Happy
New Year, and welcome back to the postgraduate run blog for the Andrew Hook Centre for American
Studies at the University of Glasgow. Yesterday, 15th
January 2015, the Centre was pleased to welcome Dr. Michael Collins (University of Kent) to the seventh
lecture of the Centre’s 2014-2015 seminar series. In what was
an engaging and highly informative talk, Dr. Collins discussed ‘Beautiful, Radiant Things: Emma Goldman and
American Anarchist Autobiography.’ This area of research developed out of a Leverhulme Early Career
Fellowship Dr. Collins held at The University of Nottingham and concerns how
realist fiction explores the effect of emergent theories of culture upon
radical, transnational conceptions of class solidarity. Below is this listener’s brief summary of the lecture.
This 1886
engraving was the most widely reproduced image of the Haymarket affair. It
inaccurately shows Fielden speaking, the bomb exploding, and the rioting
beginning simultaneously
Dr. Collins began his lecture by discussing the
so-called Haymarket affair, captured in the photograph above – which Dr.
Collins displayed as he spoke. The Haymarket affair concerned a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday May 4,
1886, at Haymarket Square in the US city of Chicago. It began as a peaceful
rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to
the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. An unknown
person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public
meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven
police officers and at least four civilians; scores of others were wounded.
Over the next few weeks, the authorities rounded
up and detained hundreds of the city’s anarchists. Eight men were put on trial
for murder, the most prominent of whom were Albert Parsons and August Spies
(pronounced ‘Spees’!!). Parsons led the city’s English-speaking anarchists, and
Spies the German-speaking ones. These ‘Chicago Eight’ anarchists were eventually
convicted of conspiracy and here is where Dr. Collins focused his attention,
particularly with regard to how Gilded Age writers interpreted, reported, and
disseminated news of the event. Or more generally, with this event in mind how
the artist might seek to represent anarchism.
Notable figures such as William Morris, Oscar Wilde,
George Bernard Shaw, and Friedrich Engels all signed petitions on behalf of the
condemned anarchists, but the Ohio born author William Dean Howells was
virtually the only American writer to do so. The newspapers mocked him for doing
so – over one of his letters, the Chicago
Tribune printed the snide headline ‘MR. HOWELLS IS DISTRESSED’ – and
called the anarchists Europe’s ‘scum and offal.’ After a number of the
conspirators were hanged, Howells began to work on his book ‘A Hazard of New
Fortunes’ – in which he effectively pours his disillusionment and anger at the
event and its outcome. Here Dr. Collins is able to show how Howells challenged
the paradigm of realist novels of the time, and was able to demonstrate how
social logics were built atop of fundamental flaws. Refusing to engage with the
Haymarket affair in his novel, Howells uses other devices to effectively render
his criticism of the event in the abstract, and thus by extent, that of the
state. Dr. Collins was able to really get to the crux of Howells’ intentions
here, and it proved to be a very interesting segment of the lecture.
Discussing the ideas behind, and the difficulty
of ensuring/translating political representation to notions of anarchism, Dr.
Collins moved on to show the importance of aestheticism and style for these
writers. Indeed, in what proved to be one of the most
illuminating and interesting aspects of the discussion, Dr. Collins highlighted
the importance of this with regard to August Spies – one of the alleged
conspirators of the Haymarket affair. Spies was the
first speaker at the Haymarket rally and left before its fiery conclusion. He
was convicted with the other seven accused, and hanged in 1887. His final words
inspired unionists and anarchists alike: ‘The day will come when our silence
will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.’
As Dr. Collins highlighted, in his
autobiography, Spies effectively subverts many of the common Gilded Age
narrative styles – playing around with notions of birthplace etc., and using
irony to parody realism. Spies chops and changes through styles, and both
punctures the dominant narrative of the time and showcases his own intellect in
the process. Often called ‘a somber narcissist well pleased with his own
learning’, Dr. Collins points out that Spies’ works are an important starting
point for considering anarchism in the Gilded Age.
Indeed, Spies’ works and ideas influenced Emma
Goldman. Like Spies, Goldman believed in the idea that through anarchism you
could rebuild the semblance of the state without much of the
institutions/structures capitalism necessitated. According to Goldman:
Anarchism, then, really stands for the
liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of
the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and
restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free
grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an
order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and
full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires,
tastes, and inclinations (Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 62).
Dr. Collins produced a really insightful talk
that got plenty of us in the audience thinking about the relationship between
history, culture, aestheticism, ethnography, theory, critical thinking, and
more generally American Studies. Informative and engaging, Dr. Collins upcoming
book (currently in print with Michigan Press) will undoubtedly be the same.
By Joe Ryan-Hume
PGR at The University of Glasgow
The Centre’s seminar series will continue
with Dr. Jay Sexton (Oxford University): ‘The Most Important U.S. Company that
you have never heard of.’ It will be held on Wednesday 28th January
2015 in Room 208, 2 University Gardens, at 5.15pm. All very welcome!
