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A “CONDITION” is always more interesting than a “theory.” The general strike of organized labor in Philadelphia has been the most interesting and instructive phenomenon in the economic struggle which any American city has offered since Chicago in 1885-6. It has revealed many things, both to its friends and its enemies, which no amount of theorizing could have foreseen. Its direct consequences, while considerable, have been insignificant compared with indirect results. As I wrote in my last month’s article, it was called some ten days later than it should have been; it was fixed for Saturday morning, March 5th,—Saturday being […]

THE PHILADELPHIA STRIKE BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE. EVER since the trolley strike of last June, when the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company was forced into the semblance of an agreement with its men, it has made systematic efforts to undermine, crush, and utterly destroy their union. The ink was scarcely dry before it began violating this agreement, and at last, feeling that it had acquired sufficient strength through the introduction of a rival union, an organization of scabs, it began forcing the situation, by discharging its old men, men who had been in the service from ten to twenty years, “for […]

OUR POLICE CENSORSHIP Address delivered October 8, 1909, in Philadelphia, at a public meeting of protest against the police suppression of Emma Goldman’s lectures. By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE FELLOW-MEN: I have written my speech; I generally write my speech. We have a censor, and the censor may call me to account. He has some reporters here; and in their anxiety to earn their money, and their shortage of intelligence, they are likely to report me as uttering a lot of idiocy which the censorship wishes me to utter, in order to excuse its illegal, unconstitutional, and tyrannical action. To illustrate […]

ON LIBERTY By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE.[note]Speech delivered by Voltairine de Cleyre at the Cooper Union Protest Meeting, June 30, 1909.[/note] MR. Crosby has said he is here in the interest of “good government”; so am I. But you know the brutal saying of some white man about Indians: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” In my opinion, the only “good” government is a dead government. I am in the habit of writing out what I have to say in advance: the reasons are several, but the principal one governing me in the present instance is, that I am […]

ON LIBERTY By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE.[note]Speech delivered by Voltairine de Cleyre at the Cooper Union Protest Meeting, June 30, 1909.[/note] MR. Crosby has said he is here in the interest of “good government”; so am I. But you know the brutal saying of some white man about Indians: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” In my opinion, the only “good” government is a dead government. I am in the habit of writing out what I have to say in advance: the reasons are several, but the principal one governing me in the present instance is, that I am […]

Related links: Voltairine de Cleyre [main page] American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion, small self-sustaining communities, isolated conditions, and hard pioneer life, grew during the colonization period of one hundred and seventy years from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of the Revolution. This was in fact the great constitution-making epoch, the period of charters guaranteeing more or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is well described by Wm. Penn in speaking of the charter for Pennsylvania: “I want to put it out of my power, or that of my successors, to do mischief.” The revolution is […]

OPEN YOUR EYES! WHEN, at the beginning of winter, the present industrial depression, following upon the great financial paroxysm of November, threw millions of people face to face with the problem of hunger and exposure, it was a foregone conclusion that protests, conscious and unconscious, would be made; that every degree of dissatisfaction, from the quiet reasoned argument of the social student to the blind act of murderous rebellion on the part of some desperate victim of “social order,” would find expression. It was equally to be foreseen that those in power, whether as manipulators of the law or as […]

THE present organization of society, working logically and inexorably, has brought about a situation which both Socialists and Anarchists have all along foreseen and foretold. It was no more to be avoided than the leap of Niagara is to be avoided, when once the headwaters start on their outward course to the sea. Those who imagine that industrial conditions can be made or unmade by this or that inadequate legal patchwork, find themselves in the midst of a frightful boiling of irreconcilable elements, which they weakly and childishly try to explain by some trivial reason, such as the attitude of […]