The Mostest Anarchist  

These days, and once again, “anarchism” has become an official swear word. For Trump’s Justice (or injustice) Department, every anarchist appears to be a violent member of Antifa, remarkably so because “Antifa” does not actually exist as an organization or even a fixed set of ideas.

A little history should help. Scholars date the rise of anarchism to the early nineteenth century and the British thinker William Godwin, then to the famed utopians like Proudhon. Only with the middle of that century does something clearly and (somewhat) strategically emerge as “anarchism”— simultaneously with something that will compete with Marxism but also serve as a fellow-actor in the global struggle to overcome capitalism.

Johann Most, Life of a RadicalBy Tom GoyensUniversity of Illinois Press; 296 pagesDecember 9, 2025Paperback:  $29.95;  E-book:  $14.95ISBN: 978-0-252-08903-9  and  978-0-252-04847-0 

Even today, after a mountain of scholarly literature in many languages has found its audience, few seem to grasp that until the 1890s at the earliest, these two, mostly competing ideologies had about the same number of sympathizers and activists. Not only did the followers of Bakunin and Marx struggle with each other, but hundreds of thousands of local activists shifted back and forth in ideas and tactics across the US, Europe and far beyond.

Thus Marx’s lieutenant in New York, music teacher Frederich Sorge, famously purged an actual majority of the US wing of the First International in 1871, including nearly all of its women members—denied employment yet still guilty of not being wage earners. They were also suspiciously anarchistic. The mass movement around the struggle for Eight Hour Day, in Chicago (known then as “Little Paris”) a decade later, was nevertheless led by social revolutionaries, i.e., anarchists, with a vigorous press and organized social life behind their politics.

Repression had a terrible effect on anarchists and not only in the US. Nevertheless, until the 1890s at the earliest, anarchists competed freely with socialists, more popular in some places, less in others. After 1900, they held attention in syndicalist-minded labor movements including the IWW, offering to the public talented educators and agitators (free love and abortion, among other sentiments), also experimental education and cooperative community experiments. Among a few groups, Mexican-Americans among them, their influence continued strongly. In general, 1920 marks a downward turning point. As oldtimers told me almost sixty years ago, in letters to the office of magazine Radical America, the world before 1920 had seemed more open as well as more cheerful.  After that, the Russian Revolution offered solace as much as hope. Somewhere, at least, capitalism had been conquered.

Here we come to the magnetic, wild-eyed Johann Most, the very avatar of anarchism. Tom Goyens’ biography is the best writing ever on Most, by a long stretch, and is likely to remain so. The real Most emerges as a highly cultured German artisan by training, a talented and prolific writer and energetic newspaper editor with a powerfully caustic sense of humor. Most of all, however, he was an orator. A bit like Luigi Galleani, the Italian-American anarchist said to set off riots by the sound of his voice, Most stirred the blood of listeners, sometimes to the boiling point.

Most believed through much of his life that he should have had a great destiny as an actor, cut off by a scar caused by an infected jaw, in his youth, treated with surgery that saved his life but also shifted the bones in his face. The effect of this personal tragedy upon his volatile temper has always invited speculation.

Born out of wedlock in 1846 to a would-be musician/actor and the daughter of a military officer, Most showed early promise in school—until expelled, after leading a strike against his French teacher in Augsburg, Germany. As an apprentice and then artisan bookbinder, he traveled widely across Europe. The First International formed in 1864, and as a corresponding secretary for an educational association in Switzerland, he embraced socialistic ideas. By 1871, he had already become a promising and locally admired radical leader. He also experienced the first wave of repression that remained his lot in life.

He could address crowds of thousands in Vienna, entertaining them with jokes and banter along with messages of hatred for the rich. Critics would say that he invited persecution. Indeed, when police in Vienna were given orders to arrest dissidents, Most refused to go into hiding. On the witness stand in 1870, he defended himself with inflammatory language and was convicted of High Treason. Expelled from Austria, he became editor of a socialist newspaper in Chemnitz, Germany. By 1872, under arrest again—falsely convicted for leading a strike that he regarded privately as doomed—he had become a public personality across much of the German-speaking world.

Already, the same year, he published a selection of fifty proletarian songs, some of them his own, at the historical moment when socialist rallies so relied upon camaraderie that prospective attendees were urged to bring along their songbooks! Here, the time and place become especially alive in the biography, inviting us to mull the radical cultures of their time and ours.

It has never been quite accurate to categorize Most as a rigid anarchist, even as he drifted toward that camp around Bakunin rather than Marx. Then and throughout his subsequent activities, he set his task as awakening working people to their proper destiny. Like other German socialists, he looked back upon a (perhaps) egalitarian ancient world, viewing the rise of the State and a propertied ruling class as the antecedent to real progress. Even by the middle 1870s, he proposed a peaceful transformation, first of working class culture itself, and then over property/class conditions, as peacefully as possible.

In 1878, a failed attempt by a lowly plumber to assassinate Emperor Wilhelm I prompted what became known as the “Anti-Socialist Law.” Most lost his editor’s job, his pamphlets were confiscated and a court sentenced him to six months in prison. He fled to London in the last month of that year. There, cafe life glowed with the fire of political exiles from across Europe. It did not help that the German Social Democratic Party formally expelled him, in his absence, in an attempt to make themselves more respectable.

When the Red Scare spread to Britain, he found himself behind bars again and his exile-newspaper, Freiheit, founded in 1879, could no longer be smuggled into Germany. Just a year after he left Germany, he left Europe altogether, for the US. There, he found himself in the fresh excitement of a rising labor movement and a “social revolutionary” following in various cities, mostly but not entirely German-American in composition. His speeches held crowds and his pamphlets circulated widely. He moved Freiheit, more and more an organ of his personal and notably literary expression, across the Atlantic.

For the rest of his life, he struggled to escape the political straight-jacket that the contemporary press put upon him: Most as the apostle of terror. A campaign of assassinations and robberies in Austria and Germany, widely credited to the followers and sometime associates of Most, brought jail sentences and even executions. In the US, and despite persecutions, only the Haymarket Martyrs of Chicago were put to death—on non-existent evidence.

Socialists in the US, seeking to relaunch their movement after several false starts, had attempted to distance themselves from Most and his ideas. The contrast and the hard feelings would remain. More to the point, Most himself or rather his image in newspaper cartoons and drawings, had already come to represent anarchism-in-the-flesh. The police repression in 1886 spread from Chicago across the US, and not only where German-Americans could be found. The same year saw the apex of the Knights of Labor, sweeping through textile villages and factory towns, especially but not only among Irish-Americans. Notwithstanding the peaceful content of the strike wave, meetings were broken up and strikes busted. All of this seemed to push socialists further away from Most.

Meanwhile, Most himself seems to have changed the nature of his anarchist beliefs. By the late 1880s, he felt himself closer to the violence-shunning philosophy of Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. He translated the published pamphlets by the Prince, urging social transformation on a cultural, almost spiritual basis.

He still might have been isolated. Providentially, the 1890s saw the influx of Italian and Jewish immigrants to the US, groups bringing with them their own versions of anarchism. Many Jewish immigrants could read German and catch up with Freiheit, which appeared intermittently. Unlike German-American anarchists, the new Jewish anarchist arrivals flocked to fledgling unions.

Most, meanwhile, found a new companion and, decades after an unsuccessful first marriage in Germany, an eventual second wife, Helene Minkin, who worked in a corset factory but would eventually take over a lot of the production and editorial work of his paper. Emma Goldman, another new acquaintance, became for a while his lover and his student. Each of the women were a generation younger, but Goldman had other lovers while Minkin would be wholly devoted to Most.

Defending himself for an incendiary address in a beer hall in 1889, he became a major figure in the fight for freedom of speech, attracting wide press attention and on his release in 1892, subject of a thunderous welcome in Cooper Union. He also made a further turn toward education, more firmly renouncing individual violence that he had been leaning away from for several years. Emma Goldman, enraged at his disavowal of Alexander Berkman in seeking to assassinate steel executive Henry Clay Frick, leaped onto a stage where Most was speaking and struck him with horsewhip!

He had already signalled his eagerness to encompass an English-speaking audience, but found himself now more interested in the stage where, with a full beard, he could hide his scar. In either language, he could dramatize the struggles of the poor against the rich. His leading performance in Hauptmann’s “Der Weber” (The Weavers) met with audience enthusiasm. He also resumed his lecture appearances, in German and English, to eager audiences, punished by the economic crisis of the 1890s.

The assassination of President McKinley in 1901 inevitably brought a fresh wave of repression, and the commercial press association of anarchism with violence. He went back on trial, this time for the crime of merely publishing Freiheit, and once against faced conviction, with a sentence of a year’s imprisonment. Released from prison at age 57, weakened by age and political frustrations, he resolved to write his memoirs.

Some described Most, at this age, as broken, Yet he set out on one lecture tour after another. Too old to become part of the Industrial Workers of the World at its founding convention in 1905, he had become an admired senior revolutionary. He died on the road in March of that year, leaving behind Minkin and their two sons. At his funeral in Cincinnati, an anarchist choir sang, and the head of the local brewers’ union praised him as the true friend of the working class. Even some of the socialist notables who had attacked him took the opportunity to pay their respect during the very large commemorative event  for him at the Grand Central Palace on 43rd Street, New York.

Most had successfully published three volumes of his memoirs. His widow, working as a midwife in the Bronx, raised the children, wrote her own memoir in the Jewish Forverts, and lived until 1954. I can recall hearing a play-by-play radio broadcast of the Boston Celtics by “the famous Johnny Most” sometime during the 1980s. Like a small number of other listeners, I was sufficiently interested to look up the connection. Johnny, like his father, had a fine speaking voice.##

[Paul Buhle, in youth a syndicalist and later a student syndicalist, has a nagging sympathy for the peaceful wing of anarchism.]

• Anarchism
• anarchists
• Johann Most
• socialism
• socialists
• Revolutionary Thought
• European revolutionary movements
• capitalism
• First International
• Karl Marx
• Marxism
• German working class
• German socialists