WRITING AGAINST DEMOCRACY: ANARCHIST LITERATURE AND THE APORIA OF REPRESENTATION, 1880-1940 BY DANIEL M. COLSON DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Gradate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Cary Nelson, Chair Professor Alan Wald (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) Associate Professor Stephanie Foote Associate Professor Tim Newcomb Assistant Professor John Marsh (Pennsylvania State University) ii Abstract This dissertation proposes “anarchist literature” as both a generic classification and a methodological orientation toward the overlapping fields of American literature and democratic politics. By expanding the boundaries of both literature and anarchism, it offers an important supplement to accounts of American literature between the Civil War and WWII. The defining characteristic of anarchist “texts” is their conflicted relationship to government and representation. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American anarchists took as their object of critique U. S. democracy, a tenuously, yet aspiringly representative form of governance. As U. S. government moved unevenly toward more complete electoral representation, anarchists questioned the validity of all forms of state power, in ways ranging from the dramatic assassination of a sitting president to the subtle permeation of anti-government thought into a wide range of texts. This project argues that representative democracy is only the most obvious face of a more comprehensive “logic of representation”: a structuring desire to re- present—to make known the absent subjects of politics and literature—which during this period folded multiple registers of representation back into the nation and its governance. This logic produces the aporia of representation, a paradox that has obscured the era’s widespread fascination with anti-government politics. By recovering a fractured, yet sustained tradition of anarchist literature, this study reveals the difficulties inherent in writing against the American democratic ideal and the paradox of critiquing governmental representationality through representational literary forms: anarchism appears as a formal conflict within a range of discourses, exposing the sublimated political unrest produced by the nation’s incomplete democracy. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: DEFINING ANARCHIST LITERATURE: NEGATIVE CRITIQUE AND REPRESENTATIONAL GOVERNMENTALITY………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 2: UNNATURAL SELECTION: SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND LITERARY NATURALISM………………………………………………………………………………….37 CHAPTER 3: ANARCHISM AND THE BRUTE: FRANK NORRIS’S ANTI-GOVERNMENT ATAVISM……………………………………………………………………………………….75 CHAPTER 4: “WILD AND FOOLISH ACTS”: ANARCHISM, VIOLENCE, AND THE REPRESENTATIONAL MANDATE…………………………………………………………117 INTERLUDE: ANTI-RADICAL LEGISLATION AND THE “DEATH” OF AMERICAN ANARCHISM………………………………………………………………………………….161 CHAPTER 5: “THE STICKY FILAMENTS OF LAW-WORDS”: LEGAL DISCOURSE AND SACCOANDVANZETTI………………………………………………………………………169 CHAPTER 6: “WE ARE TWO NATIONS”: THE AMERICAN LEFT AND ANARCHISM’S NADIR………………………………………………………………………………………….212 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..260 1 Chapter 1 Defining Anarchist Literature: Negative Critique and Representational Governmentality The American worker remains loyal to the government and is the first to defend it against criticism. He is still the most devoted champion of the “grand and noble institutions of the greatest country on earth.” Why? Because he believes that they are his institutions, that he, as sovereign and free citizen, is running them and that he could change them if he so wished. It is his faith in the existing order that constitutes its greatest security. —Alexander Berkman, What Is Anarchism? Anarchist literature is the record of an aporia, an antinomy between the fundamental anarchist move to negate and the exigencies of U.S. democracy. From the 1880s to the 1930s, anarchism haunted the nation as a fundamental threat, yet according to most accounts, had little impact on the United States or its literature. In this project, I argue that anarchism’s minimized influence and its seeming disappearance are caused by and gesture toward the period’s logic of representation: a structuring drive to re-present. The experience of American citizenship asks individuals to represent and be represented in multiple registers. At the center of this representational impulse, we find democracy. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, anarchism is asked, like citizens, to represent its politics in the public sphere. Yet, anarchism fundamentally denies that representation is a valid foundation for political life. Of course, from a certain perspective there is nothing paradoxical about this tension: the nation’s system of governance requires all politics to fit within its mechanisms, to adhere to its forms. For the anarchist, however, efforts to challenge American democracy invariably conflict with the nation, producing an antinomy: you may reject government, but you must do so through its forms. The discrepancy between the nation’s all-too-logical exclusion of anarchism and the aporetic nature of American anarchist critique are my central concerns, because they revise in 2 important ways our historical and theoretical narratives of the relationship between literature and politics. Through this study of “anarchist literature,” I probe the homologous representationality of American political and literary discourses to suggest both the reasons for anarchism’s disappearance (its purportedly minor impact) and the stakes of this absence. In this introductory chapter, I outline the historico-theoretical definitions of anarchism and anarchist literature to lay foundation for the project’s wide-ranging analysis. Beginning with anarchism’s defining characteristic—negative critique—I move toward a directed cultural history of the relationships between anarchism, democracy, and American literature. This broad view of anti-government thought’s influence requires a working definition of anarchism, as well as a discussion of previous attempts to position anarchism within extant accounts of the era’s radicalism. By questioning the validity of models that categorize literature by its authors’ politics, exploring earlier efforts to conceptualize the connections between anarchism and literature, and detailing the overlap of anarchism with various constructions of liberalism, I establish a framework for considering texts’ anti-government valences.1 After defining anarchism as an essentially negative philosophy—a political stance directed always against governmental power formations—I shift to the contemporaneous object of critique: American democracy, which I argue is only the most obvious face of a representational governmentality— an overdetermining impulse toward representation that produces the antimony as anarchists attempt simultaneously to reject and to utilize different representational registers.2 Building from 1. Throughout this project, I read a variety of texts alongside the traditional material of literary studies. By juxtaposing analysis of scientific treatises, trial transcripts, and popular accounts of anarchism with plays and novels, I am able to offer both a cultural history of American anarchism from Haymarket to the 1930s and a more comprehensive account of the relationship between anarchism, democracy, and representation. 2. Below, I address the issue of representation in greater detail, but I should flag here my awareness of the problem of “representative democracy.” I do not imply the truly representational nature of U.S. (or any other) democracy. Instead, I evoke the pervasively idyllic democracy that many imagine as desirable, perhaps achievable, and at least worth working toward—a dream to be realized as governance better “represents” those it governs. 3 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, who persistently describes representation as a unified concept, I consider literary representation alongside political and legal representation.3 As groundwork for my compound analyses of anarchism, literature, and culture, I contend that representation is the dominant rationality—the font of American citizen’s subjective experiences. Democracy is only one part of this rationality, homologous to and inextricable from infinite knowledges, practices, and strategies. Thus, when anarchism interrogates representational government without a wholesale rejection of representation, it attacks only a single part of a unified whole. I conclude this introductory chapter with a brief description of my methodology and the formal characteristics of anarchist literature. Throughout this study, I attempt to enact anarchist negative critique. By refusing to offer positivistic closures, by illuminating irreconcilable tensions, I present anarchist literature as a question. Much like American anarchism, this project remains open. I read a series of “texts”—ranging from Frank Norris’s revealingly naturalistic explorations of social Darwinism, to actual acts of violence committed by Alexander Berkman and Leon Czolgosz, to the trials, deaths, and legacies of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—not to offer another neat explanation for pre-WWII American anarchism’s short life and swift death, but to show the field of contestation in which anarchist critique struggles through representational forms of power. Despites its seeming diversity, the genre of anarchist