David Goodway's "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow": Book Review

This fills a need among not only literary critics but political historians. It's an in-depth survey of eleven British-centered thinkers, most of whom attempted to put their written theories and favored tracts into practice. They pursued their commitment to varieties of left-libertarian and anarchist thought--always as individuals, but more often sympathetic to a syndicalist-union or especially libertarian-communist (as in common grassroots management of the resources we hold in common and the means of sharing them equitably) system. Goodway burrows in, and his notes show a meticulous analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of not only the main subjects of each chapter, but of their colleagues, foes, and critics. He calls to task a lazy scholar, he cites a conflicting tidbit in one account that clashes with another's assertion, and his attention to such detail is astonishing. It proves how seriously he takes this enterprise.

Yet, it moves along, given the generally hefty subject matter and the need to cover biography, literary themes, political clashes, economic models, religious and secular contexts, and philosophical digressions of the past century, quite well. This is not light reading, not should it be. It's important as a guide to how crucial ideas energize thinkers and encourage autonomy. It instructs one in many currents of the British intellectual contributions to an encouragement of a truly liberal individual. He starts with William Morris and the guild socialism of his later career, 1880-1920, and then he moves into the impact of Edward Carpenter, the first of a few whom Goodway champions who are now generally neglected by mainstream culture. It's inspiring to find in Carpenter such an insistence on forging and forcing from one's circumstances the means for personal and social transformation. His gay identity means that much of his contribution is seen retroactively by critics since as filtered accordingly through his necessarily then-somewhat circumspect expression of his sexuality, but the larger concerns, as with Oscar Wilde, remain open to all. Goodway delves into Wilde's anarchist statements and by archival investigation uncovers fresh material for research, no easy feat for an author whom, as he notes, has been scoured by respectively gay rights advocates and English Lit scholars, both of whom, one suspects, often misread his admittedly scattershot essay on socialism.

Socialism often tugs away many who occupy left-libertarian niches here. Those who resisted the allure of the new Soviet and survived suspicion or Red Scares remain sometimes on the fringes, at least as far as the once-celebrated lecturer and author John Cowper Powys. He earns two chapters, and Goodway makes no apologies. Originally issued in 2006, this preceded by a year Morine Krissdóttir's biography (reviewed by me), but Powys' novels ("baggy monsters") and prolific career earn devoted attention herein. So does his individualist anarchism, which for this friend of Emma Goldman retreats from the political platforms erected by most in this collection, and whose works (as with Joyce, who Goodway finds shares Powys' predilection for what he called "ecstasies" and Joyce "epiphanies") can be an acquired taste. Powys demands articulation by a patient critic, as evading (not the first or last herein) facile summation. While he claimed to be a "philosophical anarchist" (as did Joyce, according to Kevin Birmingham's 2014 study [reviewed by me] of the impact of Ulysses on the regimes of state censorship), Powys to Goodway appears more of a sympathizer with a delayed encouragement of anarchism as an ideal but an impracticable one for the present time. Powys retreated into a personal stance of defiance. This is what earns Goodway's attention and deep focus.

Herbert Read's similarly long career was even more diverse, as art criticism channeled his talents along with literature and politics. WWI shifted this medal-winning recipient soon after into pacifism: "The whole war was fought for rhetoric--fought for historical phrases and actual misery, fought by politicians and generals and with human flesh and blood, fanned by false and artificially created mob passions..." (loc. 4508 qtd.). One finds when reading Read here a man able to express ideas precisely.

Pacifism gets a separate chapter, if a brief one. Akin to George Orwell here profiled, this stance stirred dissent and debate as another conflict loomed, predicted by the Spanish predicament of the anarchists, trapped in Catalonia between fascists and the Stalinists. Both men have been cursed by some who regard their shifts as untenable or signs of weakness, but Goodway while cognizant always of their inconsistencies allows each critic his fair chance for rebuttal, or clarification, over careers that found them taking on many complicated issues. Same for Aldous Huxley, and the uneven nature of his fiction and the wide range of his non-fiction gain him a central stage in this thorough presentation.

Best known for his Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort is lesser known at least abroad and nowadays for his own commitments to libertarian leftism. Along with Huxley and Bertrand Russell, his high-profile stances gained him notoriety as a proto-countercultural icon before the hippies ever marched. On the CND Committee of 100, Comfort's lifelong pacifism guided him into a recognition of anarchism as the best fit for him, a trajectory shared by many in this collection. He avers that "centralized power should be reduced to the practical minimum and individual responsibility increased to the practical maximum" (loc. 6133), a sensible ambition. I'd have liked to find out more about how his sexual affirmations aligned deeper with his libertarian vision, as this Goodway elides.

E.P. Thompson, Marxist historian of Morris and of the English working class, also worked for nuclear disarmament along with these figures. He also taught often, and to many. Like Comfort, he is taken to task for blind spots. While chastising Orwell for premature anti-Stalinism and the like, this pioneering scholar ignores the many points of agreement he had with Orwell and other dissidents.

Christopher Pallis, as with Comfort, combined a prestigious medical career with a parallel one. For Pallis (whose cousin Marco wrote a memorable travelogue of mountaineering turned spiritual quest in Peaks and Lamas, reviewed by me), he had to disguise his dogged libertarian socialism under pen names Martin Grainger and Maurice Brinton. The excerpts here felt stodgy, more "poli-sci" than his comrades, but it's amazing how he and Thompson and Comfort pursued dual research so prolifically. Here, Goodway observes: "All the ruling groups in society encourage the belief that decision taking and management are functions beyond the comprehension of ordinary people." (loc. 7118).

One problem with anarchism, which flourished 1860-1940 and then, beaten down by Bolshevism and fascism, sensationalized for its violent minority, suppressed by spies and infiltrators in capitalist societies, is that "its numerical weakness inhibits its intellectual strength." (loc. 7389) Even after its countercultural resurgence (part due to Situationists, part libertarian socialists), few thinkers since have applied it to practical rather than historical or theoretical analyses, and few workers apply their leisure to advancing its real-world manifestations, given the great obstacles to implementation.

But, the final subject shows how it can work around us. Colin Ward, whose Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction I have reviewed, gains an affectionate tribute. No surprise as the book "Talking Anarchy" combines the two men's conversations and concerns. Like busy Pallis and Comfort, Ward as an architect recycles (a verb Goodway often uses, as he is very alert to all his subjects' printed records, and how they overlap, clash, and contend) much of his writings, given a demanding career. But this chapter feels ultimately perfunctory. One waits for Ward to step in, as an engaging comrade.

Still, the closing section which channels anarchist theory into current currents, stays fluid. Goodway holds that "a society which organizes itself without authority" always exists, "like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism." (loc. 7469)  Recalling in this titular metaphor Gustav Landauer's vision, which guided Ward, Goodway finds an anarchist today widens the old thinkers' perspectives. It "is selective, it rejects perfectionism, utopian fantasy, conspiratorial romanticism, revolutionary optimism,; it draws from the classical anarchists their most valid, not their most questionable, ideas." (loc. 7644)

In conclusion, I return to Goodway's introduction. He acknowledges his own life spent immersed in Marxism as much as anarchism, and admits his conviction that the latter proves more urgently relevant for our own challenges. Rather than utopian, it is rather "the belief that voting for a political party--any party--" that is unbelievable if one believes that by voting one "can bring about significant social change": after all as he quotes, "if voting changed anything, it would be abolished." (loc. 133)

Nestled near the end, we find a reminder of the modesty and ambition that combine for anarchism: crucial it "is for individuals to be able to take command of their everyday circumstances and determine the course of their lives, almost certainly collectively: to institute personal and communal autonomy, so far as they are possible, and to exercise individual responsibility." (loc. 7956) A little share of property and the control of one's means of production, combined with a social control over resources that all need to share in common: this may appeal to a few and more, if they read this book.
(Amazon US  5-10-14)

Colin Ward's "Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction": Book Review

Given his reputation as a veteran activist and architect, who puts his ideals into practice, English anarchist Colin Ward appears to be an wisely chosen author for this Oxford series. He lives rather than merely studies the subject. Some of this Very Short Introduction's best moments come when he narrates the Green applications and environmental dimensions of a left (necessary to preface this as some capitalists have taken this term)-libertarian, small c-communist (as in controlling a common means of ownership for resources shared by all) version. This is, however, one among many versions of living without coercion under a leader or ruler.

This derivation of anarchism contrasts with the popular version, as well as mythologized black-bloc style which may admit violent means to advance the difficult pair of goals, freedom without socialist imposition of top-down power, and liberty without the liberalism which bows to the capitalist and the State as its masters. Ward's chapters move rapidly if unevenly past main themes. He defines the theory and shows its lineage. He looks to its revolutionary phase from the late 19-early 20c, which for many has soured its appeal up through the anti-austerity and Occupy protests of the present, and which with Bolshevism weakened its clout among some who had cheered it on a century ago. He looks at the post-socialist situation and how anarchy may offer alternatives. He counters the nationalist and fundamentalist drives to undermine progress by secular movements and by those seeking a more equitable society.

Here, although the book came out but a decade ago, attacks on the growing menace of the U.S. Christian Right already feel dated, if familiar as to any contemporary reader. But making anarchism fit today's contexts cannot be gainsaid, for this is the purpose Ward seeks. Avi Shlaim is cited as arguing against the nationalist tendencies towards xenophobia and extremism, "towards self-righteousness on the one hand and demonising the enemy on the other" as history is falsified or fabricated. Certainly, anarchists assert, this is relevant no matter who we elect, or is it those who are presented before us for election?

I found the chapter on prisons worthwhile for its excoriation of the industrial penal system, and likewise that on education offered stimulating ideas. How to break free of places where mass inculcation shuts down creativity and insight remains no easy question in an era of correction rather than rehabilitation and of teaching to the test instead of fostering cooperative, enjoyable learning. Both sections, all the same, lurched about a bit in pace and focus, and ended their treatments suddenly; others in this book show a similar unevenness. Ward knows the subject by living it. But it can be a challenge here and there even in a brief book to figure out why he digresses where he does, given the need to cover so much. This may be rectified by Ziga Vodavic's "The Living Spirit of Revolt: the Infrapolitics of Anarchism" (see my review) or a book anyone interested in anarchism will eventually tackle, the magisterial history by Peter Marshall, "Demanding the Impossible," reprinted in 2010 with an update.

This book's precepts may seem utopian, naturally or inevitably, to many skeptics, but I aver even critics of Ward might find useful suggestions (if they ever read such a book) for reform in both schools and the prison-industrial complex. Like that of the military, these regimens dominate our horizons today, and as Ward shows, small-scale efforts for alternative ownership of the way we make a living, teach each other, care for those who lack a way to care for themselves, and break up the centralized power we live and labor under provide worthwhile points for discussion. The anarchist articulation of individual effort and satisfying work and play, allied to the little workshops and craft endeavors a few among us try to sustain, show that progress can be made. Many of those among the New Left may have defected to the New Age (my phrase) but one can sense within Ward's judgment of the counterculture an admission that such advances come at a slow, difficult pace for those who follow in their wake 50 years on.

Ward suggests federalism, as in the Swiss cantons or regionalism supported as a counter to the EU, as ways that devolved administration of one's work and life may go forward. I cite Ward's quote of Gustav Landauer as indicative of this direction. "The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently." (qtd. loc. 160) As Paul Goodman tells us in these pages, the key goal is not freedom per se, for once freed, oppressed people do not know what to do next. Instead, encouraging autonomy, as some do now by passive resistance to coercion and decisions made not by them but for them, seems more sensible. This sort of advice, for many, may better address the need for personal and political change: "the ability to initiate a task and do it in one's own way." (qtd. loc. 847). I hope this helps you evaluate this book's merits yourself. (5-6-14 to Amazon US)

Matt Taibbi's "The Divide": Book Review

Certainly he's preaching to this choir member, and I'm glad (relatively speaking) to find Attorney General Eric Holder excoriated for his deeply embedded role in an "aggressive" style of prosecuting Wall Street in a "sophisticated" manner that backfired, allowing "banks too big to fail, too big to jail" to go off with negligible fines (often what a few hours' profit for firms accrued) or none at all. Matt Taibbi's simple thesis, over four-hundred pages, remains that "too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail." (49)

He uses a small Chinese NYC bank, Abacus, to prove how the one bank that the government pursued suffered far out of proportion, given the time and money expended, to the Wall Street neighbors who, in Chase's case, used their bailout money to buy up WaMu at fire-sale rates, and to grab two jets at $60 million each and a hanger for $18 million as part of TARP's sweet deal. As their ads assure us, we are to assume all's all right simply because they paid back the money "we" were forced to lend.

The book see-saws back and forth between high- and low-profile case studies. It makes for uneven pacing and while Taibbi labors to make transitions and emphasize contrasts in the disparity of how justice is meted out, the details of the financial and governmental manipulations provide for those intrigued or outraged by this collusion plenty of material for study. While the book (this is a galley) needed an index, and an overview might have helped, as some of this feels like a series of related articles rather than a cohesive summation of what is admittedly, no matter the party in power, an ongoing collapse of our legal system.

He critiques the policing strategy of trolling as fishing boats do among the weak and vulnerable in high-crime areas: swooping all up, seeing who has committed and can be held on petty offenses for blocking a sidewalk, public urination, or fare evasion, to juke stats (he alludes as to how NYC's anti-"broken window" methods to increase those arrested and jailed inspired HBO's "The Wire" here). Matt Taibbi argues that crime-as-lifestyle entices many no matter what the offense, if the payoff is great enough for those so driven, and that the mass arrests only anger the innocent, and try to provoke them when detained into fighting back against the corrupt power. In turn, the system wears down the weak, so as with foreclosures, welfare fraud, credit card debt, and many other offenses, the harried give up, pay fines, acknowledge guilt, cop a deal, and therefore please the law-and-order ranks.

This accounts for the dramatic rise in statistics for arrests and jailings even as the crime rate declines. Meanwhile, Taibbi compares the way the powerful and richer among us get off much easier, even though individuals can be taken down no matter their status. The point is that money matters most, more than the clout of any one person, rich or poor, even if richer is better. HSBC bank funnels the Sinaloa drug cartel money and evades sanctions, while the US government and local authorities pursue minor drug offenses far out of proportion to the gains won, considering the massive costs. At least the police and courts are kept busy, so as to justify more federal and local funds coming in, to perpetuate wars on drugs and on crime that keep on giving.

I realize Taibbi has written lively pieces for Rolling Stone for years and made his reputation. This book is more serious than I expected, and while "overcaffeinated Jesuits" as a memorable term for old-school journalists' fashion sense and lack of style sticks, Taibbi in taking the side of the underdog takes some easy potshots when they don't seem necessary. He mocks two elderly public defenders as looking like the Muppets Stadler and Waldorf, while a Barclays CEO is introduced as a "lipless, pale-faced Irish Catholic from Concord, Massachusetts, who wears Coke-bottle glasses and appears in public wearing the pinched, joyless manner of a constipated nun." (154) Memorable again, sure, but it seems a cheap shot given Taibbi's steady championing of the poor and his sympathies for those "without the right papers" whom he classifies as "hardworking immigrants" while choosing not to address the unspoken situation that this contingent has chosen to break laws and overstay visas, too.

Molly Crabapple's illustrations match the tone of this book, distorting those in the system by caricature, but never those fighting it. This plays into a muckraking feel at times that may extend the tradition of advocacy journalism, on the other hand. I found George Packer's The Unwinding, about the aftermath of Chase's foreclosure and debt-driven robo-calls that Taibbi documents, a good match.

Taibbi's on more convincing ground in handling welfare fraud, admitting that abuses happen and acknowledging the need to investigate, even as he shows how much is exerted to trap the offenders vs. how little is done to rein in Wall Street's guilty. He shows how the system targets easy targets to nab among the vulnerable, while it, as people like Timothy Geithner, Lanny Breuer, and Eric Holder connive to go as far as to ask Wall Street what to do and whom to pursue before the Feds move in, tiptoeing about. Taibbi does not bring in all of the context of deregulated banks, for the pressure on the second Bush administration to loosen up loans to minority and low-income communities is not addressed, nor is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act discussed in the detail I think it merits, in reference to the Glass-Steagall Act's partial repeal in 1999. But there is a lot of financial coverage overall.

The current White House administration encourages despite its rhetoric (as Obama's "60 Minutes' comment on ethics in typically slippery lawyerspeak is parsed by Taibbi to reveal its vacuum) deregulation and submission to the corporate domination of our nation's legal, judicial, law enforcement, and political establishments started with Reagan and sustained by Clinton and the Bushes. Here, Matt Taibbi connects the dots and singles out those who continue, as yet another election looms, to pretend they have the interests of the common people in mind instead of those with whom they consort and plot, to build what's now oligarchy. (Amazon US 5-31-14)

Joanna Higgins' "The Anarchist": Book Review

Writing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.

Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Ms. Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels. 

When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Ms. Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?

Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.

How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain. 

Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide. 

We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then, we hear a young Emma asserting, after she has read the militant newspaper which radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest. 

This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike. 

Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for.  Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive. 

In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country. 

Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon effect the President, after another botched act of violence. 

Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)

He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him. 

Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So, it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic. 

Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents. 

The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.

This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma. 

When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon-- gains its own place in the spotlight. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully. 

Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position. 

In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time. 

From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all. (NY Journal of Books 5-2-14.)

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.