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Performing Persecution:

Witnessing and Martyrdom in


the Anarchist Tradition

Elun Gabriel

Anarchism’s roots lie in late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century philo­sophical


critiques of state power. Though anarchistic strains could be found in the French
revolutions of 1789 and 1848, a recognizable anarchist movement only emerged in
the 1860s, as Mikhail Bakunin waged a losing battle with Karl Marx for control of
the International Workingmen’s Association.1 From the 1870s to the 1920s, anar-
chists played an active role in European and American politics as competitors to
Marxist socialists for the allegiance of the working classes and as participants in
various movements for social transformation. Despite the existence of competing
anarchist philosophical perspectives, the movement of the 1860s and 1870s was
closely associated with Bakunin’s vision of revolutionary insurrectionism. Whereas
many who adopted Marx’s theoretical framework regarded the triumph of their ide-
ology as the inevitable culmination of gradual economic development, anarchists
believed that only by awakening the masses to their oppression and by inspiring
revolt against the system that produced it could they usher in a new world. The
political turmoil of the mid-nineteenth century (from the revolutions of 1848 to the
conflicts leading to the respective unifications of Italy and Germany and the Paris
Commune of 1871) suggested to Bakunin and his followers that committed bands of
revolutionaries could instigate profound social transformation.

Radical History Review


Issue 98 (Spring 2007)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2006-026
© 2007 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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Gabriel | Performing Persecution 35

The philosophy of political action expressed in Bakunin’s 1873 work Stat-


ism and Anarchy influenced revolutionaries in Italy, Spain, and Russia whose gov-
ernments were racked with severe crises of legitimacy.2 Bakunin argued that for
revolutionary change to occur, “it is indispensable that the people be inspired by a
universal ideal, historically developed from the instinctual depths of popular senti-
ments, amplified and clarified by a series of significant events and severe and bitter
experiences. It is necessary that the populace have a general idea of their rights
and a deep, passionate, quasi-religious belief in the validity of these rights.”3 This
perspective led to two related strategies for reaching the masses: “propaganda of
the word” and “propaganda of the deed.” The former referred to the dissemination
of anarchist ideas through print and speech, while the latter originally described
a wide variety of political activities, such as rural banditry and insurrectionism,
meant to reveal to the people their own power and thereby spark revolution. In her
Memoirs of a Revolutionist, the Russian Populist Vera Figner described how her
organization envisioned these two strategies in the 1870s: Propagandists “proposed
to raise the mass morally and mentally to their own level, and prepare a consoli-
dated and intelligent minority in the midst of the people, which would assure, in
time of an elemental or organised revolution, the promulgation of socialist principles
and ideals”; Insurrectionists, on the other hand, believed that among the naturally
socialistic and discontented peasantry, “so much inflammatory material had accu-
mulated . . . that a small spark would easily flare up into a flame, and the latter into
a gigantic conflagration.”4 The insurrectionist route, pursued most actively in Italy
in the late 1870s, proved almost entirely futile, owing to a combination of peasant
indifference or puzzlement, on the one hand, and military repression on the other.5
Once the instigation of immediate revolution had been abandoned, Populists and
anarchists again confronted the problem of how best to spread their ideas.
Operating from a position of relative institutional powerlessness, anarchists
adopted another vocabulary of persecuted evangelizers, that of Christianity.6 Inca-
pable of defeating the states they opposed, anarchists sought to turn the state’s
power of punishment to their advantage, using it as a means to testify publicly to
their beliefs. Anarchists who wound up in the dock, on the scaffold, or in prison
saw the experience through the prism of Christian witnessing, which emphasized
the need to affirm in word and deed the truths that the soul knew to be true. In
this way anarchists hoped to triumph spiritually over an order that they could not
overcome by force.
The rituals of the legal system provided anarchists the opportunity to speak
during their trials, and, for those condemned to death, before their executions as
well. Anarchists embraced these moments of speech as chances to witness to their
faith. They could also demonstrate the power of a faith that gave them the courage
to face death and the confidence that their suffering would contribute to the world’s
redemption. Press accounts of these events (from both radical and popular journal-
36 Radical History Review

ists), as well as reprints of trial and gallows speeches took the anarchists’ message to
a larger audience than they reached through their ordinary lectures and writings.
Therefore anarchists greeted their punishment with equanimity or, in some cases,
eagerness, anticipating that it would not only rouse their comrades to renewed com-
mitment but also bring new converts to the cause. Though powerless to deflect the
doom meted out by the courts, anarchists resisted the intended effects of punish-
ment — silencing, inducing repentance, and showing the state’s invincibility. The
very act of silencing the anarchist with literal or civil death opened up a space in
which the anarchist’s words could be widely heard, preserved, and repeated among
the faithful from beyond the grave.
For anarchists who did not meet a martyr’s death, imprisonment tested their
faith. Prepared to die, anarchists often struggled with the transition to life in a place
designed to deny their lives a public dimension. Yet they ultimately learned to turn
the prison into an arena for activism. Anarchist prison memoirs recounted struggles
to humanize the prison and create solidarity among prisoners, carrying on their
pre-incarceration goal of humanizing society as a whole. Because anarchists already
regarded their societies as prison houses, the carceral experience was for them in
some ways merely an extension of the outside society, encouraging them to continue
their theorization of the state’s oppressive mechanisms. If incarceration’s function
was to subdue the prisoner’s soul, the anarchist labored to turn the prison into a
scene of the soul’s triumph over hell.
Though my central examples will be drawn from the history of anarchist
trials, executions, and imprisonments, these also illustrate how political dissidents
more broadly confronted state punishment in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. In this essay, I utilize the Russian Populist Vera Figner’s memoirs
extensively. The Populists (also known as nihilists, a term coined by Ivan Turgenev)
differed in certain respects from anarchists (their aim was liberal democracy rather
than the state’s abolition), but they had much in common, not only philosophically
but culturally. Mikhail Bakunin helped inspire Populist tactics, while the Populists’
deeds deeply influenced many later anarchists (especially, but not exclusively, Rus-
sians such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Peter Kropotkin). Much of
what I describe concerning anarchist experiences applies to some degree to other
groups as well. Indeed, nationalist movements in Europe, American abolition-
ists, and even sympathizers with the bourgeois political leaders slain by anarchists
employed the trope of martyrdom. Anarchists, however, were the first nonreligiously
grounded group to develop public witnessing and martyrdom into a central means
of propagandizing.
The anarchists’ framing of their battles with the state in these terms in the
late nineteenth century left a lasting imprint on socialists and other radicals who
embraced and augmented this discourse. This is one of anarchism’s chief legacies
to the culture of the radical Left. Anarchists developed a response to punishment
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 37

that at least partly blunted the modern state’s ability to discipline and silence its
critics. Through their witnessing and martyrdom, anarchists drew attention to the
oppressive aspects of the judicial and penal systems that tried them, encouraging
not only socialists but liberal reformers to confront the injustices of even ostensibly
liberal states.

Witnessing and the Anarchist Tradition


In the Christian tradition, witnessing means testifying to one’s faith, both living
out its ideals and publicly proclaiming its truth. From Christianity’s beginnings,
martyrdom offered the most dramatic example of such witnessing. “Martyrdom,”
according to Elizabeth Castelli, “always implies a . . . narrative that invokes notions
of justice and the right ordering of the cosmos. By turning the chaos and meaning-
lessness of violence into martyrdom, one reasserts the priority and superiority of an
imagined or longed – for order and a privileged and idealized system of meaning.”7
Through their responses to punishment, martyrs sought to counterpose their own
system of meaning to that promoted by the authorities punishing them. The Refor-
mation brought a shift away from passive physical suffering and toward active testi-
fying through speech. Robert Kolb has noted that for Martin Luther, “God’s battles
were always fought through the Word. Martyrdom was, for him, literally witness to
the faith.”8 By embracing martyrdom, the victim of punishments could invert the
meaning of the trial and execution, which were meant to dramatize the terrible
consequences of heresy. “Rather than functioning as a display of state-controlled
power,” Sarah Covington has argued about martyrdom in sixteenth-century Britain,
“the theater of execution was . . . a contested site” in which authorities, martyr, and
the observing crowd all influenced the event’s meaning.9 Martyrs sought to turn the
ritual of physical punishment into “a drama of tyranny and cruelty overcome by the
spiritually superior individual for the edification and, it was to be hoped, conversion
of others.”10 Martyrs believed that by testifying to the truth of their convictions,
they could convert those who saw or heard the story of their martyrdom, making the
circulation of martyrologies central to the evangelizing project.11
The era of modern religious martyrdom diminished significantly after the
seventeenth century, but witnessing remained a central aspect of many minority
religious sects, especially those that criticized aspects of the dominant society, for
whom religious and political witnessing often merged. For instance, a central ele-
ment of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement in the United States involved
witnessing: antislavery Christians saw it as a religious duty to resist slavery in ways
that often brought them into clashes with political authorities.12 The most famous
martyr of the abolitionist cause, John Brown, understood his attempt to free slaves
as an act of religious witnessing. In his final statement to the jury in 1859, Brown
claimed that the Bible had taught him “that all things whatsoever I would that men
should do to me, I should do even so to them . . . I endeavored to act up to that
38 Radical History Review

instruction.”13 Brown also clearly understood martyrdom’s political value when he


told friends, “I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live.”14 Nineteenth-
century Irish nationalists embraced the language of martyrdom in ways that drew
on their religious traditions, though the veneration of martyrs remained minor
until after the 1916 Easter Uprising.15 Russian Populists and anarchists embraced
this tradition of politicized witnessing and martyrdom, the latter shearing it of any
explicitly religious dimension. When they faced punishment, they interpreted it
through this matrix of meaning.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the early modern spectacle of public execu-
tion, whether for martyrs or ordinary criminals, had given way to the containment
of punishment behind prison walls, in some measure because of the ways public
executions were fraught with inevitable contestations over their meaning.16 Denied
a public audience for displays of courage and resistance while undergoing punish-
ment, the condemned lost a crucial avenue for promoting an alternative interpre-
tation of their conflict with state power. The courtroom replaced the spectacle of
physical punishment as the crucial site of symbolic rituals of either reconciliation
between the criminal and the state or the defendant’s continued defiance of the
authorities, though journalists still provided the reading public a secondhand expe-
rience of executions.17
Even the most autocratic regimes of the late nineteenth century, like czar-
ist Russia, allowed the juridical objects of punishment the opportunity to assert
themselves during the trial, thereby creating an important space for the accused
to testify and resist the dominant interpretation of the act of punishment. In Sep-
tember 1884, Vera Figner went on trial for her participation in the People’s Will
plot that slew Czar Alexander II three and a half years earlier. In her Memoirs of a
Revolutionist, Figner conveyed her appreciation for the potential significance of the
defendant’s speech within the trial. “There came at last the most memorable day of
my life,” she recalled, “the most profoundly moving moment in any trial, when the
president turning to the accused, says in a peculiarly solemn voice, ‘Defendant, the
last word is yours.’ ” Figner understood that her chance to participate in the judicial
process could be used to bear witness to her beliefs: “The last word! How great, and
how deep a significance is in that brief phrase! The accused is given an opportunity,
unique in its tragic setting, and perhaps the last, the very last opportunity in his life,
to express his spiritual individuality, to explain the moral justification of his acts and
conduct, and to speak aloud, for all to hear, those things which he wishes to say,
which he must say, and may say.”18 Such moments allowed the speaker to challenge
the official narrative of justice and offer an alternative system of meaning through
which to interpret the trial.
The possibilities of mass evangelizing led some Populists and anarchists in
the 1870s to develop a new conception of propaganda of the deed, which encom-
passed deeds of spectacular terrorism: the assassination of monarchs, politicians,
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 39

capitalists, police, and other bastions of the reigning social order. Those who advo-
cated such terrorism, always a minority outside of Russia, believed it would show the
masses the vulnerability of their oppressors while encouraging them to learn about
the ideals of the revolutionaries who undertook such noble acts of self-sacrifice.
Rather than attempting to overthrow the ruling order, anarchist terrorists saw the
tactic as a means to disseminate their ideology.19
Populist and anarchist assassins understood their acts as dramatic instances
of witnessing to their faith, which they anticipated would have great proselytizing
power. Figner helped found the Russian Populist organization known as the People’s
Will (Narodnaya Volya), whose principal propagandistic goal was the assassination
of Czar Alexander II. Should they succeed in this task, Figner believed, “the people
would be united with the Socialist party by a community of interests, and the party
would acquire among the masses a basic support which decades of propaganda by
word would not have secured.”20 The anarchist Alexander Berkman, who grew up
idolizing the Populists before he emigrated from Russia to the United States in the
1880s, undertook an attentat (a political assassination attempt) in 1892 against the
Carnegie Steel chairman Henry Clay Frick, whom he held personally responsible
for the deaths of twelve steelworkers killed in a clash with the company’s Pinkerton
detectives. “The chief purpose of my Attentat,” Berkman explained, “was to call
attention to our social iniquities; to arouse a vital interest in the sufferings of the
People by an act of self-sacrifice; to stimulate discussion regarding the cause and
purpose of the act, and thus bring the teachings of Anarchism before the world.”21
Two years later, Émile Henry, who had planted a bomb outside the Carmaux mining
company’s Paris office in retaliation for its repression of a strike, explained to the
court, “I wanted to make the miners understand that there is only one category of
men, the anarchists, who sincerely resent their sufferings and are willing to avenge
them.”22 Proponents of propaganda of the deed believed that such acts were the
most effective way to gain public attention for their concerns and ideals, especially
in societies without a free press or in which the press was seen to be entirely in
capitalist hands. The ultimate value of the terrorists’ acts lay not in eliminating their
enemy, much less in toppling a government, but in attracting adherents by commu-
nicating their ideals even at the cost of their lives.
While Populist and anarchist terrorists understood the deed itself to have
value, to be effective, it must be joined to propaganda of the word. Thus they
depended on the opportunities for speech granted by the judicial system. Expecting
trial and execution for their acts, they saw in this process of punishment the chance
to complete the propagandistic act begun by the terrorist deed. Figner regarded
her courtroom speech in this light: “The moment arrived in which I was inexorably
bound to fulfill my duty to my dead comrades . . . to confess my faith, to declare
before the court the spiritual impulses which had governed our activities, and to
point out the social and political ideal to which we had aspired.”23 Though the czar’s
40 Radical History Review

death had brought tremendous attention to the People’s Will, it remained for Figner
to explain the group’s purpose. Berkman called his act “not complete without my
explanation,” and as he sat in jail, he thought, “I must use the trial to talk to the
People. . . . It offers me a rare opportunity for a broader agitation of our ideas.”24
Only through the space provided by punishment at the state’s hands could the anar-
chist gain a voice.
In their memoirs, Figner and Berkman reflected on the power of the martyr
image in their youth and on its centrality to their interpretation of punishment.25
The prospect of death, Figner wrote, “was quite desirable; it was linked with the idea
of martyrdom, which in my childhood Christian traditions had taught me to regard
as sacred; while later the history of the struggle for the rights of the oppressed had
strengthened this idea in me.”26 Berkman, deeply influenced by the Populists of his
homeland, became focused from his early childhood on the ideal of martyrdom.
“Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause?” he asked
himself. “Why, the very life of a true revolutionist has no other purpose, no signifi-
cance whatever, save to sacrifice it on the altar of the beloved People.” In a letter to
Emma Goldman, Berkman ridiculed a jailed steelworker who had fought Carnegie’s
Pinkerton detectives but then wished to evade punishment as “a veritable Judas,
preparing to forswear his people and their cause, willing to lie and deny his partici-
pation. How proud I should be in his place: to have fought on the barricades, as he
did! And then to die for it, — ah, could there be a more glorious fate for a man, a real
man? To serve even . . . as a plank in the bridge across which the triumphant People
shall finally pass into the land of promise?”27 For Berkman, honor and manhood
merged in the idea of witnessing to sacred truth. Through his sacrifice, Berkman
hoped to convert the masses who read about his deed and trial: “The People could
not fail to realize the depth of a love that will give its own life for their cause . . .
to give all, voluntarily, cheerfully; nay, enthusiastically — could any one fail to
understand such a love?”28 Though as a child he had been expelled from school for
writing an essay advocating atheism, Berkman saw his life, as Figner did hers, as
consecrated to the personal sacrifice of martyrdom.
Anarchists, whether they accepted or rejected propaganda of the deed, still
embraced the notion of the anarchist martyr, depicting the terrorists as men and
women of saintly compassion, forced to act by their desire to relieve the suffering
of others. The French poet Paul Adam’s eulogy of Ravachol, executed for several
brutal crimes he committed in 1891 and 1892, set the tone for those who endorsed
terrorism. “The martyrdom of Ravachol,” he rhapsodized, “revived on a sudden the
tradition of self-sacrifice and furnished the present age with an example of a man
laying down his life for the good of humanity.”29 The majority of anarchists, who
refused to countenance terrorism, tended to stress the terrorists’ love of humanity
and sensitivity, which had allegedly driven them to lash out at injustice. For exam-
ple, the anarchist sympathizer Augustin Hamon’s 1894 study entitled “The Psychol-
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 41

ogy of the Anarchist” found among the essential characteristics of the anarchists an
“intense love of humanity and profound pity for the humble and the weak.”30 Emma
Goldman called Gaetano Bresci, who slew Italy’s king Umberto I in July 1900, a
man driven by an “overflowing sympathy with human suffering.”31 Berkman, still in
prison for his own attentat but having renounced terrorism, reflected about Leon
Czolgosz, who killed U.S. President William McKinley in 1901, “It is at once the
greatest tragedy of martyrdom, and the most terrible indictment of society, that it
forces the noblest men and women to shed human blood, though their souls shrink
from it.”32
The defenders of anarchist and Populist martyrs regarded their acts of ter-
rorism as only a single aspect of lives devoted to living the social gospel of compas-
sion. Figner’s accounts of two of her fellow Populists, Sofia Perovskaya and Ludmila
Alexandrovna Volkenstein, emphasized what she saw as a continuity between the
women’s compassion and their decisions to take up terrorism, as did her own auto-
biographical narrative. Perovskaya, executed in 1881 as one of the masterminds of
the czar’s assassination, possessed, in Figner’s words, “a radiant love for humanity,
which never grew dim.” Her “aspiration towards a clean life, towards personal saint-
liness” led her first to a life of service among the Russian peasants and then to ter-
rorism against czarism, which she came to believe provided the only means to truly
aid the suffering masses.33 Volkenstein’s participation in Populist terrorism, Figner
wrote of her prison-mate and friend, represented a “noble expression of love, not
only for humanity, but also for the individual.” Volkenstein’s “loving, self – sacrificing
spirit” led her to terrorism, “so that, at the price of her own life, she might clear the
path of life for generations to follow.”34 Figner depicted terrorism not merely as the
result of Volkenstein’s horror at witnessing suffering but actually as an expression
of her loving nature. Figner began her courtroom account of her own life with the
moment she awoke to “the contrast between my position and the position of those
who surrounded me,” which, she recounted, “aroused in me the first thought of the
necessity of creating for myself a purpose in life which should tend to benefit those
others.”35 Only after czarist authorities blocked her ministrations among the peas-
ants did she turn to terrorism to accomplish her purpose. Goldman’s description of
Berkman’s life before his attentat emphasized the young anarchist’s extreme asceti-
cism in the service of his ideals. Foregoing all physical and even emotional luxuries,
Berkman devoted his money and energy only to “the Cause.”36 Both Figner and
Goldman presented terrorism as the logical outcome of lives devoted to self-sacrifice
and service to others.
Anarchists who found themselves facing punishment for crimes they had not
committed likewise invoked the discourse of martyrdom. The two most influential
instances of anarchist martyrdom occurred in the United States four decades apart:
the Chicago Haymarket affair and the Sacco and Vanzetti case. On May 4, 1886, at
42 Radical History Review

a workers’ rally for the eight-hour day, a bomb was hurled into a crowd of policemen
ordering the group to disperse. The bomb and the chaotic melee that followed left
seven police officers dead. Though the bomber was never identified, eight anarchists
were tried for inspiring the murders. None of the men was directly implicated, and
some were not even present at the rally. Nevertheless, in October 1886, seven of
the eight anarchists were sentenced to death, and four were ultimately hanged on
November 11, 1887 (two had their sentences commuted, while the last committed
suicide in his cell on the eve of the execution date). The Haymarket trial and execu-
tion attracted worldwide attention, and its victims became widely known as the
“Chicago martyrs.”37 In August 1927, almost exactly forty years later, two Italian
immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were electrocuted
in Massachusetts for a 1920 robbery that left two men dead. Throughout the trial
and many years of appeals, the anarchists declared their innocence. As in the Hay-
market affair, the men garnered widespread international support both within and
beyond anarchist ranks.38 In both cases, the defendants and their supporters cast
them as martyrs killed for witnessing to their anarchist faith.
For these anarchists, no less than for the terrorists, standing in the dock fac-
ing death represented the culmination of a life of witnessing. In an autobiography
penned after his conviction, the Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons recalled his
initial call to service: “The more I investigated and studied the relations of poverty
to wealth, its cause and cure, the more interested I became in the subject.” Eventu-
ally, “a powerful impulse possessed me to place myself right before the people by
defining and explaining the objects and principles of the workingmen’s party. . . .
I therefore entered heartily into the work of enlightening my fellow men.”39 This
commitment to witnessing, he explained to the court after his sentencing, had led
him, of his own volition, to return to Chicago from out of state to stand trial with
his comrades, “to stand, if need be, on the scaffold, and vindicate the rights of labor,
the cause of liberty, and the relief of the oppressed.”40 His fellow defendant Samuel
Fielden also placed his impending death in the context of witnessing, telling the
court, “we feel satisfied that we have not lived in this world for nothing; that we
have done some good for our fellowmen, and done what we believe to be in the
interest of humanity and for the furtherance of justice. . . . If my life is to be taken
for advocating the principles of Socialism and Anarchy . . . I gladly give it up; and
the price is very small for the result that is gained.”41 Michael Schwab expressed
the need to witness in explicitly religious terms: “We contend for Communism and
Anarchy — why? If we had kept silent, stones would have cried out.”42 Having lived
for their faith, the men expressed willingness to die for it as well. Adolph Fischer
told the court, “If I am to die on account of being an Anarchist, on account of my
love for liberty, fraternity and equality, I will not remonstrate. If death is the penalty
for our love of the freedom of the human race, then I say openly I have forfeited my
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 43

life.”43 All of the Haymarket anarchists insisted that their deaths followed from the
same commitments that had inspired their lives.
Sacco and Vanzetti saw their deaths in the same light, as final testaments
to the anarchist faith they had always lived. Vanzetti told the court that had just
sentenced him to death, “I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a
radical. . . . I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times,
and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done
already.”44 In an autobiography penned after his conviction, he struck the same tone.
“At the age of thirty-three — the age of Christ,” he wrote, “I am scheduled for prison
and death. Yet were I to recommence the journey of life, I should tread the same
road.”45 Days before his execution, he wrote in a letter to Sacco’s fourteen-year-old
son, “Your father has sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart
and soul for his faith in liberty and justice for all.” Both anarchists had suffered
“unspeakable tortures and wrongs” over the years of their legal battle, he declared,
“because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of the
man by the man.”46 Facing death, the anarchists embraced their lives in the service
of humanity, thus reaffirming their faith as something worth dying for.
Though they remained powerless to resist punishment, the anarchists’
speeches emphasized their conviction in the ultimate triumph of their ideals and
the role suffering played in achieving victory. Punishment lost its terrorizing effect
for the anarchists, rendering the exercise of power powerless. Further, because they
saw their own sacrifice as hastening the coming world of happiness and justice by
revealing the glory of anarchism and the brutality of the reigning system, punish-
ment even held attractions.
Central to this vision of martyrdom was the anarchists’ belief that they died
for an eternal truth that would outlast their death. August Spies invoked a panoply
of persecuted but triumphant personalities from history to suggest how hopeless was
the state’s goal of destroying anarchism. After recounting his political goals, he con-
cluded, “I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming the truth, then I will proudly
and defiantly pay the costly price! Call your hangman! Truth crucified in Socrates,
in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, in Galileo, still lives — they and others whose
number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!”47
Believing that the power of their martyrdom would attract new converts, the
anarchists understood death not as a defeat but as a victory that would hasten the
dawn of the new world. The Russian émigré anarchist Peter Kropotkin, describing
the reaction to the Populist Perovskaya’s public execution, told a correspondent,
“By the attitude of the crowd she understood that she had dealt a mortal blow to
the autocracy. And she read in the sad looks which were directed sympathetically
towards her, that by her death she was dealing an even more terrible blow from which
the autocracy will never recover.”48 The “Chicago martyrs” believed that their deaths
44 Radical History Review

would be particularly powerful as propaganda, laying bare the injustice of capital-


ist society. Spies told the court, “The contemplated murder of eight men, whose
only crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these
suffering millions; may wake them up. Indeed, I have noticed that our conviction
has worked miracles in this direction already.”49 Fischer also assured the court that
their persecution would only help the anarchist cause. “The more the believers in
just causes are persecuted,” he asserted, “the quicker will their ideas be realized. . . .
in rendering such an unjust and barbarous verdict, the twelve ‘honorable’ men in
the jury box have done more for the furtherance of Anarchism than the convicted
could have accomplished in a generation.”50 Forty years later, Vanzetti proclaimed,
“The last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph!”51 Turning the signifi-
cance of death on its head, anarchists argued that the state’s power to silence was
chimerical. Spies’s last words before his execution eloquently expressed this theme:
“There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you
strangle today.”52 Though the state could take their lives, they remained confident
in their deaths’ power.
If anarchist expectations about the effects of their witnessing were clear, the
results were more mixed. Outside of Russia, propaganda of the deed earned anar-
chists few friends or admirers. By the end of the decade of the most concentrated
anarchist terrorism (1892 – 1901), even almost all anarchist intellectuals (including
the onetime would-be assassin Berkman) had repudiated the tactic. 53 If the assas-
sins’ deeds garnered little praise, many socialist and even liberal observers argued
that their attacks were sparked by the deep injustices of the societies they lashed
out at.54
The deaths of the Haymarket anarchists and of Sacco and Vanzetti came
closest to realizing the expectations of the movement’s martyrs. Though most news-
papers initially applauded the Haymarket verdict, people around the world (and
increasing numbers of Americans over time) were outraged at their death sentences,
including many who remained hostile to the American labor movement but consid-
ered the prospective execution “judicial murder.”55 In the thirteen months between
the anarchists’ sentencing and their executions, an international movement in sup-
port of the men grew, first supporting the men’s legal appeal, and when that failed,
focused on persuading Illinois’s governor to grant a pardon or commute the death
sentences.56 The condemned men were widely interviewed in the radical press, and
their courtroom speeches were published and disseminated by speakers who fanned
out across the country as part of an effort to save the anarchists’ lives. According to
Paul Avrich, Parsons’s wife Lucy addressed more than two hundred thousand people
herself during a speaking tour. 57 Beginning in October 1886, when the sentences
were first handed down, the militant (though not anarchist) labor organization the
Knights of Labor serialized the condemned men’s autobiographies.58 The campaign
to save the men certainly meant different things to its various participants, but there
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 45

is no doubt that it mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to action on the anar-


chists’ behalf.
For radicals of all sorts, the Haymarket affair long remained an event invested
with symbolic power. At annual commemorations, speakers emphasized how the
men’s sacrifice had led to many anarchist conversions. Echoing the second-century
martyrologist Tertullian’s dictum “the blood of Christians is seed,” the American
anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre assured the authorities, “For every drop of blood you
spilled on that November day you made an Anarchist.”59 While it is impossible to
produce reliable figures for the number of converts, numerous anarchists, includ-
ing Goldman and Berkman, traced their conversion to Haymarket.60 Many of the
founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor organization, such
as Bill Haywood, also attributed to the Chicago anarchists their own awakening to
the cause of labor.61 So powerful was the idea of the anarchists’ martyrdom that,
according to one account, thousands of mourners took to wearing miniature gallows
emblems in the manner of Christian crosses to venerate the men. More than twenty
thousand people thronged Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery to witness the anarchists’
burial.62 Over two decades later, a volume containing the complete texts of the anar-
chists’ three days of courtroom speeches, published by Lucy Parsons, sold over ten
thousand copies in its first year and half in print.63
Commemorations of the Chicago martyrs helped propel the discourse of
martyrdom to its centrality in anarchist thinking. In Blaine McKinley’s words, the
men’s deaths “became a crucial shared experience for later anarchists. By reliving
the martyrdom, the anarchists could see themselves as participants in, and succes-
sors to, a noble sacrifice.”64 Some American sympathizers described the anarchists
as John Brown’s heirs, enlarging their significance by placing them within a broad
American tradition of self-sacrifice in the name of justice.65 Waldheim Cemetery
became a sacred site, where diverse anarchists and fellow travelers chose to be bur-
ied, among them Goldman, De Cleyre, and IWW figures such as Joe Hill (whose
ashes were spread there among other places), Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn.66
Haymarket provided a model for the later induction of anarchists (and other
radicals) into the martyr tradition. Four decades later, the trial of Sacco and Van-
zetti resulted in similar outrage from anarchists and nonanarchists (such as the writ-
ers Dorothy Parker and John Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the
philosopher Bertrand Russell), culminating in a similar international movement to
prevent the men’s executions.67 As in the case of the Haymaket anarchists, Sacco
and Vanzetti were interviewed extensively by both the radical and the liberal press;
their letters were anthologized after their deaths and remain in print.68 The trial
and execution of the IWW songwriter and activist Joe Hill in 1914 – 15 likewise
brought together an international movement of anarchists, socialists, and liberals
who hoped to prevent the death of a man they believed innocent of the murder for
46 Radical History Review

which he was tried.69 Though these efforts to influence judicial outcomes failed,
they attracted attention to the martyrs’ political beliefs and made their trials sym-
bols of legal injustice even for people who did not subscribe to their ideology.
Anarchist witnessing and martyrdom did not lead to the ideology’s ultimate
triumph, but it established a reservoir of cultural images that a variety of radicals
continued to utilize for propaganda. Anarchists’ testifying and martyrdom sought to
turn the state’s most drastic punishment — death — against it by denying the state’s
ability to terrify or defeat them, and instead promising that death would herald their
triumph. They succeeded insofar as they left a legacy that inspired further acts of
political witnessing. The tradition of martyrdom incorporated events from a variety
of national contexts over a series of decades into a coherent narrative of a broad and
ongoing struggle for truth in defiance of state power. Articulated first in anarchist
and Russian Populist thought, the tradition of political martyrdom was gradually
incorporated into the political rhetoric of many other ostensibly secular movements
of the political Left.

Theorizing and Resisting the Prison


The discourse of martyrdom so dominated anarchists’ encounters with the state’s
institutions of punishment that those who were imprisoned instead of killed often
found themselves unprepared for incarceration. Anarchists organized the experi-
ence of the courtroom and the gallows around the project of public witnessing, so
imprisonment was baffling because it seemed to silence the anarchist’s public self,
bringing civil death while the state allowed the continued “privilege” of biological
life. If anarchists could march to the scaffold singing, confident in their death’s
significance, the prospect of a living death in prison could fill those sentenced to
decades behind bars with despair. Figner initially described the prison in which
she sat as a “tomb” and her cell as a “coffin.”70 “I shall not be hanged — yet I feel
as if I were dead,” thought Berkman as he sat in jail. Isolated from his comrades,
he concluded, “I do not count among the living,” and planned to commit suicide.71
Those facing shorter sentences did not face this kind of agony, but they still regarded
imprisonment as a form of temporary death to be endured until they could resume
life when they regained freedom.
Yet what anarchists found in prison was not a living grave but a society in
which they could continue their witnessing by living out their ideals in opposition
to the carceral regime that contained them. Once anarchists embraced the world
of the prison as a sphere open to activity, albeit restricted, they brought their theo-
rizations of state power into the prison. In some cases, anarchists came to a new
appreciation of how society atomized and broke down workers through their own
experiences of imprisonment. It is notable that Kropotkin, Goldman, and Berk-
man wrote theoretical essays on prisons only after having undergone incarceration,
drawing on their own experiences to formulate their arguments. Anarchists thus
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 47

turned their punishment into an opportunity for witnessing, both by finding ways
to practice their ideals even under duress and by using their experiences to convey
to the outside world the brutalities taking place in prisons. As in the case of their
battles with the judicial system, anarchists often failed to alter the carceral system’s
infliction of punishment, but they resisted its power by investing imprisonment with
ideological meaning. In prison, anarchists found a space for both political activity
and theorization.
Figner and Berkman both expected to die for their deeds, and they had seen
their trial speeches as final acts of witnessing. “My last duty had been fulfilled, and
a great peace descended on my spirit,” Figner recounted, describing the conclusion
of her courtroom speech. “They say that a similar blissful state of serenity precedes
death. . . . The curtain fell for the last time on the tragedy which I had lived through
to the last act.”72 Berkman expressed a similar feeling as he anticipated giving his
trial speech: “My mission is almost accomplished — the explanation in court, and
then my life is done. I shall never again have an opportunity to work for the Cause.
I may therefore leave the world.”73 Yet Figner spent twenty-two years in prison, and
Berkman fourteen. Both had been fully prepared to meet death, but instead they
had to learn how to endure a different kind of life. Whereas the rituals and tradi-
tions of martyrdom had provided a clear roadmap for how to behave and what to
expect as they faced trial and execution, they found themselves having to interpret
the carceral experience without a ready-made interpretive framework.74
Initially both Figner and Berkman fell back on the discourse of martyrdom to
help them bear the shocks and torments they faced on first entering prison. Coping
with the indignity of being strip-searched on her incarceration in the Schlüsselburg
prison, Figner recalled Christian maidens being thrown to the lions in ancient Rome
and refusing to resist or cry out. “I, too, had my God, my religion,” she avowed, “the
religion of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And for the glory of that doctrine I was
bound to endure everything.” Early on in her incarceration, the Christian tradition
of suffering dominated Figner’s understanding of the experience:
Whoever, like myself, has at some time been influenced by the spirit of Christ,
who, in the name of His idea has endured abuse, suffering, and death; whoever
during his childhood and youth has made of Him an ideal, and regarded His
life as an example of self-sacrificing love, will understand the mood of the
newly-condemned revolutionist who has been flung into a living grave for the
cause of liberty. . . . The ideas of Christianity, which are implanted in all of us,
consciously or unconsciously, from our very cradles, and also the lives of all
martyrs for ideas, create in such a prisoner the consoling consciousness that
the moment of his test has come. A trial is given to the strength of his love and
the hardiness of his spirit, as a fighter for that good which he has longed to
attain, not for his own transitory self, but for the people, for society, for future
generations.75
48 Radical History Review

At this stage, Figner interpreted imprisonment as merely an extension of the mar-


tyrdom narrative that had guided her revolutionary career. Berkman likewise
resorted to the martyrdom tradition when faced with the first ordeal of incarcera-
tion, describing his three days and nights of interrogation before his trial as a test of
faith. “Water is refused me,” he complained, “my thirst aggravated by the salty food
they have given me. It consumes me, it tortures and burns my vitals through the
sleepless nights passed on the hard wooden bench. The foul air of the cell is stifling.
The silence of the grave torments me; my soul is in an agony of uncertainty.”76 He
sustained himself by recalling the stories of suffering Populist martyrs, whom he
strove to emulate.77 Unsurprisingly, these revolutionaries viewed their prison expe-
rience through the same lens as they had their entire political lives.
However, on longer experience of incarceration, when they stopped thinking
of prison exclusively as a place of ongoing torment, they brought their ideological
principles to bear on the experience. Though revolutionary prisoners experienced
many aspects of incarceration much as other prisoners did, they derived strength
from their political commitments and bonds that made prison more endurable for
them and allowed them to resist some aspects of the prison regime, especially the
isolation and atomization that the system was meant to produce. Anarchists came to
the prison experience at least partly prepared with a theorization of prisons based
on their core ideological principles. The anarchist view, expressed by Kropotkin,
that “the system is wrong from the very foundation,”78 incorporated two central
criticisms. Prisons were fundamentally unjust when they housed mostly the poor
who had turned to crime because society denied them the ability to make a living,
while venerating rich people who stole from the poor through capitalism. Prisons
also were ineffective; by degrading both prisoner and prison keeper, they promoted
recidivism and brutality. Anarchists held that prisons mirrored the societies that
produced them.
Though anarchist analyses of prisons mentioned the injustice of who came
to be incarcerated, they hardly dwelt on this issue, perhaps because it seemed self-
evident to them. “My three weeks in the Tombs [the New York municipal jail],”
Goldman briefly remarked in her autobiography, “had given me ample proof that
the revolutionary contention that crime is the result of poverty is based on fact.”79
Kropotkin, arguing against the need for prisons, commented that “crimes against
property,” which he claimed made up two thirds of all crime, would “disappear . . .
when property, which is now the privilege of the few, shall return to its real source — 
the community.”80 Insofar as this perspective influenced anarchists’ understanding
of prisons, it clearly made them open to interacting with fellow inmates in prison,
as Goldman’s statement that she “considered myself one of the inmates, not above
them” suggests.81
For anarchists, the destructive aspects of the prison institution itself occu-
pied the majority of their intellectual attention. In his essay “The Moral Influence
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 49

of Prisons on Prisoners,” Kropotkin argued that “prisons have not moralized any-
body, but have more or less demoralized all those who have spent a number of years
there.”82 The chief function of the prison, he claimed, was to transform the prisoner
into “a machine” unable to exercise any personal will: “Everything has been done to
kill in him the interior force of resistance, to make him a docile tool in the hands of
those who govern him.” Condemning the panoptical goal of penologists, Kropotkin
declared that “the ideal of our prisons would be a thousand automatons, rising and
working, eating and going to bed, by electric currents transmitted to them from a
single warder.” This view of the prison mirrored the anarchist view of capitalism’s
effect on workers who were not incarcerated, which differed only in degree. Ulti-
mately, Kropotkin asserted, “our prisons are made for degrading all those who enter
them, for killing the very last feelings of self-respect.”83 Goldman saw the effect of
prisons in similar terms: “Robbed of his rights as a human being, degraded to a mere
automaton without will or feelings, dependent entirely upon the mercy of brutal
keepers, he daily goes through a process of dehumanization.” In the end, “his will is
broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly monotony and routine of
prison life.”84 After having been schooled in crime by more experienced prisoners,
having lost their will to resist temptation, and having come to hate society, those
who were eventually released were ideally prepared for recidivism.85 Prison, like
the capitalist system of which it was a microcosm, offered a passive living death, so
different from the anarchist ideal of life and death governed by individual freedom
and suffused with meaning.
Anarchists insisted that it was impossible to reform the penal system because
it reflected society itself. As with the larger society, according to Berkman, “it is the
system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My
prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose
cursed touch turns everything to the brutal services of Mammon. . . . This night-
mare is but an intensified replica of the world beyond, the larger prison locked with
the levers of Greed, guarded by the spawn of Hunger.” Only the humanization of
society that anarchism could bring, Berkman believed, would end “the injustice and
brutality of a society whose chief monuments are prisons.”86 Kropotkin argued that
prisons “will remain what they are now until the whole of our system of government
and the whole of our life have undergone a thorough change.”87 It was impossible to
make more than minor adjustments to the prison system, for it was of a piece with
the society that produced it. Only if society brought up its citizens in a humanistic,
just, and free way would there be no more need of prisons.88
These ideological resources helped anarchists cope with the inevitable dis-
orientation of being thrown into a world designed to render them mute and passive.
By maintaining connections to the political world outside the prison and drawing
on political camaraderie inside the prison, they sought to recast the prison envi-
ronment as an extension of the outside world. Both Figner and Berkman moved
50 Radical History Review

from the framework of martyrdom to a posture of active defiance against the prison
institution. Remonstrating herself for her initial reaction to imprisonment, which
was to give herself up to death, Figner wrote, “After receiving my sentence, I had
felt myself no longer a public character. . . . I forgot that once having undertaken a
public career I could not again be just a human being; that I was both more and less
than a human being, and that the public task I had chosen was not yet solved.” Soon,
awakening to the necessity of continuing her work, “I began to feel, to believe that
I had not yet died to everything that lay beyond the boundary of our Fortress walls;
it was as though the walls had parted and opened.”89 After an initial, halfhearted
suicide attempt, Berkman also steeled himself for ongoing struggle. “I looked upon
myself,” he recollected, “as the representative of a world movement; it was my duty
to exemplify the spirit and dignity of the ideas it embodied. I was not a prisoner,
merely; I was an Anarchist in the hands of the enemy; as such, it devolved upon
me to maintain the manhood and self-respect my ideals signified. The example of
the political prisoners in Russia inspired me, and my stay in the penitentiary was a
continuous struggle that was the breath of life.”90 Both prisoners thus committed
themselves to carrying on their struggles in prison, rather than simply letting them-
selves perish.
By developing connections with their incarcerated fellows and keeping up
with events in the wider world, they had much greater recourse to resist the atom-
izing and silencing effects of the prison. Figner, imprisoned in a fortress filled with
her People’s Will comrades, took great comfort in their presence. Oppressed by
silence and isolation, she described a persistent voice within her soul that told her,
“Do not fear. In the mysterious stillness, behind these deaf stones your friends are
invisibly present. It is not you alone who are oppressed here; they too are suffer-
ing. . . . You do not hear them, but they are here. They watch over you and guard
you, like disembodied spirits. . . . You are not alone, you are not alone!”91 Berkman,
incarcerated in a prison with ordinary criminals, confessed to some relief when Carl
Nold and Henry Bauer, two anarchists he had stayed with before carrying out his
attentat, ended up in his prison (wrongly accused of abetting his attack). He wrote
to Goldman, “I have not seen them yet, but their very presence, the circumstance
that somewhere within these walls there are comrades, men who, like myself, suf-
fer for an ideal — the thought holds a deep satisfaction for me. It brings me closer,
in a measure, to the environment of political prisoners in Europe. Whatever the
miseries of their daily existence, the politicals . . . breathe the atmosphere of soli-
darity.”92 After making contact with their comrades, via covert letters and wall- and
pipe-tapped messages, both Figner and Berkman described having long political
discussions with their fellows, which helped stimulate their minds and kept their
worlds from shrinking to the breadth of the prison.93 Berkman, Nold, and Bauer
even began a sub rosa magazine, Prison Blossoms, as an outlet for creative expres-
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 51

sion and political discussion, and they eventually began work on a collective book
they planned to smuggle out of the prison.94
Figner was denied the right to correspond with anyone outside her prison
for the bulk of her term, but anarchists in American and French prisons carried
on voluminous correspondences with comrades on the outside and received visits,
food, and gifts from friends and admirers.95 In his first letter to Goldman from
prison, Berkman begged her, “Write often. Tell me about the movement, yourself
and friends. It will help to keep me in touch with the outside world, which daily
seems to recede further. I clutch desperately at the thread that still binds me to the
living.”96 Berkman’s regular correspondence with Goldman and other comrades,
some previously strangers, did bind him to the living and keep him sane. The Mexi-
can anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, imprisoned in the United States from 1918
until his death in 1922, wrote to Lilly Sarnoff, “I hope, and dream, and wait, the
attentive ear in the direction of the wind to catch the subtlest rumor the outside
world may send in,” and waxed poetic about the joys of receiving her letters.97 Anar-
chists also kept themselves abreast of world events or pursued study with the books
and periodicals available to them in prison.98 Taking it as self-evident that educa-
tion would be a chief prison pastime, Kropotkin commented on his imprisonment
in a comparatively comfortable French state prison, “I need not say that at once
we organized classes, and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux I
gave my comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding them
in the study of languages.”99 Flores Magón perfected his English and carried on a
voluminous correspondence, which was published in 1925.100 In the year before his
execution, the IWW troubadour Hill wrote numerous songs and letters, all post-
humously published.101 Though these political prisoners still experienced moments
of despair and isolation, their accounts of imprisonment convey a sense of constant
engagement with ideas and political events outside the prison. Though sometimes
blocked by prison authorities from communicating with the outside world, it always
lived vividly in their minds.
Populists and anarchists eventually went further than simply reaching beyond
the prison to live vicariously through news of life outside. They came to view the
prison as a part of the wider world, where they could, and indeed must, continue
the fight for social justice and effect change. Both Populists and anarchists saw resis-
tance to the inhumanity of the prison, especially the unequal or capricious treatment
of prisoners, as a central task that gave them meaning. Figner recalled numerous
occasions when Populists in Schlüsselburg refused privileges not granted to their
comrades, such as daily walks in the yard, or went on hunger strikes to demand
improvements in prison conditions. When Figner and a comrade were caught wall
tapping and her interlocutor was taken to the punitive cell, Figner told the guard,
“It is unjust to punish one, when two were talking. . . . Take me to the punitive cell
52 Radical History Review

also.” When other comrades witnessed her being taken away as requested, “scores
of hands began to beat madly on the doors, and voices shouted, ‘Take us too!’ ”102
By confronting the guards with solidarity, the prisoners challenged the isolating
effects of the prison, showing that they retained their mutual commitments in an
environment designed to break them. Though their struggles often failed to achieve
the changes they demanded, the importance for the prisoners’ sense of dignity and
camaraderie was immeasurable.
Two prisoners in Schlüsselburg went so far as to sacrifice their lives to improve
conditions for their comrades, finding ways to make their voices heard outside the
prison despite the authorities’ attempts to keep them in silence. Figner described
how an inmate named Myshkin deliberately insulted the prison inspector, hoping
to end up in court where “he might reveal Schlüsselburg’s cruel secret, strip it bare
before all Russia . . . and at the price of his life purchase an easier lot for his com-
rades in captivity.” Grachevsky, whom Figner characterized as waging “indignant
and unceasing warfare against the prison administration, for its petty and arbitrary
acts of malice,” tried the same strategy but was denied a trial, so he immolated him-
self. These two acts forced the government to address the prison’s conditions and
ultimately to soften the prison regime; in Figner’s words, “The sacrifice bore fruit,
and a break occurred in our prison life. The dead did not come to life, but the living
began to breathe more freely.”103 By applying tactics drawn from the martyr’s tradi-
tion, they managed to deny the prison system’s intended reduction of the prisoner
to a passive object. Though severely constrained, the prisoners showed they could
still assert their will.
Myshkin’s and Grachevsky’s deeds in Schlüsselburg echoed so loudly that
Berkman received word of them in his cell in the Western State Penitentiary in
Pittsburgh, helping to fortify him for his own struggles against the prison regime.
Having witnessed an injustice done to a prisoner in the workshop, Berkman told
himself, “It is my duty as a revolutionist to take the part of the persecuted,” but
described being incapacitated by his own fear of punishment. Recalling Myshkin’s
heroic martyrdom, Berkman overcame his paralysis: “Ah! thus acts the revolution-
ist; and I — yes, I am decided. No danger shall seal my lips against outrage and
injustice.”104 This was only the first of many times Berkman reported speaking out
against wrongs done to other prisoners, sometimes paying the price with loss of
privileges or time in a punishment cell.105
Though many of the anarchist prisoners’ struggles involved the prison
administration, anarchists also worked to humanize the prison in their interpersonal
interactions with other prisoners by rejecting the logic of self-interest that governed
the prison. While imprisoned in New York’s Blackwell’s Island, Goldman was put
in charge of the prison sewing shop, where she was urged to increase production
levels. “I resented the suggestion that I become a slave-driver,” she recalled in her
autobiography. “It was because I hated slaves as well as their drivers, I informed the
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 53

matron, that I had been sent to prison. . . . I was determined not to do anything that
would involve a denial of my ideals.” When the news of Goldman’s stand spread,
inmates who had previously kept their distance warmed to her and sought to lighten
her workload in the prison. Befriended by the prison doctor, Goldman became a
nurse, eventually running the entire hospital ward during the last part of her year in
prison. “I loved my job,” she wrote. “It gave me opportunity to come close to the sick
women and bring a little cheer into their lives.” Goldman shared with the women
food she received from comrades, commenting, “I had so much to give; it was a joy
to share with my sisters who had neither friends nor attention.”106 During another
two-year stint in a Missouri federal penitentiary, prompted by her involvement in
the No Conscription League during the First World War, Goldman worked unof-
ficially at nursing and continued to share her material bounty with the other prison-
ers. At Christmas, she divided among the prisoners the many gifts she had received
from supporters and friends. Recalling the women’s happiness, she wrote, “My
Christmas in the Missouri penitentiary brought me greater joy than many previous
ones outside. I was thankful to the friends who had enabled me to bring a gleam of
sunshine into the dark lives of my fellow-sufferers.”107 Berkman, under more austere
conditions in both his imprisonments, nevertheless used his various prison jobs to
ease the lives of other prisoners.108 Many inmates, the anarchists recounted, initially
seemed puzzled by their generosity, but responded in kind, creating an environment
that was to some extent mutually supportive, despite the prison authorities’ attempts
to pit prisoners against each other. According to the anarchists’ own accounts, their
commitment to humanity and dignity in the prison bore fruit by inspiring a spirit of
resistance among the other prisoners, who began to demand better treatment.109
Regardless of whether anarchist prison activism left a lasting influence on
the prisons in which they were incarcerated or on the prisoners they encountered
there, the experiences taught the anarchists about themselves, tested and confirmed
their commitment to the cause, and energized them with a new field for their politi-
cal efforts — prison reform. On her release from Blackwell’s Island in 1894, Gold-
man claimed that her year in prison “had proved the best school,” for she “had been
brought close to the depths and complexities of the human soul.”110 Reflecting on his
moral development during his long incarceration, Berkman recalled
with sadness the first years of my imprisonment, and my coldly impersonal
valuation of social victims. . . . With the severe intellectuality of revolutionary
tradition, I thought of him and his kind as inevitable fungus growths, the rotten
fruit of a decaying society. Unfortunate derelicts, indeed, yet parasites, almost
devoid of humanity. . . . But the threads of comradeship have slowly been
woven by common misery. . . . Not entirely in vain are the years of suffering
that have wakened my kinship with les misérables, whom social stupidity has
cast into the valley of death.111
54 Radical History Review

Having come to this understanding, Berkman planned to dedicate his postprison


life to struggling for prison reform: “The day of my resurrection is approaching,
and I will devote my new life to the service of my fellow-sufferers. The world shall
hear the tortured; it shall behold the shame it has buried within these walls, yet
not eliminated. The ghosts of its crimes shall rise and harrow its ears, till the social
conscience is roused to the cry of its victims.”112 As in his life before and during
prison, his life after prison would be devoted to testifying to the suffering of his fel-
low human beings.
Though prison authorities wielded enormous power, crushing many of the
anarchists’ endeavors and frequently inflicting punishments on them, their political
commitments and theoretical critiques of prisons helped them fight against the insti-
tutions in whose power they found themselves. Even locked in prison and in failing
health, Flores Magón still saw himself as beyond the reach of his jailers: “My wings
are forever broken so as not to leave this ante-room of Death. But I have other wings
which no one can break, and I soar, soar, soar, and in my lofty place I see what the
ones who trimmed my pinions fail to.”113 Prison reconfirmed the anarchists’ faith in
and commitment to their ideology. Commenting on her two prison stays, Goldman
observed, “One must have the consolation of an ideal to survive the forces designed
to crush the prisoner.”114 For her, prison “had been the crucible that tested my faith”
and which “had helped me to discover strength in my own being, the strength to
stand alone, the strength to live my life and fight for my ideals, against the whole
world if need be.”115 Though the price was high, anarchists claimed victory over the
institution designed to destroy their faith.
Berkman’s account of his “resurrection” at the end of his fourteen years in
prison portrayed it as a victory, in which he reconsecrated himself to the anarchist
social struggle, stronger for having survived his long punishment. “After years of
contemplation and study, chastened by much sorrow and suffering,” he recalled, “I
arise from the broken fetters of the world’s folly and delusions, to behold the thresh-
old of a new life of liberty and equality. My youth’s ideal of a free humanity in the
vague future has become clarified and crystallized into the living truth of Anarchy,
as the sustaining elemental force of my every-day existence.”116 Berkman imagined
himself like a victorious Christ risen from the dead, revealing a “living truth” to the
world. Just as the anarchists facing execution saw their deaths as a triumph over the
state that punished them, so Berkman pictured his return to society as a triumph
over this same state, whose penal institution had failed to defeat him.117
Anarchists saw the penal system, like the judicial system, as an arena in
which to wage ideological battle with the state. As in the courtroom, anarchists
devoted their energy in prison to resisting the dominant institutional narrative of a
rational state dispensing justice and maintaining a benevolent social order. Though
prisons encouraged isolation, self-centeredness, and conformity to the demands of
power, anarchists opposed all of these, guided by an ideology demanding that they
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 55

profess their faith in public and seek to reshape society, even under the severe con-
straints of incarceration. As in the courtroom and before the scaffold, the institu-
tions of punishment imposed real limits on the scope of the imprisoned anarchists’
actions. Many attempts to change the social environment, to improve conditions,
and to communicate with the outside world failed. But the struggle itself reminded
the anarchists of their values and commitments and contested the state’s power to
silence. When released from prison, anarchists tried to assimilate their experiences
into their social vision of a society free from carceral institutions.

Conclusion
In a world in which they had few resources for articulating their political ideals, and
no access to the levers of power, anarchists pursued a political strategy that turned
the power of punishment to their advantage. Anarchists who ended up in the dock
understood the opportunity it provided to evangelize the masses in their political
faith. In confrontation with a power they could not escape, anarchists testified to a
faith beyond the reach of coercive power. Punishment itself became a vital compo-
nent of anarchist propagandizing, contributing both to the dissemination of anar-
chist ideas to the public and to the development of a cultural tradition that supported
continuing activism by celebrating the martyrdom of those who had gone before.
Anarchist martyrdom held out the promise both of unmasking the oppressiveness at
the heart of the liberal state and of energizing anarchists and other radicals as they
remembered their comrades’ sacrifices and aspired to attain similar glory.
Imprisonment offered a different site in which to carry on the same political
mission. Again, anarchists challenged not the state’s ability to punish, but the power
of that punishment to induce conformity or silence. The very experience of incar-
ceration revealed to the anarchists the truth of their convictions and strengthened
their determination to resist the effects of the penal process. While continuing their
political struggle on the inside, anarchists also tried to illuminate the connections
between the prison and the larger society by maintaining their links to the out-
side and bringing to the world news of conditions inside. For those who survived
imprisonment, their memoirs became new resources for anarchist education and
theorization.
Anarchists lost out in their struggle to lead the workers’ movement, and they
never brought into being the society they wished to create. Yet they succeeded in
their goal of wresting opportunities for speech from a system of punishment whose
essential goal was to contain and silence dissent, and the practical and cultural lega-
cies of their encounter with state power continue to inform the radical movements
against institutions of oppression that succeeded them.
The anarchist tradition of testifying and martyrdom depended on a social
system in which the institutions of power gave those it condemned a space to speak,
contesting the meaning of their acts and their punishment. None of the strategies
56 Radical History Review

employed by anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to turn
punishment into an avenue for speech could function in twentieth-century totalitar-
ian regimes that tried to erase all evidence of their victims. Denied open trials and
either executed in secret or imprisoned with no access to the outside world, these
regimes’ opponents could not witness publicly to their beliefs or even die as martyrs
(at least not until their words and deeds were retrospectively publicized after the
fall of these states). In the absence of participatory trials, public or even published
punishment, or a free press, political prisoners become powerless except insofar as
they can smuggle their testimony or themselves beyond the state’s borders. In lib-
eral democratic societies, anarchist and other radical political testimony was either
marginalized by centrist labor movements or overwhelmed by the volume of com-
mercial literature, while in more thoroughly repressive regimes, radicals’ lives and
voices were not just ignored but destroyed.
Even in liberal democratic societies of the late twentieth century, the anar-
chist approach to punishment came under increasing pressure. Both the increasing
concealment of punishment and the rhetoric of reformatory penality have made the
political criminal’s quest for speech more difficult. More recently, in the case of the
so-called war on terrorism, the U.S. government has adopted a new strategy, sus-
pending opportunities for speech indefinitely through extralegal detention, in which
no trial date is ever set and the prisoner is denied any communication with the world
outside. The United States, following other liberal democracies, may also be in the
process of adopting the practice of secret trials for certain categories of crimes. In
this way, the state formally abolishes the space allowing the accused to speak to the
public, though relegating this repudiation of liberal principles to certain classes of
defendants, thereby preserving the appearance of a fully open judicial sphere. The
building of a secret, parallel prison system of unknown dimensions and conditions
further threatens to produce a penal situation in which political resistance as the
anarchists understood it is impossible, or at least confined entirely to the sphere of
the prisoner’s soul.

Notes
1. Anarchism’s philosophical roots are usefully described in George Crowder’s Classical
Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991). K. Steven Vincent’s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the
Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) details
Proudhon’s participation in the French revolution of 1848, as well as his lasting influence on
French socialism. On the International, see Henryk Katz, The Emancipation of Labor: A
History of the First International (New York: Greenwood, 1992); James Joll, The Anarchists
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 84 – 114.
2. On Bakunin’s influence on Italian anarchism, see T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the
Italians (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); and Nunzio Pernicone,
Italian Anarchism, 1864 – 1892 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially
11 – 53. Bakunin’s influence on Spanish anarchism is covered in Murray Bookchin, The
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 57

Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868 – 1936 (New York: Free Life Editions,
1977), 17 – 31; and George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-
Class Movement in Spain, 1868 – 1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),
11 – 50. Some of the complexities in Bakunin’s relationship to and influence on the Russian
revolutionary tradition are covered in Philip Pomper, “Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” in
Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995), 71 – 76; and Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 22 – 52.
3. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World
Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Knopf, 1972), 335.
4. Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, authorized trans. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1991), 46 – 47.
5. On Italian anarchist insurrectionism in the late 1870s, see Pernicone, Italian Anarchism,
82 – 128; Joll, The Anarchists, 121 – 24.
6. Rosemary Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic
Hope (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), discusses the power of religious language to convey
the millennial ideals of nonreligious political movements.
7. Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 34.
8. Robert Kolb, “God’s Gift of Martyrdom: The Early Reformation Understanding of
Dying for the Faith,” Church History 64 (1995): 403 – 4; David Nicholls, “The Theatre of
Martyrdom in the French Reformation,” Past and Present 121 (1988): 66.
9. Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-
Century England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 25. The
instability of the ritual of martyrdom when confronting a determined mass movement is
also emphasized in Nicholls, “Theatre of Martyrdom,” 72 – 73.
10. Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom, 25.
11. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 162 – 65.
12. See, for example, Hugh Barbour, Slavery and Theology: Writings of Seven Quaker
Reformers, 1800 – 1870 (Dublin, IN: Print Press, 1985); Peter Brock, The Quaker
Peace Testimony, 1660 to 1914 (York, UK: Sessions Book Trust, 1990), 155 – 65; John
R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern
Churches, 1830 – 1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Douglas M. Strong,
Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
13. John Brown, “Last Speech to the Jury,” 1859, in The Radical Reader: A Documentary
History of the American Radical Tradition, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John
McMillian (New York: New Press, 2003), 158.
14. Quoted in John R. McKivigan, “His Soul Goes Marching On: The Story of John Brown’s
Followers after the Harpers Ferry Raid,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and
Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 274 – 97. Other important sources in the voluminous
literature on John Brown as a martyr include Paul Finkelman, “Manufacturing Martyrdom:
The Antislavery Response to John Brown’s Raid” and Charles Joyner, “ ‘Guilty of Holiest
Crime’: The Passion of John Brown,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John
Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1995), 41 – 66, 296 – 334.
58 Radical History Review

15. The most prominent example of Irish nationalist martyrdom in the nineteenth century was
that of the Fenian so-called Manchester Martyrs, executed for a rescue operation of two
comrades that left a police officer dead. A contemporaneous account using the discourse
of martyrdom is John Savage, Fenian Heroes and Martyrs (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1868).
Scholarly works include Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (New
York: New York University Press, 1971), 192 – 209; and D. George Boyce, Nationalism in
Ireland, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 182 – 85.
16. On the late eighteenth-century turn away from public spectacles of punishment, see
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage, 1977), 16 – 19, 67 – 69, 130 – 31; Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of
Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis
to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 183 – 99;
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 363 – 65; Louis P. Masur, Rites of
Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776 – 1865
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 93 – 116. The exception to this trend was
Russia, whose public hanging of People’s Will leaders in 1881 proved politically disastrous,
generating tremendous public sympathy for the victims, especially for Sofia Perovskaya, the
lone woman among the hanged. Russia did not hang another woman for over two decades.
See Sally Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case, 1906: Terror, Myth, and Martyrdom,” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4 (2003): 579.
17. Masur, Rites of Execution, 114 – 16, describes how newspaper accounts replaced public
witnessing of executions once capital punishment was privatized in the nineteenth century.
18. Figner, Memoirs, 156 – 57.
19. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, 59 – 63, provides a clear discussion of the origins and
evolution of propaganda of the deed. See also Martin A. Miller, “The Intellectual Origins
of Modern Terrorism in Europe,” in Crenshaw, Terrorism in Context, 41 – 50; Joll, The
Anarchists, 117 – 29. On Russian populist terrorism, see Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case,”
579 – 80.
20. Figner, Memoirs, 114.
21. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912; New York: Schocken, 1970), 68.
22. Émile Henry, “A Terrorist’s Defence,” in The Anarchist Reader, ed. George Woodcock
(Atlantic Highlands, NY: Humanities Press, 1977), 193.
23. Figner, Memoirs, 158. Though Figner was tried in a closed court, her speech soon became
public.
24. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 57.
25. The populist martyr tradition was influenced by Russian Orthodox hagiography, partly
by way of the literature of revolutionaries, most importantly Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s
revolutionary ascetic archetype, Rakhmetov, from his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?
Marcia A. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), discusses this influence of Orthodox
narratives of saints’ lives on Russian literature. On the general development of the
Russian revolutionary subculture, see Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education
and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Deborah
Hardy, Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876 – 1879 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1987); Pomper, “Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” 63 – 101.
26. Figner, Memoirs, 187.
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 59

27. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 38, 55. Figner, Memoirs, 150, 156, similarly derided some
populist military officers who recanted to spare their own lives.
28. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 5, 7, 59.
29. Quoted in Félix Dubois, The Anarchist Peril, trans. Ralph Derechef (London: T. Fisher
Unwin, 1894), 236.
30. A. Hamon, “The Psychology of the Anarchist,” in Dubois, The Anarchist Peril, 221.
Goldman, who corresponded with Hamon, cited another of his assessments of anarchist
psychology in Emma Goldman, “The Psychology of Political Violence,” in Anarchism and
Other Essays (1917; New York: Dover, 1969), 82.
31. Emma Goldman, “Gaetano Bresci,” Free Society, June 2, 1901; reprinted in Made for
America, 1890 – 1901, vol. 1 of Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American
Years, ed. Candace Falk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 455.
32. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 416. Other examples include Max Baginski, “Leon Czolgosz,”
and Emma Goldman, “Alexander Berkman,” in Mother Earth 1 (1906), reprinted
in Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, ed. Peter Glassgold
(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 21, 26; Goldman, “Psychology,” 92.
33. Figner, Memoirs, 104, 106.
34. Ibid., 201 – 2.
35. Ibid., 159.
36. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), 31 – 32, 44 – 45. Goldman also
presented her own choice to forego having children as an act of sacrifice for her political
commitments (61).
37. The best of the many accounts of the Haymarket affair is Paul Avrich, The Haymarket
Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). All eight men always maintained
their innocence.
38. Written at the time by an avowed supporter of the men, Eugene Lyons, The Life and Death
of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927; New York: Da Capo, 1970), nonetheless remains an excellent
account of the events. Later works have tended to focus on the question of the men’s guilt or
innocence to the exclusion of other matters.
39. Albert Parsons, “Autobiography of Albert R. Parsons,” in The Autobiographies of the
Haymarket Martyrs, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 31. These
autobiographies were first published in the Knights of Labor Journal.
40. Albert Parsons, “Address of Albert Parson,” in Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago
Anarchists, ed. Lucy Parsons (1910; New York: Arno, 1969), 121.
41. Samuel Fielden, “Address of Samuel Fielden,” in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 61.
42. Michael Schwab, “Address of Michael Schwab,” in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 25.
43. Adolph Fischer, “Address of Adolph Fischer,” in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 32.
44. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the Record of the Trial of Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Courts of Massachsetts and Subsequent Proceedings,
1920 – 1927, vol. 5 (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 4901.
45. Quoted in Lyons, Life and Death, 198.
46. Bartolomeo Vanzetti to Dante Sacco, August 21, 1927, in The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,
ed. Gardner D. Jackson and Maron D. Frankfurter (1928; New York: Octagon, 1980),
322 – 23.
47. August Spies, “Address of August Spies,” in Parsons, Famous Speeches, 24.
48. Quoted in Joll, The Anarchists, 128.
49. Spies, “Address,” 12.
60 Radical History Review

50. Fischer, “Address,” 33.


51. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland,
OH: World Publishing, 1962), 467.
52. Quoted in Parsons, Famous Speeches, title page.
53. Miller, “Intellectual Origins of Modern Terrorism,” 51 – 52; Joll, The Anarchists, 147 – 48,
152 – 55; Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 274 – 76; Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise
of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872 – 1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
271 – 84; Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1984), 45 – 46. The French geographer Elisée Reclus was a peculiar exception:
see Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-
Century European Anarchism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 208 – 19; and
John P. Clark and Camille Martin, eds., Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical
Social Thought of Elisée Reclus (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 66 – 69.
54. Goldman, Living My Life, 109 – 10.
55. On hostile reactions to the anarchists, see Jeffrey A. Clymer, “The 1886 Chicago Haymarket
Bombing and the Rhetoric of Terrorism in America,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002):
315 – 44; and Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 401 – 2.
56. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 297 – 380, provides a rich and engaging account of the
many activists, intellectuals, and ordinary people who became involved in this cause. See
also Joll, The Anarchists, 142 – 44.
57. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 298.
58. Ibid., 331. Foner, Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, 11 – 13, describes their
original publication in Knights of Labor.
59. Quoted in Blaine McKinley, “ ‘A Religion of the New Time’: Anarchist Memorials to the
Haymarket Martyrs, 1888 – 1917,” Labor History 28 (1987): 391. On Tertullian, see Gregory,
Salvation at Stake, 124, 172. Dubois, Anarchist Peril, 234 – 35, dates the anarchist tradition
of martyrdom to the Chicago events.
60. Goldman, Living My Life, 31, 41 – 43; Wexler, Emma Goldman, 36 – 37; McKinley, “ ‘A
Religion,’ ” 390 – 91.
61. Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the
Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 69 – 73.
62. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 411, 395 – 96.
63. Lucy Parsons, The Agitator, December 15, 1911, republished in “The Voice of the People
Will Yet be Heard,” Lucy Parsons Project, www.lucyparsonsproject.org/writings/voices_of_
people.html (accessed January 15, 2006). This piece is transcribed from Dave Roediger and
Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 183 – 84.
64. McKinley, “ ‘A Religion,’ ” 392.
65. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 409 – 11.
66. Robin Bachin, “A Labor Icon,” Illinois Labor History Society, www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/icon
.htm (accessed January 15, 2006).
67. Lyons, Life and Death, 131 – 34, 169 – 77; Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 163; Joll, The
Anarchists, 111, 222; Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 211 – 12; Goldman, Living My Life,
990 – 91.
68. Jackson and Frankfurter, eds., The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (1928) is currently
available in a 1997 Penguin Classics edition.
Gabriel | Performing Persecution 61

69. Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass
Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003), 125 – 55; Philip S. Foner, The Case of
Joe Hill (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 50 – 96. A year after Hill’s execution
by firing squad, two other IWW men, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were falsely
convicted of planting a bomb and Mooney was sentenced to death, again arousing an
international protest. In response, Mooney’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Twenty-two years later, the men were pardoned and released from prison.
70. Figner, Memoirs, 184.
71. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 88, 69. Similar statements appear on 68, 83, 87.
72. Figner, Memoirs, 166.
73. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 77.
74. Of course, Figner and Berkman were both familiar with revolutionary prison literature, but
they found it more useful for recalling them to revolutionary duty than explaining how to
respond to imprisonment on a practical level.
75. Figner, Memoirs, 181, 205.
76. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 43.
77. Ibid., 55, 85.
78. Peter Kropotkin, “On the Moral Influence of Prisons on Prisoners,” in In Russian and
French Prisons (1887; New York: Schocken, 1971), 304.
79. Goldman, Living My Life, 136. See also 571.
80. Kropotkin, “Are Prisons Necessary?” in In Russian and French Prisons, 366.
81. Goldman, Living My Life, 135. Berkman, by contrast, initially had a rather harsh view of
prisoners, seeing in them only the sad refuse of capitalism. See Berkman, Prison Memoirs,
141.
82. Kropotkin, “Moral Influence,” 309.
83. Ibid., 324, 325, 328.
84. Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” in Anarchism and Other Essays, 119 – 20.
85. Kropotkin, “Moral Influence,” 325 – 26; Goldman, “Prisons,” 120.
86. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 225, 399.
87. Kropotkin, “Russian Prisons,” in In Russian and French Prisons, 83.
88. Kropotkin, “Are Prisons Necessary?” 365 – 66.
89. Figner, Memoirs, 188 – 89, 227.
90. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 497 – 98.
91. Figner, Memoirs, 183.
92. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 175.
93. Ibid., 179 – 81, 283. The second half of Figner’s memoir devoted to her imprisonment is
almost completely taken up with interactions with her comrades, since they made up the
entire prison population.
94. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 181 – 84, 283 – 86.
95. Goldman, Living My Life, 627 – 28, 658 – 63, 672; Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 148;
Kropotkin, Memoirs, 290; Avrich, “Prison Letters of Ricardo Flores Magón to Lilly
Sarnoff,” International Review of Social History 22 (1977): 379 – 422.
96. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 137.
97. Ricardo Flores Magón to Lilly Sarnoff, October 26, 1920, in Avrich, “Prison Letters,” 387.
Nearly every letter begins with profuse thanks for the missive. See, for example, 384, 386,
389, 391.
62 Radical History Review

98. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 221, 224 – 25; Figner, Memoirs, 152, 249; Avrich, “Prison
Letters,” 392 – 94.
99. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 291.
100. Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 211.
101. Rosemont, Joe Hill, 349 – 54.
102. Figner, Memoirs, 206 – 7.
103. Ibid., 192, 193, 194.
104. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 155 – 57.
105. See, for instance, ibid., 218, 301 – 4, 458; also Goldman, Living My Life, 675.
106. Goldman, Living My Life, 135 – 36, 137.
107. Ibid., 673.
108. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 242 – 44.
109. Ibid., 215 – 18; Goldman, Living My Life, 690.
110. Goldman, Living My Life, 148.
111. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 394. On his original appraisal of criminals, see n. 103.
112. Ibid., 451 – 52.
113. Ricardo Flores Magón to Lilly Sarnoff, March 22, 1921, in Avrich, “Prison Letters,” 398.
114. Goldman, Living My Life, 571.
115. Ibid., 148.
116. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 414 – 15.
117. In fact, his adjustment to the world on the outside proved difficult until the arrest of
Goldman and other anarchist speakers threw him into action, completing his “resurrection.”
See Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 486 – 512; Goldman, Living My Life, 384 – 91.

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