American anarchism: The politics of gender, culture, and community from Haymarket to the First World War

This study suggests an understanding of American anarchism that differs significantly from the popular stereotype of anarchism as a synonym for chaos and destruction. It reveals an imaginative and constructive movement which actively participated in American society and articulated a regeneration of society in a distinctively American voice; which highlighted the significance of private roles and relationships in the realization of an anarchist community; and which expanded politics from an emphasis on institutions, parties, and government to one of power in private life. Anarchists thus emerged as leading advocates of individual freedom in manifold forms, from free love to free speech. This was the promise, the threat, and the legacy of American anarchism.;This dissertation traces the rise and fall of the American anarchist movement from Haymarket until the First World War. At a moment when many Americans turned to the federal government to address the problems of an industrializing order, anarchists opposed the state and looked to the individual as the locus for reform and to culture as their site for social change. This study examines the ways in which agents of culture---journals, literature, and communities---were the means through which anarchists endeavored to transform social roles and relationships and create an innovative cultural radicalism.;In the three decades following Haymarket, American anarchists sustained their movement through their newspapers and journals, which served both as countercultures and as forums from which to address the larger culture. Through these publications anarchists championed a prescient form of cultural politics which politicized issues of private and public life in their attention to sexuality, gender, and community. In their focus on gender, American anarchists revolutionized the social organization of intimate life in terms of marriage, maternity, and monogamy. They further addressed these concerns in their fiction, delineating how individual changes might result in broader sociopolitical transformations. Anarchists' politics of private life and aspirations for a better future coalesced in their utopian experiments, which sought to realize anarchism in practice. Politics, culture, and community were thus the triad that underscored the American anarchist movement in the three decades before the First World War.