American Anarchist the Life of Voltairine De Cleyre
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An American Anarchist The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre Paul Avrich 1978 Contents Foreword to the 40th Anniversary Edition of An American Anarchist . 3 Preface ............................................ 5 An American Anarchist 12 Introduction ......................................... 12 1. Childhood ......................................... 19 2. The Making of an Anarchist ............................... 29 3. Philadelphia ........................................ 45 4. England and Scotland ................................... 61 5. Pity and Vengeance .................................... 70 6. Anarchism without Adjectives .............................. 81 7. Herman Helcher ...................................... 94 8. The Broad Street Riot ................................... 103 9. Chicago .......................................... 115 10. Light upon Waldheim .................................. 124 Chronology 128 Bibliography 130 2 Foreword to the 40th Anniversary Edition of An American Anarchist In 1990, I walked into a tiny anarchist bookstore and found a rare copy of An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre by Paul Avrich. I knew de Cleyre only as a figure mentioned in Avrich’s later book The Haymarket Tragedy. Because I relished Avrich’s writing already, because I had the enthusiasm of a recent convert to anarchist thinking, I could hardly wait to read de Cleyre’s biography. Avrich presented to his readers the depth and intensity of this intellectual powerhouse who repeatedly made sacrifices and endangered herself in order to stay true to her principles, which she never once compromised for her own safety’s sake. De Cleyre pressed her cause when anyone else would have dropped the activism due to poverty and sickness. No one, living or dead, could introduce her as well as Paul Avrich does with this biography, which is as inspiring to readers as Emma Goldman’s Living My Life or Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Avrich’s books are as readable as novels, and de Cleyre’s life is what you’re about to discover. De Cleyre remains today one of the most inspiring of all the early-American anarchists, includ- ing the notorious few, such as Emma Goldman or Johann Most, and the less known but equally remarkable, like educator Joseph J. Cohen, editor Abraham Isaak, or the almost completely for- gotten poet-essayist Viroqua Daniels. In contemporary descriptions, Voltairine de Cleyre is striking for her intellectual powers, her intense empathy and love for suffering people and animals, and her particular charisma. Her writings carry the entire range of human experience—curiosity and profound wonder in her earlier years, then more sorrow and bitterness as she grew older. In an interview, Avrich saidde Cleyre was “a fascinating person. I read her poetry and stories and found a sadness in her.” He succeeded in rescuing this brilliant and compelling person from near non-existence, and because of his work we too are moved by her words, we imagine her voice and self, and we are energized by her courage. Paul Henry Avrich was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 4, 1931, growing up in the Crown Heights neighborhood with his sister Dorothy. His parents, Murray, the owner of a small dress manufacturing company, and Rose Zapol Avrich, were Jews who had emigrated from Odessa. Avrich was educated in public schools and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at Cor- nell University in June 1952, having started there at age sixteen on a scholarship. He then joined the military, which sent him to Syracuse University to study Russian. In 1959, Avrich was one of twelve American students chosen to go to Russia in a special ex- change program, and he spent three months in the archives of the Lenin State Library in Moscow, reading the records of factory workers’ committees and the sailors’ uprising at Kronstadt. Here was where he first discovered anarchism, and these early research endeavors in Moscow devel- oped into his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University and then into his pioneering books, The Russian Anarchists, The Russian Rebels, and Kronstadt 1921, which are still definitive texts on anarchism in Russia. Avrich began teaching at Queens College of the City University of New York in 1961 and remained there until his retirement in 1999. Karen Avrich describes her father as “an intensely disciplined man, working seven days a week, usually in his small study at the back of the family apartment on Riverside Drive. It was a somewhat Spartan space, holding a plain desk, piles of books and files, and stacks of yellow pages covered in his slanting, looping 3 longhand. There was no television or radio playing, no art on the walls; the window lookedout onto a glum section of courtyard. The only occasional distraction, a cat sprawled across the desk, tail swishing deliberately through sheaves of paper.”1 Paul Avrich spoke several languages, including Yiddish, Russian, French, German, Italian, and his native English. He could also read, with varying degrees of difficulty, other European lan- guages. He held that serious, reliable scholarship could not be done by anyone lacking a com- mand of the language of the subject.2 We might measure the extent to which Avrich was right by the gigantic footprints he left in the study of anarchists who spoke and wrote in these particular languages. In the generation of Voltairine’s admirers before Avrich, Joseph Ishill communicated with sev- eral of her friends and associates with a view to publishing all of her extant writings, as was her dying wish. Receiving a batch of her letters from the Scottish anarchist Will Duff, Ishillex- tracted parts for publication “without discrediting either Voltairine’s name or that of the comrade to whom they were addressed.” Duff continued, to Saul Yanovsky in 1930, “If I were to usethem as they originally appear it would of course be a gauche affair, an irrational piece of work which only an ignoramus or an enemy of her ideas could perform. My sense of fairness and justice to Voltairine demand that her work be well represented in the eyes of those who still cherish her revolutionary interpretations.”3 Likewise, Avrich chose not share de Cleyre’s abortion in 1897, which she described in a private letter, another part of which is quoted in the present volume. Also unmentioned is deCleyre’s syphilis4 and that Thomas Hamilton Garside, her lover, was exposed as an undercover Deputy US Marshall not long after he deserted the young de Cleyre.5 An American Anarchist includes a discussion of de Cleyre’s mentor, Dyer D. Lum, the older and respected anarchist thinker who died as Voltairine was emerging as an important anarchist 1 Karen Avrich, “A Collaborative Effort,” New York Times (Opinion), March 10, 2014. 2 Marianne Enckell, “Obit: Paul Avrich (1931–2006),” Graswurzelrevoluton 312, 35: 19. 3 Letter, Joseph Ishill to Saul Yanovsky, September 24, 1930. Fraye Arbeyter Shtime Archives, International Insti- tute for Social History, Amsterdam. 4 De Cleyre’s syphilis was mentioned in Avrich’s interview with Beatrice Fetz, January 21, 1973. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History Of Anarchism In America. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 11–13, and discussed in “Between The Living And The Dead” [unsigned, but initialed “VdC” [Voltairine deCleyre], Mother Earth, vol 1, no 8: 58–61. See also Robert P. Helms, “A Tangled Tale of Angels, Anarchists, and Atheists: Two female freethinkers who died fighting for freedom of expression,” The Truth Seeker Vol. 143: 13–17, 50–53. De Cleyre’s abortion is described in the draft of unmailed letter, Voltairine de Cleyre to “Pussy Mine” [Samuel H. Gordon], n.d., n.p.; Voltairine de Cleyre and Joseph Jacob Cohen Collection, Bund Archive, YIVO, New York City. 5 The pursuit of fugitive bank president and embezzler Gideon W. Marsh supposedly involved a shoot-out in Como, New Jersey, on June 20, 1891. The story instantly made headline news, and the wounded Deputy US Marshall, who was using a pseudonym, was recognized by several Philadelphia reporters as Thomas Hamilton Garside. “Probing The Marsh Story: Alleged Detective Max Freeman Turns Out To Be AReporter,” The Times (Philadelphia), June 23, 1891, 1. Garside’s story kept changing in the following days as he was examined by doctors and kept out of sight as he recovered, either from gunshot wounds or from falling off a porch. He was described as “an Englishman by birth, but he looks like a German. A tall blonde, with dreamy eyes and a nervous manner, his appearance is rather striking, so much so that it is no surprise to learn that he has been college professor, preacher, labor agitator, and figured in a catalog of other occupations besides before he took to newspaper reporting. Part of the accounts of the run on the Keystone Bank were written for The Times by Garside.” “On Marsh’s Track: How the Volunteer Detective Traced Him To The Sea,” The Times (Philadelphia), June 24, 1891, 1. Other papers (for whom Garside didn’t work) blasted him as a sham artist and a fraud. “Fly Blisters For Garside,” The Record (Philadelphia), June 24, 1891, 8; “Garside Denounced,” The Press, (Philadelphia), June 24, 1891, 1. 4 writer. Later scholarship tells a more shadowed backstory of depression, serious alcoholism, and more racism than we can ignore.6 Also, their relationship was almost entirely intellectual, but in Lum’s mind there was a sexual angle that did not exist in de Cleyre’s. It was de Cleyre’s writings on Lum that insured him a substantial readership after his death. In 1978 when An American Anarchist was first published, several of de Cleyre’s friends and grandchildren remained alive and were sensitive to painful items in the her story. Paul Avrich chose to write respectfully of his subject and the movement of which she was a part. Forty years later, with de Cleyre’s contemporaries gone, we can learn about parts of her life that were hitherto concealed.