Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915–1940 by Travis Tomchuk

Abstract

Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915-1940, by Travis Tomchuk. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 2015. 280 pp. $27.95 Cdn (paper). Travis Tomchuck brings the anarchist movement in Canada and the United States to life from a transnational perspective. By shedding a nationally-bound approach, Tomchuck is able to reconstruct some of the complex and influential international networks and relationships that were at the heart of the movement. The transnational element, albeit limited to only six cities (Toronto, Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie, Detroit, Newark, and New York City), allows the author to explore how Italian anarchists navigated across intellectual and physical borders; how they transplanted ideas from the Old World; and how foreign-bom anarchists practiced their anarchism in a North American context. Chronicling the movement's ideological and institutional transformations between 1915 and 1940, Transnational Radicals offers four original scholarly contributions. First, the work is grounded in archival sources, including Italian government security files and Italian-language anarchist newspapers. A key strength of this book is that it incorporates the testimony and experiences of Italian anarchists who settled in North America. Second, the work re-evaluates the nature of the Italian immigrant community by challenging the perception that Italian immigrants were immune to radical and traditionally deviant overtures. It explores varying degrees of conviction, and looks at Italians who turned to anarchism because of unemployment, discrimination, and other challenges. Third, Tomchuk demonstrates that immigrant culture as a transmitter of different, even conflicting political ideologies does not only reveal essential information on how culture influenced community politics, but it also shows how immigrant identity is intertwined with political ideologies. Finally, the work discards the introverted approach that has characterized most studies of ethnic community organizations and places the North American anarchist movement within a transnational context. Here the work makes broader conclusions about the nature and evolution of anarchism in North America. Transnational Radicals begins with a comprehensive discussion of the intellectual backbone of the anarchist movement, emphasizing leaders such as Mikhail Bakunin, Carlo Cafiero, and Luigi Galleara, and their influence in nineteenth-century Italy. Tomchuck correctly observes that once the anarchist movement starts to coalesce in Italy, a new working class culture begins to emerge in response to Italian state repression. Informed by newspapers and debates, and hardened by insurrections and protests, many Italian migrants who left in search of work or to escape persecution transplanted their ideas and activism to the New World, where they established communities and political networks mirroring those in Italy. Even vigorous debates over the structure of the movement were replicated in North America where an enmity existed between the anarcho-syndicalists and the anti-organizationalist anarchist communists (187). …