American Anarchy
The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY
A "lively, fast-paced history" (Adam Hochschild, bestselling author of American Midnight) 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.
Winner of the Presidents' Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brandeis University historian Willrich (Pox: An American History) examines late 19th– and early 20th–century anarchism through a legal lens in this innovative account, demonstrating how the anarchist movement's "assertions of personal liberty against institutional power" left an indelible mark on America's cultural memory and jurisprudence. He focuses on the high-profile trio of Emma Goldman (whose writings were cited as motivation by President McKinley's assassin), her romantic and ideological partner Alexander Berkman (charged with numerous crimes, including the attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick), and their longtime legal defender Harry Weinberger. Like many of their revolutionary compatriots, Berkman and Goldman were repeatedly in court. And though anarchists often derided law as nothing more than "so much patriotic bunting, which the state draped over everything," many came to rely upon the clever legal machinations of sympathetic lawyers. Ironically, anarchist recourse to legal defense reinforced state institutions, since many of the lawyers who tirelessly defended them, like Weinberger, believed that "the Constitution and the common law were the best available bulwarks for individual liberty against the increasing power of the modern state." Drawing heavily on primary sources, including court records and correspondence, Willrich combines a riveting legal narrative with an astute analysis of American political history. It's a revealing study of an overlooked foundation of American notions of liberty.
