The Voltairine De Cleyre Reader ISBN 1-902593-87- 1
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The Voltairine de aeyre Reader Edited by A. J. Brigati The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader ISBN 1-902593-87- 1 © 2004, A.J. Brigati All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced commercially by offset lithographic or equivalent copying devices without the permission of the author or publisher. AK Press 674A 23'd St, Oakland, California 94612-1163 www.akpress.org PO Box 12766, Edinburgh, Scotland EH89YE www.akuk.com Library of Congress Cataloguing in-Publication data A catalog record fo r this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Control Number: 2003097106 Editorial Assistants: Ben Prickett Patrick R. Sessions Research Assistants: Joy Dement Kelley McKee Special Thanks to Barry Pateman Book Design: Fourteen Little Men, Inc. / www.fourteenlittlemen.com Cover art: Night by Virginia Allison printed from the original charcoal on canvas Printed in Canada About the Editor A.J. Brigati professes Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Literature, Marxist and Anarchist Theory and Sports Literature at the University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama. Contents Preface by BarryPateman ....................... ........................i ShortChronology of Significant Dates ......................................iv Introduction .......................................................vii A Note on the Texts .............................. .....................xi Collected Prose In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation .................... 1 They Who MarryDo III ...•.......................................... 11 Anarchism and American Traditions .... ......... ........................21 The Dominant Idea ................... ............ .................. 35 DirectAction ......... .................................... ......47 The Economic Tendency of Freethought ...................................63 FranciscoFerrer .... ............................................... 75 Sex Slavery.· .................................................. 93 The Making of an Anarchist ....................... .............. ..... 105 The Heartof Angiolillo ............................................. 113 The Mexican Revolt .................. ............................. 123 The Drama of the Nineteenth Century, .................................. 129 Dyer D. Lum ............................................. .... .. 147 Crime and Punishment .......................... ............. ...... 151 McKinley's Assassinationfrom the Anarchist Standpoint . ................ ... 173 The Eleventh of November, 1887 .................... ................... 177 Collected Poetry Bastard Born .................. ...... ............................ 183 The Gods and the People ............................................ 189 And Thou Too ................................................. ... 195 The Dirge of the Sea ..... ................: ......................... 197 lAm .................. .............................. ...........201 Love's Ghost ..... .................................................202 Life or Death . .. ......... .... ..................................... 204 The Toast of Despair ................................................ 205 Mary Wollstonecraft ... ........... ............................... 207 The Suicide's Defense ....... ........................................ 208 The Road Builders .............................................. ....210 Ave et Vale ........................ ,.......... ..................... 211 Marsh-Bloom .....................................................215 Written-In-Red ...................................................216 The Worm Turns Germinal ......................................................217 Ut Sementem Feeeris, Ita Metes ......................................218 Santa Agueda ...................................................219 The Feast of Vultures ..............................................220 Night at the Grave in Waldheim ......................................223 The Hurricane ...................................................22 4 In Memoriam ...................................................226 John P. Altgeld ........................................... .... ...226 "Light Upon Waldheim" ............................................227 Notes ............................................................229 Pre/ace n his obituary of his friend and comrade, Voltairine de Cleyre, published in the August 1912 london Freedom, Harry Kelly wrote that, "to her the Anarchist ideal was something more than a dream of the future; it was a guide for I everyday life, and not to be compromised with. Most of us can find excuses for ourselves when we deviate from the straight line; but Voltairine kept herself to it unflinchingly:' As we can imagine, such vigorous and firmcommitment to her ideal led to tensions between her and other anarchist and radical contemporaries. She was not sparing in criticism both of herself and others. Difficult, compl ex, and driven by an unflinching integrity grounded in everyday experience, Voltairine de Cleyre wrote some of the most prescient and perceptive essays on anarchism that we could hope to read. Essays that refuse to li e dormant as comfortable artifacts, but still challenge us today. In many of her essays, de Cleyre consciously set out to create a specificallyanarc hist history. Wo rk on the Paris Commune, her series of talks and writings on Haymarket, her attempt to articulate and evidence an innate and organic American anarchism, all fo rm part of a larger work that analyzes, memorializes and informs present practice. Her historical pieces reflecther wide reading, her literary passionate nature and a respect and admiration fo r those militants who died fo r their beliefs. Indeed, the dead Haymarket men were a constant presence in her life providing strength and inspiration. Like her companion Dyer D. Lum, de Cleyre favored the idea of anarchism without adjectives. Initially an individualist anarchist and supporter of the ideas reflected in Benjamin Tucker's paper, Liberty, she stayed constant to the paper's initial Proudhonist mutualism while gradually recognizing class as more and more of an important aspect of her anarchism. Although she never adopted anarchist communism, de Cleyre was influenced in the idea of a unifying anarchism by Lum as well as the Spanish anarchists, Ricardo Mella and Fernando Tarrida del Marmol, whom she met in London in 1897. As she wrote to Emma Goldman in 1907, "I am an Anarchist Simply without economic labels attached." Such a position would later be adapted in some form by Malatesta, Max Nettlau, Vo line and Sebastien Faure. This view of anarchism considerably affected de Cleyre's writing on anarchism. Her essays i The Voltairi ne de []eyre Reader reflect a struggle with language, a tension if you will, centered on finding the right word fo r the right feeling, the right action. Very rarely does she use hyperbolic rhetoric. Her essays are precise explorations meant to clarify, guide or interrogate. Her belief and work reflected a commitment both to education and action. At various times in her life her work consisted of teaching young Jewish immigrants English. (Jewish anarchists were fo r de Cleyre, "the most liberal minded and active comrades in the moveme�t as well as the most transcendental dreamers.") She was a regular contributor to anarchist newspapers such as Lucife r, Free Society, The Rebel and Mother Earth, as well as to a whole series of freethought and radical journals and papers, where her uncompromising atheism and fe minism, bedrocks of her anarchism, were regularly on show. In 1892 she helped fo rm the Philadelphia Ladies Liberal League. Belying its rather genteel name it encouraged discussion on sex, anarchism and all kinds of revolutionary and radical material ("we have done this" she wrote in The Rebel of October 20, 1895, "because we love liberty and hate authority"). The Ladies Liberal League later merged with the Radical Library, another organization created by de Cleyre and her comrades, whose aim was to provide radical mate.rialthat workingmen and wo men could read at their leisure. Just who should be the focus of this education was startlingly obvious to de Cleyre. Un undertaking a speaking tour in 1910, she was dismayed by ihe uaillIeuf �Ullle uf her venues and audiences, arguing, "comrades, we have gone upon a wrong road. Let us get back to the point that our work should be chieflyamong the poor, the ignorant, the brutal, the disinterested, the men and women who do the hard and brutalizing work of the world." (Mother Earth, December 1910) Her comments precipitated a sharp response from Emma Goldman in the same issue of the magazine, who argued in a rejoinder, "the men and women who firsttake up the banner of new liberating ideas generally emanate from the so called respectable classes" and "Anarchism builds not on classes, but on men and women." We would be wrong however if we saw de Cleyre as a woman lost in books, learning and propaganda. She had a fierce and intuitive support of those anarchists taking individual or group action against oppression. Her story, The Heart of Angiolillo, her poem Santa Agueda (in praise of the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Canovas by Angiolillo), her poetic celebration of the executions of the anarchist militants, Valliant, Henry and Caserio,In the Face of Vu ltures, all reflecther unwavering ii Preface support of those who have used violence, and her desire to memorialize and celebrate their courage. In her essay McKinley's