"American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century"

Michael Willrich, Leff Families Professor of History
Brandeis University

In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement.

In this year's Milton M. Klein Memorial Lecture, historian Michael Willrich will talk about his new book, American Anarchy (Basic Books, 2023), which tells the gripping tale of the anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles over freedom and power still shape our public life.

Michael Willrich is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and the Leff Families Professor of History at Brandeis University, where he has received university-wide prizes for his undergraduate and graduate teaching. He is the author of two previous award-winning books, City of Courts and Pox: An American History, and his writing has been published in the New York Times, New Republic, and Mother Jones.