Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past

Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past

Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past

Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past

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Overview

In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called “Prison Blossoms.” This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism.

Most of the "Prison Blossoms" were smuggled out of the penitentiary to fellow comrades, including Emma Goldman, as the nucleus of an exposé of prison conditions in America’s Gilded Age. Those that survived relatively unrecognized for a century in an international archive are here transcribed, translated, edited, and published for the first time. Born at a unique historical moment, when European anarchism and American labor unrest converged, as each sought to repel the excesses of monopoly capitalism, these prison blossoms peer into the heart of political radicalism and its fervent hope of freedom from state and religious coercion.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674068186
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 03/01/2012
Series: John Harvard Library Series
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 545 KB

About the Author

Miriam Brody is an independent scholar.

Bonnie Buettner is Senior Lecturer of German Studies at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Contents Note on the Text Introduction by Miriam Brody Part I: Remembering Homestead - The Strike and the Jails 1. Capital and the Battle on the Monongahela / Carl Nold 2. A Fateful Leaflet / Henry Bauer 3. Autobiographical Sketches / Alexander Berkman 4. Jail Experiences / Alexander Berkman 5. Further Arrests / Carl Nold 6. An American Court Farce / Alexander Berkman 7. Two Further Court Farces / Henry Bauer Part II: Debating the Act - Assassination and Propaganda by Deed 8. A Few Words as to My Deed / Alexander Berkman 9. The Red Bugbear / Carl Nold and Henry Bauer 10. Tolstoi or Bakunin? / Carl Nold Part III: Surviving Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary 11. Our Prison Life: Second Half (February 1895- May 1897) / Henry Bauer 12. Penitentiary Administration and Treatment of Prisoners / Henry Bauer 13. The Treatment of Prisoner A-444, in His Own Words / Prisoner A-444 14. The Shop-Screw / Carl Nold 15. The Trusted Prisoner / Carl Nold 16. Dialogue between Two Prisoners / Carl Nold 17. A Morning Conversation between Dutch and Mike (Two Prisoners) / Carl Nold Part IV: Defending Anarchy - The Case against Church and State 18. Prisons and Crime: Punishment - Its Nature and Effects / Alexander Berkman 19. Prisons and Crime: Influence of Prisons on Morals / Alexander Berkman 20. Prisons and Crime: Crime and Its Sources / Carl Nold 21. Libertas: An Orthographical Study / Alexander Berkman 22. The Vision in the Penitentiary Cell / Carl Nold 23. The Sinking Ship: A Parable / Alexander Berkman 24. Winter Sun for My Prison Colleagues M & G, 1 January 1896 / Carl Nold Last Days in the Penitentiary: Excerpts from the Diary of Alexander Berkman Alexander Berkman's Bibliography Notes Further Reading Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Glenn C. Altschuler

At long last, these passionate and perceptive anarchists can be heard! Magnificently edited and masterfully translated, Prison Blossoms should command the attention of anyone interested in the delivery, denial or deferral of justice in the United States.

Glenn C. Altschuler, Cornell University

Mary Fainsod Katzenstein

Prison Blossoms are a distant cousin of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. This book reminds us how much we learn about the self-absorbed center of society from those who are caged in at its margin. A gem of a book.
Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, author of Faithful and Fearless

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