Willrich, Michael. American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2023.
Readers have already heard from me twice about this book since I've been reading it. I finished re-reading the epilogue last night,* and am now ready to formally review it.
The author Michael Willrich is a good historian and also a good writer. These qualities do not always travel together, and it is not without cost when they do. There is some risk to being a good historian that arises from being a good writer, namely, that you can tend to shade the reader's perceptions of the history by incorporating dramaticism that will tend to make some of the characters seem like heroes, or victims, or villains. There is some of that going on here, though Willrich's real heroes are not the anarchists but the liberals who ended up supporting them.
Indeed, this is the main lesson he wants you as a reader to take away from the work. Here is his summation in the epilogue:
The government's decades-long war against anarchy spurred the growth of federal institutions designed to repress political dissent. The same struggle also inspired the emergence of a modern movement for civil liberties, grounded in the Bill of Rights, including broad freedoms of speech, freedom from warrantless searches and 'third degree' interrogations, and rights of due process...It is 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 a dangerous delusion -- breathed new life into the Bill of Rights and spurred a probing public debate about the proper legal limits of government power[.] (374)
The real heroes of his work are liberal lawyer Harry Weinberger and liberal Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, not the anarchists that we spend so much time with during the telling. The villains are J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer, and a host of others who erected the police state we still labor under in their attempt to police immigrants they didn't trust.
The victims, mostly, are the anarchists, although Willrich doesn't attempt to hide that their movement did indeed engage in numerous bombings and bombing plots, stabbings, shootings, and other mayhem. He does note that many other charges were made but not proven by any evidence or arrests, but he does so fairly: in the case of the largest bombing, which police could never solve, he points out that historians have since identified the probable criminal as an Italian anarchist. Similarly diligent, he points out that one of Emma Goldman's moving stories about the Statue of Liberty is impossible given the fact that the Statue hadn't been assembled yet at the time that she says it happened.
I recommend the book, which is insightful and illustrative. It is surprisingly relevant to the current moment when we are experiencing an even larger-scale attempt at mass deportation, a Federal government that is trying to limit due process in such cases in order to streamline them. While his heroes are the liberals, Republicans do get a nice word towards the end for standing up to the Wilson administration's tyrannical overreach. He quotes their platform of 1920: "[I]n view of the vigorous malpractice of the Departments of Justice and Labor, an adequate public hearing before a competent administrative tribunal should be assured to all." (376)
The weakness of the book, aside from the dramatic elements, is the author's lack of interest in philosophy. He takes no care to explain, and barely even to name, the different factions of anarchist thought. These are intricate and interesting, then and into the present day. The effect of this lack of interest is to convey the idea that anarchism was some sort of amorphous blob of working-class thought, perhaps mere utopian thinking (so he describes it in the epilogue), when in fact it was (and is still, in newer forms) deeply detailed and thoroughly considered with clear philosophical factions. You will learn almost nothing about anarchism by reading this book, but you will nevertheless learn a lot about America.
* I read the epilogue the first time when I first started reading the book. This is a tip I learned in my graduate studies in history that I pass along to you, which is most useful when trying to tackle a large historical monograph: read the first and the last parts immediately, and then the rest of it. The author will introduce his topic and give you a hint of what he or she thinks the main lesson is in his introduction, and then will reaffirm that in the conclusion. Once you know the basic thing the author wants to convey, the whole work will make more sense because it will all fit into that pattern. You can then read and digest the book much faster and more effectively because you will understand why every part of it is being introduced and described, and what the author hopes you will get out of each piece of evidence.
11 comments:
The weakness of the book, aside from the dramatic elements, is the author's lack of interest in philosophy.
This seems to be true of a lot of history, though, except maybe intellectual histories. I've been reading histories that deal with religion in America and there is typically a paragraph where the historian explains a bit about whatever the particular movement believed. The rest of the book is about who their leaders were, what they did, their legal battles, etc.
Is there a book you'd recommend that did cover that aspect of things?
You might try Alan Ritter's book. It's 1980 vintage, so it doesn't treat anything going on today and in fact mostly treats a few major thinkers from the 19th century. But it's good.
https://www.amazon.com/Anarchism-Theoretical-Analysis-Alan-Ritter/dp/0521135702
A lot of the current debate among the factions is non-academic, and I'm not aware of any good studies of it. These are, roughly:
Right-wing-ish:
Anarcho-capitalists: Rejected outright by the left-wing factions, anarcho-capitalists are for voluntary free market associations and exchange without government taxation, waste, or constrictions on human freedom to buy/sell/do what they want.
Anarcho-transhumanists - Roughly Elon Musk's idea when he says he's an anarchist; he means we won't need government because we'll transform ourselves and spread to the stars, freeing ourselves to be so distributed in the universe that we won't need governance.
Mutualists: Allows ownership and co-ownership, so it's sort-of right wing. Similar to anarcho-capitalism but also to the 19th/20th century syndicalists who thought that voluntary associations like labor unions and co-op farms would allow the poorer to compete on more equal terms. Favors a kind of free market leavened by a kind of voluntary commune-style association.
Environmentalist:
Anarcho-primitivist - an environmentalist movement that wants to get back to the land and abolish high technology as well as government and society.
Left-wing:
Anarcho-communist (ironic because Louis Post's proof that one of his accused was not an anarchist was that he had joined the Socialist Party, which was considered quite distinct from both Anarchism and Communism) - this is the faction we most often see on television, typified by ANTIFA with its red-and-black-flag heraldry. They think that a communist revolution can eventually cause the state to wither away (as Marx said it would, so far without that ever actually happening).
Anarcho-egoism - a rejection of all traditional ideas about government, states, property, morals, etc., in favor of one being one's own determiner for everything about one's self. (To some degree we see this in the transgender movement, with its assertion that even basic biology can't define one's identity, which is one's own to choose).
Anarcho-pacifism - I assign this to the left, but it includes some Christians and Buddhists as well as atheists. They adopt the basic old Quaker idea that violence is always wrong and harms the self most of all; since the state is based on violence (as Weber notes early in his talk), the state is always wrong.
That's probably enough to start with. You'll have to do a lot of the exploration on your own, but this will give you a sense of who the players are likely to be.
Separately, just as good writing can be a threat to good history, so can a serious interest in philosophy. Eric Hobsbawn was a great historian except when he let his philosophical fascination with and commitment to Marxism color the page. He damaged not only his own work but the whole field by making it attractive to young Marxists who furthered the error.
History and Philosophy are, academically, almost diametrically opposed disciplines. History is supposed to favor the particular, so that you get exact facts about what did happen on this day at this time to this person. You should not try to read general rules or Universal Laws into this, but get the particulars straight.
Philosophy, by contrast, is interested especially in the universals. The particulars are helpful in informing the quest for the universals, but it's the universals that matter most.
That's not too surprising when you consider the heritage. Philosophy is the root of almost all human knowledge and almost all academic disciplines. The only two that have plausible origin stories that don't trace to philosophy are history -- Thucydides and Herodotus -- and mathematics. Mathematics' claim is that it is just a recognition of something that is true about the world; but in fact it needs some basic assumptions from philosophy to operate.
reading intro and epilogue may stem from the division between general and sequential thinking. The generalist wants the big picture right up front and will start doing some of the work on his own. The sequentialist wants to see the argument developed step-by-step. They tend to give information to others that way as well. Men are more likely to be overview generalists, women sequentialists, but this is nowhere near 100% of either, and everyone has some of each.
Geometric proofs and law cases illustrate using both alternately. We need both to function and to think clearly. Editors, teachers, and reviewers tend to be sequentialist, and insist that generalists fit their mold.
That's an interesting observation, AVI. It dovetails with the universal/particular split between philosophy and history too. Perhaps to your point, a supermajority of philosophers are men (71% currently, down from 80% recently after substantial efforts to recruit women into the field). A majority of historians are women (59%).
Thomas, I realize that in my eagerness to characterize the major splits I have left out my own school of thought, plus another that is quasi-anarchist but should be mentioned.
Voluntaryism - This school (my own) holds that it is the coercive aspects of the state that lead to its corruption and violence against rights and people. It holds that any governance should therefore be based on volunteer (unpaid as well as voluntary) efforts so that you can't earn your living by governing others. This will mean that any governance is led by those who care enough about it to do it for free because they want it to be done right. My own adoption of this follows my experience with the volunteer fire/rescue service, which draws out the virtuous people who will help for free because they want to; and also Aristotle's remarks on how what he calls 'the middle class' govern best because they aren't rich enough to spend free time on it nor poor enough to need to make it pay, so they do it as little as possible (i.e. just enough as is necessary) so that they can get back to minding their own business.
Minarchism - this school is actually fairly large, and symbolized by a hedgehog. It is somewhere between true anarchism and libertarianism. It believes in a state, but one that is strictly limited to 'night watchman' purposes: protecting from invasion, policing against violent crime (only, not victimless crimes), and providing courts to resort to in case of fraud.
It also helps you discover if the author changed theses mid-book. Sometimes, the summary in the introduction fails to match the conclusion in the epilogue. If so, alarm bells should go off. I read a few of those when I was in grad school, sometimes as horrible warnings.
When we read the introduction, conclusion, and first two pages of each chapter, we called it "gutting the book." We did it so we could become familiar with a large number of books in a very limited amount of time. We also read one or two monographs per week in their entirety.
LittleRed 1
Thanks for the recommendation and explanations. I've added Ritter's book to my to-read list.
The socialists kicked the anarchists to the curb during the Second International along with the classical liberals. It's interesting that before 1893 a hard core laissez-faire civil libertarian would have been considered a socialist, but they were all fellow travelers until that point.
Last year I studied up on British socialism and read a bit of Kropotkin. Very interesting man.
Yes, I'm solidly in the History camp there. Philosophy makes the most sense to me when I know the philosopher's historical context. Without it, I always feel like I'm missing some important steps.
Thanks for filling those out for me. I appreciate it.
Anarcho-pacifism reminds me of Bastiat. He wasn't a pacifist; he didn't say violence is always wrong. His rule for when laws are just was a test: If you would personally go over and use violence against your neighbor if you saw him doing this, then you should support a law against it. Otherwise, you should not.
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