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Strategies of Interpretation

June 13, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

SIDEBAR I. Engaging with the Texts. Don’t let anyone tell you that organizing a multi-volume edition is easy. It’s not. And organizing an anarchist edition, for an anarchist audience and taking into account even some basic anarchist theory, is much more complicated. I thought I understood all that pretty well when I took on the Bakunin Library project, but there’s nothing like living through the inevitable trial and error to remind you of the difference between theoretical and practical understanding. In general, I’m of a mind to follow Proudhon’s lead with regard to mistakes and “measure my valor by the […]

Frank Harris, “Emma Goldman, the Famous Anarchist (1923)

June 13, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

Men stone the prophets still, and persecute those sent to them to point the upward way! In prison oft, this female St. Paul, an exile now and outcast from her own, living in Berlin even on sufferance from six months’ permission to six months, and no asylum, no place of rest in the wide world, if this be denied her; yet courageous still, and uncomplaining, full, indeed, of joyous energy and pregnant with plans of work. Think of it. She might be rotten to the teeth with self-indulgence, one foul infectious sore, leprous or syphilitic, and men would take her […]

Phrenological Examinations of Emma Goldman and Marie Louise (1895)

June 13, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

CHARACTER IN UNCONVENTIONAL PEOPLE. A PAIR OF ANARCHISTS. From Personal Examinations By The Editor. We trust that the readers of The Journal will not be alarmed at the introduction of the two somewhat noted opponents of the existing order of society which we present herewith. We can vouch for their harmlessness in the shadows we print, however dangerous they may be in person and at short range. As it is only by carefully studying and comparing all the elements of human nature, both agreeable and disagreeable, that we can hope to acquire accurate and comprehensive knowledge, we propose here to […]

Margaret C. Anderson, “The Challenge of Emma Goldman” (1914)

June 12, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

EMMA GOLDMAN has been lecturing in Chicago, and various kinds of people have been going to hear her. I have heard her twice — once before the audience of well-dressed women who flock to her drama lectures and don’t know quite what to think of her, and once at the International Labor Hall before a crowd of anarchists and syndicalists and socialists, most of whom were collarless but who knew very emphatically what they thought of her and of her ideas. I came away with a series of impressions, every one of which resolved somehow into a single conviction: that […]

Guido Bruno, “Anarchists in Greenwich Village” (1916)

June 12, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

Have you ever seen a real live anarchist? Just to be honest, you never wanted to see one. Is it because the B follows the A in the alphabet or because of a close association of ideas for which you are not responsible, you think immediately of bombs? Bombs and anarchists are inseparable in the minds of most of us. Mysterious destroyers of life and of property, merciless men who have pledged their lives, their knives, or their guns to some nefarious cause or another, who assemble in cellars lighted with candles or in road-houses which seem uninhabited and in […]

Guido Bruno, “Emma Goldman—Fighter and Idealist” (1917)

June 11, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

So far as a man thinks, he is free. Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are. and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper Preamble like a “Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or act. —EMERSON. “Get Miss Goldman,” cried the pale-faced, thin-lipped matron to another white-clad attendant behind the bars of the Tombs. It was a few days after Emma Goldman’s arrest as “the head of a country-wide conspiracy to resist conscription.” I stood in a small, triangular hallway. […]

Bruce Calvert, “In the Jungle” (1908)

June 11, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur

But I started out to tell you of my intellectual bat in the city. The jag opened with ‘Gene Debs’ lecture at Orchestra Hall, where the idol of the socialists received the plaudits of three or four thousand enthusiasts. Then I listened to prim and scholarly John Spargo, another socialist speaker and writer, well known to students of economics. Spargo looks for all the world like a Presbyterian deacon, tho he doesn’t talk like one by a darn site. I heard Arthur M. Lewis, also, at the Garrick Theater, and a lecture by ex-Senator Billy Mason on the postal savings […]

Lois Waisbrooker: Eighty Years Young

June 10, 2016

LOIS WAISBROOKER. ANTIOCH, CAL. Eighty Years Young and a Human Dynamo. In reply to your request I would say that I was born in the lower strata of life. My father worked by the day or by the job to support his family. My mother was a quiet retiring woman who died at the age of thirty-six. I have no noted ancestry. I have worked in people’s kitchens year in and year out when I never knew what it was to be rested. Finally I added enough to the little schooling I received in childhood to enable me to meet […]

William Batchelder Greene, Letter to Orestes Brownson (1849)

June 6, 2016

From Orestes A. Brownson’s Middle Life from 1845-1855 (1899): Another Unitarian minister, the son of an old friend, one in whom Brownson had taken a great interest, had his reasonings and speculations submitted to a severe, but not unfriendly criticism, at about the same time as Channing. This was William B. Greene, whose name, however, did not appear as the author of the book to which he refers in the following letter: BROOKFIELD, MASS., Jan. 24th, 1849. DEAR SIR:—I Send you herewith a copy of my “Remarks on Science of History, etc.” I requested Mr. Crosby to send you a […]

Annie Field, from “Whittier: Notes Of His Life And Of His Friendships” (1897)

June 6, 2016

“Whittier: Notes Of His Life And Of His Friendships” From Annie Field’s Authors and Friends It was Whittier’s sad experience to be deprived of the companionship of all those most dear to him, and for over twenty years to live without that intimate household communion for the loss of which the world holds no recompense. For several years, before and after his sister Elizabeth’s death, Whittier wore the look of one who was very ill. His large dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and contrasted with his pale brow and attenuated figure. He had a sorrowful, stricken look, and found […]