“There is no boundary of land or time to the resistance of the human mind to coercion; it is world-wide.” —Emma Goldman, The Social Significance of Modern Drama.
This book is a study of why, where, and how anarchism as a radical mode of living developed in Progressive America and beyond. The anarchist English-language monthly Mother Earth (1906-1917), the focus of this book, epitomized the innovation, strengths, and limits of anarchist propaganda in inspiring self-expression and social change. Propaganda, for these anarchists, meant spreading their beliefs by manifesting their cause in a way to which people could respond.Emma Goldman, the publisher, highlighted anarchism as an inclusive ideology while also promoting a coalition between intellectuals and labor in revolutionizing the society. Alexander Berkman, the magazine’s primary editor, advocated labor solidarity across ethnic and national boundaries. Ben Reitman, the business manager of Mother Earth, pushed its production in a commercial style to maximize its radical effect. Other core members, consisting of multi-national immigrants and native-born radicals, helped promote a spectrum of antiauthoritarian agendas. Together, they made Mother Earth the nexus of a hybrid counterculture, surpassing the immediate anarchist movement and making anarchism as widely accessible as possible.
Headquartered in New York City and circulated across the globe, Mother Earth created a comprehensive repertoire of anarchism through its multifarious forms of propaganda. Its core members embraced classical anarchist communism, which advocated a non-coercive, stateless, and classless society based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals,while promoting and practicing it as a philosophy of life in every phase. Unlike its precursors, which focused on agitating labor strikes, Mother Earth cultivated the native-born intelligent middle class—a new constituency for anarchist communism—for an extensive social reorganization.
Blending politics and art to challenge authorities, Mother Earth promoted itself as “a revolutionary literary magazine devoted to Anarchist thought in sociology, economics, education, and life.” Goldman toured from coast to coast annually to support the magazine while promoting anarchism. In 1907, she and Berkman founded the Mother Earth Publishing Association (MEPA) to bring out a selection of publications on or compatible with anarchism. Core members built up worldwide networks that involved Mother Earth in various libertarian campaigns and social movements. They propagated a wide range of themes, including free speech, syndicalism, modern school education, anti-militarism, prison reform, antiwar, modern drama, free love, sexual liberation, birth control, and women’s emancipation. These agendas partially overlapped with those of other leftist and liberal groups. As a result, the anarchists collaborated but also competed with socialists, labor unionists, feminists, single taxers, bohemian rebels, muckrakers, freethinkers, anti-militarists, and birth control advocates. Mother Earth’s propaganda in speeches, texts, and activities embodied a combination of print activism, sex radicalism, and labor militancy that characterized the Progressive era’s (1890s-1920s) radical politics.
Studying Mother Earth with the proper assessment of its significance would shed light on the history of transnational anarchism and radical culture in the Progressive era. Though recognized by its U.S. or foreign contemporaries and current scholars as the leading anarchist organ in Progressive America, the importance of Mother Earth has not been fully understood. The nature and extent of the magazine’s influence require in-depth elucidation in order to illuminate the place of anarchism in early twentieth-century radicalism. Andrew Cornell’s 2016 book, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century, remarks that: “the Mother Earth Group’s multipronged strategy of building mass radical unions while boldly leading liberals on the issues of immigration, sexuality, and war remains, to my mind, a high-water mark of sophistication deserving greater study and replication.” Radicalism without Borders seeks not only to illustrate the “multipronged strategy” and “sophistication” of the Mother Earth group, but also to reveal its effects (intended and otherwise) on the anarchist movement. I do this by moving beyond earlier studies of Mother Earth to explicate how it propagated anarchism in a style distinct from its predecessors. A number of factors distinguish this work from earlier scholarship on the subject.
