THE END OF ANARCHISM: THE TRAJECTORY OF MARGARET ANDERSON
February 6, 2019
Although I have made every effort to ensure accuracy and completeness, this article is a work in progress and requires fine-tuning. I will continue to improve and update it. Therefore, later versions might not be identical to today’s version. Updates will be indicated by the date they are completed (see above).
The trajectory of Margaret Anderson, founder (in 1914) and editor of The Little Review, illustrates a conservative appropriation of Goldman's message. The intersection of ambiguities and tensions within Goldman's delicately nuanced philosophy with capitalist terrorism and violence, detached Goldman's social revolutionism from her radical lifestyle, her gospel of personal liberation, and her use of literature as a springboard for social criticism. Anderson epitomized the process by which Goldman's multifaceted philosophy of social revolution was reduced to a smorgasbord of personal lifestyle choices and a literature that was radical merely in form.
Although temperamentally and philosophically an anarchist, Anderson in later life belittled her youthful political commitments. "I heard Emma Goldman lecture," she claimed, "and had just time to turn anarchist before the presses closed."[i] Yet Goldman inspired Anderson because she was already an anarchist in all but name. From its first issue, The Little Review espoused anarchist positions on major issues confronting American society. While focusing on literature and the arts, The Little Review also criticized American society and life. Anderson felt that "creative criticism... from the artist's point of view" and Whitmanesque "great audiences" were prerequisites of greatness in the arts. "Books register the ideas of an age; this is perhaps their chief claim to immortality," Anderson proclaimed. Criticism must transcend a narrow focus on "literary values" and be "a blend of philosophy and poetry."[ii] Soon she became more ambitious, seeking to lead rather than reflect opinion; the function of The Little Review would include "deprecating values that have ceased to be important and appreciating new ones that have emerged--or, as I should say, values that are about to become unimportant and those that are about to emerge." Like The Masses, which Anderson hailed as "indispensable to the living of an intelligent life," The Little Review publicized proletarian revolutionaries as well as authors who soon became icons of high culture.[iii]
Anderson hoped to powerfully effect the taste, sensibility, and life of society as well as enrich the lives of her subscribers. In a mimeographed letter to subscribers, she said that "We must make [The Little Review] the kind of force we know it can come to be! But to do this we must reach as many people as possible."[iv]" In a major statement in The Little Review she said that "Life is a glorious performance.... [Art]... shows us the wonder of the way as we rush along.... The Little Review means.... to produce criticism of books, music, art, drama, and life that shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the artists's point of view.... Criticism is never a merely interpretive function; it is creation; it gives birth!"[v] Anderson enthused that
all beautiful things make a place for themselves sooner or later in the world. And we hope to be very beautiful! If you've ever read poetry with the feeling that it was your religion, your very life; if you've ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a Venus in a dim, deep room; if you've ever felt music replacing your shabby soul with a new one of shining gold; if, if the early morning, you've watched a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the sea straight up into the rose-colored sun--if these things have happened to you and continue to happen until you're left quite speechless with the wonder of it all, then you'll understand our hope to bring them nearer to the common experience of the people who read us.[vi]
Anderson demanded complete liberty for the artist--freedom from government censorship, public opinion, the tyranny of the market, and outworn critical standards. The critic must understand "the passionate independence of the artist, his service of no law except inner necessity." Stating her philosophy of life as well as of art, Anderson said that
We don't believe in the majority rule for writers. We don't believe that a writer ever lived who wrote anything really good because he thought the reading public wanted it.... A writer should write what is in him, not what is in the public. He has no excuse for writing unless he is a stronger, more sensitive, and more intelligent man than either his readers or his critics. That is the first distinction between the manufacturer of sausages and the maker of books.
In the second place, we don't believe in the subjection of writers to critics, or to fixed standards, or to anything except themselves. Whatever excuse there is for standards arises from the fact that writers have furnished the examples on which the standards are founded. The writer must find his authority in his own soul. The one thing he must do is to say what he has to say in the way which seems to him right. The history of art is one long example of the discarding by genius of rules founded on previous work.... The heightening of consciousness, the intensifying of essential values--these shall be our critical aims.[vii]
Anderson, therefore, pledged that "our point of view shall not be restrictive; we may present the several judgments of our various contributors on one subject in the same issue. The net effect we hope will be stimulating and what we like to call releasing."[viii] The Little Review sponsored a lively debate over the merits of vers libre, giving prominent space to bitter opponents even after Anderson herself had warmly endorsed the new style. Anderson also praised Charles Ashleigh, an IWW activist and avatar of proletarian literature. Anderson approvingly quoted Ashleigh's statement that "I am interested in Labor, literature, and many other aspects and angles of Life. Men and deeds are to me of primary importance and books secondary." She printed some of his poems and enthused that "We look for big things from this man."[ix] Anderson also printed Ashleigh's fervent review of Arrows in the Gale, a collection of poetry by the Wobbly poet and class warrior Arturo Giovannitti. Ashleigh, in a direct rebuke to the mere aesthetes, said that
We may confine ourselves solely to the technique of the writing, but, in so doing, we should ignore the most important and compelling part of the book: its spirit. There is something which flames through these poems that abashes one who would content himself with a sterile commentary on the versification; only those who are afraid of life would take refuge in such pedantic air-beating..... Despite occasional faults in form or stress--and we must remember that Giovannitti is writing in an alien tongue--the poems are vibrant with life and some of them express with truest art things which are not always considered by our academic friends to be at all within the province of poetry.[x]
Ashleigh also praised Imagism, even while criticizing those who claimed that it was the only valid form of new poetry.[xi] Ashleigh's life and sensibility embodied much of what Anderson herself advocated: he lived greatly and appreciated vastly different schools of poetry, regardless of convention and critical tradition.
Ashleigh also essayed an early attempt at proletarian literary criticism in a strikingly original and eloquent review of Galsworthy's The Mob. Ashleigh's approach was the opposite of that of Goldman, who looked for role models in the plays she analyzed and studiously overlooked subtle ideological differences with the playwright. Ashleigh criticized the play's hero, Sir Stephen More, an aristocratic pacifist who suffered ostracism and death for his anti-war views, as an effete and ineffectual idealist detached from the vital currents of authentic life. "More belongs to the class which really benefits by war: the monied, aristocratic and governing class," Ashleigh asserted. "To such people patriotism is a natural and inevitable source of action, as it is rooted in their very substantial stake in the country." Ashleigh averred that More had nothing but insipid, vacuous platitudes--appeals to justice, honor, and pity for the weak--to oppose the deep feelings of patriotism tapped by the militarists. In a passionate paean to struggle which must have thrilled Anderson, he said that
A great, popular, full-blooded thing like war must have a great, popular, full-blooded thing to counteract it.... A new, full gospel of affirmation, revolt and militancy must be set against the war-passion. The spirit of conflict is good; it is essential to continuity; it is the breaker of old forms and the releaser of new life.... [Such a passion and war already exists in] the hand-to-hand struggle against exploitation, against the economic bondage which has fettered the minds and bodies of the larger portion of the race for ages past. This conflict is affirmative; it calls for courage, endurance, and comradeship. Also it is true, because it has its roots in the biological basis of life--love and hunger. The stir of passion is in it; the passion of hate and the passion of love, and also the love of a good fight; and without these elements there is no war worth while.
Galsworthy's villain was the excitable mob of common people which killed More; Ashleigh perceived the workers as "the divine stuff out of which shall be formed the master-people to come, when once they decide to fight their own war instead of that of their task-masters."[xii]
In those early, heady days when imagination knew no bounds, Anderson considered a vibrant proletarian literature a real possibility. When Big Bill Haywood, whom Anderson greatly admired, proposed an anthology of Wobbly verse, Anderson remarked that "Mr. Haywood wishes to show, by this publication, the spirit of art which is manifesting itself in the working-class movement. He maintains that the heightened consciousness of the workers is beginning to express itself through an adequate and distinctive poetic medium."[xiii]
Anderson's philosophy of literature and criticism was but part of a weltanschauung that included a vigorous social criticism as well. Her insistence that "great audiences" alone could evoke great literature, and her recognition that any work of genius somehow reflected or expressed the emergent ideas of its age as well as those of its author, demanded a concern with social conditions and an engagement with the ideas of the particular works she analyzed. Anderson rejected the narrow moralism which characterized much literary criticism of the time. Like Goldman, she insisted that literature, beyond good and evil, was not susceptible to moral judgments; she believed in "Ideas even if they are not Ultimate Conclusions."[xiv] She therefore discussed the ideas and meanings of each poem or novel, in particular their intense personal meanings for her. She insisted that Galsworthy's Dark Flower had no moral or lesson; "while it's full to the brim of philosophy, it doesn't attempt to force a philosophy upon you. It offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at that--which seems to be the manner of not a few who have written greatly. For the other sort of thing, go to any second-hand novelist you happen to admire; he'll give you characters who have a hard time of it and tell you just where they're wrong."[xv] This was an implicit criticism of Goldman's approach to literature, which employed the old moralistic method for radical ends.
Anderson demanded that the critic express her own deepest personality, rather than regurgitating conventional ideas or the thoughts of the author.[xvi] "You revise your list of friends on a basis of their attitude towards Galsworthy," she said. She therefore elicited her own ineluctable moral from The Dark Flower, albeit one scandalous for a genteel lady. Mark Lennan, the main character, "was a man a woman would be glad to entrust her soul to.... Of course, to love a man of this sort would mean unhappiness; but women who face life with a show of bravery face unhappiness as part of the day's work. It remains to decide whether one will reach high and break a bone or two over something worth having, or play safe and take a pale joy in one's unscarred condition. With Mark Lennan a woman would have had--a la Browning--her perfect moment; and such things are rare enough to pay well for, if necessary."[xvii] She praised another novel as providing a more direct and practical moral: Inez Gilmore's Angel Island provided "the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is absolutely holeproof."[xviii]
Anderson criticized American society, as well as literature, in Goldmanesque terms. She demanded sexual freedom, championed the rights of labor, and attacked the traditional family as stifling parents and children alike. "Feminism?" she queried. "A clear-thinking magazine can have only one attitude: the degree of ours is ardent."[xix] Demanding gay rights, she thundered that "boys and girls, men and women, [are] tortured or crucified every day for their love--because it is not expressed according to conventional morality."[xx] When William Sanger was arrested for distributing a pamphlet on birth control, Anderson said that she had read it carefully and had "given it to all the people I know well enough to be sure they are not Comstock detectives..... Birth control is one of the milestones by which civilization will measure its progress."[xxi] Anderson charged that World War I resulted from the fundamental nature of Western civilization. "The destruction of all the things civilization has taught us to value.... is the result of civilization. It is a spectacle for demonaic laughter." She warned that
As long as we cultivate the ideal of patriotism, as long as we put economic values above spiritual and human value, as long as in our borders there exist dogmatic religions, as long as we consider desirable the private ownership and exploitation of property for private profit--whether by nations or by individuals--we maintain those elements of civilization which have led Europe to the present crisis.... Nineteenth century civilization has overwhelmingly and dramatically failed. What shall we build now?[xxii]
Anderson's anarchistic philosophy, like Goldman's, privileged intensity, authenticity, and self-expression in literature and life. She proclaimed "that nothing shall qualify as fundamentally 'immoral' except denial--the failure of imagination, of understanding, or appreciation, of quickening to beauty in every form, of perceiving beauty where custom or convention has dwarfed its original stature.... Sex is simply the quintessence of this type of feeling, plus a deeper thing for which no words have been made. But we reach the wonder of the utmost realization in just one way: by having felt greatly at every step...."[xxiii] Anderson said that "Personally, I should much rather get drenched than to go always fortified by an umbrulla and overshoes.... I should rather feel a great deal and know a little than feel a little and know a lot.... Certainly I want for The Little Review, as I want from life, not merely beauty, not merely happiness, but a quality which proceeds from the intensity with which both beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, are present...." Intensity of life, Anderson believed, was "the sole compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors.... and of ecstasies too dazzling to be shared."[xxiv]
II
When Anderson discovered that few people shared her dreams, she responded with a furious contempt for the masses. Her elitism, bordering on misanthropy, was redolent of Goldman in her most bitter moods, and stemmed from the same outraged feeling of hurt and rejection. Significantly, however, it was not offset by Goldman's unrelenting love for the common people, her resilient conviction that they were worth saving and could be spurred to liberate themselves. Anderson, echoing Nietzsche more than Marx, disdainfully said that
"People" has become to me a word that--crawls.... Sometimes I see peo-pul in this kind of picture: a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars moving first one way and then the other, slowly and vaguely, not like measuring worms who cover the ground or like ants who have their definite business, but heavily, blindly, in the stunned manner peculiar to caterpillar organisms.... Once in a hundred years one of the caterpillars breaks his skin and flies away--a butterfly through the unfriendly air. Then the black mass writhes in protest and arranges that the next butterfly shall have his wings well clipped.... I might as well say "People are caterpillars" and be done with it.[xxv]
Anderson said that "if you've got a vision--an Idea--and can find the strength to fly toward it you'll be an artist in life"--a state of being markedly distinct from mere picturesque living. "There has never been an artist without the prophet in him, and there has never been a prophet who was not an artist.... Peo-pul don't change. But the individual changes, and that is the hope. Individuals are persons who can stand alone.... It really comes to one end: Life for Art's sake. We believe in that because it is the only way to get more Life--a finer quality, a higher vibration..... And that is a step beyond the old Greek ideal of proportion and moderation. It pushes forward to the superabundance that dares abandonment."[xxvi]
Anderson criticized the subjective acquiescence of the victims of oppression, and their enthusiastic embrace of mediocrity, even more vehemently than the objective structures of power which confined and crippled them. In terms similar to those of Goldman's "Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," Anderson complained that American culture was "clogged by masses of dead people who have no conscious inner life.... Of course, any sort of inner life is impossible to the man or woman who must be a slave instead of a human being. And this brings us, of course, to a discussion of economic emancipation...." Instead of finding the sources of the stunted and warped people of whom she complained in capitalism, patriarchy, or racism, however, Anderson asserted that "there are so many slaves whose bondage can be traced to no cause except their refusal or their inability to come to life.... Human weakness is reducible to so many causes beside that much abused one of 'circumstance.' We talk so much nonsense about people not being able to help themselves."[xxvii]
Anderson preferred "to talk here not of what the individual should have done for him, but of what he might very well do for himself.... The lazy evasiveness of the 'revolutionary' with his the-world-owes-me-a-living air positively sickens me. Why should the world owe anybody anything except a protection against that lack of struggle which cramp's one's intellectual muscles so hideously?" This statement, an unintentional parody of the platitudes of the robber barons who coined their profits from the blood of children, totally misconstrued the revolutionists' emphasis on worker self-activity. Revolutionary workers demanded jobs, worker control of industry, and the full product of their toil; they did not claim that the world owed them a living. Anderson admitted that "spiritual resourcefulness is most rare among those persons who have the most leisure to cultivate it," but also savaged "phlegmatic radicals [who are] content to sit around and be radical--and nothing else."[xxviii] She demanded that radicals, especially, live their values.
Anderson, who called her philosophy "Applied Anarchism,"[xxix] attacked government for devastating every human value. Anderson lived in a society characterized by widespread malnutrition, exposure, and preventable disease, deliberately inflicted upon millions of children, men, and women by the capitalists who owned the means of production and the government. Anderson, therefore, noted that government did not provide food, housing, or clothing for the people.
She emphasized even more government's irrelevance to--indeed, destructiveness of--things a person must have "to get life out of the process of living." Government could not provide purposeful work, "something over which you can toil twenty-four hours a day if you feel like it, because if you don't your life will have no meaning." Government regulations and censorship stifled recreation, "the time and leisure to invite your soul." Although "the value of your life depends upon the intensity with which you love something or somebody," laws destroyed love by imprisoning women and men within the confines of marriage, and by criminalizing birth control, abortion, and homosexual love. "You love some one who loves you, and the world is good. Or you love some one who doesn't love you and the world is hell. Or you love and love and can find no one to love. Or you love and cannot give, or love and cannot take, or maybe you cannot love at all. And where is the government all this time?" Government, Anderson concluded, "can not give you a happy childhood. It cannot educate you or make you an interesting person. It cannot give you work, art, love, or life--or death if you think it better to die."[xxx]
Although Anderson did advocate many specific and highly incendiary changes in American life--gender equality, birth control, literary freedom, and the rights of labor--her anarchism was sometimes more of a poetic mood than a clearly-defined program. Indeed, she preferred Anarchism to Socialism because "Anarchism, like all great things, is an announcement.... Socialism is an explanation and falls, consequently, into the realm of secondary things."[xxxi] Her belief that "anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason"--essential for her belief in anarchism--was based upon the somewhat flimsy and vague assertaion that
an anarchist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between government and life; an artist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between life and love. The former knows that he can never get from the government what he really needs for life; the latter knows that he can never get from life the love he really dreams of.... Finally when you see that you can never get all the love you imagined from life; that you are trapped, really, and must find a way out; when you see that here where there is nothing is the way out, and that he wonder of life begins here--when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is 'left over' will find its music or its words.[xxxii]
III
Almost from the beginning, Goldman was Anderson's exemplary anarchist, prophet, and "artist in life." Shortly after founding The Little Review Anderson heard Goldman lecture, once to an audience of insipid, doll-like society matrons, and once before a crowd of "lively, disputative, [and] intelligent proletarians." Anderson called Goldman "a practical Nietzchean" who "has spent her time doing things that almost no one else would dare to do" and enthused that
In any civilization it requires genius to be really simple and natural. It's one of the most subtle, baffling, and agonizing struggles we go through--this trying to attain the quality that ought to be the easiest of all attainment because we were given it to start with..... Whether her philosophy will change the face of the earth isn't the supreme issue. As the enemy of all smug contentment, of all blind acquiescence in things as they are, and as the prophet who dares to preach that our failures are not in wrong applications of values but in the values themselves, Emma Goldman is the most challenging spirit in America.[xxxiii]
Goldman, who definitely expected that her philosophy would transform the earth, and whose comments about women were more often bitterly critical than warmly supporting, nevertheless expressed her "joy in finding that it was a woman who demonstrated so much depth and appreciation of the cardinal principles in my work."[xxxiv]
Later that year Anderson informed her readers that "I have met her. One realizes dimly that such spirits live somewhere in the world: history and legend and poetry have proclaimed them, and at times we hear of their passing; but to meet one on its valiant journey is like being whirled to some far planet and discovering strange new glories." Goldman was "a mountain-top figure, calm, vast, dynamic, awful in its loneliness, exalted in its tragedy." Anderson, noting that the Socialists condemned Goldman's anarchism as "a metaphysical hodge-podge, the outburst of an artistic rather than a scientific temperament," replied that such critics "miss the real issue, namely, that the chief business of the prophet is to usher in those new times which often appear in direct opposition to scientific prediction, and--this above all!--that life in her has a great grandeur." Goldman "the crucified," like most prophets, found herself among "the despised and rejected," even by those who could most benefit by her message. She was "a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination.... the artist in life."[xxxv]
Anderson loved Goldman's authenticity, her uncompromising application of her principles in life. Goldman lived the Revolution and embodied "a kind of eternal staunchness in which one may put his fundamental trust." Goldman's difference from other radicals was highlighted by a speech by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, which merely regurgitated the opinions of others and timidly ignored the oppression of homosexuals. Anderson complained that "her failure was of the sort of which prophets are never guilty.... I will merely say that Emma Goldman could never fail in this way." While Anderson clearly approved of Goldman's specific views, many of which she herself propounded, she more ecstatically praised the quality of Goldman's life and vision. "Emma Goldman believes form is of secondary importance; for me, it is first," she wrote in Goldman's magazine, Mother Earth. "And I shall be able to refute her very cleverly by applying my theory to her life. She lives in the great style." She later exclaimed that "Revolution is Art. You want free people just as you want the Venus that was modelled by the sea.... All my inadequate stammerings about Emma Goldman have been to show her as the artist she is: a great artist, working in her own material as a Michael Angelo worked in his."[xxxvi]
Goldman, while basking in Anderson's praise, implicitly criticized Andrson's subordination of Goldman's specific views--indeed of her coherent intellectual vision--to her lifestyle. Referring to The Little Review group, Goldman said that a Russian-style intelligensia was forming in the United States. "It has not yet found itself, but it is groping, it is breaking through the limited confines of home, college, social functions. It is reaching out towards a new goal, a new ideal, and new values, by no means confined merely to the esthetic strivings."[xxxvii] That Anderson's fundamentally aesthetic, rather than political, appreciation, elicited no explicit comment from Goldman was, however, an ominous portent. Goldman's integrity, her unconventional, authentic and risk-taking lifestyle could be emulated by those of vastly differently social views, or by those with no explicitly social vision at all. An astute socialist noticed this at the time; as "SHG" wrote Anderson,
I dislike very much your article on Emma Goldman, because it falls so far below the hardness of thought it should have had.... Your article shows that you have been carried away by a personality to approval of a social program, and is the most convincing proof I have ever seen that belief in anarchism is a product of the artistic temperament rather than the result of an intelligent attempt to criticze and remold society. I know you did not intend it to be so; that is the reason it annoys me so much.... I am thoroughly convinced that Emma Goldman could preach until she lost her voice without producing an appreciable effect. The world has had too much preaching.... The more we long for her success [and] the more we appreciate her personality, the more keenly we must criticize her method.
SHG lamented that Anderson's gushing enthusiasm was meant "to save yourself the trouble and unromantic grind" of investigating society with the aid of science. Agreeing that "the beginning and the end of revolution is improvement of the individual," SHG asserted that such improvement would be "a matter of inspired scientific education, of proper industrial conditions, of profound art stimulus, of sex reform, in short, of most of the things advocated today by the socialist party." While Anderson extolled Goldman precisely for her repudiation of scientific socialism, regimenting organization, and collective discipline (Anderson later said that "I have always felt a horror, a fear and a complete lack of attraction for any group, of any kind, for any purpose") Anderson's critic averred that "your despised scientists" would greatly help solve the problems of humanity.[xxxviii]
Anderson's social vision and its limitations are exemplified in her brilliant comparison of Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Anderson acknowledged that Mother Jones was "all the things you have heard her to be--vigorous, almost spritely in her eighty-two years, witty, shrewd, hopeful of great social changes, with snappy little blue eyes and a complexion like a girl of eighteen and a tongue like an automatic revolver." Anderson praised her intellectual acuity and physical and moral courage.
But there is one thing none of the magazine articles has said about her: Mother Jones is a completely simple human being, in the least flattering sense of the word. She suffers because men are sent to jail and children are killed in strikes, and she spends every day of her life working toward the prevention of these things. But she lives on no more subtle plane of adjustments to a difficult universe. You can't associate her with any sort of intense personal struggle.... She has neither a complex nor an interesting mind; she has a well-informed one.... If you asked her to sympathize with a man who had killed himself because he loved too greatly, I can rather hear her say that if men would keep busy they wouldn't have time for such notions. Life to her is reduced to a matter of two antagonisms: the struggle between Capital and Labor. Other things, such as Art, for instance--well, she makes you feel it's a little impertinent to expect her to waste time like that.... There is absolutely nothing of the artist in her. She is imaginative in the way a large child is; in fact Mother Jones is a child in the sense a grown-up can't be without losing a lot.
Anderson was personally affronted because Jones apparently perceived her as one of the non-workers, and hence as a class enemy. She also resented Jones's criticisms of the anarchists and of Big Bill Haywood. "I like these IWW people a lot," Anderson said. "They are not only offering an efficient program of labor; they are getting close to a workable philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought."[xxxix]
Anderson vastly preferred Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Mother Jones. Her comparison was thus radical as well as brilliant. Yet its relentless emphasis on the spiritual and poetic qualities of the two personalities effectively subordinated any concrete analysis of their contradictory programs. Anderson was aware of the chasm between the AFL and the IWW, and clearly preferred the Wobblies. Yet as she obliquely noted, even the IWW necessarily recruited many members who lacked the imagination and heroic grandeur, the life in "the grand style," exemplified by Goldman, Flynn, and Haywood. Any successful social revolution must engage the loyalties and energies of ordinary people, the "caterpillars" whom Anderson held in such contempt; the fact that society was filled with such prosaic and visionless persons was in fact a major justification for Revolution. If the working class as a whole had been composed of men and women of the larger-than-life stature of Anderson's idols, no Revolution would have been necessary or desireable. Anderson lamented the lack of vision of the wage slaves, even while acknowleging the inevitability of such lack of vision. The demand that artists make the revolution ineluctably devolves into a rejection of any actual revolution.
It was therefore perhaps inevitable that Anderson, measuring the revolutionary movement by the standards of its most exalted representatives, would be alienated and offended by the inevitable compromises, backbiting, pettiness, and failures which accompanies even the most exalted enterprises.
IV
Measured by the standards of Goldman, Flynn, and Haywood, rank and file radicals seemed tame indeed. As early as October 1914 Anderson expressed her exasperation with "phlegmatic radicals" who were all talk and no action--a type well known at IWW halls. In September 1915 Anderson condemned the existing order and its upholders, but also criticized do-nothing radicals. The United States, she complained, was a place
where many men work and starve, and many more work and turn into cabbages, and many steal and turn into rats, and a few own the land and turn into hogs.... Where revolt is the strongest of emotions and the weakest of actions.... Where it is beautiful to have theories of living, and ugly to apply them.... Where sex is known as the greatest human experience, and experience in sex as the greatest human sin.... Where nations go to war for things they do not believe in and individuals will not go to revolution for things they believe in.... Where birds that fly are put into cages and men who soar are put into jails....[xl]
In December 1915 Anderson asked why the five thousand people who marched in Joe Hill's funeral had not prevented his execution. "Incidentally, why didn't some one shoot the governor of Utah before he could shoot Joe Hill? It might have awakened Capital--and Labor." Anderson asked why other class-war prisoners were not released by assaults on policemen, the torching of factories, and "convincing sabotage." "Labor could do it" but failed
for the same reason that men continue to support institutions they no longer believe in; that women continue to live with men they no longer love; that youth continues to submit to age it no longer respects; for the same reason that you are a slave when you want to be free, or a nonentity when you would like to have a personality.
It is a matter of Spirit. Spirit can do everything. It is the only thing in the world that can.
For God's sake, why doesn't some one start the revolution?[xli]
This editorial, accompanied by Emma Goldman's incendiary "Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter," evoked the wrath of the authorities. The District Attorney threatened to prosecute Anderson, who told the press that "I won't back down. Some day people will find out that when we write anything in the Little Review we mean it." Anderson reiterated her belief in revolution but said that "great spirits" like Joe Hill, not an insurgent proletariat, would lead it. Privately she said that "I don't long to go to jail.... [but] I would like to say a few things in court, I can tell you! And if [the authorities] do pursue it I'll do my best to say them."[xlii] Anderson was not prosecuted.
Why were the authorities so lenient? Anderson later claimed that a prominent man, adventitiously visiting The Little Review when detectives arrived, persuaded them that Anderson was "a flighty society girl who meant nothing she said. I discovered this later, after I had sat in the studio for two days patiently waiting for the dectectives to come back." This pleasing invention aptly symbolizes the reality. Anderson, despite her poverty, was a privileged, native born white, whose rhetorical flourishes the police could forgive. "Toward Revolution" unintentionally caricatured the parlor radical who urged upon workers actions which he or she could not dream of committing herself. (The Masses, in ----- ran a John Sloan cartoon, "The Extreme Left," in which a languid society woman, lounging on her couch, exclaims "Why don't those strikers do something--let a few of them get shot, and it'll look as if they meant business.") [xliii] Anderson, who vociferously denounced radicals who did not practice what they preached, indulged in none of the violent actions she urged upon others. Big Bill Haywood thought her editorial insane; the authorities may have found it merely shocking. But Anderson's studied ignorance of the structural obstacles impeding radical change, and her apotheosis of a militant minority who could rise above circumstance, echoed, even while exaggerating, Goldman's own impatience with revolutionists-in-theory and her apotheosis of revolutionary will as capable of transcending all obstacles. Goldman, however, was by 1915 personally acquainted with the real-life consequences of advocating violence.[xliv]
Although Anderson did not herself practice violence, the attentions of the police did not silence her. When Margaret Sanger was arrested for advocating birth control, Anderson castigated those who advised Sanger to throw herself on the mercy of the court in hopes of obtaining a light sentence. "Nothing makes me so positively ill as the average radical.... [who is] a person who professes to believe something he does not believe," Anderson said in disgust. "No revolution has ever been started by evasion. No one wants Margaret Sanger to be a martyr. The Point is that every one must see to it that she is not made a martyr..... Margaret Sanger is taking the stand her type always takes--just because it is the type that insists on believing hard. We should do all the rest."[xlv]
When Sanger's case was dismissed, Anderson complained that nothing was gained "except perhaps a little education through publicity," a token victory compared to the ongoing carnage inflicted by laws against contraception. "Sanger has been 'forgiven' by the government, but the statutes regarding family limitation remain the same.... Mrs. Sanger did not even demand redress for her husband, who spent a month in prison. Mrs. Sanger means to go on with her work. What does the government mean to do about it?" Anderson noted that Goldman would stand trial for the same offense, but would have no society women appealing to President Wilson for clemency. "Emma Goldman will fight her case alone, and on its merits. If she does not succeed in effecting a revision of the penal code regarding the whole matter of birth control, she will spend the next year in prison, I understand."[xlvi] Jailed as predicted, Goldman told The Little Review that she welcomed incarceration, despite its monstrosities. "It would be well if every rebel were sent to prison for a time; it would fan his smouldering flame of hate of things that make prisons possible.... My only consolation is that the fight is not at an end and that I may yet be called upon to do something really great."[xlvii]
Anderson also attacked the pusillanimity and hypocrisy of those conducting the defense of the San Francisco labor leaders framed for the Preparedness Day Bombing in July 1916. Anderson, disgusted with the bickering, temporizing, and general imbecility of the defense, announced that "I really must say what I think about this ridiculous bombing business.... What happened after the indictment is more interesting and horrible to me." Anderson complained that no attorney would take the case pro bono and that when C.E.S. Wood had offered his services during the trial of Caplan and Schmidt, the workers refused his offer lest Wood's radicalism alienate public opinion. Anderson claimed that half of the money for the Preparedness defendants
was supplied by the daughter of a man whom the workers would call a capitalist and whose money they would repudiate as having been drained from the blood of their class.... I wouldn't get half so disgusted with labor if it would ever acknowledge that vision is not necessarily a matter of class. It is almost terrifying to watch a labor propagandist think.... The propagandist can't think. But for that matter only one kind of mind really does think, and that is the artist kind. I mean this: only the artist mind sees that this is the way things happen in the world and refuses to sentimentalize over it or to do nothing about it.... Only the artist mind knows that it doesn't matter where the money comes from; money is money, and it is made of slavery whether it comes from a finacier or a coal-digger....[xlviii]
Anderson compared this case with that of a "sixteen year old girl living in the midst of a typical American family" in Chicago who had recently been dragged back into domestic slavery when she had tried to escape. "The only way to get out of such a mess is to get out of it--detectives, jails, families and friends to boot," Anderson thundered. "Follow through! Make it real! Your friends cannot afford to be very real: one of them probably has a family to support and the others probably couldn't stand the horror of being in the papers!.... Ed Nolan [one of the San Fransisco defendants] says that the fear of death is the beginning of slavery. I think it may be that the fear of life is the very beginning."[xlix]
Anderson's coupling of the San Fransicso labor frame-up with the dilemma of a sixteen year old Chicago girl may well reveal a wellspring of her own revolutionary ardor.[l] Her attack on the class fixation of some of the labor defense personnel recalls her anger at Mother Jones's dismissal of her as a rich parasite. (Goldman, upon first seeing Anderson, had had the same impression).[li] What place, Anderson must have asked herself, could she and her values have in a revolution run by and for the proletariat? Anderson, in a partial if understandable misunderstanding of Goldman, praised Goldman as "a wonderful spirit" who "stands for a revolution of intellectuals."[lii]
Anderson provided no evidence that anyone actually considered rejecting the money offered by the rich young woman. She did specifically praise Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman--anarchists who placed their faith in the individual, and thus avoided the Socialist fixation on class--for their activities on behalf of the defense. Anderson also insisted that "the labor farce isn't confined to labor; it is merely the farce in which all people contentedly luxuriate. It is a matter of rebellions which never become real."[liii] Far from rejecting radicalism, Anderson demanded that revolutionaries live up to their professions and immediately revolutionize own personal lives. This was one of Goldman's major themes, and one of the major reasons why she and Anderson were Anarchists rather than Socialists. Significantly, Anderson left much of the September 1916 issue of The Little Review blank because she was dissatisfied with the quality of the literary contributions; that same issue carried three important articles on the San Francisco labor frame-up.
V
Elements in Anderson's weltanshauung, may, in retrospect, seem to imply that Anderson was never entirely serious about her anarchism. Anderson's alleged ideological shortcomings, however, were no more serious or prevalent than those of most other radicals, and her major inconsistencies mirrored Goldman's. The reasons for Anderson's abandonment of anarchism (or her transformation of anarchy into a merely personal and literary mood of rebellion) lie in the rise of literary modernism, in the endemic terrorism and violence against American radicals (vastly intensified by Woodrow Wilson), and in the subtle relationships between these two phenomena. Anderson's literary philosophy had shifted somewhat before America's entry into World War I and the subsequent destruction of the organized opposition to the capitalist/patriarchal/white supremist regime. Yet Anderson finally repudiated her early literary philosophy at the same time that she publically rejected anarchism, at the outset of Wilson's reign of terror.
Anderson questioned Emma Goldman's literary criticism long before she pretended to reject Goldman's political views. In July 1914 The Little Review praised Goldman's Social Significance of the Modern Drama, a refurbrished version of her drama lectures. Stretching the truth somewhat, she praised Goldman as "the interpreter here rather than the propagandist, and her interpretations are not academic discourses.... Whether you like Emma Goldman or not, you will get a more compact and comprehensive working knowledge of modern drama from her book than from any other recent compilation that we know of."[liv] In October The Little Review published a harsh critique of Goldman's book by Marguerite Swawite, who complained that
Emma Goldman is here what she has always been: the propagandist, with the modern drama as her latest text.... Those who are a bit dubious of the "Life and Laughter" that will follow the wholesale destruction of the past will have no difficulty discovering the shortcomings of Miss Goldman's method. They are the obvious ones which of necessity befall the single-minded propagandist:--the instrusion of dogma and platitude into the discussion, the wearying insistence upon "the moral" of each play, the uncritical attitude of too-ready acquiescence in the veracity of each dramatic picture of life..... Insofar as [the artist] approaches art, he does not preach.... These critics might even throw in a word for the institutions of the past which Miss Goldman believes can be as easily shed as an outworn cloak.[lv]
Aside from its obvious political elements (ironic in a review that faults Goldman for her politicizing of literature) most of this critique accorded well with Anderson's own rejection of facile moralizing and dogma, and her insistence on a vibrantly personal response to literature. Anderson, however, prefaced Swawite's article with an editorial disclaimer indicating her own disagreement.
Yet several months later Anderson voiced similar criticisms of Goldman's drama lectures. Writing in Goldman's Mother Earth, Anderson exclaimed that Goldman "makes herself so indispensable to her audience that it is always tragic when she leaves.... She stirs and inspires and endows with new life." Yet Anderson complained that
Some of the drama lectures had one serious shortcoming: they were not interesting.... All she could do in an hour's time was to tell the story of each play and point out its social value. And she did it well; instead of being indiscriminate and uncritical, as some of her critics have it, she proved how creatively critical she is.... But it is not enough from Emma Goldman. Unless she can link up her drama talk with her special function--with her own reactions--the essence of her personality is laqcking and the thing misses fire..... It is only by talking of her own ideas, not merely by explaining the ideas of other people, that Emma Goldman will build up a real following for her drama talks.[lvi]
This might indicate that Anderson's early praise of Goldman's critical technique was motivated partly by Anderson's infatuation with Goldman, and partly by the novelty of Goldman's style of literary criticism. Goldman's discussions seemed fresh and novel because she was among the pioneers of social criticism; but her formulaic and predictable discussions quickly paled. Anderson's rejection of Goldman's style of social criticism, therefore, was more an affirmation of Anderson's own critical sensibility than an indication of a fundamental ideological transformation; nor did it signify a rejection of social criticism itself. Anderson also remained firmly committed to Goldman's anarchistic philosophy.
From the beginning, The Little Review engaged in the controversies over Imagism and vers libre then raging among the literary avant-garde. The December 1914 issue featured vigorous articles attacking and defending the new poetic form; Anderson herself endorsed the new form as exemplifying "a clear-eyed workmanship which belongs distinctly to this keener age of ours." As late as September 1915, long after Anderson had welcomed Imagism and free verse, The Little Review printed a strident attack on the new styles. Anderson, registering her disagreement, complained that in the United States even poets misunderstood the new school.[lvii] In March 1916 The Little Review sponsored a vers libre contest, but Anderson's disgruntlement with the entries only re-enforced her opinion of American backwardness. Anderson's embrace of the new poetic forms confirmed her programme of exposing Americans to the best of "the new note" in the arts; it in no way represented a departure from her previous literary or political views. Many leftists warmly embraced the new in literature and art as well as in economics and politics. Imagism, a tradition-smashing literary form which aimed at brevity, clarity, the use of common language, and the evocation of a strong emotional response in the reader, was a relatively accessible and popular form of high culture, introduced to readers of The Little Review by Wobbly activist Charles Ashleigh.
By August 1916, however, Anderson expressed severe dissatisfaction with the literature she had been publishing. "I am ashamed," she told her readers, because The Little Review
has been published for over two years without coming near its ideal.... Now we shall have Art in this magazine or we shall stop publishing it. I don't care where it comes from--America or the South Sea Islands.... I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue by putting in things that were "almost good" or "important." There will be no more of it. If there is only one really beautiful thing for the September number it shall go in and the other pages will be left blank.
Come on, all of you![lviii]
Anderson almost carried out her threat. The September issue had thirteen blank pages (out of a diminutive twenty-eight) and a plaintive wail from Anderson: "The Little Review hopes to become a magazine of Art. The September issue is offered as a want ad."[lix] The issue contained much radical political commentary--including three pieces on the San Francisco bombing case and Anderson's own "The Labor Farce," which indicated her disillusionment with the pusillanimity and tepidness of many radicals. Jane Heap, soon a major presence in the life of Margaret Anderson and of The Little Review, contributed some cartoons entitled "Light Occupations of the editor while there is nothing to edit," one of which presaged a significant change in their political direction. A caricature of Margaret Anderson slumped in her chair, "suffering for humanity at Emma Goldman's lectures" expressed Heap's own skepticism of Goldman's--and Anderson's--political views.[lx] Anderson, who later downplayed her early radicalism, seriously distorted the import of the September issue, claiming that it was completely blank except for Heap's cartoons. Her autobiographical account ignored the significant and incendiary political articles contained in that issue.[lxi]
The major changes in the literary and political directions of The Little Review occured almost simultaneously, after America's entry into World War I and the unleashing of Wilson's reign of terror. In May 1917 Anderson ecstatically announced that Ezra Pound had become The Little Review's new foreign editor. This was, Anderson announced, "the most stunning plan that any magazine has had the good fortune to announce for a long, long time. It means that a great deal of the most creative work of modern London and Paris will be published in these pages." Pound's own editorial in May savaged literary censorship, organized religion, and "codes of propriety" in terms that Emma Goldman would have applauded.[lxii] Pound soon became the most important figure in determining The Little Review's literary contents; his accession, however, did not signal any political shift in Anderson's position.
Anderson publically repudiated Anarchism in August 1917. Somewhat re-writing history, she reminded her readers that The Little Review was launched as a magazine of "Art and good talk about Art."
For three years, at irregular intervals, it reflected my concern about various other matters. When I got incensed over the sufferings of what is called the proletariat, I preached profound platitudes about justice and freedom. I had always had the sense to know that all people can be put into two classes: the exceptional and the average. But when I decided that the only way to prevent the exceptional from being sacrificed to the average was for everybody to become anarchists, I preached the simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting tenets of anarchism. I have long since given them up. I still grow violent with rage about the things that are 'wrong,' and probably always shall. But I know that anarchism won't help them. I have known good anarchists who are as dull as any other good laymen. And I have no interest in laymen. Only sensibility matters.
I had always known that education doesn't produce sensibility, but I came to think that something could produce it. Now I know that nothing under heavens will make any one sensitive if he is not born that way.... All these ideas were not interesting enough to have bothered about....
And now after working through unbelievable aridness The Little Review has at last arrived at the place from which I wanted it to start. At last we are printing stuff which is creative and inventive, and, thank heaven, not purely local. The audience mentioned above, in the aggregate, resents it. We no longer interest the audience.[lxiii]
Although historians have usually accepted this repudiation at face value, Anderson's social views may not have changed as much as she claimed. Indeed, her renunciation of anarchism was motivated largely, if unconsciously, by fear.
Anderson was not easily intimidated. She had endured, with equanimity, economic terrorism and poverty that would have discouraged most persons.[lxiv] The visitations of the police after her "Toward Revolution" editorial did not noticeably soften her radicalism. She would in the future risk suppression and jail for publishing allegedly "obscene" works. Yet the Red Scare of 1917-1920 was, for the relatively privileged whites who Anderson represented, far more terrifying than previous repressions. In April 1917, the month of America's entry into the war, an editorial against the war indicated a clear awareness of imminent repression, even if it also baited the authorities. "The War" consisted of an entirely blank page, except for a bracketed announcement at the bottom, "[We will probably be suppressed for this!]"[lxv] When Goldman requested use of the magazine's offices for an anti-conscription meeting, Anderson, fearing eviction, hesitated. "I might as well have offered it to the anarchists," she later said, "because we lost it anyway." In July 1917, Anderson announced that The Little Review had been evicted from its offices "because we have expressed ourselves in regard to the trial of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman."[lxvi]
In that same issue, Anderson quoted from Henri Barbusse's Le Feu and from a review of it attacking nationalism and patriotism. "How this book ever passed the censor is beyond me...." Anderson exclaimed. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman have just been given a sentence of two years in prison, fines of ten-thousand dollars each, and deportation, for believing these same things."[lxvii] The August 1917 issue, in which Anderson publically recanted her anarchist beliefs, carried a full page ad by The Masses, which Anderson had recently declared "too valuable to lose," stating that over a dozen radical periodicals had been suppressed and asserting that "The Masses is the only one which has challenged the censorship in the courts and put the Government on the defensive....."[lxviii] Anderson understood that a merely literary radicalism would find more official tolerance than political radicalism or agitation.
Anderson's assertion that she had long ago rejected anarchism was simply untrue. She sat with Goldman and Berkman every day during their trial. She had endorsed Goldman in the July 1917 Little Review and had published a scathing article in Goldman's Mother Earth attacking the trial, the judge, and the sentence. Anderson said that she was "still shaking with the hideousness and absurdity" of the trial but would "try to write something of my fury." Her indictment embodied the very essence of the anarchist philosophy:
[The trial] was even more of a farce than I had expected it would be. For these reasons: first it is a farce for any idea to come into conflict with the law.... Second, it is a farce to believe that even under a fair trial any one accused of opposition to a specific law can prove his opposition to be his right. If the Court itself conceded the opposition to be the most reasonable and logical and inspired thinking in the world it would still be obliged to call that opposition criminal. The law is its own worst indictment.... Imagine the irony of a magistrate saying, as Judge Mayer said in his instructions to the jury: "Whether you consider these people right or wrong has nothing to do with your verdict."
Since judges always consider that their way of thinking is right the whole farce resolves itself into two autocracies of opinion, one of which has the right and the power to say to the other: "If you don't agree with my opinion you will have to go to jail." Good God! You are what you are because you disagree so emphatically with that opinion!.... The mere notion of a trial being fair is too colossally and sublimely ironic to talk of seriously.
Anderson said that "in art the whole matter is easier. You get the two autocracies of opinion just the same: the opinion of the philistine and the opinion of the artist." The philistines exasperated Anderson, but (except in cases of political radicalism or alleged obscenity) they lacked the physical violence with which to enforce their opinions. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman need no consolation," she concluded. "They have fought all their lives for the kind of thing they are in jail for now." Anderson herself endorsed the central tenet of anarchism: that of the indissoluble connection between individualism, democracy, and social service. In terms very similar to those she had used in 1914, Anderson proclaimed that "the only unshakable basis for democracy is individualism.... No man can ever be a real democrat (give out the best of himself to others) until he has become an individual (made the most of himself in order to have the most to give."[lxix]
Anderson's essay "repudiating" anarchism does not mention any anarchist beliefs which Anderson rejected. Rather, Anderson called the tenets of anarchism "simple and beautiful but quite uninteresting" and concluded that most people could not be redeemed and were not worth saving. Indeed, Anderson's assertion in the August 1917 Little Review that people were "not merely indifferent to [art]: they hate it malignantly" echoed her statement in the July Mother Earth that "uncultivated people are not merely indifferent to high and noble qualities [manifested by Goldman and Berkman]. They hate them malignantly." In both articles Anderson despaired that the exceptional minority would be submerged by the mediocre majority. Anderson, like Goldman, had simultaneously and precariously balanced a Nietzchean belief in the superior individual with an intense desire to bring that superior sensibility to the masses. In the summer of 1917 Anderson did not repudiate her own beliefs; rather, despairing of having any impact on the impermeable majority at a time when any active effort to improve the lives of the masses could lead to imprisonment, exile, or death, she allowed her longstanding elitism to trump her social consciousness.
Even Anderson's rejection of preaching and her statement that the tenets of anarchism were uninteresting echoed earlier statements. In October 1914 she had stated that "the highest mission in life is the dedication of oneself to the obvious, and that a valiant preaching of truisms is the only way to get at the root of intellectual evils....To convince a reactionary (not that I've ever done it) that renunciation is not an ultimate end, or that truth is a good thing for all people, is better than discovering a kindred soul...." By May 1915 Anderson was somewhat disillusioned: "We have made statements that seemed fearfully radical and new to a lot of people who don't know what's going on in the world; and I'm afraid we have listened to those people and tried to 'convert' them. We have wanted to convince everybody--particularly those who seemed to need it most. And there is nothing more fatal: because what everybody thinks doesn't matter; what a few think matters tremendously.... One of our big mistakes has been a hope that preaching will help." Yet Anderson promised that each future issue "shall have a special article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life--getting down to the foundations...." Anderson included "the intricate hypocricies of the music schools" and labor conditions on the railroads as possible subjects. "This," she concluded, "begins our warfare."[lxx]
Anderson's "rejection" of anarchism is also belied by the fact that she still advocated important anarchist ideas which would not evoke repression. She championed uninhibited literature and art, opposed censorship, upheld feminism, and attacked organized religion. She bemoaned the demise of The Seven Arts and denounced Mrs. Rankine, its patron, for withdrawing her subsidy because of her disagreement with the magazine's anti-war policy.[lxxi]
Perhaps the most striking indication of her real motivation in rejecting anarchism, however, comes from her own behavior when threatened with persecution. The Little Review was denied use of the mails because of Post Office objections to Wyndham Lewis's "Cantleman's Spring-Mate" in October 1917; a short time later, the Post Office burned four separate issues of The Little Review and placed Anderson and Heap on trial for purveying obscenity. In both of these cases, Anderson's own behavior markedly diverged from that which she had insisted radicals uphold, and from that which she so admired in Emma Goldman.
In November 1917 Anderson told readers that the October issue containing "Cantleman" had been secretly suppressed by the Post Office. She emphasized that the offending story was "by a distinguished man of letters, a man who at present is in the English army and is fighting in the trenches." This truckling statement emphasized the presumed political loyalty of a writer who was fighting for the Allied cause. It was followed by an article that combined conciliatory reassurances to the authorities with a determined willingness to fight. "I cannot find a word or phrase or sentence in ("Cantleman's Spring-Mate") that anyone could dream of distorting into indecency," Anderson said. "The decision of the Post Office is in our opinion quite absurdly wrong. We believe that there have been various complaints of other magazines and that because of these complaints, the Post Office officials have been aroused to excessive zeal and that we are therefore hit with the others, wrongly and unjustly we believe." Anderson predicted vindication in the courts and carefully said that "we do not question the motives of the official who acted in this case."[lxxii] Anderson, of course, had very recently denounced any governmental inquisition into art, literature, or political opinion as inherently absurd and unjust; and she had proclaimed the inherent injustice of the entire legal apparatus which prosecuted ideas. She had cast scorn and contempt on the very notion of officials and bureaucrats passing judgment upon literature. This article, however, implicitly condoned censorship, claiming only that over-zealous officials had misinterpreted Lewis's story. The government, Anderson strongly implied, was capable of discerning obscene material and justified in censoring it.
Anderson's behavior during the trial of The Little Review, Ulysses, and Anderson and Heap themselves, was also conciliatory. She placed her defense in the hands of the homophobic, misogynist attorney John Quinn, who in turn relied on the very legal technicalities that Anderson had so denounced when used by other radicals. Anderson remained primly, decorously, and unwontedly silent during the trial. She did not even testify. She had urged other radicals to stand magnifiscently on principle, eschewing compromise; she herself abandoned all principle and ignominously surrendered in order to remain out of jail. She agreed to cease publishing Ulysses and even allowed Quinn to stipulate that the Nausicaa episode which so enraged the government was the worst in the book. That Anderson was insincere became evident from her subsequent conduct: she and The Little Review vehemently denounced American culture and
went into semi-voluntary exile in Paris.[lxxiii]
Anderson later regretted her unprincipled conduct. A friend expressed disillusionment because Anderson avoided jail, and Anderson claimed that "I shared her disappointment. It is always a mistake to allow the persuasions of your friends or your lawyer to keep you out of jail. If I had refused to permit the payment of the fine I might have circulated some intelligent propaganda about 'Ulysses' from my cell." This statement, however--aside from subtly blaming others for her choice--ignores the fact that the delicate and ultra-refined Anderson was ill-suited for the harsh realities of jail. Her response to the ordeal of being fingerprinted--however absurdly theatrical--makes it abundantly clear that Anderson could not have endured the torture and threats of rape inflicted upon imprisoned members of the National Women's Party, much less the far worse abuse routinely inflicted upon Wobblies and other dissidents. [lxxiv]
Anderson's behavior, however inconsistent with her previous pronouncements, did illuminate an anarchist conundrum implicit in Goldman's own ethos. Goldman, like Anderson, denounced renunciation and self-sacrifice as unmitigated evils; both heralded the full and harmonious development of each individual personality to a complete and harmonious whole as not only the highest ethical duty, but also that most consistent with social consciousness. Yet as Goldman frequently discovered, advocacy of unpopular opinions can often lead to imprisonment, exile, or--that ultimate form of self-sacrifice--death. Neither Goldman nor Anderson ever reconciled the chasm between their philosophical rejection of self-sacrifice and the real-world necessity for self-risk. Anderson both praised the Wobblies because they refused the hackneyed role of martyr and exalted Goldman as "the crucified one".
VI
Repression, however, had a far greater impact on Anderson than her own personal experiences and fears would indicate. Incessant corporate and state violence against the labor movement enormously shaped the type of literature and art which could captivate Anderson and attain hegemony among the literati. It did this by shaping the entire world in which Anderson lived, severely delimiting not only what she was able to achieve, but even to imagine. The terrorism and violence directed against workers, African-Americans, and women, greatly narrowed the visions of those groups, and drove them towards a conservative accomodation with the regime and to a focus on mere survival, both individual and collective. This early offended and alienated Anderson, who extolled radical leaders such as Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as embodying in their lives Art in its truest and most magnifiscent sense. She had contempt for the conservatism of ordinary workers, however. "I see evolution at work in labor--not revolution" she said. "But I see something more than evolution at work in the arts--music, painting, poetry."[lxxv] In such a world, Anderson came to believe that her efforts could significantly advance the revolutionary transformation of literature and the other arts, but not of society. Anderson could have a major impact by publishing Joyce, Pound, and Eliot; she despaired of inspiring the mass of inert, conservative workers whom such towering figures as Goldman, Flynn, and Haywood failed to mobilize.
The crushing of the American revolutionary movement through assiduous terrorism and violence meant that, as Max Eastman complained, there simply was no outpouring of high-quality working-class culture to compare with the exciting innovations of the avant-garde literati. An incident from Anderson's own career illustrates this. "A young girl with gaunt eyes and the earnestness that would prevent anyone from achieving anything" offered Anderson some "stories about the miseries of miners and other tragedies of mankind in which she had never participated." Anderson contemptuously rejected the stories and told their crestfallen author that the judicious use of lip rouge would garner her some experiences worth writing about.[lxxvi] In the 1920s, with organized opposition to the capitalist/patriarchal/white supremist regime crushed, many middle-class authors who may otherwise have sided with the oppressed took Anderson's advice and wrote about private (especially sexual) life. Potential middle-class allies of the workers were separated from the workers by a chasm enforced by injunctions, bayonets, jailings, and outright murder. They could, therefore, be of little practical help. Meanwhile, as Emma Goldman well knew, most workers were far too harshly exploited (many American factories were virtual death camps) to appreciate, much less generate, great art, or even to take an interest in revolutionary politics.
Anderson, therefore, out of social reality as much as personal fear, abandoned the criticism of life and and took refuge in the Religion of Art. "The ultimate reason for Life is Art," she proclaimed. "I don't know what they mean when they talk about art for life's sake. You don't make art so that you may live; you do just the reverse of that."[lxxvii] More significantly, this apotheosized Art became an esoteric religion, inaccessible to the masses and contemptuous of them. Abandoning her earlier Whitmanesque insistence that only great audiences could evoke a great literature, Anderson subsided into elitism and misanthropy. Literature became dissociated not only from ideas, but also from emotion, and became a rarified form of mysticism whose intrinsic nature resided in language alone, regardless of any meanings outside itself. Anderson proclaimed that "humanity is the most stupid and degraded thing on the planet," ridiculed those who equated human emotions with artistic ones, and asserted, with the hauteur of the robber baron, that "the artist has no responsibility to the public whatever".[lxxviii] She gratuitiously insulted Charles Ashleigh and others who entered the vers libre contest. When Upton Sinclair cancelled his subscription to The Little Review on the grounds that it was unintelligible and hence uninteresting, Anderson cancelled her subscription to his socialist paper. "I understand everything in it," she said, "therefore it no longer interests me."[lxxix] Anderson significantly limited the scope of The Little Review, not only neglecting most social issues, but also narrowing the range and diversity of literary styles which appeared in her magazine. All the while she crowed about having at last found her true path.
The imperialist bloodbath of World War I and the defeat of nearly every hopeful insurgency re-enforced the intellectuals' need to seek refuge in their time-tested mirage, worship in the temple of art. That World War I helped drive the intelligensia to a celebration of nihilism, absurdity, and incomprehensibility as organizing principles of literature and life, is well known. Denied meaningful participation in the affairs of their society and consigned to political and social marginality, intellectuals have traditionally masked and celebrated their defeat by embracing the Religion of a transcendental Art, touted as superior to actual life. Mysticism, esotericism, and a solipsist fixation on individual salvation have characterized such retreats. This has been most studied as a German pheneomenum, but it has recurred in many times and places, including the United States of the twenties.[lxxx] The religion of art consoled intellectuals for their defeat in the larger social arena, much as ethnic solidarities, patriotism, and gender identities bolster the shattered egos of the workers and offer bogus compensations to the defeated working class. When Margaret Anderson proclaimed in 1920 that "In the last analysis it is the Arts, and the Arts alone, that give lustre to a nation,"[lxxxi] she could not have allowed herself to realize what a catastrophic decline of aspiration this represented. Just a few years earlier Anderson had envisioned a revolutionary transformation of all of American life which would have rendered all of existence for all of the people the high Art which only extraordinary individuals such as Goldman, Haywood, and Flynn could enjoy and exemplify in a society literally based upon human sacrifice. Anderson's fatuity, which could have served as both inspiration and epitaph for the Harlem Renaissance, assumed that the creations of a tiny vanguard of unappreciated and isolated individuals counted more than the lives, sufferings, and personalities of a hundred million people. For individuals such as Anderson, Heap, and Pound, who exulted in incomprehensibility and wrote for themselves rather than the general population, such a stance was particularly ludicrous.
As it was, the literati secured their revenge on the industrial magnates who excluded them from all meaningful participation in the shaping of their own societies, and hence of their own lives. In a world where the tiny handful who owned America treated the mass of workers as a cheap resource to be exploited and destroyed, the literati evolved their own form of privilege, immersion in a self-referential and solipsist culture of modernism which excluded not only the workers but the capitalists themselves. Ben Hecht, a contributor to The Little Review, stated that it became "dedicated to rescuing the art of writing from the latrines of popularity. We considered the approval of either the crowd or critics a mark of final failure."[lxxxii] In February 1918, Little Review contributor A. Orage denounced the increasing unintelligibility of The Little Review's poetry and prose. Unconsciously echoing Trotsky's early criticism of Bolshevism, Orage warned that "whoever makes a boast of writing for a coterie.... finds himself writing for a coterie of a coterie, and at last for himself alone."[lxxxiii]
In 1915 a reader of The Little Review had written Anderson extolling the "one kind of worker active in the life of today whose work is not often regarded in the light of art.... [because their work] is so vast and vague in character that many people do not even know it is being undertaken. They cannot understand effort on such a scale that the final completed work, if it is ever to be completed, will be nothing less than a new social order, a new conception of social values, actualizing itself in the shape of finer cities and grander and braver citizens on a world scale."[lxxxiv] The efflorescence of myriad schools of traditional and experimental art in the early Soviet Union, and the relationships of this renaissance with working class movements, perhaps illustrate an attractive, if ephemeral, alternative road which the American people never seriously considered. The brutality of the United States government was ultimately far more efficacious than that of the Czarist regime.
Anderson herself found a new heroine in the Baronness Else von Fretag-Loringhoven, who she called "the only figure of our generation who deserves the ephithet extraordinary." The Baronness, who went naked in public, pilfered from friends, and wrote incomprehensible poetry, embodied the spirit of Ben Reitman ("who," Anderson remakred, "wasn't so bad if you could hastily drop all your ideas as to how human beings should look and act") more than of Emma Goldman. She certainly lived an idiosyncratic life which started, shocked, and offended many people, and won the admiration of those who, in Eastman's words, confused "the delights of a venturesome life, or of creative art itself, for the effort toward world transformation."[lxxxv] To those attracted, repelled, or simply fascinated by the seemingly outlandish, she was indistinguishable from Emma Goldman. She was, however, completely apolitical, and made no lasting contribution to society. Although Anderson filled pages of The Little Review with her poetry, her literary efforts, as well as her very existence, are justly forgotten today. She, even more than Margaret Anderson, exemplified the pathetic fate of countercultural radicalism in the 1920s and beyond. Goldman had told Anderson that "I hate your [America's] rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual."[lxxxvi] With most countercultural revolutionaries dead, in jail, exiled, or dispersed by the early 1920s, this unity of the individual and the social collapsed into a narcissistic, asocial and merely eccentric individualism.
Anderson herself soon wearied of the Baronness's antics, and eventually of The Little Review itself. Although Heap's entreaties kept Anderson tangentially involved, by the time The Little Review folded in 1928 (shortly before the Great Depression sent many American expatriate writers scurrying home and to a greater social consciousness) Anderson and Heap were, in their distinct ways, equally disillusioned. In the farewell issue, Anderson said that "even the artist does not know what he is talking about." Disdaining artists who aspired to change the world, she said that "I'm not particularly interested at the moment in transformation. I want a little illumination." Illumination implies coherence, a quality notably lacking in many post-1917 writers for The Little Review. But Jane Heap's renunciation--which implicitly recognized the vital connection between society and art--was even more striking. Heap, who Anderson later described as lacking any concern for "freedom and justice," exclaimed that
Master-pieces are not made from chaos. If there is a confusion of life there will be a confusion of art.... [Even Ulysses] is too personal, too tortured, too special a document to be a master-piece in the true sense of the word....Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts.... have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.[lxxxvii]
NOTES:
[i] Thirty Years, 54.
[ii] MA, "Announcement," LR March 1914; "Incense and Splendor," June 1914. Anderson said that "The novel of manners has its delightful place, and so has the historical romance; but the novel that chronicles with subtlety the intellectual or artistic temper of an age is as much more important than these as Greek drama is than the moving picture show." "Ethel Sidgwick's 'Succession,'" LR March 1914.
[iii] Anderson, "What We are Fighting For," May 1915; Anderson, "Mr. Comstock and the Resourceful Police," April 1915.
[iv] Trial Track, pp. 123-124.
[v] "Announcement," LR March 1914. In "To Serve an Idea," October 1914, Anderson reiterated her belief that "an attempt to influence the art, music, literature and life of Chicago is an exciting and worthy one." FIND CIRCULAR LETTER CITE, A REAL FORCE, IN TRIAL TRACK.
[vi] MA, "Announcement," LR March 1914. I have combined two paragraphs into one.
[vii] Unsigned editorial, "Grocer Shops and Souls," September 1914.
[viii] "Announcement," March 1914.
[ix] "Our New Poet," July 1914. Ashleigh, while endorsing an early version of proletarian literature, did not confine authors to this genre; his own poems embraced many other themes. Ashleigh warmly endorsed Imagism.
Illustrating her own pluralistic and ecumenical tastes, in the very next issue Anderson introduced Maxwell Bodenheim, who announced that "I am not concerned with life, but with that which lies behind life." "Our Third New Poet," September 1914. [There was no August 1914 issue.]
[x] Ashleigh, "The Poetry of Revolt," September 1914.
[xi] Ashleigh, "Des Imagistes," July 1914. Some of Ashleigh's own poems appeared in this issue. ANALYSE THEM FOR FORM, CONTENT.
[xii] Ashleigh, "New Wars for Old," October 1914. Goldman, who believed in exceptional individuals more than the working class, would have extolled Sir More as a role model. She also, in many moods, fully appreciated Galsworthy's contempt for the popular mob.
[xiii] "A Rebel Anthology," October 1914.
[xiv] Anderson, "The Reader Critic," January-February 1916; Anderson, "Our Credo," June-July 1915.
[xv] Anderson, "The 'Dark Flower' and the 'Moralists'", March 1914.
[xvi] Floyd Dell, while editing the Friday Literary Supplement, told the fledging reviewers: "Here is a book on China. Now don't send me an article about China but one about yourself." (Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, 37). Anderson gave similar advice to her contributors.
[xvii] MA, "'The Dark Flower' and the 'Moralists'", LR March 1914.
[xviii] MA, "A New Winged Victory," LR April 1914.
[xix] MA, "Announcement," LR March 1914; "The Renaissance of Parenthood," July 1914.
[xx] "Mrs. Ellis's Failure," March 1915.
[xxi] "Mr. Comstock and the Resourceful Police," April 1915.
[xxii] "Armageddon," September 1914, unsigned editorial.
[xxiii] "Incense and Splendor," June 1914.
[xxiv] "Our First Year," February 1915; "To the Innermost," October 1914. The elipses are in the original.
[xxv] "The Artist in Life," June-July 1915.
[xxvi] "The Artist in Life," June-July 1915. Anderson extolled Nietzsche as the epitome of the artist in life, and said that "there ought to be Individuals coming out of a generation raised on Nietzsche."
[xxvii] "To the Innermost," October 1914.
[xxviii] "To The Innermost," October 1914.
[xxix] "Our Credo," June-July 1915.
[xxx] "Art and Anarchism," March 1916.
[xxxi] Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, 149. Eastman later said that he and Anderson "were miles apart mentally... she being of of anarchist temper and I at the time very much committed to a scientific 'method of procedure' toward freedom which I thought could be based on the writings of Marx and Engels." Trial-Track, 304-305.
[xxxii] "Art and Anarchism," March 1916.
[xxxiii] "The Challenge of Emma Goldman," May 1914.
[xxxiv] "The Reader Critic," September 1914.
[xxxv] "The Immutable," November 1914. This title, which was in quotations, was borrowed from Alexander Berkman's epithet for Goldman in his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which Anderson also extolled. Anderson said that "A terrible sadness is in her face--as though the sufferings of centuries had concentrated there in some deep personal struggle; and through it shines that capacity for joy which becomes colossal in its intensity and tragic in its disappontments.
[xxxvi] "The Immutable," November 1914; "Mrs. Ellis's Failure," March 1915; "An Inspiration," Mother Earth, March 1915; "A Real Magazine," August 1916.
[xxxvii] Goldman, "Two Months and After," Mother Earth, January 1915. See Living My Life pp. 530-531 for a similar view.
[xxxviii] SHG, "The Reader Critic," January 1915; Anderson, Thirty Years' War, 37.
[xxxix] "'Mother Jones' and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn," May 1915.
[xl] "To the Innermost," October 1914; "Reversals," September 1915.
[xli] "Toward Revolution," December 1915.
[xlii] Trial Track, pp. 114-116. This account is more accurate than Anderson's own, given in Thirty Years.
[xliii] Trial Track 113-116; Anderson's account in Thirty Years 74-75; I NEED THE DATE OF THE MASSES CARTOON; SOME SLIGHT CHANCE THAT IT EVEN REFERRED TO THIS EDITORIAL, THOUGH I DOUBT IT.
[xliv] Ironically, Anderson vastly downplayed Goldman's own commitment to violence as a mechanism of social change. SOURCES FOR THIS
[xlv] "Margaret Sanger and the Issue of Birth Control," January-February 1916.
[xlvi] "Propaganda," March 1916. Goldman had earlier stood trial on a birth control charge. Although she stood her ground uncompromisingly, she was acquitted by a friendly judge. Anderson herself did not comment on this; Louise Bryant wrote about the trial for The Little Review. Bryant, "Emma Goldman on Trial," September 1915.
[xlvii] Goldman, "Letters from Prison," May 1916.
[xlviii] "The Labor Farce," September 1916. Anderson considered Goldman and Berkman as having the artist mind and said that "I saw Emma Goldman and Berkman brooding over this strange and awful spectacle like two prophets whose souls are slowly petrifying under the antics of their disciples." SEE IF ANY EVIDENCE THAT SOME RADICALS DID WANT TO REJECT THE MONEY; WHERE DID SHE GET THIS IDEA?
[xlix] "The Labor Farce," September 1916.
[l] Anderson, Thirty Years, and Bryer, Trial Track, are among those who comment on Anderson's unhappy family life.
[li] Goldman, Living My Life, 530.
[lii] Trial Track, page 115.
[liii] "The Labor Farce," September 1916.
[liv] "Sentence Reviews," July 1914. My assumption of Anderson's authorship of this unsigned piece is based on the fact that she was the sole editor of The Little Review at the time and endorsed Goldman's book in the editorial disclaimer to Marquerite Swawite's review, discussed below.
[lv] Swawite, "Emma Goldman and the Modern Drama," October 1914.
[lvi] Anderson, "Emma Goldman in Chicago," Mother Earth, December 1914. Anderson liked Goldman's "propaganda" lectures, especially "Misconceptions of Free Love," much more than the drama lectures. Anderson ridiculed the socialtes who had attended the drama lectures and ventured to one of the "propaganda"ones; they "were in a state of excited curiosity, giggling in apprehension of how shocked they might be--and really hoped they would be.... They went away without any deeper impressions, I suppose, than that they had been daring enough to go to a 'terrible' lecture and had found nothing terrible about it."
Goldman, in the January Mother Earth, said that she had been too tired and overworked and that the dramas she discussed could not, in view of the war in Europe, evoke real passion. Goldman, "Two Months and After," ME January 1915.
[lvii] The articles in the December, 1914 issue included Llewellyn Jones, "Aesthetics and Common Sense,"; Arthur Davison Ficke's "In Defense of Free Verse" (a satiric attack on free verse); and Maxwell Bodenheim's The Decorative Straight-Jacket: Rhymed Verse." The quote from Anderson is from "Amy Lowell's Contribution." Anderson indicated her disagreement with Huntley Carter's September 1915 piece, "Poetry Versus Imagism."
[lviii] "A Real Magazine," August 1916.
[lix] Anderson, September 1916.
[lx] Heap was not herself necessarily a political conservative; her major June 1917 piece, "Push-Face," severely criticized police suppression of an anarchist meeting, and she remained a severe critic of American civilization and culture. In August 1917--after Wilson's terror had begun--Heap complained, in terms Goldman and Anderson could fully understand, about the lack of real revolutions in history. She also said, however, that "civil wars, whatever their pretext, seem always to be the fight of the self-righteous uncultivated against the cultivated and the suave." Heap, in "The Reader Critic," August 1917.
[lxi] Thirty Years', 124-5. She also claimed that the issue totalled 64 pages, when in fact it was merely 28, 13 of which were blank.
[lxii] Anderson, "Surprise," April 1917; Pound, "Editorial," May 1917.
[lxiii] "What the Public Doesn't Want," August 1917.
[lxiv] Bryer, Trial Track, chronicles numerous instances of individuals who ceased their association with The Little Review out of fear for their careers after it endorsed Goldman; of newspaper persecution and sensationalism; of individuals who broke important promises; cancelled advertising; and other retaliations for Anderson's anarchist opinions.
[lxv] "The War," April 1917.
[lxvi] "Books," July 1917; Thirty Years', 189-190.
[lxvii] "Books," July 1917; "The Reader Critic," July 1917.
[lxviii] "To Our Readers," November 1916; "Challenging the Government," an ad for The Masses, August 1917.
[lxix] Anderson, "'The Immutables,'" Mother Earth, July 1917. Berkman had, in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, called Goldman "The Immutable"; Anderson had entitled her editorial endorsement of Goldman on November 1914 by that title. In October 1914 Anderson had proclaimed that "The average mind seems never to grasp the fact that individualism and democracy are synonymous terms; that self-dependence is merely the first of one's intricate obligations to his universe, and self-completiton the first step toward that wider consciousness which makes the giving-out of the self valuable...." Anderson, "To The Innermost," October 1914.
[lxx] "To the Innermost," October 1914; "What We are Fighting For," May 1915.
[lxxi] Anderson, "Exasperations," October 1917.
[lxxii] "To Subscribers Who Did Not Receive the October Issue," November 1917; "Obscenity!", November 1917.
[lxxiii] Jackson Robert Bryer's account of the trial in Trial Track, 344-409, markedly differs from that of Anderson, Thirty Years', 212-227.
[lxxiv] Thirty Years', 221-222. "I had been docile during the trial but I decided that having my finger-prints taken was my opportunity to make as much trouble as possible.... I examined the thick fluid into which I was supposed to dip my well-kept fingers and insisted upon elaborate advance preparations to guarantee its removal. They hadn't enough towels to reassure me. They rushed out to find more. I didn't like their soap. They produced another kind. I insisted on a nail brush. This gave more difficulty but they found one. Then I managed to make them suffer for my indignity until they were all in a state bordering on personal guilt. I finally offered my fingers with the distaste of a cat and it became their responsibility to convince me that there would be no permanent disfigurement." For an excellent account of the indignities and torture inflicted upon imprisoned suffragists, see Stevens, Jailed for Freedom.
[lxxv] Anderson, "The Essential Thing," LR March 1916.
[lxxvi] Race Trac t 312, from 30 Years 154
[lxxvii] Anderson, "A Real Magazine," LR August 1916.
[lxxviii] Anderson, reply to letter by Louis Putkelis, LR July 1917; "Mr Mencken's Truisms," January 1918; "An Obvious Statement (for the Millionth Time)", September--December 1920 [Trial Track p. 395]; Ben Hecht, quoted in Trial Track, 222-223 from Child of the Century p. 234. Anderson's friend and co-editor Jane Heap, rejecting the educative function of literature, proclaimed that "Extermination seems simple and direct and lasting and the only solution to me." Heap, "Reproach," LR August 1917 p. 124. Just who Heap was referring to is unclear; she probably meant the philistines (everyone, in her view, except a tiny coterie who appreciated the authors she touted). Ezra Pound, Anderson's Foreign Editor, became more specific in the thirties and forties.
[lxxix] Anderson printed Ashleigh's contest entry with her scornful comments, and treated other authors similarly. Her account of the exchange with Upton Sinclair is in Thirty Years', 128. Although her comment is in the form of a quotation, Anderson, following her custom in her autobigoraphy, did not use quotation marks.
[lxxx] Note on World War I generated nihilism, and on Religion of Art as refuge, especially for German intellectuals.
[lxxxi] April and June-July 1920 ads, quoted in Trial Track.
[lxxxii] Hecht quote from Race Track 222-223, from Child Century, 234.
[lxxxiii] Quoted in Trail Track pp. 277-278, from Readers and Writers, The New Age, February 21, 1918. CHECK THIS MAGAZINE; PERHAPS ORAGE DID KNOW OF TROTSKY QUOTE. Reprinted in his Readers and Writers, 36-40. ALSO QUOTE TROTSKY--READERS MAY BE UNFAMILIAR WITH HIS CELEBRATED REMARK.
[lxxxiv] "Three Women," F. Guy Davis, May 1915, pp. 61-63. Davis gave a sensitive portrayal of Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman as artist-creators of the new society; in the same issue Anderson herself discussed Mother Jones and Flynn at length. Anderson generally agreed with Davis about Flynn and Goldman, but found Mother Jones rather dull, if heroic. Anderson's "'Mother Jones' and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn" is perhaps the most brilliant and lapidary exposition of Anderson's concept of revolution, and its relationship with the art of life.
[lxxxv] Anderson, Thirty Years', 177, 70; Bryer, Trial Track 316-22, 331-335, 455-56; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 548.
[lxxxvi] Anderson, "The Immutable," November 1914.
[lxxxvii] Quoted in Trial Track, 474-475. get the original citation. For a first-person account of the return of the expatriates and their greater social consciousness, see Cowley, Exile's Return.