American Anarchy

Starred review from August 1, 2023

The violent 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago and the assassination of President William McKinley provoked the U.S. government to launch a "war on anarchy." The federal and state governments spied on, harassed, and prosecuted anarchists, whom they believed were bent on the destruction of American civilization. In this deeply researched and brilliantly written history, legal scholar and historian Willrich (Brandeis Univ.; Pox: An American History) shows how lawyers advanced new and untested legal theories that later became enshrined in civil rights law. Anarchists, such as Emma Goldman (1869-1940), along with her longtime lawyer, Harry Weinberger (1886-1944), turned to the courts to defend against charges stemming from distributing birth-control pamphlets and her deportation hearings. Based on a vast array of primary archival sources, including court and military intelligence records, this book expertly details the lengths that lawyers would go to defend clients and protect their rights from repression and censorship. VERDICT This is an important, crucial purchase. Readers interested in the U.S. legal system, civil rights, and the history of American radical movements should definitely check out this title.--Chad E. Statler

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2023
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.

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Starred review from August 14, 2023
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.