Prison Blossoms : Anarchist Voices from the American Past

by Berkman, Alexander; Bauer, Henry; Nold, Carl; Brody, Miriam; Buettner, Bonnie Cleo

• ISBN13: 9780674050563
• ISBN10: 0674050568
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-05
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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 exposeacute; of prison conditions in Americars"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.

Table of Contents

Note on the Text	p. ix
Introduction	p. xv
Remembering Homestead-The Strike and the Jails
Capital and the Battle on the Monongahela	p. 3
A Fateful Leaflet	p. 10
Autobiographical Sketches	p. 19
Jail Experiences	p. 31
Further Arrests	p. 40
An American Court Farce	p. 53
Two Further Court Farces	p. 63
Debating the Act-Assassination and Propaganda by Deed
A Few Words as to My Deed	p. 79
The Red Bugbear	p. 90
Tolstoi or Bakunin?	p. 96
Surviving Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary
Our Prison Life: Second Half (February 1895-May 1897)	p. 101
Penitentiary Administration and Treatment of Prisoners	p. 108
The Treatment of Prisoner A-444, in His Own Words	p. 132
The Shop-Screw	p. 137
The Trusted Prisoner	p. 142
Dialogue between Two Prisoners	p. 145
A Morning Conversation between Dutch and Mike (Two Prisoners)	p. 147
Defending Anarchy-The Case against Church and State
Prisons and Crime: Punishment-Its Nature and Effects	p. 155
Prisons and Crime: Influence of Prisons on Morals	p. 164
Prisons and Crime: Crime and Its Sources	p. 179
Libertas: An Orthographical Study	p. 192
The Vision in the Penitentiary Cell	p. 199
The Sinking Ship: A Parable	p. 204
Winter Sun for My Prison Colleagues M & G, 1 January 1896	p. 210
Appendix
Last Days in the Penitentiary: Excerpts from the Diary	p. 221
Alexander Berkman's Bibliography	p. 224
Notes	p. 231
Further Reading	p. 250
Acknowledgments	p. 253
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