It’s an honor to join this conversation about Michael Willrich’s American Anarchy. This masterful work of narrative history vividly recounts the rise of the modern surveillance state and the modern civil liberties movement through the lives and minds of ostensibly “politically marginal immigrants.” I want to celebrate Willrich’s focus on the too-often neglected opponents of the Progressive-Era state. A major contribution of this work is showing the growth of state power in connection with dissenters who perhaps most acutely felt and contested that power.Footnote ¹

In these ways, Willrich is following his equally impressive previous book, Pox: An American History (2011). Together the two books offer a package investigation of the invasive, punitive, and repressive power of the modern state, and both courageously emphasize the power of those whose politics now seem dangerous and irredeemable to many. Willrich’s approach is textbook historical empathy. If Pox challenged readers to take antivaccinationists and their libertarian radicalism seriously, American Anarchy does the same for the anarchism of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and their comrades.Footnote ² And perhaps what Willrich is asking of readers is even more difficult this time around. Where Pox’s antivaccinationists might have unintentionally spread deadly disease through their principled defiance of public health authorities, the at times terroristic radicals of American Anarchy occasionally wielded bombs that quite intentionally brought death and destruction. That Willrich has succeeded in situating anarchists in the violent world of industrial capitalism and in placing their ordeal before a mass readership is quite an accomplishment.

My goal here is to highlight another, more implicit contribution. In my reading, American Anarchy is also a history of political economy, one that highlights an aspect of that field that has gotten somewhat less attention of late, especially among scholars of the so-called new history of capitalism.Footnote ³ Those historians have focused on finance, markets, management, and the like. And many have fruitfully followed legal and political historians by examining “the political” in political economy, which is to say that they’ve explored the role of law and the state in economic life.Footnote ⁴ Yet comparatively understudied is what I call the politics of political economy—the ideas and practices deployed by those aiming to shape the contours of economic life, not least those governed by law and the state.Footnote ⁵ Where Willrich’s Pox exposed the politics of public health, his American Anarchy is political-economic history that reveals anarchism as a mode of politics.Footnote ⁶ Notably, it was unlike party battles over currency, tariff, and tax policy; workers, farmers, and women demanding protective regulations and other forms of state action; and other interest groups and reformers aiming to make the industrial order better serve their or society’s interests.Footnote ⁷ Instead, anarchists quite differently wanted to blow up the industrial political economy. Richly on display in American Anarchy are their dissenting politics: the ideas and practices anarchists used to challenge, first, the industrial political economy; and second, the surveillance state that “spied on,” beat, “interrogated, imprisoned, and threatened them with deportation”—all because they aimed to topple industrial capitalism and the powerful American state that fueled it.Footnote ⁸

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Anarchists’ politics were rooted in radical, utopian ideas embraced and developed in a United States that had failed “to live up to its own promise” of freedom. As Willrich emphasizes, immigrants’ anarchism was “American made” and born of “encounters with industrial violence, legally sanctioned inequality, and rough treatment at the hands of police.” Anarchists connected their own struggles as expendable, impoverished workers to “the capitalist American state.” To them, the socio-economic injustices of the age were the product of a mutually reinforcing, often coordinated system of violent private and public power—an “associational state” perhaps—that privileged production and profits for the few over the lives and liberties of the masses. They recognized that the state “was not a neutral arbiter in the widening social struggle over industrial capitalism,” and they got specific.Footnote ⁹ Private property—the monopolistic foundation of “capitalism and class rule”—was an “artificial legal institution…propped up by the coercive force of the state.” The hallowed liberal rule of law was “mere ideological cover for capitalist domination of the working class.” Law, they said, treated “rich and poor” differently and was overwhelmingly “directed against working people.’” Meanwhile, churches made “complete idiots out of the mass”; “the schools” furnished “the offspring of the wealthy with those qualities necessary to uphold their class domination”; and outlets of the “capitalist press” were uncritical “mouthpieces of wealth.” The state, law, and these “taken-for granted institutions” of civil society all needed to go. In their place, anarchists argued, should be a new and just political-economic order based on cooperative voluntarism and “liberty unrestricted by man-made law” and state violence.Footnote ¹⁰

Anarchists also had ideas about politics that guided them. In addition to questioning the state, they doubted democracy, deeming it a fictitious delusion that legitimated plutocracy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they had no faith in voting and party politics and had little interest in legislative reform or “state action.” So, in these ways, anarchists seemed to reject politics. Yet what comes through in Willrich’s narrative is their abiding faith in the people themselves and an unabashed politics of public opinion. “The anarchist challenge,” Willrich explains, “was one of propaganda—the art of winning hearts and minds.”Footnote ¹¹

Part of that politics was violence, which is to say that some saw value in “acts of spectacular violence” that might shock the public to action. This “propaganda of the deed” was justifiable self-defense in a deadly industrial world in which striking workers met “armed private security forces” and “club-wielding police.” Even those ambivalent about violence appreciated its power. As Emma Goldman observed following the McKinley assassination, “Never before…has the sound of a pistol shot so startled, terrorized, and horrified the self-satisfied, indifferent, contented, and indolent public, as has the one fired by Leon Czolgosz when he struck down William McKinley, president of the money kings and trust magnates of this country.”Footnote ¹²

Willrich, however, reveals that anarchists’ politics of public opinion was largely nonviolent. During the Free Speech Fights of the early twentieth century, a crucial period of action in the book, Goldman, Berkman, and their colleagues built on earlier means of peaceful persuasion that emphasized “education of the young and the spread of anarchist ideas to workers through newspapers and open-air speeches.” Goldman supplemented her extensive lecture tours with Mother Earth, a periodical that circulated widely and connected sympathizers. In Gotham, she and her compatriots founded the Ferrer Center, a “[p]art cultural center, part schoolhouse, part anarchist hangout” that became a safe space for learning, debate, art, friendship, and forging alliances. It was, as Willrich describes, “an institution created by people who hated institutions.” To counter public schools that inundated children with “patriotic nationalism and capitalist ideology,” anarchists created The Modern School to do their own indoctrinating. In the meantime, other classic work of politics became crucial, including meetings and speechifying, leaflets and pamphlets, fundraising and collaboration with such fellow travelers as the IWWs and Free Speech Leagues.Footnote ¹³

Meanwhile, Willrich shows anarchists turning the violent weapons of capitalist oppression into political technology. The most important were law and the Constitution. As local, state, and eventually federal laws surveyed and targeted them, anarchists used arrests and trials to garner attention and spread ideas. So legal institutions mattered and so, too, did lawyers. As Goldman came to realize, “a good lawyer could help an anarchist turn a criminal court into a theater for propaganda.” Cause lawyers, Harry Weinberger especially, helped anarchists amplify their critique of industrial political economy and, in the face of the “rising anti-anarchy” surveillance state, the crucial importance of “absolute freedom of expression” in modern democracy. With delightful attention to the irony of it all, Willrich shows how anarchists—constitutional skeptics who “dismissed the very idea of constitutional rights as a delusion”—came to rely upon and advance modern conceptions of civil liberties. But beyond the ideas, Willrich reveals the democracy-doubting anarchists—through their legal and constitutional struggles inside and outside of court—contributing to the emerging modern practice of civil liberties activism, a cornerstone of twentieth-century democracy.Footnote ¹⁴

There’s a final point worth noting about anarchists’ politics: it had an intensely intimate side. As I read American Anarchy, it was hard not to think about one of the more important criticisms of the new history of capitalism: that is, the field’s tendency to relegate sex difference, gender, sexuality, and the work of women to the margins. Willrich avoids such criticism, not only by making Emma Goldman a leading character in his story, but by illustrating the very personal nature of anarchists’ politics of political economy. Most readily, anarchists’ challenges to laws criminalizing contraception demonstrate not only their propaganda campaigns and legal struggles but also the depth of their political-economic thinking. They allied with Margaret Sanger because they saw the democratization of birth control as part of their challenge to industrial capitalism. If, as historian Amy Dru Stanley writes, “slave breeding lay at the heart” of slavery’s capitalism before the Civil War, leading anarchists saw working-class procreation at the heart of industrial political economy.Footnote ¹⁵ Birth control, to them, was not just about privacy, personal liberty, and the rights of women. It was about workingwomen, their reproductive labor, and the “burden of large families” that fell on them. Along with enlightening women about the “meaning and importance of sex,” birth control, they thought, was the “essential link between sexual freedom and social revolution.” It was an essential “weapon of the revolutionary proletariat.”Footnote ¹⁶

There’s a second side of anarchists’ personal politics, one that exposes how their challenge to industrial capitalism was, at least for some, tethered to their critique of legally sanctioned patriarchy and related questions of marriage, home life, and sexuality. Here, the personal lives of Willrich’s leading protagonists are crucial. While most immigrants prioritized “earning wages, building families, and keeping faith with their religious practices”—things that upheld the industrial order—Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman chose otherwise. For Goldman, at least, her rejection of “conventional patriarchal values” was born in the violence of the family in which her father chastised her, beat her, threatened to marry her off, and pushed her to “abandon her studies and take a factory job.” She rejected not only life as a cog in the industrial machine but life as a cog in an abusive, patriarchal family dependent on industrial wages. Her failed first marriage to an impotent card player further sealed her rejection of state-sanctioned, conventional home life. She wrote, “If I ever love a man again, I will give myself to him without being bound by the rabbi or the law.” “When that love dies, I will leave without permission.”Footnote ¹⁷

Goldman deliberately charted an intimate life devoid of the violence and surveillance of fathers, husbands, families, religious institutions, traditional ethnic community, and the state. That she and Berkman became open “lovers and comrades,” that they “discoursed passionately against…marriage,” that they chose not to produce offspring—all of these were certainly personal choices. But they were also the political choices of a duo living the intimate politics of anarchism and doing so publicly, providing an example that others might follow—making propaganda of their own lives. Like many twenty-first-century “relationship anarchists,” they likely saw what they were doing not as “a lifestyle” but as decidedly “political.” As the screenwriter Kate Bailey recently wrote in the New York Times, “As a relationship anarchist, I have a responsibility to reflect unconventional truths and challenge social norms” and “to question relationship models that have been in our society for centuries.” Goldman and Berkman seem to have thought similarly, but it seems clear that their rejection of the patriarchal family and all that came with it was inextricably bound to their challenge to industrial political economy.Footnote ¹⁸

The final related point I’ll make is that Willrich offers something of a tribute to the power of individuals—seemingly marginal individuals—in history. Their choices, courage, and risk-taking come through powerfully, especially because Willrich tells their story so well through their lives and words. Any reader, I’d think, will walk away considering what Goldman, Berkman, and others endured at the hand of the state. I’d think readers will see and ponder the choices these activists made, not least choices about how to conduct politics from dynamite to the most everyday, intimate decisions. If there’s something else I wanted from this book, it’s even deeper insight into the anarchist’s advocate—the pugnacious, diminutive cause lawyer Harry Weinberger. Unfortunately, we learn comparatively little about his intimate life, but what does it say that this critical player in the anarchist saga also seemed to eschew traditional marriage, family, and home life? Was he one who put his profession, the law, and the cause of civil liberties ahead of the personal? Or might his own personal life have influenced his interest in defending the anarchists? There’s another subtext in Willrich’s story, which tells us something about the role and power of those with non-normative personal and family lives driving the type of political activism that challenged capitalism and sought to protect civil liberties. Was that coincidental, or was it a functional part of the politics of political economy that is so brilliantly on display in American Anarchy? I thank Willrich for raising these and so many other crucial ethical questions in this exceptional book.