Immigrant Radicals Research Articles

Law, Liberty, and Anarchism in the Progressive Era - Michael Willrich. American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2023. 480 pp. $32.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1541697379.

Law, Liberty, and Anarchism in the Progressive Era - Michael Willrich. American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2023. 480 pp. $32.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1541697379.

The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling ImmigrantsOne Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965

The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling ImmigrantsOne Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965

When the Big House Freaked Out: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Brazil in a Single Lifetime

When the Big House Freaked Out: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Brazil in a Single Lifetime

Wrench in the Deportation Machine: Louis F. Post’s Objection to Mechanized Red Scare Bureaucracy

Abstract Between the spring of 1920 and early 1921, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, Progressive-turned-bureaucrat Louis Freeland Post, refused to sign the warrants that would have been used to deport almost three thousand alleged immigrant radicals detained as a result of the Palmer Raids. Although this action has long been remembered as a triumph of US civil liberties, this article argues that Post’s objections to the deportations were grounded in his concern with the growing capabilities of mechanized bureaucracy and the tendency of these managerial technologies to discourage informed adjudication. Rather than opposing laws that would allow for the deportation of political radicals, Post vocally protested the “sign on the dotted line” style of governance he was expected to enact. As a result of his inaction, participants at every level of the emerging gate-keeping and immigration system objected to Post’s inability to let the deportation “machine” run.

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

<i>Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America</i> by Kenyon Zimmer

Radical Experience and the Surveillance State

Radical Experience and the Surveillance State Elizabeth Faue (bio) Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 361 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $24.99. Andrea Friedman. Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $80.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Jacob Kramer. The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 236 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $79.50. William J. Maxwell. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, works cited, and index. $29.95. Kenyon Zimmer. Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $95.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). The recent presidential campaign has brought into public debate some of the central political issues of the past century: how democracy and radicalism are defined, how political change originates in and emanates from the marginalized Left, and how the state both constrains and shapes the margins seeking to become mainstream. While the politics of gender and race equality have infiltrated broadcast news and twitter feeds, so too has radicalism—on the left and the right—drawn reporters and crowds. Antiestablishment candidates prosper, as national polls suggest a genuine disenchantment with politics as usual. A socialist garnered significant support in the Democratic Party; white supremacists endorsed the Republican candidate. There is an open and heated debate about who belongs and does not belong in our democracy and who [End Page 136] may be kept out by a wall or denied a voice through voter identification laws. The margins have overtaken the mainstream. Understanding the relationship between radical social movements and change, and between radicals and the existing state apparatus, has long occupied historians of the Left. In these five volumes, we revisit the questions of how radical activism shaped and was shaped by the state and the discourse and practice of citizenship within that state. From covering the arguments and deeds of Italian and Yiddish immigrant radicals and the creation of the national security state under the Wilson administration, to exploring mid-century anticommunism and today’s Black Lives Matter movement, these recent studies show us how responses to radicalism not only transformed the state but also continually redefined freedom and democracy from the political margins. At heart, they offer a collective exploration of how radical ideas and practices have transformed our political culture and the meanings and consequences of that transformation. Kenyon Zimmer’s Immigrants against the State is a case in point. Anarchism in the United States has a bifurcated history. Native-born individualist anarchism dates back to the nineteenth century, when William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau positioned themselves against state-sanctioned slavery. Its heirs today are allied with libertarianism and its pro-capitalist followers. Communist—or collectivist—anarchism, an ideology that veered from authorizing political assassination to pacifist resistance to state-sanctioned violence, has been understood as chiefly European in origin, with its roots in the ideas of Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin. It also has been viewed as an immigrant ideology, not only foreign in origin but also in advocacy. Immigrant communities among Yiddish- and Italian-language speakers gave shelter to anarchists and supported radical political activities, cultural and educational institutions, and newspapers and journals. It is this world that Kenyon Zimmer captures in his account of Progressive Era Yiddish and Italian anarchists. His attention to detail is at times overwhelming, as names, networks, community organizations, and places are stacked like firewood against forgetting. Still, in trying to resurrect an anarchist movement that has been largely ignored and marginalized, the weight of information matters. And while Zimmer treads some familiar ground here—in particular, the work of Michael Miller Topp and Jennifer Guglielmo—his mapping of immigrant anarchism goes beyond these scholars to an account that covers not only the...

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940

Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture compellingly documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture.

Italian Anarchism in America: Its Accomplishments, Its Limitations

From the last third of the 19th century until soon after the turn of the 20th century, Italy (with the exception of Spain) was the site of Europe's largest anarchist movement. Mikhail Bakunin, the progenitor of modern anarchism, first found widespread support in Italy, and, while there, from 1863 to 1867, he published his seminal writings, which remain the framework for anti-organizational, libertarian anarchism. Italian intellectuals, notably Carlo Pisacane and Errico Malatesta, contributed to the development of anarchist theory. In the United States, anarchism persisted longer and had more effect in the Italian immigrant community than elsewhere. Most significantly, it challenged (for a time successfully) Fascist hegemony in the multitudinous Little Italys where the vast majority of Italian Americans resided. Marcella Bencivenni's Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States 1890–1940 sheds new light on the culture (both as production/consumption and as a way of life) of the Italian radical movement, especially its anarchist wing, in America. Bencivenni's presentation of the culture of Italian American radicalism explains, despite the anarchist communities' inability to sustain a larger movement and consolidate victories, the appeal of anarchism in the Italian immigrant community, and by extrapolation in other working-class constituencies.

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940

Book Review| January 01 2013 Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940. By Marcella Bencivenni. New York: New York University Press, 2011. viii + 278 pp. Notes and index. $50 (cloth). Charles A. Zappia Charles A. Zappia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2013) 32 (2): 121–123. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0121 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Charles A. Zappia; Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2013; 32 (2): 121–123. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0121 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Marcella Bencivenni . Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 . New York: New York University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 279. $50.00.

Marcella Bencivenni . Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 . New York: New York University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 279. $50.00.

Italian immigrant radical culture: the idealism of the sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Italian immigrant radical culture: the idealism of the sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940

Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early-Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields

This article explores the largely unknown world of militant Italian labor organizers and the rank-and-file Italian immigrants they led in labor struggles in the western coalfields of the United States in the early twentieth century. Building on the recent “transnational turn” in immigration scholarship and employing a close reading of an important Italian-language newspaper, Il Lavoratore Italiano; official Italian consular records and police archives; and previously unused American federal and state prison records, the authors analyze the ways immigrant workers and their immigrant radical leaders (focusing especially on Carlo Demolli, a United Mine Workers of America and Western Federation of Miners organizer and newspaper editor from northern Italy) launched intense labor actions in these years. The language of Italian solidarity that emerges from these sources helped a militant ethnic minority of Italian migrants sustain a major six-month strike in 1903–4 that crossed local, regional, national, and transnational material and symbolic boundaries, despite intense legal and military opposition from coal operators and the aligned forces of local, state, and U.S. officials and Italian consular officers.

Paterson's Italian Anarchist Silk Workers and the Politics of Race

The article explores how first generation Italian immigrant radicals looked at race as well as their involvement in struggles for national liberation. Italian American anarchist silk workers based in Paterson, New Jersey became part of the Industrial Workers of the World foreign translational network of mixed locals in 1906. In Paterson, the group pioneered multiethnic forms of organizing. Such community-based multiethnic and racial strategies are typically associated with the Congress of Industrial Organization in the 1930s and the English-speaking second generation of industrial workers. In fact, these organizational forms were prevalent with “Latin” first generation immigrants who played important roles as pioneers of the new unionism. This article also challenges the dominant way Italian immigrant radicalism has been portrayed.

United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic, by David A. Wilson

<i>United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic</i>, by David A. Wilson

United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic.

United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic.

Parallel Struggles: Irish Republicanism in the American South, 1798–1876

PARALLEL STRUGGLES: IRISH REPUBLICANISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1798–1876* DAVID T. GLEESON What is that in your hand? It is a branch. Of what? Of the Tree of Liberty. Where did it first grow? In America. Where does it bloom? In France. Where did the seeds fall? In Ireland.1 as this often cited password of the United Irishmen suggests, Ireland’s first republicans believed that there was a connection between their own revolutionary struggle and those taking place in other countries. Similarly, the efforts of later generations to break the connection between Britain and Ireland also seemed to depend upon extraterritorial aid, particularly from the United States. The sheer number of Irish immigrants in nineteenth -century America and their growing prosperity were vital to republican plans. Historians have recently begun to examine the impact that Irish republicanism had upon America, but they have not examined the subject in a regional context to any great degree. Just as we are learning that IrishIRISH REPUBLICANISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1798–1876 97 * Research for this article was partially funded by grants from the O’Shaughnessy Irish Research Fund of the Irish American Cultural Institute and the Snellgrove Fund of the Department of History at Mississippi State University. 1 Quoted in Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 57. American economic and political life varied in regional terms, so too did Irish republicanism.2 In particular, the Irish in the antebellum American South did not seem to fit the traditional stereotype that historians have constructed of Irish republicans generally in America.3 While many of them embraced republicanism because they wished for revenge against British misrule in Ireland, a far greater number embraced it because it helped them to integrate more easily into southern society. I United Irish exiles in Jeffersonian America had an immediate affinity with their fellow republicans. Their belief in the universal tenets of republicanism helped them to adapt rapidly to the tumult of American politics. The political views that they espoused allowed them to maintain an interest in removing Britain’s dominance of Ireland without any fear of being considered “un-American.”4 However, what might be called “classical” Irish republicanism declined sharply after 1798, and in its place there arose a more Anglophobic nationalism that made it increasingly difficult for Irish refugees to assimilate. The millions who immigrated to America between 1815 and the beginning of the Civil War, and especially those who arrived in the wake of the great famine of the late 1840s, carried with them a “psychological legacy” of British oppression. To all intents and purposes they became cultural “exiles” in the United States, exiles who leaned heavily upon that familiar crutch of the republican faith: the desire to sepIRISH REPUBLICANISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1798–1876 98 2 David N. Doyle, “The Regional Bibliography of Irish America, 1830–1930: A Review and Addendum,” Irish Historical Studies 23 (May 1983), 254–83; Dennis Clark, Hibernia America : The Irish and Regional Cultures (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). 3 In this paper the South is defined as the eleven states that officially joined the Confederacy in 1861. “Republican” is used here not just for immigrants who were active in the various republican movements but also for those who harbored similar views. Therefore, many Irish southerners, although they supported constitutional movements, could be justifiably defined as republican. 4 Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 282, states: “Early Irish republicanism bore little resemblance to its later separatist reincarnations” and “cannot be dismissed simply as separatist and anti-English.” Whelan also recognizes the uniquely eighteenth-century Enlightenment characteristics of the United Irishmen. David A. Wilson’s United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 177, sees more of a continuity between the various incarnations of Irish republicanism in America but believes that United Irishmen assimilated well into American politics and were able “to bolster the country’s sense of mission, its belief that it was the political, social...

The Enemy Within: Studies in the American Antipathy to the Left

These excellent studies add to the historical commentary on a peculiarity of American life: the absence of a sustained socialist or social democratic contestant within mainline politics. Each of the two authors locates within specific national conditions the reasons why the public has defined the radical Left as being, in twentieth-century terminology, un-American. Each, then, has written not only an inquiry into his specific subject but an examination of the American mind and culture. While the term anticommunism is of more recent vintage, communism, as a generic term for ideologies denying private was in pejorative use before the middle of the nineteenth century. By late in the century, Heale demonstrates, a body of presumptions defending the status and goods of the nation's white affluent classes had developed in the face of union organization, immigrant radicalism, and whatever else seemed to smack of communism. Its components, in Heale's lucidly reasoned presentation, were of old American grain: republicanism, the affirmation of as a ground of personal independence, and a tradition of active citizenship that had its uglier side in the vigilantism that sometimes emerged to confront union organizing or other dissidence. In the longer stretch of history such values have been not so much reactionary as revolutionary, and they have had a more contradictory presence in American popular politics than at first may appear. The nation's egalitarianism, Heale remarks, allowed radicals in the mid-nineteenth century to call for the equalization of property, but they rarely contemplated the abolition of private property (p. 13). The comment deserves more elaboration

Militants and Migrants: Immigrant Workers in the United States, 1880–1920

Even this long after the centennial of her birthday, it is difficult these days to avoid the Statue of Liberty. Continuing immigration reminds us that for all of its problems the United States is still a magnet for poor and oppressed people throughout the world. The symbolic importance of the statue has seldom been more poignantly displayed than in Tiananmin Square in the spring of 1989. The Chinese students' Liberty was more an amalgam of images than an exact replica, but its likeness to the lady in New York Harbor was clear. America's image in the eyes of immigrant workers has certainly changed over the years, however, while the reality of immigrant working-class life has confronted the newcomers with both problems and opportunities. In October 1986 a group of American and European scholars gathered in Paris for a conference to commemorate the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. AI 'Ombre de la Statue de la Libert? is a collection of the conference papers grouped around four broad themes: the changing image of America among European workers; the immigrants' actual experience of America, with an emphasis on the trans-Atlantic dimension of social movements and intellectual influences; immigrant radicalism; and, of course, republicanism. One persistent theme in the essays concerned with America's image is its transformation from a sort of republican utopia in the mid-nineteenth century to a grotesque capitalist giant by the 1880s. This metaphorical evolution is hardly