Tom Goyens. Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2007. 263 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03175-5.
Reviewed by Wolfgang Hochbruck (Englisches Seminar - Nordamerikastudien, Universitaet Freiburg)
Published on H-GAGCS (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Thomas Adam
Mostly Harmless
That a book about New York anarchists should be edited by a press from Illinois is one of the subtle ironies that come with the subject: while most Americans still show an "irrational fear of socialism," let alone anarchism, the few that have ever been brave enough to look into the matter at all are at best familiar with the Chicago anarchists, and have heard of the Haymarket affair (p. 213). Tom Goyens is to be applauded, therefore, for at least trying to start plugging the gap in our knowledge about anarchists and the variety of their associations, activities, and lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when anarchism was strongest around the world and when it first provided a glimpse at a viable alternative to capitalism and its system of reckless exploitation. Furthermore, the approach that he announces at the start is genially adequate to the subject: how can an elusive internationalist idea, such as anarchism, be described in terms of a regional entity? The first of the six chapters into which the book is divided attempts a socio-geographic answer, looking at "the social space for a dissident subculture" and portraying the anarchists of New York very much in the way that the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) appears in the sixth scene of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1922): mostly harmless, big words and revolutionary rhetoric versus a peaceful practice of beer-hall discussions and communal picnics (p. 17). The resulting socio-geographic image of an anarchism that was largely limited to the area between Myrtle and Flushing avenues (see map on p. xi) does a lot to humanize and deflate the stereotypical image of wild-eyed, bushy-haired men in black wielding lighted Mills bombs that the mass media successfully generated and maintained.
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