Anarchist Printers: Material Circuits of Politics
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The New Materialism By “new materialism” I mean those directions of thought that mute the opposition between life and non-life in order to theorize things themselves as “lively.” There are many versions of this line of thought. Jane Bennett explains this liveliness as “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”57 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost call us with some urgency to acknowledge the “restlessness and intransigence” of physical objects; they ask, “How could we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?”58 Bill Brown encourages us to discern the fleeting latency and excess in everyday matter that distinguishes flat objects from vital things: “We look through objects…we catch a glimpse of things.”59 Claiming that “everything exists equally,” Ian Bogost proposes one of the strongest versions of an “object-oriented ontology” that “puts things at the center of being.”60 The new materialism calls on minoritarian resources in the history of western thought - Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty, Latour, Deleuze and Guatarri, and others – to repartition the sensible and create space to think materiality as vital. With Latour, Bennett theorizes things as actants; an actant, she tells us, “has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.”61 Actants are efficacious; they do things. William Connolly finds unexpected phenomenological moments shared by Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Foucault to create an immanent materialism (179). While Coole and Frost position the new materialism as a critique of discourse analysis, the new materialism shares what one might call a methodological attitude with its postmodern compatriots: both are, as Foucault characterizes genealogy, “grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary.”62 The new materialism, Bennett tells us, needs “a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body.”63 Both Foucault’s and Bennett’s invocation of patient attention to detail encourage me to pursue glimpses of actants in the world of anarchist printers. The new materialism does not replace the old, Bennett argues, but leaves room for it while directing attention to a different register of human relations with the other-than-human world. This register Bennett calls “thing power” – “the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.” She points us toward “human-nonhuman assemblage[s]” to discern “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”64 All bodies, Bennett tells us, are affective in that they share “the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness.”65 This is not the same as adding spirit to matter, but rather is tracing the affect of materiality. This perspective seems particularly appropriate to bring to the study of printers and presses, in that the person handling the objects is a hand compositor, composing bodies of text into relation with other bodies to create more powerful bodies.66 If metal, in Bennett’s hands, can be said to have a “life,” then what can we make of the life of a press? What “material recalcitrance” does it offer, what ability does it have to produce effects, to intervene?67 Recalling the artistic performance of a skilled printer, Hicks says that he “played tunes as he handled planer, mallet, and shooting stick, plugged a dutchman here and there in poorly-space ads.” Sometimes the printer was, literally, also a musician; Hicks recalls several events in which printers rustled up some musical instruments and demonstrated their talent. But more importantly, skilled printers could play the presses as though they were musical instruments, something like a song, or perhaps a dance, gracefully holding the composing stick, selecting the sorts one-by-one, and manipulating the rule to set type. Describing another printer’s skill, Hicks likened it to sign language: “When he hit the case, stick in hand, his movements were something like deaf-and-dumb signs in the air, but a steady, sure motion that never permitted him to miss a letter. It was like clockwork.”68 Reporting on a race among compositors in Boston in 1886, the local papers reported that the winner, George Graham, possessed a “smooth grace” and “beautiful motion,” even that “he seems to be touching the type with the tips of his fingers.”69 The manipulation of the sorts, the organization of sorts onto composing sticks, the transfer of the material to the frame – these could take on the grace of song or dance, the press a partner in the performance. Bennett invites us to become vital materialists, to linger in those moments during which [we] find [our]selves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that [we] share with them. This sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the out-side may induce vital materialists to treat nonhumans – animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities – more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically.70 Bennett’s invitation is particularly appropriate for the press and the printing process, as can perhaps be witnessed in the remarkable renaissance of letterpress work in recent years.71 When Bogost encourages us to attend to “the world that sat unconsidered” previously, I suspect that he overplays his hand – the printers, I suggest, have already at least partially blazed that trail.72 Presses, I speculate, lend themselves to the curiosity of vital materialists because printers already have led the way, have cultivated a “direct sensory, linguistic and imaginative attention toward a material vitality.”73 All printers, I imagine, participate in a brain/body/machine assemblage, but that assemblage would probably have been more intense and extensive in anarchist communities, where the press, the printers, and the publications were vital to the politics that held them together. Presses were a nodal point in the anarchist assemblage; they were participants in the “variegated clusters” and “interfolding networks of humanity and non-humanity” that allowed anarchism to be.74 Anarchist confederations, I imagine, consisted of presses and their people, each efficacious for the others, carrying “the power to make a difference that calls for response.”75 The dynamic energies of presses and printers formed an “open whole” in which various relations gathered, folding in some elements, changing some aspects, preserving others, and expelling still others.76 The moments resonate among their elements; everything adjusts. “The press mesmerizes,” comments contemporary printer Allan Runfeldt.77 I doubt that it makes sense to posit the press as having an inner world to which I can gain access, in any but the most poetic and fanciful of ways, but I am confident that the press-printer relation is a two-way street.78 Printer’s sorts can be, for example, corralled and organized in their cases, poised for use; they can be in the tramp printer’s bag, a badge of identity and labor militancy; they can be on the bar, claiming a place for the printer in the premises and securing him/her a drink. The anarchist printer’s body is shaped by engagement with the machine as the printer participates in the ecology of the press. The centrality and vitality of the printer/press relation in anarchist communities may help to explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence, in the face of sustained onslaughts by authorities. Sometimes the work of the printer blurred the distinction between writing text and setting type. Ordinarily, the printers set the words written by reporters or editors; an editor with a “good fist” was one whose handwriting was readily decipherable.79 But many editors’ scrawls required some intervention by the printers, who had to determine what the text should say in order to set the type. Further, some printers were also writers simultaneously. When Jo Labadie wrote for the Detroit labor paper The Socialist, he and his editor Judson Grennell put out the paper in the evenings and on weekends, after leaving their long day’s work at a printing job that paid the bills. “By the light of the kerosene lamp, they stood at a printer’s case on the third floor of the Volksblatt building on Farmer Street, writing and typesetting articles simultaneously to save time.”80 The ability to write an article upside down and backwards suggests a daunting collaboration in the relation of the printer to the press. Presses interacted with printers in a multi-way encounter, so that the press became, as Bennett says, “a force to be reckoned with without being purposive in any strong sense.”81 By now, the “old materialist” is probably shaking her head in disbelief at the new. Anticipating this response, Bennett encourages us to leave room in our thinking for the workings of older materialisms, while still entertaining the possibilities offered by thing power.82 Yet Bennett is willing to risk “a bit of anthropomorphizing” to get at the world Deleuze and Guatarri characterize in A Thousand Plateaus as “matter-movement” or “matter-energy”: In a vital materialism, an anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances, sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to be a hierarchical structure. We at first may see only a world in our own image, but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities (including the seeing self).83 For the old materialists, this risks not just the appearance of foolishness but the loss of grounds for collective struggle. What can we make, at this point, of the incomplete encounter between old and new materialisms? Anarchism itself, as a project to liberate working people from the tyranny of bosses, owners, and their accompanying hierarchies, would make no sense at all absent the framing logic of (some version of) the old materialism. Yet I have tried to show that the constitutive relation of anarchist printers and presses comes into focus more forcefully through the theoretical resources of the new materialism. The relation between them hinges in part, I think, on the question one seeks to answer. Now I turn briefly to the role of women printers, their forceful exclusion and persistent reappearance, to ask what sort of materialist energies are best recruited to understand the world these women made with presses and other printers.
Women had long insisted that they could perform alongside men in most of the workrooms of a printing establishment, certainly newspaper composing rooms. Men, especially union men, insisted they could not. Some reasons were traditional and silly: women were careless, women lacked patience to decipher badly handwritten copy. Above all, women could not take the routine grind. The women might last a day or two, but by midweek, “many a member of the craft was willing to bet…that the ladies would succumb to the strain upon them.” They did no such thing.86 Printers were part of the proletarian elite. Yet, the printing trade was experiencing segmentation, with daily papers separated from the production of books, magazines, posters, and other jobs and threatened by deskilling. Printers tried to preserve their status by hoarding their knowledge, often keeping apprenticeships closed to all but family members. They frequently tried to keep women out, fearing women’s effect as competitors and potential scabs. Cynthia Cockburn sees the printer as a problem for class unity, because as a skilled worker he saw himself as above unskilled laborers as well as “lord of his household,” the breadwinner supporting wife and children. She stresses the significance of the male monopoly on skilled physical labor: “The appropriation of muscle, capability, tools, and machinery by men is an important source of women’s subordination, indeed it is part of the process by which females are constituted as women.”87 The combination women = weak and dependence = feminine policed the gender politics of printing. There was often considerable overlap of jobs in the print industry, especially in the jobs that typically went to men. The compositor was often a “sub-editor, proofreader, engineer, press feeder, ad solicitor” as well. Journalists often started out as printers; editors drafted printers to report or edit; printers move up to be successful editors. Many famous writers started out as printers.88 The more humble itinerant printers recalled by Hicks, Howells and Deacon, and Boutin were proud of the brotherhood they shared with their famed colleagues: Mark Twain, Hicks remarks, was “proud of his ability as a printer.” A young printer named Burns Mantle became a highly regarded New York drama critic, and “to the day of his death… carried a paid-up working card in the Denver Typographical Union.” Editor and reformer Horace Greeley was president of New York typographical local #6 and famously remarked, “A printer’s case is a better education than a high school or a college.”89 Walt Whitman was a skilled printer who stayed involved in the production process: one scholar notes, “Whitman did not just write his book, he made his book, and he made it over and over again, each time producing a different material object that spoke to its readers in different ways.”90 The literary successes of former printers elevated the intellectual life of all printers. Women’s usual labor in the trade as a whole, in contrast, offered fewer such opportunities. Women’s work was largely in the feeding of the press, collating and folding of the paper, and stitching of the binding. These jobs were called unskilled because women did them and they were less likely to lead to higher positions.91 Additionally, proofreading was often considered women’s work. The gender segregation in the industry at large continued through the mid-twentieth century: a 1947 recruitment film for the printing industry, entitled “Letterpress Printing Vocational Film” reveals the same general division of labor. 92 One of the ways that women’s exclusion was enforced was to keep women out of the workplaces and unions. Male journeymen dominated the larger newspapers, where pay was highest, and women tended to work for book publishers or small job-printing shops, where pay and professional standing were diminished. The culture of the saloon, print shop and union hall was often hostile to women. The press and its objects could be vehicles for that hostility. The “sharp eyes and sensitive fingers” of the printers allowed them to recognize fonts by feel. Sorts generally possessed a “nick,” a single indent on the side to assist compositors in aligning the sorts, which had to be picked up one at a time and assembled on the stick. Printer Ted Morse recalls, “The right hand forefinger touching the nicks of foundry type being assembled into lines in the stick was part of the skill of hand-setting for 500 years.” Morse goes on to note the convenience of the nick for mocking women printers: “The ‘feel’ acquired by astute journeymen in hand-setting extended to nicknaming female printers ‘two nicks.”93 The ITU, too, was initially a site of exclusion: from its inception in 1852 until 1869, the union excluded women. In 1869, New York compositor Augusta Lewis started Women’s Typographical No 1, “the first all-female labor union in the country.” In 1870, a Boston printer named Mrs. Lane attempted a similar move but was unsuccessful. Over the next 16 years, some ITU locals “reluctantly opened their doors to women,” while others, including Boston’s local no. 13, refused, until events initiated by women printers, below, induced change.94 The change was enabled by one of the popular typesetting races, which ordinarily excluded women. When George Graham was crowned “the champion typesetter of all New England” in Boston in 1886, the first and, it turns out, last women’s contest was also allowed. The host of the contest, Austin & Stone’s Dime Museum, “staged the women’s contest to be identical to the men’s in every way” except for those circumstances that disadvantaged the women, such as the nearby distractions of loud music and noisy performing monkeys, along with a shortage of the right kind of sorts. The race was won by Miss L. J. Kenney, with Miss White coming in second and Miss Francis, third. All three of them scored higher than all the male typesetters in the men’s race, including “the champion of all New England.” Kenney beat Graham by 950 ems, White by 650 ems, and Francis by 475 ems.95 The men now faced a dilemma, which they cleverly resolved by lying about the circumstances of the race while making sure there was never another one. The printers’ account of the races, as told in A Collation of Facts Relative to Fast Typesetting, mentioned that the women had been reported to outscore the men but opined that “much latitude was allowed the ladies in the matter of time and proofs, [so] their scores cannot take rank as genuine records.”96 This untruth may have saved face but was evidently insufficient as a plan, because Boston Local 13 of the ITU began discussions about admitting women days after the race, and acted to do so four months later. Rumble comments, “Hoping to contain what it could not conquer, Boston’s printing union acted expeditiously to bring women into the fold.” For good measure, there was never another race at which men’s and women’s performance could be compared.97 A somewhat more felicitous situation could be found among anarchist women printers. Lillian Harmon was compositor for the anarchist journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, edited by her father Moses Harmon, and co-editor of another anarchist journal, Fair Play, with her partner E.C. Walker. We can infer her skill by the drop in quality of the journal when she was imprisoned, as well as her father’s laments. Moses Harmon was reduced to putting out the journal singlehandedly when his daughter and partner were imprisoned for cohabitation, and he asked his readers for forbearance since he did not have the skill to match Lillian’s work.98 Georgia Replogle set type and co-edited the individualist anarchist journal Egoism. Adalgisa Guabello immigrated with her brother Paolo to Paterson, NJ, in 1904 and became active in the Italian anarchist movement; she worked in the print shop of her husband, anarchist Alberto Guabello.99 Emma Langdon was a printer in Colorado, where she published the Cripple Creek Record singlehandedly after the male workers were jailed for criticizing the mining companies; she was later honored by the anarchist-friendly Western Miners Federation.100 With her husband Maximiliano Olay, Anna Olay operated the Spanish Labor Press Bureau, a news service of the Spanish anarchists during their revolution and civil war.101 Margaret Anderson, co-editor of the anarchist-oriented Little Review, had been a printer.102 Anarchists Sonya Deanim printed and clandestinely distributed Frayhayt, while Brona Greenburg ran an underground press in Warsaw in the 1930s.103 Teenage sisters Helen and Olivia Rosetti edited and printed The Torch in London.104 Lois Waisbrooker edited, wrote, and set type for Our Age, Foundational Principles, and Clothed with the Sun.105 These examples suggest that, among the anarchists, women frequently both wrote and produced the journals and continued to work as compositors while they wrote and edited. While gender equality was generally endorsed, at least in theory, among anarchists, nonetheless the journal Egoism hosted a debate over women printers that echoed the disputes in the larger publishing world. In the December, 1891 issue, Editor and compositor Georgia Replogle defended women printers’ right to equal pay for equal work and praised the quality of their work. The highly respected editor of Liberty, individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, argued against; he maintained that, “Apart from the special inferiority of woman as printer…there exists the general inferiority of women as worker...”106 The curmudgeonly Tucker stood out in anarchist circles for his stubborn insistence that women printers should be paid less than men, even when their work is of equal quality.107 Serving as both writer and printer, Replogle pointed out in reply that in San Francisco, where Egoism was produced, 105 of the working union printers were women and were paid equal wages; she took this as “strong evidence that at least that fraction of the sex had practically mastered the accomplishment.” Similarly, in other west coast cities, Replogle noted that in one a woman was foreman, in another the head of advertising: “ …so far as personal observation goes, the women seem as useful as the men. They work as steadily, as fast, require no different accommodations, and their product sells for the same price in the market.”108 To my knowledge, Tucker never acknowledged the irony of carrying on this rather surly dispute in the beautifully printed pages of Georgia Replogle’s journal. Conclusion At the turn of the last century, 56 U.S. cities had socialist mayors, and several states elected socialists to their legislatures and even to the Congress. Eugene Debs received a million votes for president. The IWW blossomed, as did anarchist schools and colonies. Hundreds of radical periodicals by anarchists, socialists, trade unionists, feminists, and other progressives flourished. The world of anarchist printers and presses was woven into that place and time. Looking back, it is difficult to grasp an America that routinely elects socialists and cannot, despite extreme official efforts, repress the vigorous anarchist political communities that formed around their many hundreds of publications. Anarchist presses, printers, and publications were nodal points in the production of that America. Their contribution to the “circuit of communication” did not simply reflect anarchist politics; they produced it, and produced each other, through their vigorous interactions.109 There were so many papers, so many printers, that the printer/press relation saturated the anarchist subculture; they were nodes in networks out of which anarchist politics and publics emerged. Their work, as Hoyt concludes about Abate and Galleani, “manages to linger on, whispering to us a century later.”110 Anarchism is incomprehensible, I provisionally conclude, without bringing to bear the resources of both the old and the new materialisms.111 For example, apprehending the struggles of the women printers requires continued infusions of insight from the Marxist-feminist and anarchist-feminist inspired old materialism. Women were positioned differently in the family structures and class orders, and the patriarchal and capitalist logic of their lives is central to a successful understanding today. Misses Francis, Kenney, and White, for instance, likely cultivated a structural analysis of the obstacles to their success as printers. The joker who substituted sorts carrying two nicks, rather than the standard one, in the women’s cases at the Boston race was reinforcing a structural subordination, not simply having a laugh at the women’s expense. The double nick initially threw Miss Francis off her stride, but she recovered, and on the second day the women solved the problem by “attentively distribut[ing] their own type.”112 At the same time, the remarkable story of the women’s race comes alive at a different level when folded in with the analytic energies of the new materialism. When the unexpected twin-nicked sorts confounded Miss Francis, we might see that as a moment when the printer confronted what Bill Brown calls “the thingness of objects”: We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working or us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.113 The sorts stopped working, acting on Miss Francis who in turn adjusted her encounters with the sorts in order to reduce the number of turned letters. Similarly, the utter perfection of Miss Kenney’s performance suggests an aesthetic invoked by Hicks as a song or a dance; Miss Kenney, “in her graceful way… simply never made mistakes.”114 Bystanders noticed that the women were not primarily trying to beat each other. They were trying to beat the men, and they succeeded. Imagine the remarkable sensory encounter required, the intense concentration and the flying hands, which would have been required to never make a mistake. By the second day of the women’s weeklong race, the hall hosting the competition was filled with male compositors, “earnestly interested in seeing how well the thing could be done.” “‘No mistake,’ mused one, ‘they can set type.”115 1 Introduction, “Joseph Ishill and the Authors and Artists of the Oriole Press,” http://www.lib.umich.edu/joseph-ishill-authors-artists-oriole-press/ (Feb 3, 2012) (accessed 9/9/12). 2 Anderson, All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), p. 59. 3 Andrew Hoyt, “Carlo Abate, Luigi Galleani, and the Art of the Cronaca Sovversiva,” (Unpublished paper, Department of American Studies, University of Minnesota, 2011), pp. 8, 23. 4 My thanks to my colleague Michael Shapiro for this felicitous phrase and for countless other insights. 5 Kenyon Zimmer, “The Whole World is Our Country”: Immigration and Anarchism in the United States, 1885-1940” (doctoral dissertation, Dept of History, University of Pittsburgh, 2010), Appendix A, pp. 480-484. 6 “Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice,” Letter from the Attorney General, Nov 17, 1919, 66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate, doc No. 153 Washington: Gov Printing Office, 1919,” p. 12 7 Jon Bekken, “The First Anarchist Daily Newspaper: The Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung,” Anarchist Studies 3 (1995): 10 3-23. 8 Bekken, p. 11 9 Zimmer, bet 10 and 13. 10 Kathy E. Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), chapter two. 11 John Edward Hicks, Adventures of a Tramp Printer, 1880-1890 (Kansas City, MO: Midamericana Press, 1950): 110. Hicks was not a self-identified anarchist, and in his autobiography pays scant attention to the ideological perspective of the scores of papers for which he worked, although printers in general were a left-of-center lot with strong union ties. My reading of the biographies and autobiographies of printers suggests that, especially for the itinerants, life and labor was structured much the same, regardless of ideological differences. 12 Howells and Dearman, Tramp Printers (Pacific Grove, CA: Discovery Press, 1996), “The Second Revolution: Linotype,” para 5. 13 From FRITZ1 in conversation on Briar Press website “Linotype vs. handset ID?” on http://www.briarpress.org/29099 (accessed 8/26/12). 14 Hicks, find page. 15 Charles Pierce Le Warne, Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975, p. 208. The precise dates of publication of The Word were 1872-1890 and 1892-1893; publication was interrupted by the two years Haywood spent in prison after his conviction of sending obscene material (in this case, anarchist analyses of love, sexuality and marriage) through the mail. 16 Anderson, 212. 17 Hicks, pp. 101, 228. 18 Walker Rubble tells the story of Joe McCann, who migrated from Ireland, armed with the Dublin Typographical Provident Society’s union card and the “foreign immigration allowance” the union provided. “Printing unions everywhere sponsored migration as a means of regulating workforce and wages.” Tramping was “an honorable, even mythic aspect of the life.” (Rubble, “From the Shop Floor…” p. 89) 19 My thanks to Duncan Dempster, Art Department, University of Hawai’i, for his explanation and demonstration of various presses (8/26/12). See also Burr, 51-52. 20 Walker Rumble, “From the Shop Floor to the Show: Joseph W. McCann, Typesetting Races, and Expressive Work in 19th –Century America,” Journal of Popular Culture, p 90. 21 Hicks, p. 16. 22 Anderson, 36-37. 23 Cynthia Cockburn, “The Material of Male Power,” Feminist Review 9 (August 1981): p. 44. 24 Anderson, 188, 156. 25 Hicks, 25, 225. 26 Hicks, 16, 21. 27 Rumble, “From the Shop Floor,” p. 87, 88. 28 Rumble, “From the Shop Floor,” p. 91. 29 Rumble, “From the Shop Floor,” p. 87. 30 Rumble, “A Showdown of ‘Swifts’: Women Compositors, Dime Museums, and the Boston Typesetting Races of 1886,” The New England Quarterly Vol 71, No. 4 (December, 1998): 617, 618. 31 Rumble, “From the Shop Floor,” pp. 88, 90. 32 Hicks, p. 35. 33 Hicks, p. 19. 34 Jules Tygiel, “Tramping Artisans: Carpenters in Industrial America, 1880-90,” in Eric H. Monkkonen, Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 92. 35 Rumble, “From the Shop Floor,” p. 89. 36 Hicks, pp. 30, 21, 116; see also Howells and Dearman’s chapter on the Missouri River pirates. 37 For accounts of women tramp printers, see Howells and Dearman, pp. 103-121. 38 Hicks, pp. 12, 176, 28, 107, 172, 175, 42, 17, 216. Hicks recalls these establishment as friendly to tramp printers: Billy Beebe’s saloon in St. Louis (p. 46); The Galt House in St. Joseph (p. 51); Tom Quick’s saloon and gambling parlor in Lincoln (p. 77); George and Charles Jessup’s place, “The Soup,” on West Madison St in Chicago. The Jessup brothers were themselves printers. “Ordinarily, Indianapolis was avoided as it was a rather low-rate town.” (p. 109) 39 Anderson, p. 38. 40 Hicks, pp. 13, 161, 36. 41 Anderson, p. 24 . 42 Hicks, p. 110. 43 Typographical Journal (Washington D.C.: Communications Workers of America, July 15, 1889): 6; quoted in Anderson, 38. 44 Anderson, p. 38. 45 Hicks, pp. 200, 279. 46 Hicks, pp. 149, 157, 51, 13. 47 Bekken, p. ?. 48 Hicks, pp. 175-76. 49 Otto J. Boutin, A Catfish in the Bodoni (St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press, 1970), pp. 2, 3. 50 Hicks, p. 130. 51 Hoyt, pp. 4 fn 4, p. 9 fn 15, 13, 15, 16-17. 52 Alexander Lawson, The Compositor as Artist, Craftsman, and Tradesman (Athens, GA: Press of the Nightowl, 1990) quoted in Rumble, “From the Shop Floor,” p. 100. 53 Rumble, “Shop Floor,” p. 100. 54 Anderson, p. 243. 56 Colin Ward, The Self-Employed Society, http://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/en/Ward_Colin_-_A_SELF-employed_society.html (accessed 9/9/12). 57 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. viii. 58 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics (Raleigh, SC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 1. 59 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 4. 60 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 6. 61 Bennett, p viii. 62 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Donald F. Bouchard, ed, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 139. 63 Bennett, p. xiv. 64 Bennett, p. xvi, 6. 65 Bennett, p. xii. 66 I am paraphrasing Deleuze and Guatarri, One Thousand Plateaus, 257. 67 Bennett, pp. 1, 5, 9. 68 Hicks, pp. 14, 7, 76, 13. 69 Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 621. 70 Bennett, pp. 17-18. 71 See, for example, Kiss the Paper, a film by Fiona Otway (fionaotway.com). 72 Bogost, p. 1. 73 Bennett, p. 19. 74 Bennett, pp. 23, 31. 75 Bennett, p. 32. 76 Bennett, p.35. 77 See Kiss the Paper (fionaotway.com) (accessed 9/9/12). 78 Bogost’s determination to shed the human-centric is often fun, but less politically useful than Bennett’s more modest exploration of actants. 79 Hicks, p. 25. 80 Anderson, p. 51. 81 Bennett, p. 3. 82 Bennett, p. xvi. 83 Bennett, p. 99. Bennett cites Deleuze and Guatarri on p. 54, passim. 84 Ava Baron, “Contested Terrain Revisited: Technology and Gender Definitions of Work in the Printing Industry, 1850-1920,” in Barbara D. Wright, et al, eds., Women, Work and Technology: Transformations (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 69. 85 Burr, p. 54. 86 Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 626. 87 Cockburn, pp. 41, 44 (italics in original). 88 Hicks, pp. 13, 135, 151, 188, 199. 89 Hicks, p. 49, 104, 113, 270. 90Ed Folsom, “Whitman Making Book/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary,” The Walt Whitman Archive http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00150.html) (accessed 9/7/12). 91 Cockburn, p. 48. 92 Burton Holmes Films, Chicago, 1947 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=bPCiWiLu-W4) (accessed 9/1/12). 93 Ted Morse, “Twin-Nick Printers,” in Howells and Dearson, p.120. 94 Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 628. 95 Rumble, “Showdown,” pp. 615, 625. 96 William C. Barnes, Joseph W McCann and Alexander Digit, A Collation of Facts Relative to Fast Typesetting (NY: Concord Cooperative Printing Company 1887) p. 28; cited in Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 61). 97 Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 628. 98 See the issues of 18XX for Moses’s comments as well as the uncharacteristically sloppy copy. 99 Zimmer 133, 166; Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina, 2010), p. 153. 100 Richard O. Boyer & Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (NY: Cameron and Associates, 1955): 152-153. 101 Zimmer, p. 424. 102 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (NY: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 266. 103 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), pp. 336, 465. 104 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (NY: Dover, 1970), p. 165. 105 Passet, p. 237. 106 Tucker, in Liberty 5 (May 12, 1888): 1, quoted in Margaret S. Marsh, “The Anarchist-Feminist Response to ‘The Woman Question’ in the late Nineteenth Century,” American Quarterly XXX: 4 (Fall 1978): 543. 107 Egoism Vol II: (Oct 1891): pp. 2-3. 108 Egoism Vol II, no. 8 (Dec 1891): 1. 109 For an interesting discussion of circuits of communication, see Laurel Brake, “Writing, cultural production, and the periodical press in the nineteenth century,” in J.B. Bullen, ed., Writing and Victorianism (Essex: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), pp. 54-72. 110 Hoyt, p. 24. 111 Many other questions about the relations of old and new materialism might be explored within the world of the anarchist printers. We could explore further the relation of thing power to commodity fetishism. The communist and collectivist anarchists would be the first to object that, in a society based on private ownership of resources and vast inequality, respecting the object becomes too close to “respecting private property” which becomes a mandate to “respect capitalism.” Yet, the individualist anarchists praised small-scale private ownership for reasons that come close to the new materialists’ respect for things. The individualist anarchists loved tools – the beauty and independence of owning your own tools, of controlling your access to the things you need to make your life. These anarchists are weirdly claimed by right wing libertarians today, but Replogle, Tucker and others weren’t defending corporate capitalism; they were cultivating both the independence of making a living and the elegance of the tools. 112 Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 626. 113 Brown, p. 4. 114 Rumble, “Showdown,” p. 624. 115 Boston Globe, 28 Feb 1886, p. 6, quoted in Walker, “Showdown,” p. 626. Bibliography “Anarchist Printer, The” u-tube.com/watch?v=gFZk_wOevc8) (accessed 9/11/12). Anderson, Carlotta, All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005) Baron, Ava, “Contested Terrain Revisited: Technology and Gender Definitions of Work in the Printing Industry, 1850-1920,” in Barbara D. Wright, et al, eds., Women, Work and Technology: Transformations (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1987): 58-83. Bekken, Jon, “The First Anarchist Daily Newspaper: The Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung,” Anarchist Studies 3 (1995): 3-23. Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Bogost, Ian, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Boutin, Otto J., A Catfish in the Bodoni (St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press, 1970). Richard O. Boyer & Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (NY: Cameron and Associates, 1955). Briar Press, “Linotype vs. handset ID?” http://www.briarpress.org/29099 (accessed 8/26/12). Brown, Bill, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1-23. Burr, Christina, “Defending ‘The Art Preservative’: Class and Gender Relations in the Printing Trades Unions, 1850-1914,” Labor/Le Travail vol 31 (Spring, 1993): 47-73. Burton Holmes Films, Chicago, 1947 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=bPCiWiLu-W4) (accessed 9/1/12). Cockburn, Cynthia, “The Material of Male Power,” Feminist Review 9 (August 1981): 41-58. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics (Raleigh, SC: Duke University Press, 2010). Deleuze, Jacques, and Felix Guatarri, One Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Christianity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Ferguson, Kathy E., Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). Ed Folsom, “Whitman Making Book/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary,” The Walt Whitman Archive http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00150.html) (accessed 9/7/12). Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Donald F. Bouchard, ed, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977): 139-164. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (NY: Dover Publications, 1970). Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1931. Guglielmo, Jennifer, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina, 2010). Hicks, John Edward, Adventures of a Tramp Printer, 1880-1890 (Kansas City, MO: Midamericana Press, 1950). Howells, John, and Marion Dearman, Tramp Printers (Pacific Grove, CA: Discovery Press, 1996). Hoyt, Andrew, “Carlo Abate, Luigi Galleani, and the Art of the Cronaca Sovversiva,” (Unpublished paper, Department of American Studies, University of Minnesota, 2011). Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, Letter from the Attorney General, Nov 17, 1919, 66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate, doc No. 153 Washington: Gov Printing Office, 1919. “Joseph Ishill and the Authors and Artists of the Oriole Press,” http://www.lib.umich.edu/joseph-ishill-authors-artists-oriole-press/ (Feb 3, 2012) (accessed 9/9/12). Le Warne, Charles Pierce, Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975). Marsh, Margaret S., “The Anarchist-Feminist Response to ‘The Woman Question’ in the late Nineteenth Century,” American Quarterly XXX: 4 (Fall 1978): 533-547. Passet, Joan E., “Power through Print: Lois Waisbrooker and Grassroots Feminism in Women,” in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Ed James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006): 229-250. Rumble, Walker, “From the Shop Floor to the Show: Joseph W. McCann, Typesetting Races, and Expressive Work in 19th-Century America,” Journal of Popular Culture pp. 87-101. Rumble, Walker, “A Showdown of ‘Swifts’: Women Compositors, Dime Museums, and the Boston Typesetting Races of 1886,” The New England Quarterly Vol. 71, No. 4 (December 1998): 615-628. Stansell, Christine, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (NY: Henry Holt, 2000). Tygiel, Jules, “Tramping Artisans: Carpenters in Industrial America, 1880-90,” in Eric H. Monkkonen, Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 87-117. Ward, Colin, The Self-Employed Society, http://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/en/Ward_Colin_-_A_SELF-employed_society.html (accessed 9/9/12). Washick, Bonne and Elizabeth Wingrove, “Politics that Matter: Thinking about Power and Justice with the New Materialists,” paper presented at the Western Political Science Association Annual meeting, 2012. Zimmer, “The Whole World is Our Country”: Immigration and Anarchism in the United States, 1885-1940” doctoral dissertation, Dept of History, University of Pittsburgh, 2010. 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