Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy Footnote ¹ contains multitudes, at once an intellectual history of anarchism and the rule of law in the U.S., a professional history of early cause lawyering, and a legal history of the simultaneous rise in the crucible of World War I of a capacious administrative state alongside robust judicially protected civil liberties. In the nooks and folds of Willrich’s intricately crafted narrative, a less visible but equally compelling story emerges: a social and legal history of how people become American. The legal history of immigration focuses by and large on the administration of the border—who is admitted, who is excluded, and how the process of deportation operates.Footnote ² While Willrich foregrounds an intricate chronicle of illiberal border administration, American Anarchy moves from outlining the borders of belonging to reflecting on the substance of belonging, from a legal history of immigration towards something related, but different: a legal history of immigrants, mostly at work, over decades in New York City.

This essay reads American Anarchy as a legal history of immigrants, a book that stands alongside new histories that look beyond the border and account for the role of law in shaping American identity.Footnote ³ I start by describing how the book roots American anarchism in the particular conditions of the workplace. If work bred anarchists, I then explore how American anarchism became work, its devotees forging an ideology and communications strategy that would enable it to compete in a marketplace of political ideas. In the process, anarchists such as Emma Goldman built coalitions with, socialized with, and acculturated to native-born Americans, achieving what countless less radical immigrants aspired to do. I conclude by reflecting on the end of the anarchist moment with the closing of the border after World War I—why anarchism needed a constant influx of new immigrants, or to put it another way, why the children of anarchists did not keep up the fight.

The border and its oppressive administrative apparatus were well within memory of the recent immigrants, by and large Eastern European Jews, who populate American Anarchy. But the formalities of getting through Castle Garden or Ellis Island had little to do with the experience of being an immigrant inside the United States. Rather, it was an experience dominated by hours upon hours of exhausting labor in the sweatshops and factories of industrial New York: sewing corsets, shirtwaists, and ulster coats, rolling cigars, cutting glass, stitching book bindings, shoveling snow, packing and hauling boxes, casting tools, operating steam presses, and fleshing fur pelts (57, 61, 63, 77, 264, 272).Footnote ⁴ Working all day almost every day, working through sickness and injury and abuse, working only to scrape by in poverty, anarchist immigrants developed their enduring sense of what was just and unjust about America and how they could find a place within it (53, 61, 270). Theirs was one of many reactions to the overwhelming necessity of doing miserable work. As Willrich writes, “[N]ot many had the time or the inclination to throw themselves into the labor movement or the baroque world of local political life” (59).

The rules of immigration and citizenship had little to do with becoming American; what mattered more was how immigrant workers spent their days and nights. While police, government officials, and the press constantly described anarchism as a foreign contagion (53), Willrich reveals a uniquely American and legal anarchist consciousness that took shape amid a host of routine, private processes, from working under labor contracts to buying and selling goods and services and paying rent, as well as through union organizing, negotiating, and striking and political participation, expression, and assembly. Out of the churn of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American industrial capitalism emerged a cohort of Lower East Siders who could articulate their radical creed by quoting Emerson and Thoreau and the text of the First, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments (32, 206), who could raise eyebrows in court by referring to the constitutional framers as anarchist pamphleteer Jacob Abrams did in 1918, as “our forefathers” (283).

Working in America created American anarchism. For Emma Goldman, the magnetic heroine at the heart of American Anarchy, anarchism became work. In August 1889 the twenty-year-old Russian immigrant shlepped her sewing machine from Rochester to New York, ready to take her place in a sweatshop and earn rent for a tenement room (58). After finding her way to afterwork cafés, saloons, and meeting halls and embracing the ferment of radical Jewish immigrant politics (59), the seamstress was “discovered,” like a Hollywood starlet, and trained to be an anarchist orator by the charismatic thinker and aspiring actor Johann Most (63). By January 1890, just five months after arriving in the city, she found herself on a public speaking tour of Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland, stirring crowds with her speech on “the futility of the struggle for the eight-hour workday” (63-64). For the better part of three decades, Goldman crisscrossed the United States. Like a generation of Jewish peddlers who ventured deep into the American hinterland,Footnote ⁵ she perfected her English, fell in love with her nation’s landscape, delighted in riding the rails, and befriended (and occasionally had to flee from) Americans of all backgrounds (108, 118, 129, 202-03).

Willrich acknowledges the work that Goldman had to “grind out” (121), describing a six-month tour in 1910 that covered thirty-seven cities in half the states of the union, reaching forty thousand people (120). By then, Goldman had become a mass media celebrity, “a bona fide American public figure” (304). For her labors, the “Queen of the Anarchists” earned lecture fees plus a cut of the gate, enough to pay the upfront costs of her tours and start and sustain Mother Earth magazine (120), enough to help cover travels in Europe and retraining as a nurse, midwife and “Vienna scalp and face specialist” (107), loftier avocations than sewing corsets. Goldman could now afford clothes that were radical and chic, from the boots that elevated her above five feet to her shell-rimmed glasses (80). After one of her early brushes with the law, she reported to jail “dressed in a blue serge suit and wearing a black hat with a veil” (83). Anarchism transformed Goldman from sewing garments to modeling them at the lectern, in mugshots, and on the courthouse steps. The circumstances of her working life on the road could not but commodify anarchism and herself. Expanding her audience was an economic imperative. Arrests became opportunities not just for fundraising, but also for brand building, for her cause and her star power.

The work of anarchism took Goldman out of factory and ghetto, placing her into a wider world, physically and metaphysically, with a vast new network of comrades. If Goldman’s anarchism started in saloons on the Lower East Side, it quickly afforded her access to salons in Greenwich Village and uptown. She fell in with bohemian writers and artists, spoke to small groups “of the well-educated and respectable middle class” and large crowds of libertarian professionals and artists (107), and found “common cause with liberal magazine editors and progressive reformers” (138). Her extraordinary lawyer Harry Weinberger, a native-born, Republican striver, became a close friend, imagining an excursion with her to the Jersey Shore more wholesomely middle class than subversive, where they would “dance the fox trot, and all the other dances” (303). Switching among multiple languages, she could rouse radically different audiences. She formed coalitions and working groups with people like Roger Nash Baldwin who were more Plymouth Rock than Ellis Island (192). Anarchism gave Goldman a new language, new connections, new friendships, and the space to fashion the life that she wanted to live. She was achieving what most immigrants, anarchist or otherwise, dreamed for themselves.

Being a professional anarchist turned Goldman into an American, and her commitment to creating a place for anarchism in the figurative and literal marketplace of ideas transformed the ideology. As a market actor, competing for followers with socialism and communism and the Democratic and Republican political machines, Goldman pursued ideas and causes that would boost anarchism’s notoriety while also rooting it solidly in American values. She walked a fine line to attract mass support. While her first speech critiquing the eight-hour workday drew pushback from listeners (63-64), she moved on to an array of topics that reached beyond anarchist workers: free love, birth control, women’s rights, free speech, and militarism and the World War I draft (107). Free love and birth control could scandalize the Comstocks of the world, but the issues had decidedly more appeal than the elimination of private property. On the lecture circuit, she worked with, crossed paths with, and fiercely competed with advocates who were not anarchists (136). She accomplished what the “propaganda of the deed”—assassinations and bombings plotted by her lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman and other anarchists—never could manage, to build coalitions that in time could shift politics and change society. The marketplace boosted the palatable parts of the anarchist agenda and in some instances changed it entirely.

Most notably in American Anarchy, Goldman with the help of her advocate Weinberger embraced the courts, contrary to anarchist principles that viewed the rule of law as a corrupt instrumentality of capitalism. While her comrade Berkman refused free legal representation after shooting steel magnate Henry Frick in 1892 (73), Goldman the market actor came to see the courts as an extraordinary platform for speaking directly to the American public. Over years of fighting the charges upon charges that prosecutors rained down on her, from obscenity to sedition, she determined to “never let a good arrest go to waste” (146), milking the free publicity to maximum advantage. In the process, almost in spite of herself, she became a bulwark of the rule of law, not just defending it, but willing it into existence. Willrich writes that “the rule of law has existed only because people have willingly put their own lives or liberties at risk” (375); the most notorious American anarchist became one of those people even as her reflexive cynicism about the courts remained ever-present. To the end, Willrich writes, she “teased Harry Weinberger about his peculiarly American faith in the law—his constitutional credulousness”—all the while “plotting … their next legal campaign” (252). Simply by fighting the charges against her and attacking the motives and legal theories of her adversaries, Goldman used the courts but also legitimated them as places where every American had a voice and where pathways to liberty and equality could open up to the least likely of people. While Goldman acculturated, anarchism showed itself capable of accommodation to the American political landscape.

Ultimately, Willrich tells a story of how this accommodation was not to be. The state moved to crush anarchism. Congress and the executive branch weaponized the administration of the border, deploying that zone of unreviewable executive authority against anarchists who were non- or less-than-citizens, foreshadowing what the federal government could try to do to everyone else, anarchist or not. Goldman and Berkman were deported to Soviet Russia, as were next-generation anarchists like Mollie Steimer, a refugee from the 1905 Russian Revolution whom the press tagged as “an ‘embryonic Emma Goldman’” (286). Willrich captures the cruelty and tragedy of deporting people who cherished America, whose radical critique of their nation embraced an earnest civil libertarian vision of the Constitution that would imprint itself in American law later in the twentieth century.

The poignancy of Goldman’s love of country—her sense that “it is no use deceiving myself and others by saying I will feel at home and be able to take root anywhere out of America” (382), her famously American protest to Lenin over the lack of free speech in the Soviet Union (380)—suggests something important about why anarchism withered after a half century of activism and notoriety. More than the World War I-era deportations, which affected very few people and left many anarchists on American shores, Willrich observes that the closing of the U.S. border cut off the lifeblood of the movement. Anarchism constantly depended on new immigrants. At the end of the nineteenth century, Eastern European Jews and Italians took over the movement from a prior cohort of German immigrants (11). Yet it seems that the new generation did not add to the ranks of the old so much as supplant them. And when the border closed, the movement dissipated instead of retaining the support it had.

Anarchism was a movement that resisted the passage of time and span of generations. Why? Part of the answer has to do with the accessibility of American opportunity. For millions of immigrants, the agonies of work, that essential condition for articulating and embracing an anarchist critique, gave way to something better, often thanks to unions that represented workers, anarchist and not: more money, more things to own, safer jobs, better housing in neighborhoods far from the Lower East Side.Footnote ⁶ Immigrants sent their children to public schools, where they engaged with governmental authority … and flourished (163-64). Reliable social mobility within one generation ensured, in Willrich’s words, that “few American-born children of immigrant radicals seemed anxious to take up their parents’ cause” (378).

Just as important, immigrants not only accessed American opportunity; they became Americans. Being an immigrant was never a static existence. The powerful narrative that American Anarchy presents about ideology and state-building sits alongside a subtler, but no less profound story of how immigrants become American through everyday processes bounded by law. Anarchists like Emma Goldman agitated for the revolutionary transformation of America. All the while they experienced revolutionary transformation again and again, in work and leisure, in body and mind, in the words they whispered and shouted, in the ways they conceived of their world and community and themselves.