Gates of Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind

Section Two: Freedom, Justice, Anarchism

Section Two FREEDOM, JUSTICE, ANARCHISM As the letters in the preceding section show, from de Cleyre’s earliest days as a freethought agitator in Grand Rapids her attention was ‹xed on the inequality, desperation, and crime bred by the violence inherent in any so-called social “order” not founded on liberty. The pieces included in section 2—all central to the discussion in part I, chapters 1 and 2— give some idea of the range of her writing, from her early poem “The Hurricane” to her exultant lecture “The Commune Is Risen” a few months before she died. The imagery of “The Hurricane” (1889)—of inevitable upheavals, torrential explosions of the human will in the face of deprivation and despair—is central to her view that the oppressed inevitably rise up in the end. In “A Rocket of Iron” (1902), she ‹gures such an uprising in an explosion at an ironworks. Discussed at length in chapter 2, this story deserves to be as well known as other nineteenth-century works about industrial labor, most notably Rebecca Harding Davis’s now widely taught “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861). Like Davis’s story, de Cleyre’s centers on a sensitive man, an ironworker, with a suppressed—‹nally tragically lost—heroic potential. As in that story, too, the narrative is ren192 dered in the ‹rst person by a somewhat enigmatic observer about whom we know almost nothing, and who seems at the same time intimate with and strangely distant from the events. If it can be established that de Cleyre read Davis, these links will become even more interesting. In any case, the contrast is instructive: the difference in their approaches bespeaks not only a difference of forty years in publication, but the difference de Cleyre’s anarchism makes in her handling of the subject. Both these works present de Cleyre’s sense that the intolerable pressures of life under the present system produce inevitable explosions of the human will. Sometimes these explosions are heroic and transformative ; at other times merely violent and tragic. Her own experience of such a tragedy, Herman Helcher’s attempt on her life in December 1902, gave a personal dimension to her theorizing on the subject of law and violence, which can be seen in her appeal to comrades for money for Helcher’s legal fees, published January 11, 1903. A few years later, a trip to Georgia, the same visit on which she overheard the African American church service mentioned in chapter 1, inspired her sketch “The Chain Gang” (1907), which Goldman considered one of de Cleyre’s highest literary achievements. It expresses once again, both in personal and theoretical terms, her horror at the “justice” system. It is also one of her most powerful renderings of the indomitable human will to freedom and self-expression—the will she had early discovered in herself; the will in which she placed her faith that social revolution would ‹nally succeed . The will to imagine a new social order requires faith that such an order is possible—a faith that must in some sense be sustained by historical precedents. On March 18, 1871, in the midst of the chaos produced by the Franco-German war, ordinary working-people took over the city of Paris as government of‹cials, the army, business owners, and members of the ruling class ›ed. The result was the Paris Commune, a revolutionary restructuring of social and economic life in which the old bureaucracy was dismantled; Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—including rights for women—were proclaimed; power was vested in elected representatives subject to recall in the space of a day; professional police and army were replaced by a “people in arms” who elected their own of‹cers; workers managed their own factories; co-ops proliferated. On May 28 the French government retook the city in a bloody siege of rape, torture, and massacre that left twenty-‹ve thousand Communards dead and proved, Kropotkin said, “that there really are two classes in our modern society; on one side, the man who works and yields up to the monopFreedom , Justice, Anarchism 193 olists of property more than half of what he produces and yet lightly passes over the wrong done him by his masters; on the other, the idler, the spoiler, hating his slave, ready to kill him like game, animated by the most savage instincts as soon as he is menaced in his...