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Voltairine de Cleyre, “Anarchism and American Traditions” (1908-09)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

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 […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “Open Your Eyes!” (1908)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

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 […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “Our Present Attitude” (1908)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

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 […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Chain Gang” (1907)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

It is far, far down in the southland, and I am back again, thanks be, in the land of wind and snow, where life lives. But that was in the days when I was a wretched thing, that crept and crawled, and shrunk when the wind blew, and feared the snow. So they sent me away down there to the world of the sun, where the wind and the snow are afraid. And the sun was kind to me, and the soft air that does not move lay around me like folds of down, and the poor creeping life in […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “At the End of the Alley” (1907/1911)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

IT is a long narrow pocket opening on a little street which runs like a tortuous seam up and down the city, over there. It was at the end of the summer; and in summer, in the evening, the mouth of the pocket is hard to find, because of the people, in it and about, who sit across the passage, gasping at the dirty winds that come loafing down the street like crafty beggars seeking a hole to sleep in—like mean beggars, bereft of the spirit of free windhood. Down in the pocket itself the air is quite dead; one […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “To Strive and Fail” (1908)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

There was a lonely wind crying around the house, and wailing away through the twilight, like a child that has been refused and gone off crying. Every now and then the trees shivered with it, and dropped a few leaves that splashed against the windows like big, soft tears, and then fell down on the dark, dying grass, and lay there till the next wind rose and whirled them away. Rain was gathering. Close by the gray patch of light within the room a white face bent over a small table, and dust-dim fingers swept across the strings of a […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Case of the Imprisoned Italians in Philadelphia” (1908)

July 29, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

ALL readers of Mother Earth are familiar with the story of last February’s “riot,” and the subsequent arrest, trial, and discharge of H. Weinberg and myself. What they are not so familiar with is the case of the four Italian “rioters,” who were railroaded through the courts and sentenced most mercilessly by Judge Von Moschzisker. Three of these men were Social Revolutionists, the fourth an Anarchist; the latter received a five year sentence. During all the time that money was being raised for our defense, little or nothing was said about these, the worst sufferers in the whole affair; and […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Philadelphia Farce” (1908)

July 28, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

After the lapse of nearly four months from “the riot” of last February, the case of the “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Hyman Weinberg and Voltairine de Cleyre” was called for trial on the 17th of June, the trial Judge being Mayer Sulzberger, a gentleman having a reputation of being somewhat more inclined to weigh the rights of citizens as against the attacks of the police than some other judges. On the morning of the 17th, Weinberg and myself, the witnesses for the defense, and our respective lawyers were all ready in the court room. The State, however, was not ready; […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “They Who Marry Do Ill” (1908)

July 28, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

THEY WHO MARRY DO ILL By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE. (A lecture presenting the negative side of the question, whose positive was argued under the heading “They Who Marry Do Well,” by Dr. Henrietta P. Westbrook; both lectures delivered before the Radical Liberal League, Philadelphia, April 28, 1907.) LET me make myself understood on two points, now, so that when discussion arises later, words may not be wasted in considering things not in question: First—How shall we measure doing well or doing ill; Second—What I mean by marriage. So much as T have been able to put together the pieces of […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “November 11, Twenty Years Ago” (1907)

July 28, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

A PEACEABLE MEETING of protest against a murderous attack of the police on strikers, a meeting already half dispersed because of an approaching storm; an unprovoked attack by two hundred police upon the remnant of the meeting; a sullen glow in the air, a dull and angry roar, wounded and dying police and citizens, terror and consternation, bewildered faces and flying feet, a panic-stricken city full of the savagery of fright! So passed the 4th of May, 1886, into history. A wild and insane spirit of revenge, a determination to hang somebody, as many as possible, a crystallization of that […]