SDS People

From Anarchistories by Tom Goyens

The transformative “new social history” that emerged in the 1960s was a boon to the historical profession, especially for labor and immigrant history—two pillars essential to understanding anarchism in America. Yet, despite its potential, anarchism remained a marginal topic in the history writing of the 1960s and 1970s. The reasons for this neglect are as complex as the movement itself, shaped by ideological biases, linguistic barriers, and internal dynamics among anarchists.

Accessing anarchism’s past was and is no small feat. There are, of course, no party or election records. The real treasure trove for historians is letters and newspapers, but they are scattered across numerous archives in different countries, and, most challenging of all, mainly written in languages other than English. The crucial immigrant roots of American anarchism have therefore often been overlooked. This linguistic and cultural gap meant that a comprehensive narrative of anarchism, especially immigrant anarchism, remained out of reach for decades.

Despite such academic barriers, a resurgence of anarchist ideas and practices occurred within the emerging student movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s. Non-hierarchical organizing, mutual aid, consensus decision-making, prefigurative politics, and direct action were either attempted or discussed. With it came a renewed interest in the anarchist tradition that lay buried in archives and out-of-print books and pamphlets. Several anthologies of anarchist writings (at least those available in English) appeared in the United States and Britain. However, few historians took notice of the fact that anarchism had never died after all.

What’s more, many anarchist activists of the 1960s and 1970s were reluctant to engage with and reinterpret their history, especially in contrast to Marxists, who were more organized in documenting their legacy. Terry Perlin was one of the new anarchist historians who believed that anarchists of the 1970s had been caught up in the present and perplexed by the past. He detected a “contempt for the past,” an “unconscious avant-gardism,” not so much anti-historical, but ahistorical. He was not surprised, therefore, that “the revival of anarchist activity in the 1960s and 1970s triggered no special nostalgia.”1

These difficulties were intensified by a Marxist bias among radical historians, which persisted even as the New Left of the 1960s criticized dogmatic Marxism and the Communist Party. Marxist historians tended to treat anarchism as something irrational, a movement that once kicked around, then died out and had remained without much consequence. The radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, for instance, once planned to compile a reader titled Anarchists, Criminals, Deviants, viewing anarchism as a “pivot” of Marxism. Yet, Mills knew little about anarchism and left no serious research on its history. His student, sociologist Irving Horowitz, took a different stance. In editing one of the first anthologies on anarchism (1964), Horowitz rejected the idea of anarchism as a Marxist offshoot, instead calling it a radical—but ineffectual—alternative to the Marxist tradition.2 These intellectual tensions reveal why anarchism struggled to gain recognition as a legitimate field of study.

Even as a new generation of historians sought to challenge orthodox Marxism, these assumptions about anarchism proved remarkably durable. Between 1959 and 1969, New Left historians fought an uphill battle for acceptance in the profession, countering accusations of “presentism,” the supposed imposition of political ideology on historical analysis. They recognized the resurgence of anarchist ideas and practices, but for the most part, refrained from a re-evaluation of anarchism’s history. Compare this to how the New Left reassessed the Abolitionists, long dismissed as “psychologically disturbed fanatics.”3 In 1962, historian Martin Duberman’s essay The Abolitionists and Psychology redefined (and rehabilitated) this group in light of the civil rights movement.4 But anarchism remained saddled with its old stereotypes: irrational, violent, fanciful, inconsequential, or a mere offshoot of Marxism. The opportunity for uncovering, let alone rethinking, the history of anarchism went largely unrealized.

There were a few bright spots for anarchist historiography in 1960s America. In 1961, the Berkeley professor Richard T. Drinnon (1925–2012) published Rebel in Paradise, the first American biography of Emma Goldman and a notably sympathetic one. However, Drinnon was apparently deemed too ideological by university administrators. Although he was allowed to teach a course titled “A Critical View of American History,” he was denied tenure because of his political views. A few years later, in 1966, Anchor Books released Patterns of Anarchy: A Collection of Writings on the Anarchist Tradition, a substantial new 570-page anthology assembled by two retired scholars, the philosopher Leonard Krimerman and the historian Lewis Perry. It is noteworthy that their project involved direct collaboration with anarchist organizations, London’s Freedom Group and the New York–based Libertarian League, which supplied the authors with historical and often hard-to-find materials.

If the New Left briefly opened the door to a broader reconsideration of radical traditions, that opening would soon narrow dramatically. In the wake of the turmoil and defeats of 1968, the student movement and SDS collapsed in 1969. These events caused radical historians to pivot even more toward an unorthodox Marxism. This shift may well have invigorated certain strands of historical thought, but it inadvertently marginalized anarchism further, both as a movement and a subject of serious academic inquiry. One historian remembered the topic of anarchism being greeted by “snide remarks by Marxist and non-socialist commentators.”5 This dismissive tone lingered for years. As late as 1983, labor historian Paul Buhle called for a reassessment of American working-class anarchism, arguing that “syndicalist and anarchist themes have remained a hidden text, awaiting the unraveling of the political knot bound up in the Russian Revolution and the generations of Cold War that have followed.”6

Compounding the blind spot problem was the persistence of a liberal bias in historical narratives, a remnant of the “consensus history” of the 1940s and 1950s. This perspective viewed revolutionary anarchism as an import and thus incompatible with the supposed purity of American democratic ideals. According to this view, anarchism was a foreign contagion; its radicalism too alien for the American experience and therefore not part of a supposed national consensus. By contrast, individualist anarchism, with its alignment to laissez-faire principles, was cast as the only “authentic” American variant.

This liberal framing did more than exclude anarchism from the national story; it fundamentally distorted the historical record. It ignored the fact that the sporadic violent acts of anarchists were dwarfed by the systemic violence of American laissez-faire capitalism, from avoidable industrial accidents to organized anti-labor violence committed by employers and law enforcement. Moreover, it failed to account for the dynamic process of radicalization among immigrants, many if not most of whom embraced anarchism after being confronted with the brutalities of American industrial capitalism.

Taken together, these overlapping biases help explain why anarchism has remained for so long on the margins of American historiography. These biases are rooted in ideological obstinacy and intellectual laziness. Only recently has the promise of social history been realized for anarchism, as scholars integrate it into the intertwined histories of labor, immigration, gender, race, and dissent. The history of anarchism (and radicalism in general) offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant myths of the nation’s past.

Note: social preview image taken from https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-12/sixties-left-usa

1 Perlin, “Recurrence of Defiance,” in Contemporary Anarchism, edited by Perlin (1979), 14-15

2 Horowitz, ed. The Anarchists (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964), acknowledgments.

3 Jonathan M. Weiner, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980,” The Journal of American History Vol. 76, No. 2 (Sep. 1989), 413.

4 Duberman, “The Abolitionists and Psychology,” Journal of Negro History 47 (July 1962), 183-91.

5 Avakumovic, “Review of Anarchist Portraits by Paul Avrich,” Slavic Review Vol. 49, No. 3 (Autumn 1990), 454.

6 Buhle, “Anarchism and American Labor,” International Labor and Working Class History 23 (Spring 1983), 21.

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