From the 1880s through the 1940s tens of thousands of anarchists were active in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them first- and second-generation immigrants. But most were not yet devotees of the anarchist cause when they arrived on American shores. Instead, a clear link existed between migration and the embrace of anarchist ideology. This study asks how and whythousands of migrants became anarchists, and how their embrace of an anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan ideology shaped their identities, experiences and actions.
Utilizing anarchist publications, government surveillance files, and archival materials, it focuses on Eastern European Jews and Italiansthe two largest segments of the anarchist movement by the turn of the centuryand the development of anarchism among these groups in three important centers of American anarchism: New Yorks Lower East Side, Paterson, New Jersey, and San Francisco. It then follows the changing fortunes of the movement in the face of war, the Russian Revolution, the First Red Scare, and the birth of communism and fascism, and ends with an examination of immigrant American anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, and that conflicts dramatic impact on the movement in the United States.
This study argues that it was American conditions that usually made immigrants into anarchists, rather than European ones, inextricably linking the histories of migration and American anarchism. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of post-migration radicalization defies categorization within most historiographical paradigms of European immigration that focus on the construction of hyphenated American identities or hybrid transnational ones. Anarchists chose an alternative: they embraced an ideology that opposed both Americanization and Old World nationalisms, severing their attachments to their states of origin while willfully resisting assimilation into their host society. They formulated a radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity that embraced diversity, rejected hierarchies, and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. This cosmopolitanism was ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of competing nationalisms ranging from Americanism to fascism to Zionism, but it stands as an important example of a transnational collective identity delinked from nationalism, the nation-state and racial hierarchies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-05182010-125238 |
| Date | 01 October 2010 |
| Creators | Zimmer, Kenyon |
| Contributors | Marcus Rediker, Richard Oestreicher, Patrick Manning, Donna Gabaccia |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-05182010-125238/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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