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Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America by Kenyon Zimmer

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.2016.0071

1086-3141

Christopher M Sterba,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Reviewed by: Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America by Kenyon Zimmer Christopher M. Sterba (bio) Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. By Kenyon Zimmer. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press. xiv + 300 pp. Immigrants Against the State examines the rise and fall of the American anarchist movement, from the peak years of southern and eastern European immigration to the start of the Cold War. Kenyon Zimmer describes the experiences of anarchist strongholds in New York, San Francisco, and Paterson, New Jersey, each community representing a distinctive type of transnational dynamism and cohesiveness. He anchors his discussion with two main arguments. First, he contends that most of his subjects became anarchists after their arrival in the United States, radicalized by both exploitation and the inspiring political culture of debate and action they found here. Second, he ascribes the movement’s rapid decline in the 1930s and 1940s to the end of relatively open migration [End Page 585] from Europe after the First World War. The immigration restriction acts of the 1920s cut off the lifeblood of the movement, which aged and faded from political relevance in the polarized atmosphere of World War II and the Cold War. Zimmer gives depth to this narrative by highlighting the transnationalism of militancy in the Lower East Side, Paterson’s Italian community, and San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. New York’s vast Yiddish-speaking population provided the movement in America with its greatest following and its most successful newspaper, the Fraye Arbeter Shtime. Yet if the flourishing of yidishkayt helped anarchism to become a factor in the garment union struggles and the Russian Revolution, it also was a major reason for its decline. So linked in their cultural identity to the Yiddish language, the New York militants could neither reach out to non-Yiddish speakers nor sustain the movement among American-born Jews. The Italian anarchists of Paterson and San Francisco, meanwhile, were much more connected to their ethnically diverse neighbors and the global movement. Paterson’s silk workers created the most durable anarchist-led labor organizations in the country, which mobilized across ethnic lines while establishing a movement culture that included schools, bookshops, drinking societies, and even a mandolin orchestra. Most famously, Paterson activist Gaetano Bresci assassinated the Italian King Umberto I. In San Francisco, militancy reflected the city’s fluid ethnic mosaic, as conditions fostered a pan-Latin movement of immigrants. In perhaps the most eye-opening passages in the book, Zimmer narrates how these activists connected with contemporaries from across Asia, including Indian anarchists. Zimmer importantly qualifies how revolutionary in practice these communities were by discussing the experiences of female activists in a movement that, across immigrant group and cities, was completely male-dominated. Zimmer argues nonetheless that anarchism represented the era’s best platform for women’s political expression, as seen in the career of Emma Goldman and other activists. Immigrants Against the State’s most important archival source are the dozens of newspapers the movement published in Yiddish, Italian, French, Spanish, and English. As Zimmer shows, these papers document critical debates over the movement’s core beliefs. How did a political philosophy that professes internationalism, secularism, anti-statism, and revolutionary action deal with issues such as Zionism? Or the gradualism of the trade union movement? How did anarchist editors respond to the outpouring of nationalism during World War I, or the developing statism of the Russian Revolution? When should an anarchist endorse “propaganda by the deed” and its many deadly applications, which included the assassination of President William McKinley? Zimmer addresses [End Page 586] these questions by drawing from the commentaries of a wide range of ethnic and geographical communities. There are also, however, major disadvantages to working so closely with newspapers of this type. Understandably, Zimmer wants to make as strong a case as possible that the immigrant anarchist movement was a vital force. But this unfortunately has led him to focus on the minutiae of organizational activity, citing a steady stream of short-lived newspapers, sectarian conflicts, minor figures, and protests of various kinds. This makes for tedious reading, especially when one considers the narrative potential...