AMERICAN ANARCHY

Vigorous history of the anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this well-written narrative, history professor Willrich, author of Pox: An American History, focuses on the agitators who immigrated to the U.S. and quickly became involved in the Gilded Age struggle for workers’ rights—some peacefully, some with bombs, some using both nonviolent and violent strategies. The author also investigates the invention of the modern surveillance state, tracing it to “the nation’s extraordinarily brutal and explicitly racist colonial war in the Philippines,” a horror show of mock trials and summary executions that, applied to the anarchist movement in the U.S., put soldiers on the streets to monitor and suppress American citizens. As Willrich writes, many lawmakers and law enforcement agents thrived in the era of Palmer raids and the post-Haymarket crackdown on suspected labor activists. The NYPD bomb squad, for instance, collaborated with the Justice Department to prosecute Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and to have them deported to Russia after New York’s U.S. attorney characterized them as “exceedingly dangerous to the peace and security of the United States.” Against a broad range of oppressors stood the anarchists themselves, who organized workers in places such as the West Virginia coal fields and Chicago steel mills, as well as numerous sympathizers—and, more, devotees of civil liberties, including a lawyer named Louis Post, who wrote in an editorial, “Public indignation at the reckless violence of a few foreigners overshadows all other thought and affords an excellent screen behind which freedom of assembly, of speech, of the press, is being strangled.” As Willrich capably shows, the efforts of Post and like-minded lawyers and government officials helped slow the wave of deportations, established truly legal procedures for proving the anarchists’ supposed crimes, and “breathed new life into the Bill of Rights.”

A memorable portrait of an era of official lawlessness in the name of law and order, one with echoes to this day.