Shapiro on Jun, 'Proletarian Days: a Hippolyte Havel Reader'

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H-HOAC Shapiro on Jun, 'Proletarian Days: A Hippolyte Havel Reader'

Discussion published by John Haynes on Monday, June 17, 2019

Shapiro on Jun, 'Proletarian Days: A Hippolyte Havel Reader' Nathan Jun, ed. Proletarian Days: A Hippolyte Havel Reader. Chico AK Press, 2018. 450 pp. $24.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84935-328-1.

Reviewed by Shelby Shapiro (Independent Scholar) Published on H-Socialisms (June, 2019) Commissioned by Gary Roth

Hippolyte Havel

Hippolyte Havel, the anarchist publicist and activist, was born in 1869, in what was then Bohemia, and died in New Jersey in 1950. Converted to anarchism in Vienna as a student before emigrating to America, he met Emma Goldman in London in late 1899; after the two of them travelled to Paris, they came to the United States in 1900. Havel would become very close--both personally and politically--with Goldman, and was a leading collaborator with her and others in the anarchist journal _Mother Earth._

Havel was not a theoretician, unlike Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or Rudolf Rocker (1873-1948). He excelled at small pieces. Kropotkin, on the other hand, wrote large treatises, such as _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_ (1898), _Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution _(1902), and _The Conquest of Bread _(1892), among others. Kropotkin's _An Appeal to the Young_ (1880) remains to this day a call to idealistic youth to fight for social justice. Kropotkin's historical study _The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793_ (1893) and his autobiographical volumes, _Memoirs of a Revolutionist_ (1899) and _In Russian and French Prisons_ (1887), continue to be valuable reading. Nor did Havel make his mark as an organizer. Informing the world about anarchism and seeking to inspire thought and action was the essence of his career in the movement. Havel's forte was the small essay, simultaneously informing and exhorting.

Of the fifty-seven pieces in the book, thirty-one first appeared in _Mother Earth_ from 1908 to 1914, two were published in _Greenwich Village_ in 1915, two came out of _The Social War _in 1917, and four were printed in 1929-30 in _The Road to Freedom_. Only a few items lack information as to who published them: "Among Books" (1910), "Among the Books" (1930), "A Victim of Communist Treachery" (1930), "Kotoku's Correspondence with Albert Johnson--Continuation" (1911),

Citation: John Haynes. Shapiro on Jun, 'Proletarian Days: A Hippolyte Havel Reader'. H-HOAC. 06-17-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6077/discussions/4211921/shapiro-jun-proletarian-days-hippolyte-havel-reader Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-HOAC and "The Voice of Gary" (1928). Since the first part of Kotoku's correspondence appeared in _Mother Earth_, it is likely that the continuation piece appeared there as well.

The editor has arranged the essays in chronological order. The readers thus witness the anarchist movement in real time, a continuous present, as events occurred. With a journalist such as Havel, this makes more sense than dividing them up by topic, an arrangement that also places the events and actors more in the past. Havel did not write in a systematic manner; his was very much a literature in response, reacting to the events of the day, to those he knew or met; what comes through most clearly is Havel's passion, his fervent belief in the anarchist ideal.

Havel did not restrict himself to the American and European anarchist movements. Four pieces deal with Denjiro Kotoku (1871-1911), the Japanese anarchist executed in 1911, who wrote as Kotoku Shusui. Other pieces deal with the martyred Spanish educator/revolutionist Francisco Ferrer and Russia's Peter Kropotkin. Havel's essays on literature demonstrate the width and depth of his knowledge and interests. The book contains pieces on the American author Jack London (1876-1916), the Russian writers Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81), and from Britain, H. G. Wells (1866-1946). In writing about Jack London, he devotes one essay to London's autobiographical novel, _Martin Eden _(1909), a work which unfortunately London's other novels have eclipsed in popularity--_Call of the Wild _(1903), for example. While _The Iron Heel_ (1908) is very interesting as London's prophecy of an authoritarian future as well as an experiment in telling a story in the form of a diary, it still lacks the emotional and psychological force of _Martin Eden_; and it is upon this attention to psychological forces that Havel focuses.

Surprisingly--and whether this is true of these selections or Havel's oeuvre in its entirety this reviewer cannot say--there is but one mention of the Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the closest thing to syndicalism which that existed in North or South America. Beyond the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Italian anarchists receive no mention at all. Of all the non-English-speaking anarchist groups in America, the Italians were the most numerous.

This book is a gem: crafted, polished, and set. It serves as a model for what an editor/compiler should do. The editor has tracked down all of the publication details for each article (with the few exceptions noted above) and provides annotations so the reader will

Citation: John Haynes. Shapiro on Jun, 'Proletarian Days: A Hippolyte Havel Reader'. H-HOAC. 06-17-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6077/discussions/4211921/shapiro-jun-proletarian-days-hippolyte-havel-reader Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-HOAC know about whom or what Havel was referring. He further notes where Havel erred. One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is its resurrection or reminder of the forgotten--forgotten people, events, places, publications.

Citation: Shelby Shapiro. Review of Jun, Nathan, ed., _Proletarian Days: A Hippolyte Havel Reader_. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. June, 2019. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53449

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.