The Left and Public Memory

Oral histories, for all their worth as primary sources, take on even greater value by defying instrumentality — by protecting lived experience and memory from historians’ arguments and narratives. In the historiography of the twentieth-century American Left, personal testimony serves as a counterweight to the tendency toward a kind of reverse Whiggism in which inevitable (or overdetermined) decline and defeat replace progress and triumph. Perhaps this reverse Whiggism is itself inevitable in any long view of radicalism’s fortunes, especially when, at the century’s end, an organized and powerful Left exists only in the persecution complexes, paranoid fantasies, and political demonology of the dominant Right. But political and labor historians have recently begun to recognize the dangers of what Robin L. Einhorn calls narratives of “irrevocable loss.” “If we believe that the really important battles were irrevocably lost years ago,” Einhorn writes, “there seems little reason to write history.” George Lipsitz, Dana Frank, and others now urge their colleagues to stake out a middle ground between celebration and despair and to discover a place for contingency and hope in the stories they tell. ¹

The “D” words — decline, defeat, disillusionment, despair — certainly find their way into Paul Avrich’s eloquent Anarchist Voices. “What would you think if I told you that anarchism is a pipe-dream?” asks Laurance Labadie, son of the anarchist printer and archivist Joseph A. Labadie (p. 16). Lena Shlakman, who read Kropotkin as a sixteen-year-old factory worker in Vilna and then saw him speak in New York, confessed after her 101st birthday that “now I am discouraged. I don’t believe that ‘it’ — the free society — will ever come” (p. 328). Many of Avrich’s subjects speak in generational terms. A Spanish anarchist from Detroit regrets that the “movement and culture are gone, forgotten by the younger generation” (p. 400). “Anarchism was a movement of poor immigrants,” observes a French anarchist who lived at the Mohegan Colony in Westchester. “As soon as the children made money, they lost anarchism” (p. 260). John J. Most, Jr., a Boston dentist and son of the famous German-American anarchist Johann Most, points out that his son, the legendary Boston Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most, “has no interest in anarchism whatever” (p. 19). In his introductions, Avrich himself notes the passing of anarchism from “movement” to “sect” to distant memory.

What is most striking about Anarchist Voices, however, is the extent to which its subjects testify to kept rather than lost faith. By recording multiple voices, Avrich shows how individual lives often challenge or complicate historical generalizations. When anarchists tell their own stories, idealism is as much the keynote as disillusionment. “I have never seen a better or nobler idea,” declares Bartolomeo Provo, a carpenter, World War I draft resister, and defender of Sacco and Vanzetti (p. 119). Provo’s faith is echoed throughout the book by people in their eighties and nineties. Julius Seltzer and Attilio Bortolotti, both comrades of Emma Goldman in Toronto, state emphatically that they are not disillusioned (pp. 330, 188). Boris Yelensky, veteran of both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, announces in his mid-nineties that “I’ll remain an anarchist to the end” (p. 390).

The reasons for this persistent idealism — this defiance of reverse Whiggism — can be found in the testimony as well. Avrich’s book, with its emphasis on what he calls the “human dimension,” reveals that anarchism was more than a political movement and program; it was, as Gussie Denenberg puts it, “a way of life” (p. 213). Reflecting on their whole lives, Avrich’s subjects remember not only protests, strikes, bombings, harassment, imprisonment, and deportation but schools, newspapers, bookstores, lectures, performances, and picnics. Anarchist Voices, in other words, shows how the failure of the political movement obscures the successes of the ethical and cultural movement. As...