Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street

by Tom Goyens (Contributor), Allan Antliff (Contributor), Marcella Bencivenni (Contributor)

New York City's identity as a cultural and artistic center, as a point of arrival for millions of immigrants sympathetic to anarchist ideas, and as a hub of capitalism made the city a unique and dynamic terrain for anarchist activity. For 150 years, Gotham's cosmopolitan setting created a unique interplay between anarchism's human actors and an urban space that invites constant reinvention. Tom Goyens gathers essays that demonstrate anarchism's endurance as a political and cultural ideology and movement in New York from the 1870s to 2011. The authors cover the gamut of anarchy's emergence in and connection to the city. Some offer important new insights on German, Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish-speaking anarchists. Others explore anarchism's influence on religion, politics, and the visual and performing arts. A concluding essay looks at Occupy Wall Street's roots in New York City's anarchist tradition. Allan Antliff, Marcella Bencivenni, Caitlin Casey, Christopher J. Castañeda, Andrew Cornell, Heather Gautney, Tom Goyens, Anne Klejment, Alan W. Moore, Erin Wallace, and Kenyon Zimmer.

Genres: History, Essays

270 pages, Hardcover

Published June 12, 2017

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radical Gotham is a collection of essays on New York's anarchist communities, from its base in immigrant communities to shifts to intellectual and artist communities, to finally today youth subcultures. It builds on scholarship by a collection of noted historians of the left and current day activists, which helps us with the understanding of both specifically anarchists (which itself was and is a diverse set of ideas and cultures) and the larger American radical left. While the book is specific to New York City, as the largest city, certainly it was a hotbed of radical activity and similar trends occurred in other American cities.

The book begins with chapters on each of the Anarchist communities that were centered on progressive waves of European immigrants in the latter 19th century, which was continually reignited and overlapped as new immigrants were radicalized by their experiences in the United States. German communities, followed by Yiddish speaking anarchists, followed by the Italian traditions of insurrectionist anarchism continued the first period of Anarchist history. As NYC anarchists faced challenges from repression and the rise of the Communist Party competitors on the left, it largely fell into smaller and smaller numbers. As Andy Cornell documents, pacifist in prisons during WWII carried the anarchist tradition from the old anarchists to art and theater houses that sprung up during the New Left upheavals of the 1960s-70s (Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers youth groups). Anarchists continued to the anti-globalization and Occupy movements, as traced by the squatters rights movements in ABC No Rio.

Any scholar of the left, social movements, immigrant/intellectual/art movements, and urban historians should pick up this book.

[Jeff Buddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book is a collection, I've gotta give credit to Tom Goyens who organizes the essays chronologically and manages to build a narrative out of disparate points of view. We start with Justus Schwab's Saloon in the mid-1800s and move all the way to Occupy Wall Street. The narrative thread is Anarchism.

Kropotkin wrote: "The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing." To me, this book demonstrates the truth of that idea. We're getting close, comrades, but we're not there yet.

I guess I find this book inspiring. Here are people throughout history who have cleaved to an ideal and worked to its end, the idea that EVERY human could be free to realize their full potential if only the coercive power that controls them would be abolished. Very few of these people find themselves recorded in official history, even though much of what they've done helps us today. Early Anarchists identified and despised racism, sexism, and homophobia...and condemned the structures that encourage such thought.

[Mills College Library]

335.83 R1292 2017