underground railroad - 2009 - A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

Kathleen Bradford

Scholastic Canada

2009

224 pages

A Desperate Road to Freedom is a work of fiction written in the style of a young girl's personal journal as she tells the story of her escape, with her family, from a slave farm in Virginia to a homestead in Ontario. Julia May Jackson, with her parents and siblings, flee slavery through the underground railroad to settle into the Owen Sound region. The book is a part of an interesting series, titled 'Dear Canada', put out by Scholastic Canada, of fictional journals written by girls who lived through times of historical trauma in the Canadian and (sometimes) American contexts. Other books in the series are written from the perspective of girls who lived through the internment of Japanese Canadian’s for example, or through the War of 1812. I intend to read the books on the Upper Canada rebellion of 1837 and the Red River Metis rebellion too.

I don’t know about other books in the series but what I admire about this particular entry is that it does not idealize Canadian society or sanitize it of its own racism. The history of slavery and the underground railroad in North America provides an opportunity for Canadians to compare our history with that of the (still) deeply racist US, with the potential for us to view ourselves historically as a nation as having more enlightened attitudes towards race. The diary of Julia May Jackson tells the story of racist brutality and murder in the US, but also of racial prejudice experienced after her family’s escape, in Ontario, where even the friendly folks of the area express their prejudices in subtle but no less upsetting terms.

transcendentalists - 1987 - Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Paula Blanchard

Addison-Wesley Publishing

1987

371 pages

Paula Blanchard wrote a highly detailed biography of Margaret Fuller, a member of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual Transcendentalist movement of mid-19th century New England. The movement is best remembered as the group which counted America’s best loved philosophers of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as members. Fuller is a less remembered member of the group probably because her involvement was, according to Blanchard, oriented around conversation rather than writing. Emerson and Thoreau had not only attained a certain status as American philosophers, but also their writings did much to found a uniquely American literature.  Fuller's own writings were often relatively short pieces of social criticism, many of which were revolutionary calls for increased rights for women.

Fuller's output was lighter on textual production than some of the other transcendentalist, although she was editor of one of the major organs of the movement’s thought, The Dial, a periodical where she published much of her own writing. Blanchard's text is a very detailed account of Fuller's life discussing her strict upbringing, oriented around her education, by her politician father, Timothy Fuller. her background directed her into an adult career as a strict schoolteacher who was nevertheless loved by her students.  She then went on to enter the Transcendentalist circle in which she formed non-conformist beliefs and developed a strain of social commentary which blossomed into the fight for equal rights for women in America.  Fuller’s story as told by Blanchard ends with the great woman embarking on a European tour with little money, and ending up with a family - to her death on the shoals the American east coast upon her return to her homeland.

Fuller seems entrenched in the Transcendentalist movement, which led her to the cause of women’s rights and to become a pioneering mind in early American feminism.  I don’t know much about this volume’s author, Paula Blanchard, aside from that she has written biographies of other great women, such as the Canadian painter Emily Carr and American author Sarah Orne Jewett.

utopian communities - book - 1870 - History of American Socialisms

History of American Socialisms
John Humphrey Noyes
JB Lippencott & Company
1870
678 pages

John Humphrey Noyes was the founder of the Oneida Community, one of the most successful utopian-socialist societies of the United States. Founded in 1848, the community thrived until 1881 upon principles of communal sharing of property and the belief that Christ’s return had already occurred and therefore the heavenly kingdom may then be built upon earth. The journalist Charles Nordhoff, in his 1875 book The Communistic Societies of the United States referred to Noyes group as the perfectionists and he devoted a chapter to describing their customs and lifestyle.

Noyes

Noyes wrote his history of other utopian communities, originally published in 1870, in response to an unpublished book of a history of such groups written by an A. J. MacDonald who was a great admirer of these societies and their philosophical inspirations such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. According to Noyes introduction, MacDonald died some time in the 1850s and Noyes and his associates had found MacDonalds research notes and from those materials he constructed this text in combination with his own views and some additional research. Yale University, in their rare books and manuscripts collection, actually has MacDonald’s research papers and notes, which were given to Yale by Noyes as a gift.

History of American Socialisms is a long and comprehensive book about the phenomena of Utopian societies in 19th century America. Over the course of 48 chapters, Noyes gives the details of virtually every aspect of utopian communities, from their philosophical influences, to the aspect of religion, to the individual and specific communities, and in rare cases, the specific effect of certain influences on certain communities (such as the chapter on Swedenborgianism on the venerable Brook Farm community). The longest chapter in Noyes history was on the Wisconsin Phalanx (the phalanxes were societies specifically based on the utopian socialist ideas of French idealist philosopher, Charles Fourier) and Noyes’ own Oneida Community, which was one of the longest lasting of these societies, and the one which the author could speak about at length with great authority.  

Noyes also inserts many of his own views, and in particular, the importance of religion to these societies was often stated by the author. Noyes himself was a theologian who “discovered” that Christ had made his second coming in 70 ad, a peculiar perspective that provided the ground for the beliefs of his society.  Furthermore, the author notes that most of the utopian societies barely survived a year, and he believes that those societies that had cleaved themselves to religious principles were more successful. 

Noyes view that a mix of socialist politics and millenarian religion keeps a group together has a truth to it that, I'm sure, most contemporary activists who admire socialistic communities would like to dismiss. At the time of this book's publication, Noyes own community was in its second decade, and most of the other groups he describes were long gone. The Oneida Community is now long gone too but some communities continue, and are hardly acknowledged as countercultural by current activists, who would love to establish long-term socialist communities, because they cannot conceive of spiritual belief as anything other than a strategy deployed by authorities for the purpose of deceiving unsophisticated adherents into obedience. Noyes history reveals that people can successfully and sincerely combine socialist politics and religion into the theoretical foundation for a new way of life.

Transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau - book - 1864 - The Maine Woods

The Maine Woods
Henry David Thoreau
Quality Paperback Book Club
1864 (1994)
423 pages

The Maine Woods is an account of a trip taken in the Summer of 1846 by Henry David Thoreau, the great Transcendentalist philosopher, through Maine to the Mount Katahdin. The book, published after Thoreau’s death (like most of his writing), primarily gives the details of the plant and animal life of the wilderness he crosses by foot or by canoe. The descriptions of these natural features, I would say, make up most of the book and demonstrate a very focused attention on the natural world.  This particular edition of the book also includes lengthy appendices that list the life Thoreau encountered.  

Aside from noting all of the different forms of plant and animal life, The Maine Woods is filled with Thoreau’s musings on human activities in its interaction with nature, focusing both on American development and treatment of the land, and on the Indian interactions with the land.  A particularly noteworthy passage was where Thoreau lamented the killing of a moose by a white hunter, just for fun.  Thoreau was very critical of such activity which is, in essence, cowardly, stupid, and wasteful. He was also critical of some Indian (to use Thoreau’s term) practices as well, noting that they could be equally wasteful of natural resources at times, although he certainly also showed a great respect for Indian culture and the final section of the book is a list of words from the languages of the American northeast, and their English translations.

organized labour - book - 1931 - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence In America

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
Louis Adamic
Peter Smith
1931 (Revised Edition - 1963)
495 pages

Louis Adamic, the author of Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, was not an academically trained historian.  He was rather one of the working class intellectuals that Antonio Gramsci theorized in his essay The Formation of the Intellectuals published in the Selections from the Prison Notebooks.  That is, an individual who emerged from his or her specific form of class consciousness to act as philosopher from their social situation.  Adamic was, as a young man, an unemployed and unskilled worker, a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the international radical labour union, to become a speaker and historian of that movement.  He lacked formal education but possessed a will to compile the history of a movement that, in his time, no academic historian was likely to produce. That is, the history of fighting labour in the United States from the mid-19th century through to the 1920s.  

Adamic’s history begins with the Molly Maguires, or “Mollies”, a group of ruthlessly aggressive Irish immigrant miners who would kill any mining bosses that created unfavourable conditions.  This history then progresses into early wildcat strikes which led to the organization of labour unions.  Adamic has a fondness for the more radical unions (such as his own IWW) and opposes them to the more bureaucratic and conservative unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed under the boss-like cigarmaker Samuel L. Gompers.  The heroes of Dynamite are probably Bill Haywood, the brawling Miners Union leader, and Eugene V. Debs, the radical leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who personally led their rank and file into street battles with police and strikebreakers.  Adamic appears to have a fondness, as well, for the users of dynamite, as the statement “Dynamite!  That’s the stuff!” appears throughout his text as an affirmation of radical labour’s fighting spirit. Woven into Ademic’s historical narrative of violent labour activity are the stories of anarchists who have taken up the cause, or of related persecution of anarchists of this period, including the episode of Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of mine boss Henry Clay Frick, Louis Lingg and the Haymarket Explosion, and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and execution, which occurred while Ademic was researching and writing this text.

Adamic seems to adore the fighting spirit, even the willingness to use dynamite to advance the interests of working people. Conversely, he speaks with derision of Gomper’s willingness to compromise, negotiate with bosses, which he portrays as the behavior of one who was essentially a career politician. Furthermore, when Adamic speaks of Miner and IWW leader “Big” Bill Haywood’s willingness to leap into combat with only his fists as weapons, he discusses with loathing the AFL’s alliances with Mafia ‘protection’ men, and hired brutes who fought against the bosses’ Pinkerton (for-hire strikebreaking muscle) bullies. Thus Adamic identifies a rift in the American labor movement and firmly priviledges one side over another in his narration of the history of labor-centered violence.

anarchism - book - 1964 - The Anarchists

The Anarchists
James Joll
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
1964 (2nd ed. 1979)
299 pages

One of the things I love about library books are the handwritten notes that are left in the page margins by other patrons. I know that vast numbers of library patrons hate that people make marks in these books and consider it disrespectful, but I love that each book can, over time, accumulate the specific signs of its use.  Almost every page of the copy of early sociologist George H. Mead’s Mind, Self and Society that I borrowed from UofT’s Robarts Library was so heavily underlined that it had the stippled texture of 19th century Japanese Prints. My secondhand copy of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down To This, a diary of living in Toronto’s turn-of the century tent city, includes a handmade index on the inside back cover so that a previous reader could make certain aspects of the text accessible on his or her return to the book.  

I borrowed a copy of The Anarchists by James Joll, a British historian whose career was mostly focused on the politically radical (he also wrote a book about the Socialist Second International, and a biography of the Italian Marxist leader and philosopher, Antonio Gramsci) from the UofT Scarborough Library, and includes notes by other borrowers recommending other, better books on anarchist history.  While Joll’s book can now be seen as a truncated survey of anarchist thought that has, since its publication, been eclipsed in importance by more thorough studies like Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible, at the time of its first publication The Anarchists was basically opening up the field of anarchist studies.  Joll charts a history of anarchist thought from the Gnostics of early Christendom to the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, although he focuses most of his work on the anarchists of the 19th century: in particular on the thought and deeds of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.  

Joll’s analysis takes a close look at the effects of anarchist writings and speech and the competing philosophical tendencies within the broad anarchist scene.  One of the notes written in the copy of this book that I read stated “an excellent book which, among other things, clears up many seemingly inconsistent ideas in anarchist thought is “Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis” by Alan Ritter, 1980.”  This note doesn’t dissolve the value of Joll’s history but, in its recommendation of another text, it does mark the social function of library books and their ability to communicate between patrons.

anarchism - article - 2011 - Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality”: Anarchism and the First of May, 1890-1892

Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality”: Anarchism and the First of May, 1890-1892
Davide Turcato
Journal for the Study of Radicalism
Vol 5, No 1: 2011
pp. 1-32
Michigan State University Press

Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality” is the third article I will have annotated from Vol 5, No 1 of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  Author Davide Turcato, an independent scholar, challenges an assertion, that anarchist actions are often irrational eruptions, which is commonly expressed in anarchist scholarship.  Turcato suggests that activity that appears as irrational to previous anarchist scholars is likely the result of planning that has occurred out of view. Anarchist planning is often unseen and therefore not a part of in the historical record.  According to Turcato, this gap in the record has produced the stereotype of the irrational anarchist and has lead scholars such as Peter Marshall (who’s attempted to write a comprehensive history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible) and Eric Hobsbawm (the great Marxist historian who discusses the irrationality of anarchists in his work, Primitive Rebels) to take events as they appear, or to take the word of police or anarchist critics at face value because their words ARE the record.  Like Gabriel,  with his article, Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914, and Andrew Cornell with his article, A New Anarchism Emerges, Turcato is inventing new ways of looking at anarchist action and development.  

Turcato is listed by the Journal for the Study of Radicalism as an independent scholar, however he has received a doctorate in History from Simon Frasier University.  He has also earned a Govenor General’s Gold Medal award for his doctorate on Italian anarchism.  Aside from a very strong interest in historical Italian anarchism, Turcato is a language engineer... I don’t really know what a language engineer is, however most of the scholarly articles that appear on his publishing record pertain to the deployment of language by digital technologies.  

Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality” proceeds from the assumption that social formations that appear to engage in irrational behavior to distant outsiders (such as historians) should rather assume to be operating on their own set of rationale.  Furthermore, drawing from British historian E.P. Thompson’s studies of the 19th century Luddite movement, Turcato classifies 19th century European anarchism as an opaque movement, a social underground, that produced anarchist texts but not necessarily written evidence for specific actions.  

Violent anarchist events from First of May celebrations in France, Italy, and Spain from the years 1890-1892 are used as case studies, by Turcato, to give substance to his new perspective on anarchist history.  Turcato discusses at length these events to speculate on the underlying rationale that drove the spectacular irrationality that other historians have noted.  The author closely investigates the actions of the Italian anarchist leader Errico Malatesta during these years to demonstrate patterns of activity and planning that suggest that events did not spontaneously erupt into violence but were rather crafted insurrections.

Turcato’s article is interesting because, through his study of Malatesta and his interrogation of the existing historical literature, he demonstrates how even historians and thinkers who are sensitive to anarchist politics, such as the Canadian George Woodcock, or the aforementioned Peter Marshall, reinforce the stereotype of the irrational insurrectionist.  It is difficult for me to reconcile Turcato’s newfound rationality in anarchist activity with an understanding of anarchism that has, perhaps, been in part conditioned by the above authors to consider irrationality to be a component of anarchism’s appeal. 

anarchism - article - 2011 - Anarchism's Appeal to German Workers, 1887-1914

Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914
Elun Gabriel
Journal for the Study of Radicalism
Vol 5, No 1: 2011
pp. 33-66
Michigan State University Press

Elun Gabriel is an associate professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he teaches courses on modern European history.  He has published a number of articles on anarchism in Europe (and more specifically, Germany) and his CV on the St. Lawrence U. website states that he has a soon-to-be-published book titled Anarchism, Social Democracy, and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany, 1871-1918.  His focus appears to be upon the influence of anarchist thought and practice on a left-wing population that preferred socialism.  His hypothesis is that, while Germany never developed an anarchist movement as other European nations did, there was still a significant degree of anarchistic pathos among that country’s socialist populace.

The above statements comprise the thesis of Gabriel’s article, Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914, published in an anarchism themed issue, Vol 5, No 1, of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  Gabriel discusses how late 19th to early 20th century Germany had a small number of anarchists but among them were individuals who were vocal and quite popular with the German working class.  Of particular interest to Gabriel was Johann Most, a Bavarian-born member of the Social Democratic party who was incredibly popular among Germany’s industrial workers and was, in 1874, elected to the Reichstag as a political representative.  While Most was a Social Democrat, he gravitated towards international socialism and then towards insurrectionist politics.  His advocacy for revolutionary violence and ‘propaganda by the deed’ actions lead to his expulsion from the Social Democratic Party in 1880.  Still, Most’s writings remained popular with workers who read his far-left paper, Freiheit, (the German word for ‘liberty’) without actually becoming anarchists.

Gabriel’s idea for why anarchism appealed to the German workers stems from a working class ethos of drinking and brawling.  The workers were, generally, socialists, but official socialism as represented by the Social Democratic Party looked down upon the ‘rough culture’ of their working class constituents.  An anarchism of incendiary rhetoric and calls for violent direct action held great appeal for workers whose culture was treated in a condescending manner by the political party that represented their ideals.  Furthermore, anarchism appealed to workers who understood and desired social change through violent confrontation rather than policy change via official channels.  Furthermore, according to Gabriel, the reading of anarchist texts helped workers articulate frustrations with Germany’s class system and with a Social Democratic Party who attributed the proletariat popularity of Most’s Freheit newspaper, to give an example of the degree of their condescension, with a political immaturity among workers.  In this, it sounds as though anarchist writings and rhetoric appealed to the hearts of German workers while socialism appealed to their minds.

Elun Gabriel’s article opens a new dimension for anarchist scholarship in which the influence of anarchism is studied beyond the boundaries of those historical movements that pledged allegiance to that ideology.  His heavy emphasis on Johann Most, an SDP party member whose fiery rhetoric exceeded the limits of mannered socialism demonstrates the nerve centre of this phenomena, as Most was not truly anarchist during the height of his popularity although he was a conduit for anarchist words and ideals.