Native Anarchists

Partisans of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism, by William O. Reichert. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press. 602 pp.

The American anarchist tradition, which dates back to the 1840s and has earlier antecedents, has never been well interpreted; apart from mention of one or two conspicuous individuals, it is seldom noticed in studies of America’s radical past. In part this is because the anarchism that became selfconscious in the 1840s was individualist in emphasis, while the anarchism that dates from the 1880s, from the Chicago anarchists, was communist, syndicalist, or collectivist. The former was “yankee” in character, the latter was mainly a movement of proletarian immigrants, and...