrich doesn't mention her intellectual odyssey, which went from Goldman-style labor activism to full-fledged Communist and Stalinist fangirl.
Margaret Sanger also appears, as cooperating with Goldman in efforts to inform the public about the details of birth control, another sore spot with the authorities. Willrich doesn't go into their embrace of eugenics, something even Planned Parenthood acknowledges these days. (You'd think that would be something a Brandeis prof might find worth mentioning in these days of wokeness, but no.)
In other spots, Willrich wanders into TMI-land. On page 172, we're informed that a primary lawyer for the anarchists, Harry Weinberger, was appointed to be commisioner of deeds by alderman Frank J. Dotzler, who (in turn) "won the Tammany Hall steak-eating contest in 1910 by putting away eleven and a quarter pounds of meat." As near as I can tell, Dotzler does not figure elsewhere in the Willrich's narrative, but if I had been writing the book, I'd have added this 1920 news story: 340 lb Santa Stuck in Chimney. Yep, that was Frank.
Willrich does however, to his credit, reflect on the "great irony" of Goldman's legal struggles with American authorities relying so much on the legal framework of the Constitution. Which her ideology claimed was a sham, designed to protect the oligarchy. Ironic, sure, but how opportunistic and cynical was that strategy? I don't think Willrich goes into that.
February 18, 2024
It's interesting that anarchism has such a resurrection at the turn of the millennium with the WTO protests in Seattle in Montreal, and then after 9/11, was shut down even more forcefully than the crackdown this book narrates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I'm always interested in the histories - often of women and radical movements - that have been not so much forgotten as actively repressed or erased. Something more forceful and intentional than forgetting.
"American parents warned their naughty children to behave or Emma Goldman would get them" (5).
J Edgar Hoover started his career as head of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, "compiling a card catalog of subversives and sympathizers that ran to 200,000 names" (6). "Deporting them would launch his meteoric public career, leading to his near half-century tenure at the helm of the FBI." And he was on the barge that took Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman to their ship when they were deported on December 21, 1919. Emma said, "This is the beginning of the end of the US. Time was when this country had professed to welcome the downtrodden of other lands. At that time Russia was deporting men and women to Siberia for their political beliefs. Now it was reversed. A free Russia had arisen. As the old Russ had fallen, so the new US would fall, and for the same reasons" (7).
This made me think of arguements about the rise of neoliberalism, and the way in which the fall of the Berlin Wall hollowed out the left and gave the impression that capitalism had "won." But Fanon writes of the need for a third way for the oppressed, not having to choose between the thieves of western capitalism and the dispossessed of their victims.
Emma often chided her attorney, Harry Weinberger, for being "'credulous'. How could he actually believe that, in America, the law was anything more than so much patriotic bunting, which the state draped over everything in order to hide the real violence and injustice of capitalism, militarism, and nativism" (11). Author considers his book tale of two "utopian visions": anarchism and the rule of law. (11).
In 1886 1400 strikes involved half a million workers (In 2023, there were 400 strikes involving half a million workers https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024..., in a country with 63 million people, one fifth the present number. They were striking for the eight hour day, which did not become federal law until 1939 - nearly sixty years later. "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will" was their cry (18).
A bomb was thrown at the demonstration at Haymarket, and in the ensuing melee, a number of police and bystanders were arrested. Eight anarchists were put on trial, including Albert Parsons, whose wife was Lucy Parsons. News of the Haymarket martyrs inspired Sasha Berkman in Kovno, "the small river port city in the Pale of Settlement where the brilliant but rebellious boy lived under the guardianship of an uncle" (22).
During the movement's heyday, which lasted from the 1871 Paris Commune through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, there were many" (mutualist, individualist, communist, syndicalist, pacifist and terrorist, direct action, protests, strikes, industrial sabotage, newspapers, schools, and theater. (23). _Mother Earth_ offered a concise definition: "Anarchism -- the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest of violence and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary" (23).
Hungarian emigre historian Oscar Jaszi summarizes that anarchists believe people are basically good unless corrupted by governments. "Anarchists wanted a society without formal structures of authority - without government and laws, above all, but also without churches, patriarchal families, and business monopolies. In such a society, they believed, equality would flourish, and individuals would be free to realize their true capacities. Without the artificial legal institution of private property, propped up by the coercive force of the state, capitalism and class rule would cease to exist. Basic human wants would be provided by a decentralized network of voluntary associations" (24).
French theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote in the 1840s that "property is theft" (25). Kropotkin and Bakhunin were leading voices.
Johann Most trained Emma as a public speaker for nearly two years (63). "Wexler writes 'the particular hallmarks of her early style - her aggressive, combative stance toward her audiences, her use of ridicule and sarcasm -- were all the legacy of Johann Most" (63).
Goldman later whipped Most on stage at the Oddfellows Hall (72) when they had a disagreement about Most's view of the attentat against Frick, when Most called Berkman "a glory-seeking traitor" (72).
Nelly Bly, who had bested the fictional record of 80 days to travel around the world, interviewed Goldman in prison and called her not "the capitalist-killing, riot-promoting agitator," but "A little bit of a girl, just 5 feet high, including her bootheels, not showing her 120 pounds; with a saucy, turned up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes that gazed inquiringly at me through shell-rimmed glasses" (80).
In 1894, an anarchist assassinated President Marie Francois Sadi Carnot of France (84). On July 29, 1900, Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto * of Italy. "The King was the fourth world leader in six years to die at the hands of an anarchist." Prime Minster Antonio Canovas del Castillo of Spain in 1897, and Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898. (87). On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley (89). Goldman refused to denounce him. Berkman did not support the act, because "in America, where republican institutions rested upon the hegemony of democratic ideals - the popular delusion of self-government and independence,' as Berkman put it - the president (though he may be the the chief representative of our modern slavery') was not an immediate enemy. 'In modern capitalism, exploitation rather than oppression is the real enemy of the people. Oppression is but its handmaid. Therefore the battle is to be waged in the economic rather than the political field'" (97).
The broad reach of the 1903 immigration act brought liberal reformers as an audience for Emma's lectures on free speech (103). In the decade after the assassination of McKinley, "America's 'Queen of the Anarchists" lectured on anarchism, free speech, free love, family limitation, women's emancipation, and literature. She spoke to huge meetings of wage earners and to small salons of the well-educated and respectable middle class" (107). She launched Mother Earth in 1906. Man Ray was one of its photopgrapher/illustrators (126).
1912 strike of 20,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, strikers began to starve. "Haywood and Tresca came up with a solution: send the children to live with sympathizers in New York, Philadelphia, and Barre, Vermont. The tactic helped turn the tide. And the arrival of 119 emaciated children from Lawrence, in the dead of winter, at a Grand Central Station teeming with sympathizers and news photographers, became a national event. Accompanying the children from Lawrence was a little-known nurse and socialist organizer named Margaret Sanger" (128). Led to wage increases across the industry.
1914 protests by the unemployed and Ludlow massacre in CO led to Berkman's idea to take the fight to the home of John D Rockefeller (who had a controlling interest in the mine) in Tarrytown, and then to detonate a bomb there (132).
In May 1914 Sanger launched "Woman Rebel" a new monthly of militant thought championing feminism, anarchism, and radical unionism, motto "No Gods No Masters." First issue included IWW Preamble and a "polemic against marriage" written by Goldman. Ben Reitman sold it at Emma's lectures. 1914-1917 "no radical cause sold better in America than the one Sanger called the 'propaganda of birth control'" (135) and allowed anarchists to repair their reputation after disaster of Lexington Avenue bomb disaster.
William Sanger was arrested and said "I deny the right of the State to exercise dominion over the souls and bodies of our women by compelling them to go into unwilling motherhood" (141). Margaret wrote her sister, "Bill had to get mixed up in my work after all, and of course make it harder for me and all of us" (141).
Random fact I didn't know: by 1910, 55% of NY public high school graduates were Jewish (163).
From 1798 to World War I, the US had no "federal legislation against seditious expression." (193)
"During a career of almost thirty years as America's most infamous anarchist, [Goldman] had been sentenced to prison (the workhouse) only twice. That was not dumb luck. Goldman was smart, law smart" (208).
239 Berkman's anarchist newsletter was called _The Blast_.
Even after Goldman had been in prison for 7 months, some folks thought she was still masterminding the anarchist movement (271).
"The acts of brutality described by the suspects in military police custody do not seem spontaneous or unique to their case. The acts have the quality of ritual, a political ritual of domination and degradation" (274).
When Weinberger delivered bail, nearly $28k was in Liberty Bonds - lovely irony (299).
Goldman turned 50 in prison, sixteen months into her term in June 1919. (302).
From January-June 1910, she delivered 120 lectures to 40,000 people in 37 cities (120).
I'm always interested in the histories - often of women and radical movements - that have been not so much forgotten as actively repressed or erased. Something more forceful and intentional than forgetting.
"American parents warned their naughty children to behave or Emma Goldman would get them" (5).
J Edgar Hoover started his career as head of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, "compiling a card catalog of subversives and sympathizers that ran to 200,000 names" (6). "Deporting them would launch his meteoric public career, leading to his near half-century tenure at the helm of the FBI." And he was on the barge that took Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman to their ship when they were deported on December 21, 1919. Emma said, "This is the beginning of the end of the US. Time was when this country had professed to welcome the downtrodden of other lands. At that time Russia was deporting men and women to Siberia for their political beliefs. Now it was reversed. A free Russia had arisen. As the old Russ had fallen, so the new US would fall, and for the same reasons" (7).
This made me think of arguements about the rise of neoliberalism, and the way in which the fall of the Berlin Wall hollowed out the left and gave the impression that capitalism had "won." But Fanon writes of the need for a third way for the oppressed, not having to choose between the thieves of western capitalism and the dispossessed of their victims.
Emma often chided her attorney, Harry Weinberger, for being "'credulous'. How could he actually believe that, in America, the law was anything more than so much patriotic bunting, which the state draped over everything in order to hide the real violence and injustice of capitalism, militarism, and nativism" (11). Author considers his book tale of two "utopian visions": anarchism and the rule of law. (11).
In 1886 1400 strikes involved half a million workers (In 2023, there were 400 strikes involving half a million workers https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024..., in a country with 63 million people, one fifth the present number. They were striking for the eight hour day, which did not become federal law until 1939 - nearly sixty years later. "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will" was their cry (18).
A bomb was thrown at the demonstration at Haymarket, and in the ensuing melee, a number of police and bystanders were arrested. Eight anarchists were put on trial, including Albert Parsons, whose wife was Lucy Parsons. News of the Haymarket martyrs inspired Sasha Berkman in Kovno, "the small river port city in the Pale of Settlement where the brilliant but rebellious boy lived under the guardianship of an uncle" (22).
During the movement's heyday, which lasted from the 1871 Paris Commune through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, there were many" (mutualist, individualist, communist, syndicalist, pacifist and terrorist, direct action, protests, strikes, industrial sabotage, newspapers, schools, and theater. (23). _Mother Earth_ offered a concise definition: "Anarchism -- the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest of violence and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary" (23).
Hungarian emigre historian Oscar Jaszi summarizes that anarchists believe people are basically good unless corrupted by governments. "Anarchists wanted a society without formal structures of authority - without government and laws, above all, but also without churches, patriarchal families, and business monopolies. In such a society, they believed, equality would flourish, and individuals would be free to realize their true capacities. Without the artificial legal institution of private property, propped up by the coercive force of the state, capitalism and class rule would cease to exist. Basic human wants would be provided by a decentralized network of voluntary associations" (24).
French theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote in the 1840s that "property is theft" (25). Kropotkin and Bakhunin were leading voices.
Johann Most trained Emma as a public speaker for nearly two years (63). "Wexler writes 'the particular hallmarks of her early style - her aggressive, combative stance toward her audiences, her use of ridicule and sarcasm -- were all the legacy of Johann Most" (63).
Goldman later whipped Most on stage at the Oddfellows Hall (72) when they had a disagreement about Most's view of the attentat against Frick, when Most called Berkman "a glory-seeking traitor" (72).
Nelly Bly, who had bested the fictional record of 80 days to travel around the world, interviewed Goldman in prison and called her not "the capitalist-killing, riot-promoting agitator," but "A little bit of a girl, just 5 feet high, including her bootheels, not showing her 120 pounds; with a saucy, turned up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes that gazed inquiringly at me through shell-rimmed glasses" (80).
In 1894, an anarchist assassinated President Marie Francois Sadi Carnot of France (84). On July 29, 1900, Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto * of Italy. "The King was the fourth world leader in six years to die at the hands of an anarchist." Prime Minster Antonio Canovas del Castillo of Spain in 1897, and Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898. (87). On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley (89). Goldman refused to denounce him. Berkman did not support the act, because "in America, where republican institutions rested upon the hegemony of democratic ideals - the popular delusion of self-government and independence,' as Berkman put it - the president (though he may be the the chief representative of our modern slavery') was not an immediate enemy. 'In modern capitalism, exploitation rather than oppression is the real enemy of the people. Oppression is but its handmaid. Therefore the battle is to be waged in the economic rather than the political field'" (97).
The broad reach of the 1903 immigration act brought liberal reformers as an audience for Emma's lectures on free speech (103). In the decade after the assassination of McKinley, "America's 'Queen of the Anarchists" lectured on anarchism, free speech, free love, family limitation, women's emancipation, and literature. She spoke to huge meetings of wage earners and to small salons of the well-educated and respectable middle class" (107). She launched Mother Earth in 1906. Man Ray was one of its photopgrapher/illustrators (126).
1912 strike of 20,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, strikers began to starve. "Haywood and Tresca came up with a solution: send the children to live with sympathizers in New York, Philadelphia, and Barre, Vermont. The tactic helped turn the tide. And the arrival of 119 emaciated children from Lawrence, in the dead of winter, at a Grand Central Station teeming with sympathizers and news photographers, became a national event. Accompanying the children from Lawrence was a little-known nurse and socialist organizer named Margaret Sanger" (128). Led to wage increases across the industry.
1914 protests by the unemployed and Ludlow massacre in CO led to Berkman's idea to take the fight to the home of John D Rockefeller (who had a controlling interest in the mine) in Tarrytown, and then to detonate a bomb there (132).
In May 1914 Sanger launched "Woman Rebel" a new monthly of militant thought championing feminism, anarchism, and radical unionism, motto "No Gods No Masters." First issue included IWW Preamble and a "polemic against marriage" written by Goldman. Ben Reitman sold it at Emma's lectures. 1914-1917 "no radical cause sold better in America than the one Sanger called the 'propaganda of birth control'" (135) and allowed anarchists to repair their reputation after disaster of Lexington Avenue bomb disaster.
William Sanger was arrested and said "I deny the right of the State to exercise dominion over the souls and bodies of our women by compelling them to go into unwilling motherhood" (141). Margaret wrote her sister, "Bill had to get mixed up in my work after all, and of course make it harder for me and all of us" (141).
Random fact I didn't know: by 1910, 55% of NY public high school graduates were Jewish (163).
From 1798 to World War I, the US had no "federal legislation against seditious expression." (193)
"During a career of almost thirty years as America's most infamous anarchist, [Goldman] had been sentenced to prison (the workhouse) only twice. That was not dumb luck. Goldman was smart, law smart" (208).
239 Berkman's anarchist newsletter was called _The Blast_.
Even after Goldman had been in prison for 7 months, some folks thought she was still masterminding the anarchist movement (271).
"The acts of brutality described by the suspects in military police custody do not seem spontaneous or unique to their case. The acts have the quality of ritual, a political ritual of domination and degradation" (274).
When Weinberger delivered bail, nearly $28k was in Liberty Bonds - lovely irony (299).
Goldman turned 50 in prison, sixteen months into her term in June 1919. (302).
From January-June 1910, she delivered 120 lectures to 40,000 people in 37 cities (120).
February 11, 2024
This book is well written and informative, but dense and a bit dry at parts. I learned a lot but had to give up reading it.
June 9, 2025
Emma Goldman was the most well known American anarchist. There were many others at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most, like Emma, were not bomb throwers although they were hated and feared by a large segment of the American public. Emma was a passionate speaker, full of fury at the plight of working people under an oppressive capitalist system. She spoke to the thousands of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who were struggling to keep hope alive and bread on the table. For the content of her speech she was jailed numerous times.
In 1917, as the United States was drawn into the Great War a wave of repression spread over the land criminalizing dissent, especially speaking out against conscription laws. Anarchists, socialists,communists, labor organizers were rounded up on the flimsy pretext of sabotaging the war effort. One group of young anarchists distributed antiwar leaflets from a rooftop in New York city. For that they were arrested, beaten, tried, and sentenced to 10 or 20 years in prison. One arrestee died. Most anarchists were recent immigrants and the country was aflame to chase them from its borders. They were a foreign element poisoning the water of a great society. Sound familiar?
In this tale there are a few heroes. Lawyer Harry Weinberger, trained in night school, not a member of a prestigious white shoe law firm, gave his all to obtain justice and the often promised freedom of speech for his clients. Louis F. Post, an Assistant Secretary of Labor stood up to a hostile Congress, J Edgar Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. It was Post's job to deport immigrant prisoners. Instead, he freed many and prevented others from being deported. His courage seemed to inspire a nation. Anti-immigrant vitriol slowly evaporated soon after his actions.
This book both inspires despair at the fragility of our constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and it also evokes a hope that in time our country will remember and live up to its stated foundations.
In 1917, as the United States was drawn into the Great War a wave of repression spread over the land criminalizing dissent, especially speaking out against conscription laws. Anarchists, socialists,communists, labor organizers were rounded up on the flimsy pretext of sabotaging the war effort. One group of young anarchists distributed antiwar leaflets from a rooftop in New York city. For that they were arrested, beaten, tried, and sentenced to 10 or 20 years in prison. One arrestee died. Most anarchists were recent immigrants and the country was aflame to chase them from its borders. They were a foreign element poisoning the water of a great society. Sound familiar?
In this tale there are a few heroes. Lawyer Harry Weinberger, trained in night school, not a member of a prestigious white shoe law firm, gave his all to obtain justice and the often promised freedom of speech for his clients. Louis F. Post, an Assistant Secretary of Labor stood up to a hostile Congress, J Edgar Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. It was Post's job to deport immigrant prisoners. Instead, he freed many and prevented others from being deported. His courage seemed to inspire a nation. Anti-immigrant vitriol slowly evaporated soon after his actions.
This book both inspires despair at the fragility of our constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and it also evokes a hope that in time our country will remember and live up to its stated foundations.
January 5, 2026
Disappointed asf
December 28, 2023
Looking forward to discussing this book in my Immigrants in American History class.
Here are my notes:
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Michael Willrich
P.9 When the United States entered World War I in 1917, virtually no one in America– neither the agents of the Bureau of Investigation, the justices of the US Supreme Court, nor, least of all, the anarchists themselves– actually believed that the Constitution offered the slimmest protection for noncitizen radicals and their political ideas.
P.11 This book is the story of two antithetical utopian ideals– anarchism and the rule of law– and the extraordinary individuals whose living out of those ideals under the most trying of circumstances helped change the course of American history. It is also the tale of a powerful democratic nation that for a time (and not for the last time) suspended its most fundamental principles and freedoms for the illusion of security
P.12 The federal government’s grave concerns about politically marginal immigrants who challenged established ideas about institutions stand in stark contrast to its virtual indifference to the surging incidence of lawless white violence against Black Americans during the same period.
P.13 In the late nineteenth century, the distinctive traditions of localism and federalism in the United States ensured that American responses to anarchist activities remained local, episodic, and dramatic in their violence. The signature episode was the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. The incident left seven policemen and an unknown number of civilians dead. The state hung four anarchists after a local trial that was so lacking in fair procedures that anarchists forever after called it, without much exaggeration, an act of “judicial murder.”
P.23 Anarchists were not a political party. They viewed politics as a rigged game played by fools. As befitted a stunningly cosmopolitan international movement whose ultimate aim was “anarchy” – from the Greek anarkhia, meaning with a chief or head” – anarchists differed on ideas, goals, and tactics. During the movement’s heyday, which lasted from the 1871 Paris Commune through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, there were “mutualist” anarchists, “individualist” 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. During their long American careers, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman advocated or tried their hand at all of the above.
P.24 Anarchists struggled simultaneously against the dead hand of the past and the messianic inevitability that animated both the Marxian revolutionary and the liberal-democratic visions of modern centralized industrial states. “The anarchists were thus obliged to accumulate enemies: to the landlords and priests of the old order were soon added the revolutionary tyrants and bureaucrats who were being produced by the movements that aimed at creating the new society.”
P.30 … anarchists assumed their rhetoric of violence would appeal to American workers for the simple reason that violence was so present in their lives. American industrial workplaces were exceptionally hazardous by European standards, leaving nearly a hundred workers dead each day. American judges used common law doctrines to insulate employers from liability for workplace accidents. Employers hired armed private security forces and relied on club-wielding police to defend their property from strikers. It is in this context that anarchists’ claims to be acting in self-defense are to be understood.
P.58 Citizenship and patriarchy were powerfully intertwined in the public law of the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1855 provided that an alien woman who married a male US citizen automatically became a citizen herself.
P.84 In August 1894, less than two months after an anarchist assassinated President Marie Francois Sadi Carnot of France, the US Senate passed a bill to bar alien anarchists from entering the United States and to allow deportation of nonnaturalized alien anarchists already living in the country
P.86 On July 29, 1900, the Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto I of Italy. The king was the fourth world leader in six years to die at the hands of an anarchist.
P.89 On September 6, 1901,a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed factory worker named Leon Czolgosz approached President William F. McKinley on a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and shot him twice in the stomach with a 32-caliber revolver. The president died from his wounds eight days later.
P.91 The McKinley assassination marked the beginning of a new era in the political history of anarchism in the United States, when the state and federal governments rolled out powerful new laws and institutions to eradicate anarchism.
P.101 When Congress finally did act, it used its plenary authority to control immigration rather than its far more limited powers in the field of criminal law.
P.102 On March 3, 1903, Congress enacted, and the next day President Thedore Roosevelt signed, a bold omnibus immigration law that created a more elaborate federal machinery for immigration enforcement than had ever existed in the United States… The 1903 Immigration Act marked the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that Congress had authorized barring the entry of foreigners for their political beliefs.
P.160 Eastern European Jews swelled the population of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1900, the city had a half million Jewish residents roughly 15 percent of the total population. Within a decade, the number had doubled, and more than a quarter of all New Yorkers were Jewish… Among the era’s major immigrant groups, the eastern European Jews were distinctive in many respects. Theirs was largely a migration of families who intended from the outset to settle permanently in America. They arrived with a relatively high level of literacy, and their children flocked to the city’s public high schools.
P.189 The war gave vivid expression to the enduring tension between the liberal ideal of the rule of law and the ideal of “real liberty” at the heart of the anarchist creed. In liberal-democratic constitutional theory, wartimes are exceptional moments. States seize powers unimaginable during peacetime, suspending the normal legal restraints on power in order to ensure the survival of the sovereign– and thus the law itself.
P.291 The 1918 Immigration Act ran just three paragraphs, and its passage was scarcely noted in the newspapers. But the new law had an extraordinary reach. It authorized the secretary of labor to deport any person identified as a noncitizen and an anarchist, or merely a noncitizen who thought like an anarchist– no matter how long that person had lived in the United States. The act applied, with equal force, to “aliens who disbelieve in or are opposed to all organized government” and “ to aliens who advocate or teach the assassination of public officials.” The long nettlesome distinction between philosophical anarchists and violent terrorists was gone. More important, the new law eliminated the troublesome issue of individual culpability. Merely being a member of an organization that advocated “anarchistic” ideas was now sufficient cause for deportation.The statute gave to the secretary of labor– and, in practice, his high-level subordinates at the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Immigration– near total discretion to decide what organizations might fit that description.
P.295 [May Day plot– April 29 and June 2] As American leaders of politics and opinion loudly marshaled xenophobic and eugenics-tinged rhetoric to demand plainer lines and sturdier gates, all meaningful distinctions between anarchists, Bolshevists, and other working-class radicals blurred into red.
P.297 The most momentous steps were taken at the national level. The federal state– early twentieth-century Americans called it simply “the government” – was the least likely political unit to lead a peacetime fight against anarchy. By constitutional tradition, the federal government had no general police power. Its criminal code was largely confined to interstate offenses of an economic character, and its capacity to enforce laws was limited
P.300 Having failed to persuade Congress to enact a peacetime sedition act, Palmer and his advisers at the Justice Department reached for the most powerful tool left on the shelf: the Immigration Act of October 1918. …. The plan was to join the investigative resources of the Justice Department to the statutory powers of deportation held by the Department of Labor. Extending its “fullest” cooperation to the Labor Department, the Justice Department would in effect bring immigration enforcement onshore. Marshaling the power of an administrative process largely unrestrained by the due process standards of the criminal law, these architects of the expanding surveillance state imagined an America purged of anarchists and other “Reds,” one shipload at a time. Building upon precedents stretching back to the late nineteenth century, the public leaders of this campaign explicitly framed the war on anarchy as a war against noncitizens.
P.324 On November 21, Goldman and Berkman embarked upon their farewell lecture tour, with extended stops in Detroit and Chicago. Speaking to packed union halls and sold-out auditoriums, they addressed the three topics foremost in their minds: amnesty for the many prisoners still incarcerated under the wartime statutes, abolition of the American prison system, and their fight against the federal government’s deportation program….
P.347 The Eighth Amendment signals the importance of bail as an institution in the American legal system, declaring that “Excessive bail shall not be required.” Even a relatively low bail of $500 could be well beyond the means of an alien in a deportation case
P.349 Habeas proceedings were a first and last resort in deportation cases– the only means available to get a detainee’s case lifted from the administrative process into a court of law. But cause lawyers like Recht and Weinberger turned habeas petitions into a formidable tool. The lawyers used habeas applications to demand access for their clients to counsel, bail, and other basic rights of due process. By bringing cases from closed hearing rooms into the public forum of a US District Court, lawyers invited press coverage that could turn even a losing case into a propaganda win. Habeas proceedings in New York, Boston, and Butte, Montana, produced some of the first detailed records of the Palmer raids, serving as essential documentary resources for te public investigations and congressional hearings that later dampened public support for the Justice Department and helped bring an end to the “Red crusade.”
P.369 [Pou to Post] “You realized, of course, Mr. Secretary, that all of these rules that you laid down… that every one of them operates to make it more difficult to deport the alien?”
“Every rule in the interest of liberty makes it more difficult to take personal liberty away from a man who is entitled to his liberty,” Post answered. “The question of innocence or guilt has that thrown around it.”
P.374 It s the great irony of the story told in these pages that the many trials of the anarchists-working-class thinkers who denounced the liberal ideal of the rule of law as dangerous delusion– breathed new life into the Bill of Rights and spurred probing public debate about the proper legal limits of government power in modern America.
P.378 The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act..dramatically reduced the total number of immigrants admitted to the United States each year. The statute effectively banned all immigration from Asia, and it established “national origins” quotas, which limited the yearly number of immigrants of any single nationality group to 2 percent of their total number in the 1890 Census. The explicit purpose of the law was to turn back the demographic clock to the age before the arrival of millions of Italians, Jews, and the members of other undesirable “races” from southern and eastern Europe.
Here are my notes:
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Michael Willrich
P.9 When the United States entered World War I in 1917, virtually no one in America– neither the agents of the Bureau of Investigation, the justices of the US Supreme Court, nor, least of all, the anarchists themselves– actually believed that the Constitution offered the slimmest protection for noncitizen radicals and their political ideas.
P.11 This book is the story of two antithetical utopian ideals– anarchism and the rule of law– and the extraordinary individuals whose living out of those ideals under the most trying of circumstances helped change the course of American history. It is also the tale of a powerful democratic nation that for a time (and not for the last time) suspended its most fundamental principles and freedoms for the illusion of security
P.12 The federal government’s grave concerns about politically marginal immigrants who challenged established ideas about institutions stand in stark contrast to its virtual indifference to the surging incidence of lawless white violence against Black Americans during the same period.
P.13 In the late nineteenth century, the distinctive traditions of localism and federalism in the United States ensured that American responses to anarchist activities remained local, episodic, and dramatic in their violence. The signature episode was the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. The incident left seven policemen and an unknown number of civilians dead. The state hung four anarchists after a local trial that was so lacking in fair procedures that anarchists forever after called it, without much exaggeration, an act of “judicial murder.”
P.23 Anarchists were not a political party. They viewed politics as a rigged game played by fools. As befitted a stunningly cosmopolitan international movement whose ultimate aim was “anarchy” – from the Greek anarkhia, meaning with a chief or head” – anarchists differed on ideas, goals, and tactics. During the movement’s heyday, which lasted from the 1871 Paris Commune through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, there were “mutualist” anarchists, “individualist” 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. During their long American careers, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman advocated or tried their hand at all of the above.
P.24 Anarchists struggled simultaneously against the dead hand of the past and the messianic inevitability that animated both the Marxian revolutionary and the liberal-democratic visions of modern centralized industrial states. “The anarchists were thus obliged to accumulate enemies: to the landlords and priests of the old order were soon added the revolutionary tyrants and bureaucrats who were being produced by the movements that aimed at creating the new society.”
P.30 … anarchists assumed their rhetoric of violence would appeal to American workers for the simple reason that violence was so present in their lives. American industrial workplaces were exceptionally hazardous by European standards, leaving nearly a hundred workers dead each day. American judges used common law doctrines to insulate employers from liability for workplace accidents. Employers hired armed private security forces and relied on club-wielding police to defend their property from strikers. It is in this context that anarchists’ claims to be acting in self-defense are to be understood.
P.58 Citizenship and patriarchy were powerfully intertwined in the public law of the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1855 provided that an alien woman who married a male US citizen automatically became a citizen herself.
P.84 In August 1894, less than two months after an anarchist assassinated President Marie Francois Sadi Carnot of France, the US Senate passed a bill to bar alien anarchists from entering the United States and to allow deportation of nonnaturalized alien anarchists already living in the country
P.86 On July 29, 1900, the Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto I of Italy. The king was the fourth world leader in six years to die at the hands of an anarchist.
P.89 On September 6, 1901,a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed factory worker named Leon Czolgosz approached President William F. McKinley on a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and shot him twice in the stomach with a 32-caliber revolver. The president died from his wounds eight days later.
P.91 The McKinley assassination marked the beginning of a new era in the political history of anarchism in the United States, when the state and federal governments rolled out powerful new laws and institutions to eradicate anarchism.
P.101 When Congress finally did act, it used its plenary authority to control immigration rather than its far more limited powers in the field of criminal law.
P.102 On March 3, 1903, Congress enacted, and the next day President Thedore Roosevelt signed, a bold omnibus immigration law that created a more elaborate federal machinery for immigration enforcement than had ever existed in the United States… The 1903 Immigration Act marked the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that Congress had authorized barring the entry of foreigners for their political beliefs.
P.160 Eastern European Jews swelled the population of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1900, the city had a half million Jewish residents roughly 15 percent of the total population. Within a decade, the number had doubled, and more than a quarter of all New Yorkers were Jewish… Among the era’s major immigrant groups, the eastern European Jews were distinctive in many respects. Theirs was largely a migration of families who intended from the outset to settle permanently in America. They arrived with a relatively high level of literacy, and their children flocked to the city’s public high schools.
P.189 The war gave vivid expression to the enduring tension between the liberal ideal of the rule of law and the ideal of “real liberty” at the heart of the anarchist creed. In liberal-democratic constitutional theory, wartimes are exceptional moments. States seize powers unimaginable during peacetime, suspending the normal legal restraints on power in order to ensure the survival of the sovereign– and thus the law itself.
P.291 The 1918 Immigration Act ran just three paragraphs, and its passage was scarcely noted in the newspapers. But the new law had an extraordinary reach. It authorized the secretary of labor to deport any person identified as a noncitizen and an anarchist, or merely a noncitizen who thought like an anarchist– no matter how long that person had lived in the United States. The act applied, with equal force, to “aliens who disbelieve in or are opposed to all organized government” and “ to aliens who advocate or teach the assassination of public officials.” The long nettlesome distinction between philosophical anarchists and violent terrorists was gone. More important, the new law eliminated the troublesome issue of individual culpability. Merely being a member of an organization that advocated “anarchistic” ideas was now sufficient cause for deportation.The statute gave to the secretary of labor– and, in practice, his high-level subordinates at the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Immigration– near total discretion to decide what organizations might fit that description.
P.295 [May Day plot– April 29 and June 2] As American leaders of politics and opinion loudly marshaled xenophobic and eugenics-tinged rhetoric to demand plainer lines and sturdier gates, all meaningful distinctions between anarchists, Bolshevists, and other working-class radicals blurred into red.
P.297 The most momentous steps were taken at the national level. The federal state– early twentieth-century Americans called it simply “the government” – was the least likely political unit to lead a peacetime fight against anarchy. By constitutional tradition, the federal government had no general police power. Its criminal code was largely confined to interstate offenses of an economic character, and its capacity to enforce laws was limited
P.300 Having failed to persuade Congress to enact a peacetime sedition act, Palmer and his advisers at the Justice Department reached for the most powerful tool left on the shelf: the Immigration Act of October 1918. …. The plan was to join the investigative resources of the Justice Department to the statutory powers of deportation held by the Department of Labor. Extending its “fullest” cooperation to the Labor Department, the Justice Department would in effect bring immigration enforcement onshore. Marshaling the power of an administrative process largely unrestrained by the due process standards of the criminal law, these architects of the expanding surveillance state imagined an America purged of anarchists and other “Reds,” one shipload at a time. Building upon precedents stretching back to the late nineteenth century, the public leaders of this campaign explicitly framed the war on anarchy as a war against noncitizens.
P.324 On November 21, Goldman and Berkman embarked upon their farewell lecture tour, with extended stops in Detroit and Chicago. Speaking to packed union halls and sold-out auditoriums, they addressed the three topics foremost in their minds: amnesty for the many prisoners still incarcerated under the wartime statutes, abolition of the American prison system, and their fight against the federal government’s deportation program….
P.347 The Eighth Amendment signals the importance of bail as an institution in the American legal system, declaring that “Excessive bail shall not be required.” Even a relatively low bail of $500 could be well beyond the means of an alien in a deportation case
P.349 Habeas proceedings were a first and last resort in deportation cases– the only means available to get a detainee’s case lifted from the administrative process into a court of law. But cause lawyers like Recht and Weinberger turned habeas petitions into a formidable tool. The lawyers used habeas applications to demand access for their clients to counsel, bail, and other basic rights of due process. By bringing cases from closed hearing rooms into the public forum of a US District Court, lawyers invited press coverage that could turn even a losing case into a propaganda win. Habeas proceedings in New York, Boston, and Butte, Montana, produced some of the first detailed records of the Palmer raids, serving as essential documentary resources for te public investigations and congressional hearings that later dampened public support for the Justice Department and helped bring an end to the “Red crusade.”
P.369 [Pou to Post] “You realized, of course, Mr. Secretary, that all of these rules that you laid down… that every one of them operates to make it more difficult to deport the alien?”
“Every rule in the interest of liberty makes it more difficult to take personal liberty away from a man who is entitled to his liberty,” Post answered. “The question of innocence or guilt has that thrown around it.”
P.374 It s the great irony of the story told in these pages that the many trials of the anarchists-working-class thinkers who denounced the liberal ideal of the rule of law as dangerous delusion– breathed new life into the Bill of Rights and spurred probing public debate about the proper legal limits of government power in modern America.
P.378 The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act..dramatically reduced the total number of immigrants admitted to the United States each year. The statute effectively banned all immigration from Asia, and it established “national origins” quotas, which limited the yearly number of immigrants of any single nationality group to 2 percent of their total number in the 1890 Census. The explicit purpose of the law was to turn back the demographic clock to the age before the arrival of millions of Italians, Jews, and the members of other undesirable “races” from southern and eastern Europe.
December 8, 2023
This is an excellent book that traces anarchistic movement in America in the early 29th century. The book starts out at the events leading up to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886. The result was the hanging of four “anarchists” for killing a policeman. The book then traces anarchism through the careers of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.
We learn how the backlash against radical groups after the assassination of President McKinley on 1901. The government began a campaign against radical groups using surveillance, infiltration and brutal repression. Civil rights of the suspected anarchists were ignored and violated. Racism was also a factor many of the radical were Jewish and from Eastern Europe and Italy. The situation worsened during World War One. Immigration laws were passed to limit immigration from undesirable countries. Deportation became a major weapon against radicals.
The reader learns about many groups that were persecuted: the IWW, birth control advocates, socialists and ethnic social organizations.
The bright spot in all this oppression was the lawyers and groups that were formed to fight back against the oppression and defend the civil rights of the accused. The First Amendment becomes one of focal points in this struggle.
This is an informative and fascinating book.
We learn how the backlash against radical groups after the assassination of President McKinley on 1901. The government began a campaign against radical groups using surveillance, infiltration and brutal repression. Civil rights of the suspected anarchists were ignored and violated. Racism was also a factor many of the radical were Jewish and from Eastern Europe and Italy. The situation worsened during World War One. Immigration laws were passed to limit immigration from undesirable countries. Deportation became a major weapon against radicals.
The reader learns about many groups that were persecuted: the IWW, birth control advocates, socialists and ethnic social organizations.
The bright spot in all this oppression was the lawyers and groups that were formed to fight back against the oppression and defend the civil rights of the accused. The First Amendment becomes one of focal points in this struggle.
This is an informative and fascinating book.
June 6, 2023
The United States at the beginning of the twentieth century was a country of change. Michael Willrich presents us with a fascinating look at this point in U. S. history in his book, "American Anarchy." During this period, the country was experiencing a large influx of immigrants, mainly from Russia and other eastern European countries. Many of these people were poor, politicized and Jewish. They were Socialists and Anarchists. Emma Goldman, a young woman from Russia was in the front line of these immigrants and their politics. A gifted speaker, she roused the workers who were treated with distain could only find work in areas that were dangerous and underpaid. Ms. Goldman and her sometimes partner, Alexander Berkman traveled around the U.S.bringing their politics with them, much to the dismay of the U.S. and local governments.
Mr. Willrich paints this story with his thorough research. There are many parts of the history that resonate with the current state governments attitude toward new immigrants with the push to "send them back from where they came." I highly recommend this book for those who wish to see an unvarnished part of our country's history.
Mr. Willrich paints this story with his thorough research. There are many parts of the history that resonate with the current state governments attitude toward new immigrants with the push to "send them back from where they came." I highly recommend this book for those who wish to see an unvarnished part of our country's history.
August 31, 2024
I know I have found a winner of a book when I can't help bringing it up in conversation. My intention when picking this up was to learn more about a time and movement in history that I didn't know much about, and this did cover the early 20th century pretty well, including a look at the life of famous Anarchist Emma Goldman. But the scope of Willrich's work goes beyond documenting who the key players in the Anarchist movement were. Instead, this book looks at the development of the early survelience state in the US and the push back that helped kick start the ideas of civil rights and free speech, which all have important implications for life in the US today. These legal battles, because this is mostly a book about legal history, are also particularly interesting in the context of the Anarchists, who did not believe in the concept of the rule of law. I am making this sound very dry and intellectual, but I found it as shocking as it was thought provoking and written without any pretention, making the events and ideas clear.
May 30, 2024
If most books are a sprint this one is a marathon. The clock spins back some 150 years ago to the brooding post civil war climate. The growing spirit of liberalism and Marxism sweeps Europe and America; and with it a new ideology - anarchism. Waves of industrial workers from Italty and Eastern Europeans of jewish heritage (p.11), found the spirit of anarchism a remedy to the inhumanity of industry and the chimera of the American dream. The brooding sense of urban unrest and countervailing spirit of revolution is captured in a quote by anarchist thinker John Most “It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - 'voluntarily' sell - himself every day and hour to the 'beast of property.”
Michael Willrich ignites the engine with a description of the US Burke, known as the Russian Ark, some 249 Russian nationals, among them Emma Goldman, “queen of the anarchists” and Alexander Berkeman, would set sail back to Russia. The story of the widespread crackdown on dissent and moral turpitude, would lead to the deportation of these individuals - many caught in the dragnet of a rising surveillance and police state. One of the powerful questions explored here, and in our time is how we contend with dissent. Willrich alludes to the similarities between the rise of the security state due to islamic jihadist terrorism and the extensive crackdown on civil liberties and freedom of speech in response to the violence of radical anarchists. In Willrich’s words, “Steps by congress and state legislatures to bar immigration of “Alien” anarchists, censor radical publications and closely track activities of labor radicals (p.14).
A solid portion of the book tracks Goldman and Berkman’s dissent, along with the righteous hand of their pioneering lawyer Harry Weinberger. Alongside their cause are windows into progressive movements such as: Magaret Sanger’s activism for birth control; responses to militarism and the first world war; the emergence of civil liberties movements such as the ACLU in response to the Supreme Court’s actions against the Red Scare. Although I think Willrich could address it more, we get insights into the collective spirit of prior century and attitudes toward power.
Although the book centers around the legal cases and the flagpoles of the time, we get some remarkable quotes and passages about the animating spirit of anarchism. Goldman, one of the prominent propagandists and lecturers, stated “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary” (p.15). It is interesting to explore how these questions of personal liberty match with the country's Bill of Rights. Goldman would later go back to her homeland, and met with Vladimir Lenin, first leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Although we only have the journals to go by, her confrontation between idealism of a country professing the values of the proletariat, and thestate murder of the “Red Terror” is haunting. One of the other passages that was a highlight was Mollie Steimer’s interpretation of anarchism (p.285), a poetic appeal toward broad universalism of opportunities and brotherhood. I’m sure readers will come to different feelings about the righteousness of anarchism, and with it their experiences with capitalism and the modern state; the book retains a academic tone but the underpinnings of a passionate spirit are present.
Certainly a hefty and difficult read at times. At times I wish the text would invite us in more. Faithfully it travels through the recorded events of crimes, trials and politics, but I think readers could benefit from more analysis and intertextual dialogue. As it stands, it’s well worth your time; a remarkable look at the radical politics of anarchism, real or imagined, and it’s threat to Western power. A country healing from civil war and assassination of a president at the turn of the century, would embolden judicial and political rulings; their impact and legacy felt strongly on the American character today.
Michael Willrich ignites the engine with a description of the US Burke, known as the Russian Ark, some 249 Russian nationals, among them Emma Goldman, “queen of the anarchists” and Alexander Berkeman, would set sail back to Russia. The story of the widespread crackdown on dissent and moral turpitude, would lead to the deportation of these individuals - many caught in the dragnet of a rising surveillance and police state. One of the powerful questions explored here, and in our time is how we contend with dissent. Willrich alludes to the similarities between the rise of the security state due to islamic jihadist terrorism and the extensive crackdown on civil liberties and freedom of speech in response to the violence of radical anarchists. In Willrich’s words, “Steps by congress and state legislatures to bar immigration of “Alien” anarchists, censor radical publications and closely track activities of labor radicals (p.14).
A solid portion of the book tracks Goldman and Berkman’s dissent, along with the righteous hand of their pioneering lawyer Harry Weinberger. Alongside their cause are windows into progressive movements such as: Magaret Sanger’s activism for birth control; responses to militarism and the first world war; the emergence of civil liberties movements such as the ACLU in response to the Supreme Court’s actions against the Red Scare. Although I think Willrich could address it more, we get insights into the collective spirit of prior century and attitudes toward power.
Although the book centers around the legal cases and the flagpoles of the time, we get some remarkable quotes and passages about the animating spirit of anarchism. Goldman, one of the prominent propagandists and lecturers, stated “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary” (p.15). It is interesting to explore how these questions of personal liberty match with the country's Bill of Rights. Goldman would later go back to her homeland, and met with Vladimir Lenin, first leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Although we only have the journals to go by, her confrontation between idealism of a country professing the values of the proletariat, and thestate murder of the “Red Terror” is haunting. One of the other passages that was a highlight was Mollie Steimer’s interpretation of anarchism (p.285), a poetic appeal toward broad universalism of opportunities and brotherhood. I’m sure readers will come to different feelings about the righteousness of anarchism, and with it their experiences with capitalism and the modern state; the book retains a academic tone but the underpinnings of a passionate spirit are present.
Certainly a hefty and difficult read at times. At times I wish the text would invite us in more. Faithfully it travels through the recorded events of crimes, trials and politics, but I think readers could benefit from more analysis and intertextual dialogue. As it stands, it’s well worth your time; a remarkable look at the radical politics of anarchism, real or imagined, and it’s threat to Western power. A country healing from civil war and assassination of a president at the turn of the century, would embolden judicial and political rulings; their impact and legacy felt strongly on the American character today.
April 28, 2024
This is an excellent book which describes in detail the anarchist movement in the USA , mainly on the Eastern Coast and especially in New York. The movement, whose beginning was in the horrible massacre which occurred in Chicago in 1886, spread afterwards very quickly,its adherents being the known figures of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and others. One such anarchist resorted to violence whose result was the murder of President McKinley.
The anarchists merely wanted to improve the lot of the working-class people, who were endlessly expoited by their employers, who did not care at all about their workers. The latter ones toiled for some 18 hours a day in conditionsin a way which would shame the deoictions written by Charles Dickens.
The anarchist movement, which started in Europe in the second half of the 19th century had two proponents or ideologists: Kropotkin and Bakunin.Thus, many heads of various stated were murdered following the principles of practical anarchy as proposed by Bakunin, who was in favour of resorting to violent means in order to achieve many things , one of the being the right to vote for women and another to get social benefits for all.
A pricipal character in the fascinating book is that of Harry Weiberger, a lesser known figure, who was a lawyer and had conducted an almost endless number of legal battles in courts , fighting for the rights of the anarchists. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not.
Enter 1917, when the USA has finally agreed to join WW1 and from that point onwards, the anarchiss movement got into dire straits, the resutl being accusing the anarchists-most of whom preached pacifism-of treason.
Finally, Goldman ,Berkman and many others were expelled from the USA to Russia, but even there they did not get any whatsoever peace of mind.
The whole movement petered out after the 1924 decision to limit the number of immigrants to the USA.
But one can say that the anarchist movement achieved one thing which people take for granted: they fought for civil rights which had never existed before and had fought bravely agaist those mega-capitalists which wanted to maximize their profits, no matter what. This is why everyone should read this superb book in order to make sure that the rights of the workers in the USA will not be affected or minimized, albeit the so many injustices perpetrated even today by those huge corporations, where regulatory measures seem to be on the paper only. Thanks, Professor Willrich for this book!!
The anarchists merely wanted to improve the lot of the working-class people, who were endlessly expoited by their employers, who did not care at all about their workers. The latter ones toiled for some 18 hours a day in conditionsin a way which would shame the deoictions written by Charles Dickens.
The anarchist movement, which started in Europe in the second half of the 19th century had two proponents or ideologists: Kropotkin and Bakunin.Thus, many heads of various stated were murdered following the principles of practical anarchy as proposed by Bakunin, who was in favour of resorting to violent means in order to achieve many things , one of the being the right to vote for women and another to get social benefits for all.
A pricipal character in the fascinating book is that of Harry Weiberger, a lesser known figure, who was a lawyer and had conducted an almost endless number of legal battles in courts , fighting for the rights of the anarchists. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not.
Enter 1917, when the USA has finally agreed to join WW1 and from that point onwards, the anarchiss movement got into dire straits, the resutl being accusing the anarchists-most of whom preached pacifism-of treason.
Finally, Goldman ,Berkman and many others were expelled from the USA to Russia, but even there they did not get any whatsoever peace of mind.
The whole movement petered out after the 1924 decision to limit the number of immigrants to the USA.
But one can say that the anarchist movement achieved one thing which people take for granted: they fought for civil rights which had never existed before and had fought bravely agaist those mega-capitalists which wanted to maximize their profits, no matter what. This is why everyone should read this superb book in order to make sure that the rights of the workers in the USA will not be affected or minimized, albeit the so many injustices perpetrated even today by those huge corporations, where regulatory measures seem to be on the paper only. Thanks, Professor Willrich for this book!!
June 16, 2024
This is about how the legal struggles of American anarchists left a lasting mark on how the nation and its courts view civil liberties. Sort of.
Yes, there absolutely is the larger story listed above, but the overwhelming focus of the book is a life-and-time biography of the two most prominent anarchists in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. You get a bit of the entire history of the anarchist movement from them. It began with German anarchists like Johnny Most and the Haymarket Riot. The rise of Goldman and Berkman showed a generational passing to eastern European Jews. Later, Italian anarachists became more prominent.
Goldman and Berkman initially had no use for the rule of law or the US legal system. They thought it was all a sham and Berkman refused to participate in the normal legal proceedings at his trial for trying to kill William Frick. However, they came to realize that this was self-defeating. Not only did it make it harder to win their cases, but it also meant they missed opportunities to get their word out. So they defended themselves on the grounds of civil liberties enshrined in the US Constitution, even though they were (at best) incredibly skeptical of any claims made by that document. By the WWI era, their lawyer Harry Weinbergr did a good job fighting as hard as they could for civil liberties, such as free speech, just as the government became far more repressive on that matter.
The Schenk case may have been lost, the Abrams case also a lost, and yes Goldman and Berkman were both deported. But the dissenting opinion in Abrams signaled a new era, one where our modern notion of First Amendment rights gained a following. The ACLU was founded and much of this owed to the legal and philosophical groundwork laid by the anarchists. (As Goldman once jokingly told a crowd of anarchists, you'll be the only ones foolish enough to fight for the Constitution).
It's a good book, but I personally could've done more with the broader point and less on the personal life stories of the protagonists. Also, the end of the anarchists movement and how it never regained steam -- anything more to explain that?
Still, it is overall a very solid job by Willrich.
Yes, there absolutely is the larger story listed above, but the overwhelming focus of the book is a life-and-time biography of the two most prominent anarchists in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. You get a bit of the entire history of the anarchist movement from them. It began with German anarchists like Johnny Most and the Haymarket Riot. The rise of Goldman and Berkman showed a generational passing to eastern European Jews. Later, Italian anarachists became more prominent.
Goldman and Berkman initially had no use for the rule of law or the US legal system. They thought it was all a sham and Berkman refused to participate in the normal legal proceedings at his trial for trying to kill William Frick. However, they came to realize that this was self-defeating. Not only did it make it harder to win their cases, but it also meant they missed opportunities to get their word out. So they defended themselves on the grounds of civil liberties enshrined in the US Constitution, even though they were (at best) incredibly skeptical of any claims made by that document. By the WWI era, their lawyer Harry Weinbergr did a good job fighting as hard as they could for civil liberties, such as free speech, just as the government became far more repressive on that matter.
The Schenk case may have been lost, the Abrams case also a lost, and yes Goldman and Berkman were both deported. But the dissenting opinion in Abrams signaled a new era, one where our modern notion of First Amendment rights gained a following. The ACLU was founded and much of this owed to the legal and philosophical groundwork laid by the anarchists. (As Goldman once jokingly told a crowd of anarchists, you'll be the only ones foolish enough to fight for the Constitution).
It's a good book, but I personally could've done more with the broader point and less on the personal life stories of the protagonists. Also, the end of the anarchists movement and how it never regained steam -- anything more to explain that?
Still, it is overall a very solid job by Willrich.
December 28, 2023
American Anarchy by Michael Willrich is a fascinating look at the radical movements at the turn of the 20th century, the legal battles they waged, and the ways in which both have helped to shape how we view civil rights to this day.
Even having taught sections on this period, including many of the people and events, I learned a lot about the details of the legal arguments as well as a little more nuance to how some of the anarchists of the time viewed their realistic goals.
For those primarily interested in history, this is an excellent look at the period and how the government could emphasize the very rights they thoroughly undermined. Sound like current events? Well, many of the legal approaches developed during this time to try to counter government overreach, and just plain un-American abuses masquerading as national security, have become part of both civil rights policy as well as foundational concepts for our current struggles against the powers that be, especially those that tried (and failed) to illegally maintain power.
Those with an interest in radical movements will gain both a wonderful historical perspective as well as see how such movements can succeed and fail, often concurrently when they have a scattershot approach. This also highlights how, in any movement, there will be nuanced differences between how the activists themselves understand their ideology. Action first? More philosophical with well-considered (or, arguably, over-considered) action taken? Violent or nonviolent? Is there a time to switch from one to another? What intermediate goals can and should be targeted? Or do you believe total and complete change, for the positive, can happen instantaneously? Is that even remotely realistic?
Highly recommended for readers of history, civil liberty movements, and legal history. Written in a very accessible manner, you don't need to be an expert in any field to get a lot out of this book.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Even having taught sections on this period, including many of the people and events, I learned a lot about the details of the legal arguments as well as a little more nuance to how some of the anarchists of the time viewed their realistic goals.
For those primarily interested in history, this is an excellent look at the period and how the government could emphasize the very rights they thoroughly undermined. Sound like current events? Well, many of the legal approaches developed during this time to try to counter government overreach, and just plain un-American abuses masquerading as national security, have become part of both civil rights policy as well as foundational concepts for our current struggles against the powers that be, especially those that tried (and failed) to illegally maintain power.
Those with an interest in radical movements will gain both a wonderful historical perspective as well as see how such movements can succeed and fail, often concurrently when they have a scattershot approach. This also highlights how, in any movement, there will be nuanced differences between how the activists themselves understand their ideology. Action first? More philosophical with well-considered (or, arguably, over-considered) action taken? Violent or nonviolent? Is there a time to switch from one to another? What intermediate goals can and should be targeted? Or do you believe total and complete change, for the positive, can happen instantaneously? Is that even remotely realistic?
Highly recommended for readers of history, civil liberty movements, and legal history. Written in a very accessible manner, you don't need to be an expert in any field to get a lot out of this book.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
March 31, 2025
President sweeps into the White House with the help of a third party candidate, coming in with far fewer than 50% of votes? Immigrants snatched up off the streets and deported for speaking out against the US government's foreign policy? A president authorizing the re-imposition of segregation inside the federal bureaucracy? Sound familiar? Naturally, we are talking about the United States in the 1910s.
This book would've been informative and fantastic in a vacuum but feels especially resonant in this moment. Don't delude yourself, the book isn't here to be some overly optimistic tonic to current events. People were deported and murdered when they returned to their home countries, people were jailed for years for the audacity to speak out against the government, and the heavy handed law enforcement response gave a certain J. Edgar Hoover his start (and we all know how that went).
On the flip side, it also gave us the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the heroic actions of Louis F. Post. What's the learning there for me? The way out is through, and the best way to do so is through collective action, organizing, and the occasional brave individual in a place of power to stand up in the face of what is undeniably wrong.
This book isn't easy and is itself a useful introduction to Anarchism as a political philosophy (at least, it was for me). That said, if the above appeals to you, I think it's a worthwhile read.
This book would've been informative and fantastic in a vacuum but feels especially resonant in this moment. Don't delude yourself, the book isn't here to be some overly optimistic tonic to current events. People were deported and murdered when they returned to their home countries, people were jailed for years for the audacity to speak out against the government, and the heavy handed law enforcement response gave a certain J. Edgar Hoover his start (and we all know how that went).
On the flip side, it also gave us the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the heroic actions of Louis F. Post. What's the learning there for me? The way out is through, and the best way to do so is through collective action, organizing, and the occasional brave individual in a place of power to stand up in the face of what is undeniably wrong.
This book isn't easy and is itself a useful introduction to Anarchism as a political philosophy (at least, it was for me). That said, if the above appeals to you, I think it's a worthwhile read.
June 19, 2023
I came to this book not knowing much, and learned a lot. What Willrich does brilliantly is put faces on the d evelopments in the early 1900s. I knew of Emma Goldman but this book gives me so much more detail about her life and her fight, including the nuances of her views. I found it interesting how her story was tied to the fallout of the Haymarket Riot. Willrich makes the case that anarchism was not just a moment in time, but had a long shadow of influence that crept over aspects of American society.
Czolgosz's assassination of McKinley is a story that I already knew, but wasn't aware of the subsequent roundup of anarchists in response. Ch. 4 looks at the issue of free speech, which I found to be fascinating, considering our current debates over the limits of speech and "cancel culture." What is old is new again, I suppose. It must goes to show that history can provide us examples of how people dealt with issues in the past, whether successfully or not. I also felt like Ch. 6, on WWI and Wilson, fleshed out a lot of the lingering questions I had about his war efforts and the impact that immigrants had on it. Radicalism was an important part of the propaganda war, and Willrich includes some personal stories of court cases.
I highly recommend this book. I fills a gap on some history that gets overlooked
Czolgosz's assassination of McKinley is a story that I already knew, but wasn't aware of the subsequent roundup of anarchists in response. Ch. 4 looks at the issue of free speech, which I found to be fascinating, considering our current debates over the limits of speech and "cancel culture." What is old is new again, I suppose. It must goes to show that history can provide us examples of how people dealt with issues in the past, whether successfully or not. I also felt like Ch. 6, on WWI and Wilson, fleshed out a lot of the lingering questions I had about his war efforts and the impact that immigrants had on it. Radicalism was an important part of the propaganda war, and Willrich includes some personal stories of court cases.
I highly recommend this book. I fills a gap on some history that gets overlooked
September 16, 2023
During the late 1800s and the early 1900s, there was a movement by groups of new immigrants to create groups of anarchists who called for the END of government. The problem was that the reactionaries in Congress and the Republican Party looked at Anarchism from the wrong side. Most anarchist believed in changing government by persuasion and discussion and NOT by violence.
Yes, there were violent anarchists, most of those that were persecuted by the government were Socialists and not Anarchists (or Communists), but the government didn't recognize the difference. Not only that but they didn't want to understand the difference because this gave them a bigger group of people to persecute.
Willrich's book is not only well documented but written in a clear concise method and wording.
Yes, there were violent anarchists, most of those that were persecuted by the government were Socialists and not Anarchists (or Communists), but the government didn't recognize the difference. Not only that but they didn't want to understand the difference because this gave them a bigger group of people to persecute.
Willrich's book is not only well documented but written in a clear concise method and wording.
February 29, 2024
Well-written book covering the anarchists of the early 20th century. Perhaps a little heavy on Emma Goldman given that she's not specifically mentioned in the subtitle, but I suppose she left a substantial paper trail compared to others. If you haven't read much about that era, I'd actually recommend starting with American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild. A broader view of the time period, focused more on how the government was targeting various threats and building up a surveillance state.
As a New Englander, I was left wanting more content about the Italian-American anarchist movement, and while there are brief mentions of the Galleanisti, the focus is on Goldman and others in New York.
As a New Englander, I was left wanting more content about the Italian-American anarchist movement, and while there are brief mentions of the Galleanisti, the focus is on Goldman and others in New York.
November 9, 2024
This is a great study about a totally neglected facet of American history. Most people today are not very familiar with the high water mark of Anarchism in American life between late 1800 and the early 1900's. The focal point here are two leaders in the movement Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman along with their defense attorney Henry Weinberger who defends them against the government for decades for their public statements. There is much more here about many other aspects of the movement.
January 8, 2025
A very readable history.i picked it up in acknowledgment of my lack of knowledge about the old bearded-crazy looking-dudes-with-a-bomb-w-burning-fuse tropes that I only knew of from old comics and such, but got sucked into the narrative almost immediately. And as the history progresses the amazing parallels to events of the 21st C become all too clear. If you are curious or anxious about what summarily deporting thousands of”undesirable aliens” looks like and how much legal hell it unleashes you might want to get a hold of this book…it’s all here.
February 9, 2025
"The long American war against anarchy left the United States government with dangerous new powers of surveillance and political repression. But this historic struggle also left the American people with powerful examples and tools for pushing back and many would continue to do so in the decades to come. In the end, The American ideal of a 'government of laws, not men' is not a delusion. But the ideal is only as real and true as the women and men who , in such necessitous times, will stand tall before the juggernaut of uncontrolled power."
February 14, 2024
Really interesting read. I didn’t realize Wilson was so bad and cracked down on any dissent so strongly. This history shows how US began to use spies to infiltrate targeted organization and condoned and rewarded police violence against dissenters, unions, etc. FBI and ACLU both born from this landscape. Sadly, it shows a lot of bad men in power who had incredibly paranoid, angry mindsets and who created bad policies that still survive. A couple of real life heroes are here too, though!
February 2, 2025
A very revealing and compelling tale that few know of the rise of Anarchism from the late 1800’s-1920’s, this leaves you with a surprisingly hopeful feeling at the end of it. If the anarchists and civilians of the world back then went through turmoil, unlawful seizures and searches with no due process, decades of jail time, and even death, it makes few excuses for the voices of today to take the same path forward.
November 29, 2024
A well-narrated version of a rather well-known story of the anarchist movement in the US, from Haymarket into the first Red Scare, with the difference in emphasis (on the civil rights angle), and new sources (mainly the papers of lawyer Harry Weinberger, who worked with Abrams, Berkman, Goldman, Steimer and others).
May 7, 2023
An engagingly written and fascinating book about the early years of the American anarchist movement, the birth of the surveillance state, and those who fought against the odds for free speech and civil liberties during a tumultuous time in American history. This book deserves a wide readership.
try-again-later
December 23, 2025I am just really not in the right mood for this now. Taking it back to the library, hopefully I'll be in a better headspace for it in a few months.
September 29, 2023
*3.5
American Anarchy is a great introduction to anarchism and anarchist figures during the late 1800s to early 1900s. I knew a fair amount of this history going in and was a bit bored in certain places.
American Anarchy is a great introduction to anarchism and anarchist figures during the late 1800s to early 1900s. I knew a fair amount of this history going in and was a bit bored in certain places.
January 13, 2024
This was a fascinating read. I had never before heard of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, or Harry Weinberger. In addition, I knew very little about the government overreach/censorship that went on during and directly after WWI. I was surprised to learn that our modern, broad reading of freedom of speech was a novel legal theory at the time. Willrich’s window into a past period when the United States wrestled with social unrest and questions of free speech provides important context to better understand the current moment and how it relates to the United States’ history.
December 9, 2025
This was a great insight into anarchist minority within the radical movements of the late 18th century and early 20th century.
July 12, 2023
American Anarchy, by Michael Willrich, is an important contribution to a robust and growing field of research focused on how the Left (in all it's various forms) was picked apart and destroyed by those in power, specifically in the 20th century. His characterization of the American Anarchist movement was, I thought, very fair and objective, and he paints a compelling portrait of the push and pull of political opposites that eventually leads us to the modern surveillance state.
Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the digital review copy of the book in exchange for my honest opinion.
Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the digital review copy of the book in exchange for my honest opinion.
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