witnessing and martyrdom in the anarchists

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Performing Persecution:

Witnessing and Martyrdom in

the Anarchist Tradition

Elun Gabriel

Anarchisms roots lie in late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century philosophicalcritiques of state power. Though anarchistic strains could be found in the Frenchrevolutions of 1789 and 1848, a recognizable anarchist movement only emerged inthe 1860s, as Mikhail Bakunin waged a losing battle with Karl Marx for control ofthe International Workingmens Association.1From the 1870s to the 1920s, anar-chists played an active role in European and American politics as competitors toMarxist socialists for the allegiance of the working classes and as participants invarious movements for social transformation. Despite the existence of competinganarchist philosophical perspectives, the movement of the 1860s and 1870s wasclosely associated with Bakunins vision of revolutionary insurrectionism. Whereasmany who adopted Marxs theoretical framework regarded the triumph of their ide-ology as the inevitable culmination of gradual economic development, anarchistsbelieved that only by awakening the masses to their oppression and by inspiringrevolt against the system that produced it could they usher in a new world. Thepolitical turmoil of the mid-nineteenth century (from the revolutions of 1848 to the

conicts leading to the respective unications of Italy and Germany and the ParisCommune of 1871) suggested to Bakunin and his followers that committed bands ofrevolutionaries could instigate profound social transformation.

Radical History ReviewIssue 98 (Spring 2007) doi 10.1215/01636545-2006-026 2007 by MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.

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The philosophy of political action expressed in Bakunins 1873 work Stat-ism and Anarchy inuenced revolutionaries in Italy, Spain, and Russia whose gov-ernments were racked with severe crises of legitimacy.2Bakunin argued that for

revolutionary change to occur, it is indispensable that the people be inspired by auniversal ideal, historically developed from the instinctual depths of popular senti-ments, amplied and claried by a series of signicant events and severe and bitterexperiences. It is necessary that the populace have a general idea of their rightsand a deep, passionate, quasi-religious belief in the validity of these rights.3 Thisperspective led to two related strategies for reaching the masses: propaganda ofthe word and propaganda of the deed. The former referred to the disseminationof anarchist ideas through print and speech, while the latter originally describeda wide variety of political activities, such as rural banditry and insurrectionism,meant toreveal to the people their own power and thereby spark revolution. In herMemoirs of a Revolutionist, the Russian Populist Vera Figner described how herorganization envisioned these two strategies in the 1870s: Propagandists proposedto raise the mass morally and mentally to their own level, and prepare a consoli-dated and intelligent minority in the midst of the people, which would assure, intime of an elemental or organised revolution, the promulgation of socialist principlesand ideals; Insurrectionists, on the other hand, believed that among the naturallysocialistic and discontented peasantry, so much inammatory material had accu-mulated . . . that a small spark would easily are up into a ame, and the latter intoa gigantic conagration.4 The insurrectionist route, pursued most actively in Italy

in the late 1870s, proved almost entirely futile, owing to a combination of peasantindifference or puzzlement, on the one hand, and military repression on the other.5Once the instigation of immediate revolution had been abandoned, Populists andanarchists again confronted the problem of how best to spread their ideas.

Operating from a position of relative institutional powerlessness, anarchistsadopted another vocabulary of persecuted evangelizers, that of Christianity.6 Inca-pable of defeating the states they opposed, anarchists sought to turn the statespower of punishment to their advantage, using it as a means to testify publicly totheir beliefs. Anarchists who wound up in the dock, on the scaffold, or in prisonsaw the experience through the prism of Christian witnessing, which emphasized

the need to afrm in word and deed the truths that the soul knew to be true. Inthis way anarchists hoped to triumph spiritually over an order that they could notovercome by force.

The rituals of the legal system provided anarchists the opportunity to speakduring their trials, and, for those condemned to death, before their executions aswell. Anarchists embraced these moments of speech as chances to witness to theirfaith. They could also demonstrate the power of a faith that gave them the courageto face death and the condence that their suffering would contribute to the worldsredemption. Press accounts of these events (from both radical and popular journal-

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36 Radical History Review

ists), as well as reprints of trial and gallows speeches took the anarchists message toa larger audience than they reached through their ordinary lectures and writings.Therefore anarchists greeted their punishment with equanimity or, in some cases,

eagerness, anticipating that it would not only rouse their comrades to renewed com-mitment but also bring new converts to the cause. Though powerless to deect thedoom meted out by the courts, anarchists resisted the intended effects of punish-ment silencing, inducing repentance, and showing the states invincibility. Thevery act of silencing the anarchist with literal or civil death opened up a space inwhich the anarchists words could be widely heard, preserved, and repeated amongthe faithful from beyond the grave.

For anarchists who did not meet a martyrs death, imprisonment tested theirfaith. Prepared to die, anarchists often struggled with the transition to life in a placedesigned to deny their lives a public dimension. Yet they ultimately learned to turnthe prison into an arena for activism. Anarchist prison memoirs recounted strugglesto humanize the prison and create solidarity among prisoners, carrying on theirpre-incarceration goal of humanizing society as a whole. Because anarchists alreadyregarded their societies as prison houses, the carceral experience was for them insome ways merely an extension of the outside society, encouraging them to continuetheir theorization of the states oppressive mechanisms. If incarcerations functionwas to subdue the prisoners soul, the anarchist labored to turn the prison into ascene of the souls triumph over hell.

Though my central examples will be drawn from the history of anarchist

trials, executions, and imprisonments, these also illustrate how political dissidentsmore broadly confronted state punishment in the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries. In this essay, I utilize the Russian Populist Vera Figners memoirsextensively. The Populists (also known as nihilists, a term coined by Ivan Turgenev)differed in certain respects from anarchists (their aim was l iberal democracy ratherthan the states abolition), but they had much in common, not only philosophicallybut culturally. Mikhail Bakunin helped inspire Populist tactics, while the Populistsdeeds deeply inuenced many later anarchists (especially, but not exclusively, Rus-sians such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Peter Kropotkin). Much ofwhat I describe concerning anarchist experiences applies to some degree to other

groups as well. Indeed, nationalist movements in Europe, American abolition-ists, and even sympathizers with the bourgeois political leaders slain by anarchistsemployed the trope of martyrdom. Anarchists, however, were the rst nonreligiouslygrounded group to develop public witnessing and martyrdom into a central meansof propagandizing.

The anarchists framing of their battles with the state in these terms in thelate nineteenth century left a lasting imprint on socialists and other radicals whoembraced and augmented this discourse. This is one of anarchisms chief legaciesto the culture of the radical Left. Anarchists developed a response to punishment


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that at least partly blunted the modern states ability to discipline and silence itscritics. Through their witnessing and martyrdom, anarchists drew attention to theoppressive aspects of the judicial and penal systems that tried them, encouraging

not only socialists but liberal reformers to confront the injustices of even ostensiblyliberal states.

Witnessing and the Anarchist Tradition

In the Christian tradition, witnessing means testifying to ones faith, both livingout its ideals and publicly proclaiming its truth. From Christianitys beginnings,martyrdom offered the most dramatic example of such witnessing. Martyrdom,according to Elizabeth Castelli, always implies a . . . narrative that invokes notionsof justice and the right ordering of the cosmos. By turning the chaos and meaning-lessness of violence into martyrdom, one reasserts the priority and superiority of animagined or longed for order and a privileged and idealized system of meaning.7Through their responses to punishment, martyrs sought to counterpose their ownsystem of meaning to that promoted by the authorities punishing them. The Refor-mation brought a shift away from passive physical suffering and toward active testi-fying through speech. Robert Kolb has noted that for Martin Luther, Gods battleswere always fought through the Word. Martyrdom was, for him, l iterally witness tothe faith.8 By embracing martyrdom, the victim of punishments could invert themeaning of the trial and execution, which were meant to dramatize the terribleconsequences of heresy. Rather than functioning as a display of state-controlled

power, Sarah Covington has argued about martyrdom in sixteenth-century Britain,the theater of execution was . . . a contested site in which authorities, martyr, andthe observing crowd all inuenced the events meaning.9 Martyrs sought to turn theritual of physical punishment into a drama of tyranny and cruelty overcome by thespiritually superior individual for the edication and, it was to be hoped, conversionof others.10 Martyrs believed that by testifying to the truth of their convictions,they could convert those who saw or heard the story of their martyrdom, making thecirculation of martyrologies central to the evangelizing project.11

The era of modern religious martyrdom diminished signicantly after theseventeenth century, but witnessing remained a central aspect of many minority

religious sects, especially those that criticized aspects of the dominant society, forwhom religious and political witnessing often merged. For instance, a central ele-ment of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement in the United States involvedwitnessing: antislavery Christians saw it as a religious duty to resist slavery in waysthat often brought them into clashes with political authorities.12 The most famousmartyr of the abolitionist cause, John Brown, understood his attempt to free slavesas an act of religious witnessing. In his nal statement to the jury in 1859, Brownclaimed that the Bible had taught him that all things whatsoever I would that menshould do to me, I should do even so to them . . . I endeavored to act up to that


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instruction.13 Brown also clearly understood martyrdoms political value when hetold friends, I am worth now innitely more to die than to live.14 Nineteenth-century Irish nationalists embraced the language of martyrdom in ways that drew

on their religious traditions, though the veneration of martyrs remained minoruntil after the 1916 Easter Uprising.15 Russian Populists and anarchists embracedthis tradition of politicized witnessing and martyrdom, the latter shearing it of anyexplicitly religious dimension. When they faced punishment, they interpreted itthrough this matrix of meaning.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the early modern spectacle of public execu-tion, whether for martyrs or ordinary criminals, had given way to the containmentof punishment behind prison walls, in some measure because of the ways publicexecutions were fraught with inevitable contestations over their meaning.16 Denieda public audience for displays of courage and resistance while undergoing punish-ment, the condemned lost a crucial avenue for promoting an alternative interpre-tation of their conict with state power. The courtroom replaced the spectacle ofphysical punishment as the crucial site of symbolic rituals of either reconciliationbetween the criminal and the state or the defendants continued deance of theauthorities, though journalists still provided the reading public a secondhand expe-rience of executions.17

Even the most autocratic regimes of the late nineteenth century, like czar-ist Russia, allowed the juridical objects of punishment the opportunity to assertthemselves during the trial, thereby creating an important space for the accused

to testify and resist the dominant interpretation of the act of punishment. In Sep-tember 1884, Vera Figner went on trial for her participation in the Peoples Willplot that slew Czar Alexander II three and a half years earlier. In her Memoirs of aRevolutionist, Figner conveyed her appreciation for the potential signicance of thedefendants speech within the tr ial. There came at last the most memorable day ofmy life, she recalled, the most profoundly moving moment in any trial, when thepresident turning to the accused, says in a peculiarly solemn voice, Defendant, thelast word is yours. Figner understood that her chance to participate in the judicialprocess could be used to bear witness to her beliefs: The last word! How great, andhow deep a signicance is in that brief phrase! The accused is given an opportunity,

unique in its tragic setting, and perhaps the last, the very last opportunity in his life,to express his spiritual individuality, to explain the moral justication of his acts andconduct, and to speak aloud, for all to hear, those things which he wishes to say,which he must say, and may say.18 Such moments allowed the speaker to challengethe ofcial narrative of justice and offer an alternative system of meaning throughwhich to interpret the trial.

The possibilities of mass evangelizing led some Populists and anarchists inthe 1870s to develop a new conception of propaganda of the deed, which encom-passed deeds of spectacular terrorism: the assassination of monarchs, politicians,


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capitalists, police, and other bastions of the reigning social order. Those who advo-cated such terrorism, always a minority outside of Russia, believed it would show themasses the vulnerability of their oppressors while encouraging them to learn about

the ideals of the revolutionaries who undertook such noble acts of self-sacrice.Rather than attempting to overthrow the ruling order, anarchist terrorists saw thetactic as a means to disseminate their ideology.19

Populist and anarchist assassins understood their acts as dramatic instancesof witnessing to their faith, which they anticipated would have great proselytizingpower. Figner helped found the Russian Populist organization known as the PeoplesWill (Narodnaya Volya), whose principal propagandistic goal was the assassinationof Czar Alexander II. Should they succeed in this task, Figner believed, the peoplewould be united with the Socialist party by a community of interests, and the partywould acquire among the masses a basic support which decades of propaganda byword would not have secured.20 The anarchist Alexander Berkman, who grew upidolizing the Populists before he emigrated from Russia to the United States in the1880s, undertook an attentat (a political assassination attempt) in 1892 against theCarnegie Steel chairman Henry Clay Frick, whom he held personally responsiblefor the deaths of twelve steelworkers killed in a clash with the companys Pinkertondetectives. The chief purpose of myAttentat, Berkman explained, was to callattention to our social iniquities; to arouse a vital interest in the sufferings of thePeople by an act of self-sacrice; to stimulate discussion regarding the cause andpurpose of the act, and thus bring the teachings of Anarchism before the world.21

Two years later, mile Henry, who had planted a bomb outside the Carmaux miningcompanys Paris ofce in retaliation for its repression of a strike, explained to thecourt, I wanted to make the miners understand that there is only one category ofmen, the anarchists, who sincerely resent their sufferings and are willing to avengethem.22 Proponents of propaganda of the deed believed that such acts were themost effective way to gain public attention for their concerns and ideals, especiallyin societies without a free press or in which the press was seen to be entirely incapitalist hands. The ultimate value of the terrorists acts lay not in eliminating theirenemy, much less in toppling a government, but in attracting adherents by commu-nicating their ideals even at the cost of their lives.

While Populist and anarchist terrorists understood the deed itself to havevalue, to be effective, it must be joined to propaganda of the word. Thus theydepended on the opportunities for speech granted by the judicial system. Expectingtrial and execution for their acts, they saw in this process of punishment the chanceto complete the propagandistic act begun by the terrorist deed. Figner regardedher courtroom speech in this light: The moment arrived in which I was inexorablybound to fulll my duty to my dead comrades . . . to confess my faith, to declarebefore the court the spiritual impulses which had governed our activities, and topoint out the social and political ideal to which we had aspired.23 Though the czars


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death had brought tremendous attention to the Peoples Will, it remained for Fignerto explain the groups purpose. Berkman called his act not complete without myexplanation, and as he sat in jail, he thought, I must use the trial to talk to the

People. . . . It offers me a rare opportunity for a broader agitation of our ideas. 24Only through the space provided by punishment at the states hands could the anar-chist gain a voice.

In their memoirs, Figner and Berkman reected on the power of the martyrimage in their youth and on its centrality to their interpretation of punishment.25The prospect of death, Figner wrote, was quite desirable; it was linked with the ideaof martyrdom, which in my childhood Christian traditions had taught me to regardas sacred; while later the history of the struggle for the rights of the oppressed hadstrengthened this idea in me.26 Berkman, deeply inuenced by the Populists of hishomeland, became focused from his early childhood on the ideal of martyrdom.Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause? he askedhimself. Why, the very life of a true revolutionist has no other purpose, no signi-cance whatever, save to sacrice it on the altar of the beloved People. In a letter toEmma Goldman, Berkman ridiculed a jailed steelworker who had fought CarnegiesPinkerton detectives but then wished to evade punishment as a veritable Judas,preparing to forswear his people and their cause, willing to lie and deny his partici-pation. How proud I should be in his place: to have fought on the barricades, as hedid! And then to die for it, ah, could there be a more glorious fate for a man, a realman? To serve even . . . as a plank in the bridge across which the triumphant People

shall nally pass into the land of promise?27

For Berkman, honor and manhoodmerged in the idea of witnessing to sacred truth. Through his sacrice, Berkmanhoped to convert the masses who read about his deed and trial: The People couldnot fail to realize the depth of a love that will give its own life for their cause . . .to g ive al l, voluntarily, cheerfully; nay, enthusiastically could any one fail tounderstand such a love?28 Though as a child he had been expelled from school forwriting an essay advocating atheism, Berkman saw his life, as Figner did hers, asconsecrated to the personal sacrice of martyrdom.

Anarchists, whether they accepted or rejected propaganda of the deed, stillembraced the notion of the anarchist martyr, depicting the terrorists as men and

women of saintly compassion, forced to act by their desire to relieve the sufferingof others. The French poet Paul Adams eulogy of Ravachol, executed for severalbrutal crimes he committed in 1891 and 1892, set the tone for those who endorsedterrorism. The martyrdom of Ravachol, he rhapsodized, revived on a sudden thetradition of self-sacrice and furnished the present age with an example of a manlaying down his life for the good of humanity.29 The majority of anarchists, whorefused to countenance terrorism, tended to stress the terrorists love of humanityand sensitivity, which had allegedly driven them to lash out at injustice. For exam-ple, the anarchist sympathizer Augustin Hamons 1894 study entitled The Psychol-


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ogy of the Anarchist found among the essential characteristics of the anarchists anintense love of humanity and profound pity for the humble and the weak.30 EmmaGoldman called Gaetano Bresci, who slew Italys king Umberto I in July 1900, a

man driven by an overowing sympathy with human suffering.31 Berkman, still inprison for his own attentat but having renounced terrorism, reected about LeonCzolgosz, who killed U.S. President William McKinley in 1901, It is at once thegreatest tragedy of martyrdom, and the most terrible indictment of society, that itforces the noblest men and women to shed human blood, though their souls shrinkfrom it.32

The defenders of anarchist and Populist martyrs regarded their acts of ter-rorism as only a single aspect of lives devoted to living the social gospel of compas-sion. Figners accounts of two of her fellow Populists, Soa Perovskaya and LudmilaAlexandrovna Volkenstein, emphasized what she saw as a continuity between thewomens compassion and their decisions to take up terrorism, as did her own auto-biographical narrative. Perovskaya, executed in 1881 as one of the masterminds ofthe czars assassination, possessed, in Figners words, a radiant love for humanity,which never grew dim. Her aspiration towards a clean life, towards personal saint-liness led her rst to a life of service among the Russian peasants and then to ter-rorism against czarism, which she came to believe provided the only means to trulyaid the suffering masses.33 Volkensteins participation in Populist terrorism, Fignerwrote of her prison-mate and friend, represented a noble expression of love, notonly for humanity, but also for the individual. Volkensteins loving, self sacricing

spirit led her to terrorism, so that, at the price of her own life, she might clear thepath of life for generations to follow.34 Figner depicted terrorism not merely as theresult of Volkensteins horror at witnessing suffering but actually as an expressionof her loving nature. Figner began her courtroom account of her own life with themoment she awoke to the contrast between my position and the position of thosewho surrounded me, which, she recounted, aroused in me the rst thought of thenecessity of creating for myself a purpose in life which should tend to benet thoseothers.35 Only after czarist authorities blocked her ministrations among the peas-ants did she turn to terrorism to accomplish her purpose. Goldmans description ofBerkmans life before his attentat emphasized the young anarchists extreme asceti-

cism in the service of his ideals. Foregoing all physical and even emotional luxuries,Berkman devoted his money and energy only to the Cause.36 Both Figner andGoldman presented terrorism as the logical outcome of lives devoted to self-sacriceand service to others.

Anarchists who found themselves facing punishment for crimes they had notcommitted likewise invoked the discourse of martyrdom. The two most inuentialinstances of anarchist martyrdom occurred in the United States four decades apart:the Chicago Haymarket affair and the Sacco and Vanzetti case. On May 4, 1886, at


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a workers rally for the eight-hour day, a bomb was hurled into a crowd of policemenordering the group to disperse. The bomb and the chaotic melee that followed leftseven police ofcers dead. Though the bomber was never identied, eight anarchists

were tried for inspiring the murders. None of the men was directly implicated, andsome were not even present at the rally. Nevertheless, in October 1886, seven ofthe eight anarchists were sentenced to death, and four were ultimately hanged onNovember 11, 1887 (two had their sentences commuted, while the last committedsuicide in his cell on the eve of the execution date). The Haymarket trial and execu-tion attracted worldwide attention, and its victims became widely known as theChicago martyrs.37 In August 1927, almost exactly forty years later, two Italianimmigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were electrocutedin Massachusetts for a 1920 robbery that left two men dead. Throughout the trialand many years of appeals, the anarchists declared their innocence. As in the Hay-market affair, the men garnered widespread international support both within andbeyond anarchist ranks.38 In both cases, the defendants and their supporters castthem as martyrs killed for witnessing to their anarchist faith.

For these anarchists, no less than for the terrorists, standing in the dock fac-ing death represented the culmination of a life of witnessing. In an autobiographypenned after his conviction, the Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons recalled hisinitial call to service: The more I investigated and studied the relations of povertyto wealth, its cause and cure, the more interested I became in the subject. Eventu-ally, a powerful impulse possessed me to place myself right before the people by

dening and explaining the objects and principles of the workingmens party. . . .I therefore entered heartily into the work of enlightening my fellow men.39 Thiscommitment to witnessing, he explained to the court after his sentencing, had ledhim, of his own volition, to return to Chicago from out of state to stand trial withhis comrades, to stand, if need be, on the scaffold, and vindicate the rights of labor,the cause of l iberty, and the relief of the oppressed.40 His fellow defendant SamuelFielden also placed his impending death in the context of witnessing, telling thecourt, we feel satised that we have not lived in this world for nothing; that wehave done some good for our fellowmen, and done what we believe to be in theinterest of humanity and for the furtherance of justice. . . . If my life is to be taken

for advocating the principles of Socialism and Anarchy . . . I gladly give it up; andthe price is very small for the result that is gained.41 Michael Schwab expressedthe need to witness in explicitly religious terms: We contend for Communism andAnarchy why? If we had kept silent, stones would have cried out.42 Having livedfor their faith, the men expressed willingness to die for it as well. Adolph Fischertold the court, If I am to die on account of being an Anarchist, on account of mylove for liberty, fraternity and equality, I will not remonstrate. If death is the penaltyfor our love of the freedom of the human race, then I say openly I have forfeited my


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life.43 All of the Haymarket anarchists insisted that their deaths followed from thesame commitments that had inspired their lives.

Sacco and Vanzetti saw their deaths in the same light, as nal testaments

to the anarchist faith they had always lived. Vanzetti told the court that had justsentenced him to death, I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am aradical. . . . I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times,and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have donealready.44 In an autobiography penned after his conviction, he struck the same tone.At the age of thirty-three the age of Christ, he wrote, I am scheduled for prisonand death. Yet were I to recommence the journey of life, I should tread the sameroad.45 Days before his execution, he wrote in a letter to Saccos fourteen-year-oldson, Your father has sacriced everything dear and sacred to the human heartand soul for his faith in liberty and justice for all. Both anarchists had sufferedunspeakable tortures and wrongs over the years of their legal battle, he declared,because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of theman by the man.46 Facing death, the anarchists embraced their lives in the serviceof humanity, thus reafrming their faith as something worth dying for.

Though they remained powerless to resist punishment, the anarchistsspeeches emphasized their conviction in the ultimate triumph of their ideals andthe role suffering played in achieving victory. Punishment lost its terrorizing effectfor the anarchists, rendering the exercise of power powerless. Further, because theysaw their own sacrice as hastening the coming world of happiness and justice by

revealing the glory of anarchism and the brutality of the reigning system, punish-ment even held attractions.Central to this vision of martyrdom was the anarchists belief that they died

for an eternal truth that would outlast their death. August Spies invoked a panoplyof persecuted but triumphant personalities from history to suggest how hopeless wasthe states goal of destroying anarchism. After recounting his political goals, he con-cluded, I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming the truth, then I will proudlyand deantly pay the costly price! Call your hangman! Truth crucied in Socrates,in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, in Galileo, still l ives they and others whosenumber is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!47

Believing that the power of their martyrdom would attract new converts, theanarchists understood death not as a defeat but as a victory that would hasten thedawn of the new world. The Russian migr anarchist Peter Kropotkin, describingthe reaction to the Populist Perovskayas public execution, told a correspondent,By the attitude of the crowd she understood that she had dealt a mortal blow tothe autocracy. And she read in the sad looks which were directed sympatheticallytowards her, that by her death she was dealing an even more terrible blow from whichthe autocracy will never recover.48 The Chicago martyrs believed that their deaths


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would be particularly powerful as propaganda, laying bare the injustice of capital-ist society. Spies told the court, The contemplated murder of eight men, whoseonly crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these

suffering millions; may wake them up. Indeed, I have noticed that our convictionhas worked miracles in this direction already.49 Fischer also assured the court thattheir persecution would only help the anarchist cause. The more the believers injust causes are persecuted, he asserted, the quicker will their ideas be realized. . . .in rendering such an unjust and barbarous verdict, the twelve honorable men inthe jury box have done more for the furtherance of Anarchism than the convictedcould have accomplished in a generation.50 Forty years later, Vanzetti proclaimed,The last moment belongs to us that agony is our triumph!51 Turning the signi-cance of death on its head, anarchists argued that the states power to silence waschimerical. Spiess last words before his execution eloquently expressed this theme:There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices youstrangle today.52 Though the state could take their lives, they remained condentin their deaths power.

If anarchist expectations about the effects of their witnessing were clear, theresults were more mixed. Outside of Russia, propaganda of the deed earned anar-chists few friends or admirers. By the end of the decade of the most concentratedanarchist terrorism (1892 1901), even almost all anarchist intellectuals (includingthe onetime would-be assassin Berkman) had repudiated the tactic. 53 If the assas-sins deeds garnered little praise, many socialist and even liberal observers argued

that their attacks were sparked by the deep injustices of the societies they lashedout at.54

The deaths of the Haymarket anarchists and of Sacco and Vanzetti cameclosest to realizing the expectations of the movements martyrs. Though most news-papers initially applauded the Haymarket verdict, people around the world (andincreasing numbers of Americans over time) were outraged at their death sentences,including many who remained hostile to the American labor movement but consid-ered the prospective execution judicial murder.55 In the thirteen months betweenthe anarchists sentencing and their executions, an international movement in sup-port of the men grew, rst supporting the mens legal appeal, and when that failed,

focused on persuading Illinoiss governor to grant a pardon or commute the deathsentences.56 The condemned men were widely interviewed in the radical press, andtheir courtroom speeches were published and disseminated by speakers who fannedout across the country as part of an effort to save the anarchists lives. According toPaul Avrich, Parsonss wife Lucy addressed more than two hundred thousand peopleherself during a speaking tour.57 Beginning in October 1886, when the sentenceswere rst handed down, the militant (though not anarchist) labor organization theKnights of Labor serialized the condemned mens autobiographies.58 The campaignto save the men certainly meant different things to its various participants, but there


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is no doubt that it mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to action on the anar-chists behalf.

For radicals of all sorts, the Haymarket affair long remained an event invested

with symbolic power. At annual commemorations, speakers emphasized how themens sacrice had led to many anarchist conversions. Echoing the second-centurymartyrologist Tertullians dictum the blood of Christians is seed, the Americananarchist Voltairine de Cleyre assured the authorities, For every drop of blood youspilled on that November day you made an Anarchist.59 While it is impossible toproduce reliable gures for the number of converts, numerous anarchists, includ-ing Goldman and Berkman, traced their conversion to Haymarket.60 Many of thefounders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor organization, suchas Bill Haywood, also attributed to the Chicago anarchists their own awakening tothe cause of labor.61 So powerful was the idea of the anarchists martyrdom that,according to one account, thousands of mourners took to wearing miniature gallowsemblems in the manner of Christian crosses to venerate the men. More than twentythousand people thronged Chicagos Waldheim Cemetery to witness the anarchistsburial.62 Over two decades later, a volume containing the complete texts of the anar-chists three days of courtroom speeches, published by Lucy Parsons, sold over tenthousand copies in its rst year and half in print. 63

Commemorations of the Chicago martyrs helped propel the discourse ofmartyrdom to its centrality in anarchist thinking. In Blaine McKinleys words, themens deaths became a crucial shared experience for later anarchists. By reliving

the martyrdom, the anarchists could see themselves as participants in, and succes-sors to, a noble sacrice.64 Some American sympathizers described the anarchistsas John Browns heirs, enlarging their signicance by placing them within a broadAmerican tradition of self-sacrice in the name of justice.65 Waldheim Cemeterybecame a sacred site, where diverse anarchists and fellow travelers chose to be bur-ied, among them Goldman, De Cleyre, and IWW gures such as Joe Hill (whoseashes were spread there among other places), Haywood, and Elizabeth GurleyFlynn.66

Haymarket provided a model for the later induction of anarchists (and otherradicals) into the martyr tradition. Four decades later, the trial of Sacco and Van-

zetti resulted in similar outrage from anarchists and nonanarchists (such as the writ-ers Dorothy Parker and John Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and thephilosopher Bertrand Russell), culminating in a similar international movement toprevent the mens executions.67 As in the case of the Haymaket anarchists, Saccoand Vanzetti were interviewed extensively by both the radical and the liberal press;their letters were anthologized after their deaths and remain in print.68 The trialand execution of the IWW songwriter and activist Joe Hill in 1914 15 likewisebrought together an international movement of anarchists, socialists, and liberalswho hoped to prevent the death of a man they believed innocent of the murder for


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which he was tried.69 Though these efforts to inuence judicial outcomes failed,they attracted attention to the martyrs political beliefs and made their trials sym-bols of legal injustice even for people who did not subscribe to their ideology.

Anarchist witnessing and martyrdom did not lead to the ideologys ultimatetriumph, but it established a reservoir of cultural images that a variety of radicalscontinued to utilize for propaganda. Anarchists testifying and martyrdom sought toturn the states most drastic punishment death against it by denying the statesability to terrify or defeat them, and instead promising that death would herald theirtriumph. They succeeded insofar as they left a legacy that inspired further acts ofpolitical witnessing. The tradition of martyrdom incorporated events from a varietyof national contexts over a series of decades into a coherent narrative of a broad andongoing struggle for truth in deance of state power. Articulated rst in anarchistand Russian Populist thought, the tradition of political martyrdom was graduallyincorporated into the political rhetoric of many other ostensibly secular movementsof the political Left.

Theorizing and Resisting the Prison

The discourse of martyrdom so dominated anarchists encounters with the statesinstitutions of punishment that those who were imprisoned instead of killed oftenfound themselves unprepared for incarceration. Anarchists organized the experi-ence of the courtroom and the gallows around the project of public witnessing, soimprisonment was bafing because it seemed to silence the anarchists public self,

bringing civil death while the state allowed the continued privilege of biologicallife. If anarchists could march to the scaffold singing, condent in their deathssignicance, the prospect of a living death in prison could ll those sentenced todecades behind bars with despair. Figner initially described the prison in whichshe sat as a tomb and her cell as a cofn.70 I shall not be hanged yet I feelas if I were dead, thought Berkman as he sat in jail. Isolated from his comrades,he concluded, I do not count among the living, and planned to commit suicide.71Those facing shorter sentences did not face this kind of agony, but they still regardedimprisonment as a form of temporary death to be endured until they could resumelife when they regained freedom.

Yet what anarchists found in prison was not a living grave but a society inwhich they could continue their witnessing by living out their ideals in oppositionto the carceral regime that contained them. Once anarchists embraced the worldof the prison as a sphere open to activity, albeit restricted, they brought their theo-rizations of state power into the prison. In some cases, anarchists came to a newappreciation of how society atomized and broke down workers through their ownexperiences of imprisonment. It is notable that Kropotkin, Goldman, and Berk-man wrote theoretical essays on prisons only after having undergone incarceration,drawing on their own experiences to formulate their arguments. Anarchists thus


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turned their punishment into an opportunity for witnessing, both by nding waysto practice their ideals even under duress and by using their experiences to conveyto the outside world the brutalities taking place in prisons. As in the case of their

battles with the judicial system, anarchists often failed to alter the carceral systemsiniction of punishment, but they resisted its power by investing imprisonment withideological meaning. In prison, anarchists found a space for both political activityand theorization.

Figner and Berkman both expected to die for their deeds, and they had seentheir trial speeches as nal acts of witnessing. My last duty had been fullled, anda great peace descended on my spirit, Figner recounted, describing the conclusionof her courtroom speech. They say that a similar blissful state of serenity precedesdeath. . . . The curtain fell for the last time on the tragedy which I had lived throughto the last act.72 Berkman expressed a similar feeling as he anticipated giving histrial speech: My mission is almost accomplished the explanation in court, andthen my life is done. I shall never again have an opportunity to work for the Cause.I may therefore leave the world.73 Yet Figner spent twenty-two years in prison, andBerkman fourteen. Both had been fully prepared to meet death, but instead theyhad to learn how to endure a different kind of life. Whereas the rituals and tradi-tions of martyrdom had provided a clear roadmap for how to behave and what toexpect as they faced trial and execution, they found themselves having to interpretthe carceral experience without a ready-made interpretive framework.74

Initially both Figner and Berkman fell back on the discourse of martyrdom to

help them bear the shocks and torments they faced on rst entering prison. Copingwith the indignity of being strip-searched on her incarceration in the Schlsselburgprison, Figner recalled Christian maidens being thrown to the lions in ancient Romeand refusing to resist or cry out. I, too, had my God, my religion, she avowed, thereligion of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And for the glory of that doctrine I wasbound to endure everything. Early on in her incarceration, the Christian traditionof suffering dominated Figners understanding of the experience:

Whoever, like myself, has at some time been inuenced by the spirit of Christ,who, in the name of His idea has endured abuse, suffering, and death; whoeverduring his childhood and youth has made of Him an ideal, and regarded His

life as an example of self-sacricing love, will understand the mood of thenewly-condemned revolutionist who has been ung into a living grave for thecause of liberty. . . . The ideas of Christianity, which are implanted in all of us,consciously or unconsciously, from our very cradles, and also the lives of allmartyrs for ideas, create in such a prisoner the consoling consciousness thatthe moment of his test has come. A trial is given to the strength of his love andthe hardiness of his spirit, as a ghter for that good which he has longed toattain, not for his own transitory self, but for the people, for society, for futuregenerations.75


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At this stage, Figner interpreted imprisonment as merely an extension of the mar-tyrdom narrative that had guided her revolutionary career. Berkman likewiseresorted to the martyrdom tradition when faced with the rst ordeal of incarcera-

tion, describing his three days and nights of interrogation before his trial as a test offaith. Water is refused me, he complained, my thirst aggravated by the salty foodthey have given me. It consumes me, it tortures and burns my vitals through thesleepless nights passed on the hard wooden bench. The foul air of the cell is stiing.The silence of the grave torments me; my soul is in an agony of uncertainty.76 Hesustained himself by recalling the stories of suffering Populist martyrs, whom hestrove to emulate.77 Unsurprisingly, these revolutionaries viewed their prison expe-rience through the same lens as they had their entire political lives.

However, on longer experience of incarceration, when they stopped thinkingof prison exclusively as a place of ongoing torment, they brought their ideologicalprinciples to bear on the experience. Though revolutionary prisoners experiencedmany aspects of incarceration much as other prisoners did, they derived strengthfrom their political commitments and bonds that made prison more endurable forthem and allowed them to resist some aspects of the prison regime, especially theisolation and atomization that the system was meant to produce. Anarchists came tothe prison experience at least partly prepared with a theorization of prisons basedon their core ideological principles. The anarchist view, expressed by Kropotkin,that the system is wrong from the very foundation,78 incorporated two centralcriticisms. Prisons were fundamentally unjust when they housed mostly the poor

who had turned to crime because society denied them the ability to make a living,while venerating rich people who stole from the poor through capitalism. Prisonsalso were ineffective; by degrading both prisoner and prison keeper, they promotedrecidivism and brutality. Anarchists held that prisons mirrored the societies thatproduced them.

Though anarchist analyses of prisons mentioned the injustice of who cameto be incarcerated, they hardly dwelt on this issue, perhaps because it seemed self-evident to them. My three weeks in the Tombs [the New York municipal jail],Goldman briey remarked in her autobiography, had given me ample proof thatthe revolutionary contention that crime is the result of poverty is based on fact.79

Kropotkin, arguing against the need for prisons, commented that crimes againstproperty, which he claimed made up two thirds of all crime, would disappear . . .when property, which is now the privilege of the few, shall return to its real source the community.80 Insofar as this perspective inuenced anarchists understandingof prisons, it clearly made them open to interacting with fellow inmates in prison,as Goldmans statement that she considered myself one of the inmates, not abovethem suggests.81

For anarchists, the destructive aspects of the prison institution itself occu-pied the majority of their intellectual attention. In his essay The Moral Inuence


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of Prisons on Prisoners, Kropotkin argued that prisons have not moralized any-body, but have more or less demoralized all those who have spent a number of yearsthere.82 The chief function of the prison, he claimed, was to transform the prisoner

into a machine unable to exercise any personal will: Everything has been done tokill in him the interior force of resistance, to make him a docile tool in the hands ofthose who govern him. Condemning the panoptical goal of penologists, Kropotkindeclared that the ideal of our prisons would be a thousand automatons, rising andworking, eating and going to bed, by electric currents transmitted to them from asingle warder.This view of the prison mirrored the anarchist view of capitalismseffect on workers who were not incarcerated, which differed only in degree. Ulti-mately, Kropotkin asserted, our prisons are made for degrading all those who enterthem, for killing the very last feelings of self-respect.83 Goldman saw the effect ofprisons in similar terms: Robbed of his rights as a human being, degraded to a mereautomaton without will or feelings, dependent entirely upon the mercy of brutalkeepers, he daily goes through a process of dehumanization. In the end, his will isbroken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly monotony and routine ofprison life.84 After having been schooled in crime by more experienced prisoners,having lost their will to resist temptation, and having come to hate society, thosewho were eventually released were ideally prepared for recidivism.85 Prison, likethe capitalist system of which it was a microcosm, offered a passive living death, sodifferent from the anarchist ideal of life and death governed by individual freedomand suffused with meaning.

Anarchists insisted that it was impossible to reform the penal system becauseit reected society itself. As with the larger society, according to Berkman, it is thesystem, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. Myprison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whosecursed touch turns everything to the brutal services of Mammon. . . . This night-mare is but an intensied replica of the world beyond, the larger prison locked withthe levers of Greed, guarded by the spawn of Hunger. Only the humanization ofsociety that anarchism could bring, Berkman believed, would end the injustice andbrutality of a society whose chief monuments are prisons.86 Kropotkin argued thatprisons will remain what they are now until the whole of our system of government

and the whole of our life have undergone a thorough change.87

It was impossible tomake more than minor adjustments to the prison system, for it was of a piece withthe society that produced it. Only if society brought up its citizens in a humanistic,just, and free way would there be no more need of prisons.88

These ideological resources helped anarchists cope with the inevitable dis-orientation of being thrown into a world designed to render them mute and passive.By maintaining connections to the political world outside the prison and drawingon political camaraderie inside the prison, they sought to recast the prison envi-ronment as an extension of the outside world. Both Figner and Berkman moved


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from the framework of martyrdom to a posture of active deance against the prisoninstitution. Remonstrating herself for her initial reaction to imprisonment, whichwas to give herself up to death, Figner wrote, After receiving my sentence, I had

felt myself no longer a public character. . . . I forgot that once having undertaken apublic career I could not again be just a human being; that I was both more and lessthan a human being, and that the public task I had chosen was not yet solved. Soon,awakening to the necessity of continuing her work, I began to feel, to believe thatI had not yet died to everything that lay beyond the boundary of our Fortress walls;it was as though the walls had parted and opened.89 After an initial, halfheartedsuicide attempt, Berkman also steeled himself for ongoing struggle. I looked uponmyself, he recollected, as the representative of a world movement; it was my dutyto exemplify the spirit and dignity of the ideas it embodied. I was not a prisoner,merely; I was an Anarchist in the hands of the enemy; as such, it devolved uponme to maintain the manhood and self-respect my ideals signied. The example ofthe political prisoners in Russia inspired me, and my stay in the penitentiary was acontinuous struggle that was the breath of life.90 Both prisoners thus committedthemselves to carrying on their struggles in prison, rather than simply letting them-selves perish.

By developing connections with their incarcerated fellows and keeping upwith events in the wider world, they had much greater recourse to resist the atom-izing and silencing effects of the prison. Figner, imprisoned in a fortress lled withher Peoples Will comrades, took great comfort in their presence. Oppressed by

silence and isolation, she described a persistent voicewithin her soul that told her,Do not fear. In the mysterious stillness, behind these deaf stones your friends areinvisibly present. It is not you alone who are oppressed here; they too are suffer-ing. . . . You do not hear them, but they are here. They watch over you and guardyou, like disembodied spirits. . . . You are not alone, you are not alone!91 Berkman,incarcerated in a prison with ordinary criminals, confessed to some relief when CarlNold and Henry Bauer, two anarchists he had stayed with before carrying out hisattentat, ended up in his prison (wrongly accused of abetting his attack). He wroteto Goldman, I have not seen them yet, but their very presence, the circumstancethat somewhere within these walls there are comrades, men who, like myself, suf-

fer for an ideal the thought holds a deep satisfaction for me. It brings me closer,in a measure, to the environment of political prisoners in Europe. Whatever themiseries of their daily existence, the politicals . . . breathe the atmosphere of soli-darity.92 After making contact with their comrades, via covert letters and wall- andpipe-tapped messages, both Figner and Berkman described having long politicaldiscussions with their fellows, which helped stimulate their minds and kept theirworlds from shrinking to the breadth of the prison.93 Berkman, Nold, and Bauereven began a sub rosa magazine, Prison Blossoms, as an outlet for creative expres-


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sion and political discussion, and they eventually began work on a collective bookthey planned to smuggle out of the prison.94

Figner was denied the right to correspond with anyone outside her prison

for the bulk of her term, but anarchists in American and French prisons carriedon voluminous correspondences with comrades on the outside and received visits,food, and gifts from friends and admirers.95 In his rst letter to Goldman fromprison, Berkman begged her, Write often. Tell me about the movement, yourselfand friends. It will help to keep me in touch with the outside world, which dailyseems to recede further. I clutch desperately at the thread that still binds me to theliving.96 Berkmans regular correspondence with Goldman and other comrades,some previously strangers, did bind him to the living and keep him sane. The Mexi-can anarchist Ricardo Flores Magn, imprisoned in the United States from 1918until his death in 1922, wrote to Lilly Sarnoff, I hope, and dream, and wait, theattentive ear in the direction of the wind to catch the subtlest rumor the outsideworld may send in, and waxed poetic about the joys of receiving her letters.97 Anar-chists also kept themselves abreast of world events or pursued study with the booksand periodicals available to them in prison.98 Taking it as self-evident that educa-tion would be a chief prison pastime, Kropotkin commented on his imprisonmentin a comparatively comfortable French state prison, I need not say that at oncewe organized classes, and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux Igave my comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding themin the study of languages.99 Flores Magn perfected his English and carried on a

voluminous correspondence, which was published in 1925.100

In the year before hisexecution, the IWW troubadour Hill wrote numerous songs and letters, all post-humously published.101 Though these political prisoners still experienced momentsof despair and isolation, their accounts of imprisonment convey a sense of constantengagement with ideas and political events outside the prison. Though sometimesblocked by prison authorities from communicating with the outside world, it alwayslived vividly in their minds.

Populists and anarchists eventually went further than simply reaching beyondthe prison to l ive vicariously through news of life outside. They came to view theprison as a part of the wider world, where they could, and indeed must, continue

the ght for social justice and effect change. Both Populists and anarchists saw resis-tance to the inhumanity of the prison, especially the unequal or capricious treatmentof prisoners, as a central task that gave them meaning. Figner recalled numerousoccasions when Populists in Schlsselburg refused privileges not granted to theircomrades, such as daily walks in the yard, or went on hunger strikes to demandimprovements in prison conditions. When Figner and a comrade were caught walltapping and her interlocutor was taken to the punitive cell, Figner told the guard,It is unjust to punish one, when two were talking. . . . Take me to the punitive cell


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also. When other comrades witnessed her being taken away as requested, scoresof hands began to beat madly on the doors, and voices shouted, Take us too! 102By confronting the guards with solidarity, the prisoners challenged the isolating

effects of the prison, showing that they retained their mutual commitments in anenvironment designed to break them. Though their struggles often failed to achievethe changes they demanded, the importance for the prisoners sense of dignity andcamaraderie was immeasurable.

Two prisoners in Schlsselburg went so far as to sacrice their lives to improveconditions for their comrades, nding ways to make their voices heard outside theprison despite the authorities attempts to keep them in silence. Figner describedhow an inmate named Myshkin deliberately insulted the prison inspector, hopingto end up in court where he might reveal Schlsselburgs cruel secret, strip it barebefore all Russia . . . and at the price of his life purchase an easier lot for his com-rades in captivity. Grachevsky, whom Figner characterized as waging indignantand unceasing warfare against the prison administration, for its petty and arbitraryacts of malice, tried the same strategy but was denied a trial, so he immolated him-self. These two acts forced the government to address the prisons conditions andultimately to soften the prison regime; in Figners words, The sacrice bore fruit,and a break occurred in our prison life. The dead did not come to life, but the livingbegan to breathe more freely.103 By applying tactics drawn from the martyrs tradi-tion, they managed to deny the prison systems intended reduction of the prisonerto a passive object. Though severely constrained, the prisoners showed they could

still assert their will.Myshkins and Grachevskys deeds in Schlsselburg echoed so loudly thatBerkman received word of them in his cell in the Western State Penitentiary inPittsburgh, helping to fortify him for his own struggles against the prison regime.Having witnessed an injustice done to a prisoner in the workshop, Berkman toldhimself, It is my duty as a revolutionist to take the part of the persecuted, butdescribed being incapacitated by his own fear of punishment. Recalling Myshkinsheroic martyrdom, Berkman overcame his paralysis: Ah! thus acts the revolution-ist; and I yes, I am decided. No danger shall seal my lips against outrage andinjustice.104 This was only the rst of many times Berkman reported speaking out

against wrongs done to other prisoners, sometimes paying the price with loss ofprivileges or time in a punishment cell.105

Though many of the anarchist prisoners struggles involved the prisonadministration, anarchists also worked to humanize the prison in their interpersonalinteractions with other prisoners by rejecting the logic of self-interest that governedthe prison. While imprisoned in New Yorks Blackwells Island, Goldman was putin charge of the prison sewing shop, where she was urged to increase productionlevels. I resented the suggestion that I become a slave-driver, she recalled in herautobiography. It was because I hated slaves as well as their drivers, I informed the


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matron, that I had been sent to prison. . . . I was determined not to do anything thatwould involve a denial of my ideals. When the news of Goldmans stand spread,inmates who had previously kept their distance warmed to her and sought to lighten

her workload in the prison. Befriended by the prison doctor, Goldman became anurse, eventually running the entire hospital ward during the last part of her year inprison. I loved my job, she wrote. It gave me opportunity to come close to the sickwomen and bring a little cheer into their lives. Goldman shared with the womenfood she received from comrades, commenting, I had so much to give; it was a joyto share with my sisters who had neither friends nor attention.106 During anothertwo-year stint in a Missouri federal penitentiary, prompted by her involvement inthe No Conscription League during the First World War, Goldman worked unof-cially at nursing and continued to share her material bounty with the other prison-ers. At Christmas, she divided among the prisoners the many gifts she had receivedfrom supporters and friends. Recalling the womens happiness, she wrote, MyChristmas in the Missouri penitentiary brought me greater joy than many previousones outside. I was thankful to the friends who had enabled me to bring a gleam ofsunshine into the dark lives of my fellow-sufferers.107 Berkman, under more austereconditions in both his imprisonments, nevertheless used his various prison jobs toease the lives of other prisoners.108 Many inmates, the anarchists recounted, initiallyseemed puzzled by their generosity, but responded in kind, creating an environmentthat was to some extent mutually supportive, despite the prison authorities attemptsto pit prisoners against each other. According to the anarchists own accounts, their

commitment to humanity and dignity in the prison bore fruit by inspiring a spirit ofresistance among the other prisoners, who began to demand better treatment.109

Regardless of whether anarchist prison activism left a lasting inuence onthe prisons in which they were incarcerated or on the prisoners they encounteredthere, the experiences taught the anarchists about themselves, tested and conrmedtheir commitment to the cause, and energized them with a new eld for their politi-cal efforts prison reform. On her release from Blackwells Island in 1894, Gold-man claimed that her year in prison had proved the best school, for she had beenbrought close to the depths and complexities of the human soul.110 Reecting on hismoral development during his long incarceration, Berkman recalled

with sadness the rst years of my imprisonment, and my coldly impersonalvaluation of social victims. . . . With the severe intellectuality of revolutionarytradition, I thought of him and his kind as inevitable fungus growths, the rottenfruit of a decaying society. Unfortunate derelicts, indeed, yet parasites, almostdevoid of humanity. . . . But the threads of comradeship have slowly been

woven by common misery. . . . Not entirely in vain are the years of sufferingthat have wakened my kinship with les misrables, whom social stupidity hascast into the valley of death.111


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Having come to this understanding, Berkman planned to dedicate his postprisonlife to struggling for prison reform: The day of my resurrection is approaching,and I will devote my new life to the service of my fellow-sufferers. The world shall

hear the tortured; it shall behold the shame it has buried within these walls, yetnot eliminated. The ghosts of its crimes shall rise and harrow its ears, till the socialconscience is roused to the cry of its victims.112 As in his life before and duringprison, his life after prison would be devoted to testifying to the suffering of his fel-low human beings.

Though prison authorities wielded enormous power, crushing many of theanarchists endeavors and frequently inicting punishments on them, their politicalcommitments and theoretical critiques of prisons helped them ght against the insti-tutions in whose power they found themselves. Even locked in prison and in failinghealth, Flores Magn still saw himself as beyond the reach of his jailers: My wingsare forever broken so as not to leave this ante-room of Death. But I have other wingswhich no one can break, and I soar, soar, soar, and in my lofty place I see what theones who trimmed my pinions fail to.113 Prison reconrmed the anarchists faith inand commitment to their ideology. Commenting on her two prison stays, Goldmanobserved, One must have the consolation of an ideal to survive the forces designedto crush the prisoner.114 For her, prison had been the crucible that tested my faithand which had helped me to discover strength in my own being, the strength tostand alone, the strength to live my life and ght for my ideals, against the wholeworld if need be.115 Though the price was high, anarchists claimed victory over the

institution designed to destroy their faith.Berkmans account of his resurrection at the end of his fourteen years inprison portrayed it as a victory, in which he reconsecrated himself to the anarchistsocial struggle, stronger for having survived his long punishment. After years ofcontemplation and study, chastened by much sorrow and suffering, he recalled, Iarise from the broken fetters of the worlds folly and delusions, to behold the thresh-old of a new life of liberty and equality. My youths ideal of a free humanity in thevague future has become claried and crystallized into the living truth of Anarchy,as the sustaining elemental force of my every-day existence.116 Berkman imaginedhimself like a victorious Christ risen from the dead, revealing a living truth to the

world. Just as the anarchists facing execution saw their deaths as a triumph over thestate that punished them, so Berkman pictured his return to society as a tr iumphover this same state, whose penal institution had failed to defeat him.117

Anarchists saw the penal system, like the judicial system, as an arena inwhich to wage ideological battle with the state. As in the courtroom, anarchistsdevoted their energy in prison to resisting the dominant institutional narrative of arational state dispensing justice and maintaining a benevolent social order. Thoughprisons encouraged isolation, self-centeredness, and conformity to the demands ofpower, anarchists opposed all of these, guided by an ideology demanding that they


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profess their faith in public and seek to reshape society, even under the severe con-straints of incarceration. As in the courtroom and before the scaffold, the institu-tions of punishment imposed real limits on the scope of the imprisoned anarchists

actions. Many attempts to change the social environment, to improve conditions,and to communicate with the outside world failed. But the struggle itself remindedthe anarchists of their values and commitments and contested the states power tosilence. When released from prison, anarchists tr ied to assimilate their experiencesinto their social vision of a society free from carceral institutions.

Conclusion

In a world in which they had few resources for articulating their political ideals, andno access to the levers of power, anarchists pursued a political strategy that turnedthe power of punishment to their advantage. Anarchists who ended up in the dockunderstood the opportunity it provided to evangelize the masses in their politicalfaith. In confrontation with a power they could not escape, anarchists testied to afaith beyond the reach of coercive power. Punishment itself became a vital compo-nent of anarchist propagandizing, contributing both to the dissemination of anar-chist ideas to the public and to the development of a cultural tradition that supportedcontinuing activism by celebrating the martyrdom of those who had gone before.Anarchist martyrdom held out the promise both of unmasking the oppressiveness atthe heart of the liberal state and of energizing anarchists and other radicals as theyremembered their comrades sacrices and aspired to attain similar glory.

Imprisonment offered a different site in which to carry on the same politicalmission. Again, anarchists challenged not the states ability to punish, but the powerof that punishment to induce conformity or silence. The very experience of incar-ceration revealed to the anarchists the truth of their convictions and strengthenedtheir determination to resist the effects of the penal process. While continuing theirpolitical struggle on the inside, anarchists also tried to illuminate the connectionsbetween the prison and the larger society by maintaining their links to the out-side and bringing to the world news of conditions inside. For those who survivedimprisonment, their memoirs became new resources for anarchist education andtheorization.

Anarchists lost out in their struggle to lead the workers movement, and theynever brought into being the society they wished to create. Yet they succeeded intheir goal of wresting opportunities for speech from a system of punishment whoseessential goal was to contain and silence dissent, and the practical and cultural lega-cies of their encounter with state power continue to inform the radical movementsagainst institutions of oppression that succeeded them.

The anarchist tradition of testifying and martyrdom depended on a socialsystem in which the institutions of power gave those it condemned a space to speak,contesting the meaning of their acts and their punishment. None of the strategies


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employed by anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to turnpunishment into an avenue for speech could function in twentieth-century totalitar-ian regimes that tried to erase all evidence of their victims. Denied open trials and

either executed in secret or imprisoned with no access to the outside world, theseregimes opponents could not witness publicly to their beliefs or even die as martyrs(at least not until their words and deeds were retrospectively publicized after thefall of these states). In the absence of participatory trials, public or even publishedpunishment, or a free press, political prisoners become powerless except insofar asthey can smuggle their testimony or themselves beyond the states borders. In lib-eral democratic societies, anarchist and other radical political testimony was eithermarginalized by centrist labor movements or overwhelmed by the volume of com-mercial literature, while in more thoroughly repressive regimes, radicals lives andvoices were not just ignored but destroyed.

Even in liberal democratic societies of the late twentieth century, the anar-chist approach to punishment came under increasing pressure. Both the increasingconcealment of punishment and the rhetoric of reformatory penality have made thepolitical criminals quest for speech more difcult. More recently, in the case of theso-called war on terrorism, the U.S. government has adopted a new strategy, sus-pending opportunities for speech indenitely through extralegal detention, in whichno trial date is ever set and the prisoner is denied any communication with the worldoutside. The United States, following other liberal democracies, may also be in theprocess of adopting the practice of secret trials for certain categories of crimes. In

this way, the state formally abolishes the space allowing the accused to speak to thepublic, though relegating this repudiation of liberal principles to certain classes ofdefendants, thereby preserving the appearance of a fully open judicial sphere. Thebuilding of a secret, parallel prison system of unknown dimensions and conditionsfurther threatens to produce a penal situation in which political resistance as theanarchists understood it is impossible, or at least conned entirely to the sphere ofthe prisoners soul.

Notes1. Anarchisms philosophical roots are usefully described in George Crowders Classical

Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991). K. Steven Vincents Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and theRise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) detailsProudhons participation in the French revolution of 1848, as well as his lasting inuence onFrench socialism. On the International, see Henryk Katz, The Emancipation of Labor: AHistory of the First International (New York: Greenwood, 1992); James Joll, The Anarchists(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 84 114.

2. On Bakunins inuence on Italian anarchism, see T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and theItalians (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988); and Nunzio Pernicone,Italian Anarchism, 1864 1892 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially11 53. Bakunins inuence on Spanish anarchism is covered in Murray Bookchin, The


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Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868 1936 (New York: Free Life Editions,1977), 17 31; and George Richard Esenwein,Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868 1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),

11 50. Some of the complexities in Bakunins relationship to and inuence on the Russianrevolutionary tradition are covered in Philip Pomper, Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, inTerrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1995), 71 76; and Paul Avrich,Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1988), 22 52.

3. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of WorldAnarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Knopf, 1972), 335.

4. Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, authorized trans. (DeKalb: Northern IllinoisUniversity Press, 1991), 46 47.

5. On Italian anarchist insurrectionism in the late 1870s, see Pernicone, Italian Anarchism,82 128; Joll, The Anarchists, 121 24.

6. Rosemary Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of MessianicHope (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), discusses the power of religious language to conveythe millennial ideals of nonreligious political movements.

7. Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2004), 34.

8. Robert Kolb, Gods Gift of Martyrdom: The Early Reformation Understanding ofDying for the Faith, Church History 64 (1995): 403 4; David Nicholls, The Theatre ofMartyrdom in the French Reformation, Past and Present 121 (1988): 66.

9. Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 25. Theinstability of the ritual of martyrdom when confronting a determined mass movement isalso emphasized in Nicholls, Theatre of Martyrdom, 72 73.

10. Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom, 25.11. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 162 65.12. See, for example, Hugh Barbour, Slavery and Theology: Writings of Seven Quaker

Reformers, 1800 1870 (Dublin, IN: Print Press, 1985); Peter Brock, The QuakerPeace Testimony, 1660 to 1914 (York, UK: Sessions Book Trust, 1990), 155 65; JohnR. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the NorthernChurches, 1830 1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Douglas M. Strong,Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

13. John Brown, Last Speech to the Jury, 1859, in The Radical Reader: A DocumentaryHistory of the American Radical Tradition, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and JohnMcMillian (New York: New Press, 2003), 158.

14. Quoted in John R. McKivigan, His Soul Goes Marching On: The Story of John BrownsFollowers after the Harpers Ferry Raid, inAntislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, andCultural Conict in Antebellum America, ed. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 274 97. Other important sources in the voluminousliterature on John Brown as a martyr include Paul Finkelman, Manufacturing Martyrdom:The Antislavery Response to John Browns Raid and Charles Joyner, Guilty of HoliestCrime: The Passion of John Brown, in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to JohnBrown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville: University Pressof Virginia, 1995), 41 66, 296 334.


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15. The most prominent example of Irish nationalist martyrdom in the nineteenth century wasthat of the Fenian so-called Manchester Martyrs, executed for a rescue operation of twocomrades that left a police ofcer dead. A contemporaneous account using the discourse

of martyrdom is John Savage, Fenian Heroes and Martyrs (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1868).Scholarly works include Leon Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (NewYork: New York University Press, 1971), 192 209; and D. George Boyce,Nationalism inIreland, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 182 85.

16. On the late eighteenth-century turn away from public spectacles of punishment, seeMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan(New York: Vintage, 1977), 16 19, 67 69, 130 31; Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle ofSuffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis

to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 183 99;Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the EighteenthCentury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 363 65; Louis P. Masur, Rites ofExecution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776 1865(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 93 116. The exception to this trend wasRussia, whose public hanging of Peoples Will leaders in 1881 proved politically disastrous,generating tremendous public sympathy for the victims, especially for Soa Perovskaya, thelone woman among the hanged. Russia did not hang another woman for over two decades.See Sally Boniece, The Spiridonova Case, 1906: Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom, Kritika:Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4 (2003): 579.

17. Masur, Rites of Execution, 114 16, describes how newspaper accounts replaced publicwitnessing of executions once capital punishment was privatized in the nineteenth century.

18. Figner, Memoirs, 156 57.19. Esenwein,Anarchist Ideology, 59 63, provides a clear discussion of the origins and

evolution of propaganda of the deed. See also Martin A. Miller, The Intellectual Origins

of Modern Terrorism in Europe, in Crenshaw, Terrorism in Context, 41 50; Joll, TheAnarchists, 117 29. On Russian populist terrorism, see Boniece, The Spiridonova Case,579 80.

20. Figner, Memoirs, 114.21. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912; New York: Schocken, 1970), 68.22. mile Henry, A Terrorists Defence, in The Anarchist Reader, ed. George Woodcock

(Atlantic Highlands, NY: Humanities Press, 1977), 193.23. Figner, Memoirs, 158. Though Figner was tried in a closed court, her speech soon became

public.24. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 57.25. The populist martyr tradition was inuenced by Russian Orthodox hagiography, partly

by way of the literature of revolutionaries, most importantly Nikolai Chernyshevskiisrevolutionary ascetic archetype, Rakhmetov, from his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?Marcia A. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), discusses this inuence of Orthodoxnarratives of saints lives on Russian l iterature. On the general development of theRussian revolutionary subculture, see Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Educationand Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); DeborahHardy,Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876 1879 (Westport, CT:Greenwood, 1987); Pomper, Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, 63 101.

26. Figner, Memoirs, 187.


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27. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 38, 55. Figner, Memoirs, 150, 156, similarly derided somepopulist military ofcers who recanted to spare their own lives.

28. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 5, 7, 59.

29. Quoted in Flix Dubois, The Anarchist Peril, trans. Ralph Derechef (London: T. FisherUnwin, 1894), 236.30. A. Hamon, The Psychology of the Anarchist, in Dubois, The Anarchist Peril, 221.

Goldman, who corresponded with Hamon, cited another of his assessments of anarchistpsychology in Emma Goldman, The Psychology of Political Violence, inAnarchism andOther Essays (1917; New York: Dover, 1969), 82.

31. Emma Goldman, Gaetano Bresci, Free Society, June 2, 1901; reprinted in Made forAmerica, 1890 1901, vol. 1 ofEmma Goldman: A Documentary History of the AmericanYears, ed. Candace Falk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 455.

32. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 416. Other examples include Max Baginski, Leon Czolgosz,and Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, in Mother Earth 1 (1906), reprintedinAnarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldmans Mother Earth, ed. Peter Glassgold(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 21, 26; Goldman, Psychology, 92.

33. Figner, Memoirs, 104, 106.34. Ibid., 201 2.35. Ibid., 159.36. Emma Goldman,Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), 31 32, 44 45. Goldman also

presented her own choice to forego having children as an act of sacrice for her politicalcommitments (61).

37. The best of the many accounts of the Haymarket affair is Paul Avrich, The HaymarketTragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). All eight men always maintainedtheir innocence.

38. Written at the time by an avowed supporter of the men, Eugene Lyons, The Life and Death

of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927; New York: Da Capo, 1970), nonetheless remains an excellentaccount of the events. Later works have tended to focus on the question of the mens guilt orinnocence to the exclusion of other matters.

39. Albert Parsons, Autobiography of Albert R. Parsons, in The Autobiographies of theHaymarket Martyrs, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 31. Theseautobiographies were rst published in the Knights of Labor Journal.

40. Albert Parsons, Address of Albert Parson, in Famous Speeches of the Eight ChicagoAnarchists, ed. Lucy Parsons (1910; New York: Arno, 1969), 121.

41. Samuel Fielden, Address of Samuel Fielden, in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 61.42. Michael Schwab, Address of Michael Schwab, in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 25.43. Adolph Fischer, Address of Adolph Fischer, in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 32.44. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the Record of the Trial of Nicola Sacco and

Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Courts of Massachsetts and Subsequent Proceedings,

1920 1927, vol. 5 (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 4901.45. Quoted in Lyons,Life and Death, 198.46. Bartolomeo Vanzetti to Dante Sacco, August 21, 1927, in The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,

ed. Gardner D. Jackson and Maron D. Frankfurter (1928; New York: Octagon, 1980),322 23.

47. August Spies, Address of August Spies, in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 24.48. Quoted in Joll, The Anarchists, 128.49. Spies, Address, 12.


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50. Fischer, Address, 33.51. George Woodcock,Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland,

OH: World Publishing, 1962), 467.

52. Quoted in Parsons, Famous Speeches, title page.53. Miller, Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism, 51 52; Joll, The Anarchists, 147 48,152 55; Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 274 76; Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Riseof Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872 1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),271 84; Candace Falk,Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehartand Winston, 1984), 45 46. The French geographer Elise Reclus was a peculiar exception:see Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elise Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littleeld, 1979), 208 19; andJohn P. Clark and Camille Martin, eds.,Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The RadicalSocial Thought of Elise Reclus (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 66 69.

54. Goldman,Living My Life, 109 10.55. On hostile reactions to the anarchists, see Jeffrey A. Clymer, The 1886 Chicago Haymarket

Bombing and the Rhetoric of Terrorism in America, Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002):315 44; and Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 401 2.

56. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 297 380, provides a rich and engaging account of themany activists, intellectuals, and ordinary people who became involved in this cause. Seealso Joll, The Anarchists, 142 44.

57. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 298.58. Ibid., 331. Foner,Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, 11 13, describes their

original publication in Knights of Labor.59. Quoted in Blaine McKinley, A Religion of the New Time: Anarchist Memorials to the

Haymarket Martyrs, 1888 1917,Labor History 28 (1987): 391. On Tertullian, see Gregory,Salvation at Stake, 124, 172. Dubois,Anarchist Peril, 234 35, dates the anarchist tradition

of martyrdom to the Chicago events.60. Goldman,Living My Life, 31, 41 43; Wexler, Emma Goldman, 36 37; McKinley, A

Religion, 390 91.61. Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the

Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 69 73.62. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 411, 395 96.63. Lucy Parsons, The Agitator, December 15, 1911, republished in The Voice of the People

Will Yet be Heard, Lucy Parsons Project, www.lucyparsonsproject.org/writings/voices_of_people.html (accessed January 15, 2006). This piece is transcribed from Dave Roediger andFranklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 183 84.

64. McKinley, A Religion, 392.65. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 409 11.66. Robin Bachin, A Labor Icon, Illinois Labor History Society, www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/icon

.htm (accessed January 15, 2006).67. Lyons,Life and Death, 131 34, 169 77; Avrich,Anarchist Portraits, 163; Joll, The

Anarchists, 111, 222; Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 211 12; Goldman, Living My Life,990 91.

68. Jackson and Frankfurter, eds., The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (1928) is currentlyavailable in a 1997 Penguin Classics edition.


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69. Franklin Rosemont,Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary WorkingclassCounterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003), 125 55; Philip S. Foner, The Case ofJoe Hill (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 50 96. A year after Hill s execution

by ring squad, two other IWW men, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were falselyconvicted of planting a bomb and Mooney was sentenced to death, again arousing aninternational protest. In response, Mooneys death sentence was commuted to life in prison.Twenty-two years later, the men were pardoned and released from prison.

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