Voltairine de Cleyre

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de Cleyre at the age of 35 in Philadelphia

Voltairine de Cleyre (born November 17, 1866 in Leslie, Michigan , † June 20, 1912 in Chicago ) was an American author and anarchist .

Life

Born in the small town of Leslie, Michigan, she was sent to a Catholic convent as a teenager because her father could not support the family. This drove her to atheism rather than Christianity . The monastery was located in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. About the time spent there she said:

... it was like the valley of the shadow of death, there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burned me with their hell fire in these oppressive days.

She tried to run away and swam to Port Huron, Michigan; she hiked 17 miles where she met family friends who contacted her father and sent her back. She ran away again and never went back.

Family ties to the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad , along with the harsh and persistent poverty in which she grew up and being named after the philosopher Voltaire , contributed to the radical posture she developed after her youth. After training in the monastery, de Cleyre began her intellectual engagement in the strongly anti- clerical freethought movement , giving lectures and publishing articles in freethinker publications.

During her time in the freethinking movement of the mid and late 1880s, de Cleyre was particularly influenced by Thomas Paine , Mary Wollstonecraft, and Clarence Darrow . Other influences came from Henry David Thoreau , Big Bill Haywood and later Eugene Debs . After the Haymarket demonstrators were hanged in 1887, she became an anarchist: "Until then, I believed in the essence of the justice of American law through the jury," she wrote in an autobiographical essay, "after that I could never do it again".

Voltairine de Cleyre 1897

In 1887 she got to know anarchism, initially in the form of individualistic anarchism. However, she quickly expanded her horizons and accepted anarchist positions of any direction as legitimate - whether militant or pacifist, whether mutualist, individualistic or communist - and referred to herself simply as an anarchist without a restrictive adjective. Here's what she wrote about the various economic models advocated by anarchists:

I believe that these and many others can be tried out with success in different places; I want the instincts and habits of people in every community to be able to express themselves freely; and I'm sure different environments require different solutions. While I recognize that freedom would be vastly increased under each of these economic models, I openly admit that none of them satisfy me. Socialism and communism require a level of combined effort and administration that involves more regulation than is compatible with ideal anarchism; Individualism and mutualism require the establishment of a private police force, since they are based on property, which is not at all compatible with my ideas of freedom. My ideal would be a situation in which all natural resources are forever freely accessible to all, and the worker can individually produce everything to satisfy his basic needs, if he likes, so that he does not have to align work and leisure with the times of others. I think such a time will come, but only with the development of new modes of production and different tastes for people. In the meantime, we are all calling with one voice for freedom to try.

And about the different methods that have been suggested, she said:

Are you asking for a method? Do you ask spring about its method? What is more necessary, sunshine or rain? They are mutually exclusive - right; they destroy one another - right, but from this destruction the flowers grow. Everyone choose the method that best expresses their idiosyncrasy and nobody judges another for expressing themselves in a different way.

Between 1889 and 1910 she lived in Philadelphia teaching English to Jewish immigrants. She always made it a point to pay for herself and did not take any fees for her anarchist and free-thinking lectures, which soon made her well-known nationwide.

Since 1892 de Cleyre was involved in the Ladies Liberal League (Women's Freedom Association), from the mid-1890s for the Radical Library in Philadelphia, which existed until the 1940s. She became known to a wider audience primarily through her poems and short stories, in which she cultivated natural poetry in addition to social and free-thinking texts. In 1897 she traveled to England, where she met Max Nettlau , Peter Kropotkin , Louise Michel and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol .

She moved to Chicago in 1910 to teach at the Ferrer Sunday School and the similarly oriented Chicago Modern School. Her last engagement was with the Mexican Revolution , to whose support she even considered moving to California. Her friends succeeded in bringing out an anthology of her literary and theoretical work shortly after her death in 1912.

She was known as an eminent speaker and author - according to her biographer Paul Avrich , she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist" - and a tireless advocate of the anarchist cause, whose "religious zeal," said Goldman, "everything she did excel. ” The friendship with Emma Goldman suffered from the difference in the view of life of both women: Voltairine de Cleyre saw in the cheerful manner Goldman approaches to a bourgeoisisation, a concession to the bourgeois overestimation of things towards people. Emma Goldman interpreted this criticism as a pettiness.

James B. Elliot and de Cleyre's son Harry

De Cleyre's relationships with the opposite sex were tumultuous. She was close friends with Dyer D. Lum , from which it was also inspired: "her teacher, her confidant, her comrade" but Lum committed 1893 suicide . On June 12, 1890, she gave birth to their son Harry, whose father was the free thinker James B. Elliot . The child was taken away from her when she refused to live with Elliot.

Throughout her life she was of illness and depression plagued committed at least twice attempted suicide and survived an assassination attempt on December 19, 1902. Her attacker, Herman Helcher, was a former student that a fever disease had made insane in childhood. When Senator Hawley put a bounty on anarchists in the hysteria following the assassination of President McKinley (1901), she offered herself to him as a target in an open letter. In fact, she was assassinated the following year, albeit not by the senator. She was seriously injured, but traditionally she called on the anarchist movement to support the assassin during his trial. She immediately forgave him and wrote:

It would be a crime against civilization to put him in prison for the result of a sick brain.

The bullets could not be removed from her body and further undermined her already poor health. The attack left her with chronic earache and throat infections, which had a lasting detrimental effect on her ability to concentrate and speak.

In 1903 she traveled to Norway to relax a little. On arrival she was arrested because the German Kaiser Wilhelm was staying in the country at the time, and the police suspected that she had come to murder him. In the period that followed, her health deteriorated more and more. Although she was increasingly plagued by depression - she attempted suicide in 1905 - her literary productivity peaked in the last few years of her life. The essays “Anarchism and American Traditions” (1909), “The Dominant Idea”, “ Francisco Ferrer ”, “Modern Educational Reform” (1910), “Direct Action” and “The Mexican Revolution” (1911) were published.

Emma Goldman called her "the most talented and gifted anarchist America has ever produced".

Political beliefs

Anarchism without adjectives

Voltairine de Cleyre's political stance changed during her life, leading her to the role of a main proponent of “ anarchism without adjectives ,” a doctrine, as historian George Richard Esenwein put it, “with no qualifying label such as communist , collectivist , mutualist or individualistic . For others ... it was simply understood as an attitude that tolerated the coexistence of the various anarchist schools. "

For several years de Cleyre participated in American individual anarchism. She herself saw her early loyalty to individualism as the main differentiation from Emma Goldman:

“Miss Goldman is a communist, I am an individualist. She wants to destroy the right to property, I want to explain it. I wage my war against privilege and authority while maintaining the right to property, the true right of every individual. She believes that cooperation would completely replace competition; I state that competition in one form or another will always exist and it is highly desirable that it do. "

- Voltairine de Cleyre : In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation

Despite their early dislike of one another, Goldman and de Cleyre respected each other on an intellectual level. In her essay "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation" (German: In defense of Emma Goldman and the right to expropriation) de Cleyre also wrote despite her neutral stance on this question

"I don't think all of New York City's property rights are worth a bit of sensitive human flesh ... I say it is up to you to decide whether to starve and freeze to death in the sight of food and clothing outside of prison, or some overt act against the institution of property and want to take their place next to Timmermann and Goldman. "

- Voltairine de Cleyre : In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation

De Cleyre also distanced himself from individualism in one statement:

Socialism and communism require joint effort and administration, which are more regulation than would be compatible with my ideal of anarchism; Property-based individualism and mutualism involve the development of a private police force, which is not at all compatible with my concept of freedom.

Instead, she became one of the most famous representatives of anarchism without adjectives . In The Making of an Anarchist , she wrote, "I no longer call myself anything other than just 'anarchist'."

“The best thing that ordinary workers could do would be to organize their industry themselves and get rid of the money all together ... Let them produce collectively, in cooperation instead of as employees and hirers; Let them join forces group by group, let everyone use what they need from their products, bring the rest to department stores and let the others take the goods when the opportunity arises. "

- Voltairine de Cleyre : Why I am an Anarchist

There is no consensus on whether Voltairine's rejection of individualism meant a turn to communism. Rudolf Rocker and Emma Goldman asserted this; others - such as her biographer Paul Avrich - reject this.

Direct action

Poster for a commemorative event in 1912

Her 1912 essay on direct action is often quoted today. In this essay, de Cleyre points to examples such as the Boston Tea Party with the note, "Direct action has always been used and is now portrayed as morally reprehensible by those who approve it in historical context" .

feminism

In her 1895 lecture, Sex Slavery , de Cleyre condemned the ideals of beauty that cause women to deform their bodies and the socialization of children, which creates unnatural gender roles . The title of the work does not refer to female prostitution - even if it is mentioned - but rather to the marriage laws, which allowed men to rape their wives without any consequences. Such laws make "every married woman, no matter who she is, a chained slave who takes the name of her master, her master's bread, her master's command, and who serves the passions of her master."

Anti-militarism

She rigorously rejected the standing army on the grounds that its existence increased the likelihood of war. In her 1909 essay Anarchism and American Traditions , she argued that, in order to achieve peace, “all peaceful people should drop support for the army, and demand that anyone wishing to wage war do so at their own expense and risk to do; that neither wages nor pensions should be available for those who decide to make killing a business. "

Legacy

A collection of her speeches - The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895-1910 (The first May 1: The Haymarket -Reden) - was published by the "Libertarian Book Club" in 1980 and 2004, "AK Press" brought The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader. out. In 2005 two further collections of her speeches and articles appeared: at "SUNY Press" came Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine De Cleyre - Anarchist, Feminist, Genius and at the " University of Michigan Press" Voltairine De Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind ( Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Spirit).

literature

Web links

Commons : Voltairine de Cleyre  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Anarchism, 1901
  2. ^ A b People & Events: Voltairine de Cleyre, PBS American Experience
  3. ↑ Presley, Sharon. Exquisite Rebel: Voltairine de Cleyre . Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 6, 2008 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / voltairine.org
  4. ^ Esenwein, George Richard "Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898" [p. 135] (Ex. DA)
  5. ^ Voltairine de Cleyre, "Anarchism," Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre , New York: Mother Earth, 1914, p. 107.
  6. ↑ Presley, Sharon. Exquisite Rebel: Voltairine de Cleyre . Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / voltairine.org
  7. ^ Lecture manuscript. First read at a public event in Philadelphia in April 1901 (Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchy, Vol. 4, p. 453). Printed October 13, 1901 in the Chicago Free Society.
personal data
SURNAME Cleyre, Voltairine de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anarchist and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Leslie (Michigan)
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 1912
Place of death Chicago