Running Amok: Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth

Anarchism is not exactly the specter haunting American society. Yet in recent years anarchists have become one of the nation's best hopes of fueling national paranoia about domestic subversion. Let's face it. Unless we have commies hiding under the bed or an Evil Empire ever-poised for and hell-bent on our destruction, we're just not happy. With the Islamic-fundamentalist-terrorist thing not working out quite as well as some may have expected, black-ski-masked anarchists?running amok in places like Seattle, blithely attacking national institutions such as Starbucks and Niketown?will have to do.

What most Americans actually know about anarchism as a political philosophy is not a lot. What most young self-styled anarchists know about it is probably not much more. Both realities, especially the latter, are unfortunate. Indeed, anarchism, in all its various manifestations and subtleties, has a long and proud tradition in Europe and the United States. Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth (Counterpoint, 400 pages, $26), lovingly edited, with commentary, by Peter Glassgold, attempts to rectify our historical amnesia and contemporary ignorance of the topic.

Unlike the faintly sad present-day remnant that even constant coverage by CNN cannot manage to transform into a terrifying threat to domestic security and the American way of cappuccino-drinking life, anarchists of the past were a truly frightening bogey lurking in the public's imagination. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anarchists were collectively and singularly blamed for the Haymarket riots, the assassination of President William McKinley and all manner of supposed revolutionary violence. The fact that most anarchists did not actually advocate the violent overthrow of the government was inconsequential. Only swift and brutal action was deemed appropriate to eradicate this threat on American soil. Victims of the first American Red Scare, anarchists have had a bad, though largely undeserved, reputation ever since.

Yet anarchy was never as alien?nor as violent?as the forces of repression made it out to be. According to the editors of Mother Earth, anarchism is a "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." A tad extreme perhaps, but many of its most cherished principles are wholly consistent with the American belief in a limited (if not nonexistent) government and in individual liberty in the Jeffersonian strain. Moreover, as Glassgold's selections bear out, the overriding concerns of the contributors to Mother Earth, once the nation's leading organ of anarchist opinion, are still with us, including birth control, women's rights, civil liberties, prison reform, homelessness and poverty.

Although most anarchists consider themselves to be men and women of the Left, as an anti-statist philosophy, anarchy also has a certain resonance with rightward-leaning libertarian ideologies. As Glassgold puts it, "the libertarians of today...are certainly offspring of the individualist anarchists of a hundred years ago, though it might come as a surprise to a good many of them." In this vein, those who have fretted over the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist will find much food for thought in this volume.

The issue brings to mind a conversation I once had with a professor of mine about the distinction between a socialist (a pink) and a communist (a red). To which he replied, they both seek the overthrow of capitalism and the bourgeois state, but the communists really mean it. These days, it's hard to throw a rock without hitting a libertarian, especially in my neighborhood near NYU, but in terms of hardcore principles, the anarchists of the early 20th century put the creepy college libs to shame. The anarchists, it seems, really meant it.

And they paid for it. The U.S. government spent over a decade trying to deport Emma Goldman for her inflammatory views, and finally succeeded in 1919. Hardly content to merely dispose of the woman viewed as the movement's ringleader, from November 1919 to February 1920 the zealous federal agents of the Dept. of Justice coordinated with eager local police to stage a series of nationwide sweeps, arresting some 5000 suspects in 33 cities in 23 states. Many of those arrested on questionable warrants and vague charges had no prior criminal records, including the 800 aliens who were summarily deported.

Mother Earth did not survive the purge, but its lively culture of remarkably nonsectarian debate is captured in the pages of Anarchy! Founded by Goldman in 1906 and skillfully edited by Alexander Berkman from 1907 to 1915, Mother Earth consistently delivered on its promise to provide a public forum for a diverse range of anarchist opinion. In its 12 years of existence, the dogged little magazine ran pieces by Maxim Gorky, Peter Kropotkin, Margaret Sanger, Mabel Dodge, Louise Bryant, Leo Tolstoy, Goldman, Berkman and Voltairine de Cleyre, among others. The earnestness drips from every page, but so, too, do courage, independence and conviction.

While most readers who encounter this volume by either chance or design will no doubt flip first to the contributions of the famous and the infamous, the articles by de Cleyre, whose essays, poems and short fiction appeared in Mother Earth even after her death in 1912, deserve equal attention. Her elegant prose style and acerbic wit are displayed most readily in "They Who Marry Do Ill." She unleashes the full force of her sharp opinions in a virtual barrage of words, damning the base property arrangement (marriage) masked by religious doctrine, sappy sentimentality and state power. Recalling her youthful opposition to the idea of marriage as "a sacrament of the Church," de Cleyre writes:

"With all the energy of a neophyte freethinker, I attacked religious marriage as a piece of unwarranted interference on the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals, condemned the 'until-death-do-us-part' promise as one of the immoralities which made a person a slave through all his future to his present feelings, and urged the miserable vulgarity of both the religious and civil ceremony, by which the intimate personal relations of two individuals are made topic of comment and jest by the public. By all this I still hold. Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging all delicacy with the trumpeting of private matters in the general ear."

An advocate of free and unrestrained love, de Cleyre would scarcely countenance even the possibility of long-term, committed relationships: "No matter how perfectly adapted to each other two people may be at any given time, it is not the slightest evidence that they will continue to be so." (As a recently jilted woman?harrumph!?I was particularly taken with that last bit.)

With essays ranging from free love to the nature of the state, from feminism to modernist literature, from trade unionism to the Russian Revolution, Anarchy! embodies a vision of anarchism as a multifaceted philosophy of individual freedom and individual responsibility. By distilling more than 5000 pages of printed materials into a well-organized and readable volume?with one of the most thorough indexes I've encountered in a good long while?Glassgold has provided a service to scholars and general readers alike. Specialists will appreciate his careful selection of writings currently unavailable outside of aging microfilm housed in special collections libraries. And general readers will surely find his desire to reproduce essays that speak to issues of today a welcome contribution.

The only major weakness of Glassgold's otherwise marvelous volume is the lack of historical contextualization. While he provides a more than ample and detailed explication of the ins and outs of Mother Earth in terms of form, appearance, financing, production and distribution, Glassgold dedicates relatively scant attention to the social and political role of the magazine within the broader anarchist movement. Such quibbles aside, it's oddly reassuring to know that the anarchist spirit lives on, if only between the pages of Glassgold's wonderful anthology.

Angela D. Dillard teaches history and politics at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is the author of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (NYU Press).