Claire Santry's "The Family Tree Irish Genealogical Guide": Book Review

This is the best resource in print on Irish genealogical research that I have found. I had to learn some of this advice the hard way, before the internet eased the process. Claire Santry had the advantage of accessing much online as well as onsite, and she shows how the first stage can be done before one visits Ireland. Key to success is matching the surname back to its townland--the small area that as she informs, was what a cow could graze on. This focuses an investigation on its narrowest set of data.

She intersperses her suggestions with a general history of Irish events and situations that affected the records extant. While for many of Catholic origins, the trail will end around the middle of the 19th century, she shows how landlords, neighbors, witnesses at marriages and baptisms, and other friends of the family, so to say, can orient a seeker who may have a common surname, common first names, and many families of that line in the same region, or different ones. Particularly helpful are patterns of naming children based on their relatives and ancestors: the reason why so few names are often used, and why they keep repeating down the generations in records or lore, complicating the quest.

The records transcribed or microfilmed are gradually archived online, some free, some not. Santry gives detailed directions on how to organize one's notes, and how best to proceed online so as to get as much of a sense of the local area as possible, before ideally a visit. Civil registrations, church records, census, land and property, newspaper, police gazette, military, and probate documents all are mentioned and often illustrated. Deciphering Latin abbreviations in parish registers is challenging; the appendix provides help. From my experience and I assume hers, the state of the online uploads as to legibility does not improve at all on the physical microfilm in many cases, so be forewarned.

From Santry's book, I learned a few new tricks. Findmypast is a site I'd never seen, linked to the 1749 Diocese of Elphin census, valuable for Co. Roscommon information in my own case. Griffiths Valuations are a lot easier to read than when I needed them on microfilm, and the National Archives of Ireland now has some land valuation notebooks I spent hours paging through in person uploaded.

Connaught and Munster databases for landed estates are now online, as are some Irish and British newspapers (some in my search behind paywalls). Finally, headstones by the thousands in photos and transcriptions are now also on the web. Such tidbits collect rich knowledge in one handy guidebook.

Therefore, lists of genealogy centers, local history organizations, libraries and government offices are also appended, as firsthand encounters may have to be done when net-working only takes one so far. Both American and Irish databases are covered, as well as some British ones, which will please the many millions descended from mid-19c emigrants. The book's narrative concludes with a couple of case studies, showing from researchers how they successfully navigated their way through the data.

I'd add that for certain surnames, blogs or discussion groups or websites are often recommended, as you may find that others have preceded or paralleled your path. I found this out years after my own search of primary records seen in Irish record keeping offices, but at least that then verified my own findings--and that the "tree" on Ancestry-com had an error due to that mixing of common first names and surnames that may likely bedevil even the most diligent tracker, due to traditional naming patterns. I'd add a final caution that even at the parish or townland level, you may find repetition among different families, often related of course, sharing surnames that concentrate very locally. (Amazon US 5-18-17)

Sebastian Barry's "Days Without End": Book Review

Sebastian Barry, in six previous novels (as well as his play The Stewart of Christendom) takes inspiration from his family members, past and present. More than one Barry narrative features the McNulty clan from the Irish port of Sligo. Days Without End sidles back before The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and A Long, Long Way. Barry credits not only the rumor of a great-great uncle "in the Indian Wars" but he dedicates this latest installment to his son Toby, who has come out as gay.

Whereas those two earlier McNulty fictions began as a Great War shattered peace, this densely allusive, self-aware new narrative begins with the Famine, sending in 1847 thirteen-year-old Tommy McNulty off to Canada on a "fever ship," and then to Missouri. In Daggsville, a town as unpromising as its moniker suggests, he meets his lover, John Cole. Fifty-odd years later, Thomas tells us of their pairing: "We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world." They dress in a "comely fashion" as dance partners to entice lovelorn miners, desperate to be fooled by feminine wiles. During Tommy's teens, this stratagem succeeds. With maturity, illusion withers. The partners join the Army. Heading west, they meet what they expect.

"To tell a story I have to trust it but I can issue a warning like a ticket master issuing a ticket for a western-bound train that will be obliged to go through wilderness, Indians, outlaws, and storms." Thomas's adventures turn bleak in Northern California. Summoned against the Yuroks, soldiers massacre women and children and their "braves." Troops are fooled by darkness, driven by frenzy.

The victors bury corpses. Enlisted men fill in the pits with dirt "like we were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies." Arresting phrases and novel images sharpen this blunt coming-of-age story. Barry balances beauty with horror.  Bloody duties order Thomas and John back and forth across the expanding 1850s frontier. "We wanted the enemy stilled and destroyed, so that we could live ourselves." Thomas recites the details of how these men (un-)settled themselves, unflinchingly. "A man's memory might have only a hundred days in it; he has lived thousands." Death watches it all.

Such a conflict wearies them. Their sergeant ages. Thomas reflects: "Like we got ten faces in our lives and we wear them one by one." For a while, these two young men return to their theatrical niche. In Grand Rapids they court gypsum miners. "We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards." For a while, this satisfies the couple. "Out on stage we hear the first skits going over the footlights like crates of delicious apples. Thomas gets to wear a dress and don female frippery, and does so away from the limelight. But a greater campaign empties Michigan mines of men. John and Thomas join their old sergeant, who recruits both into a Massachusetts Irish regiment.

Marched into Northern Virginia, Union ranks await battle: "Fear like a bear in the cave of banter." After this slaughter, Thomas notices that land wrest back its dominion. "The whippoorwill will call forever over these snowy meadows. But the tents are temporary." That weather worsens along with the plight of the regiment hacking its way into Tennessee. The Deep South holds a fate for the "Feds" which many novelists have evoked. Sebastian Barry, as these excerpts attest, strives to capture the Joycean tone of his storyteller, infused with Barry's small slips of verse within his very stylized prose.

A longtime fellow fighter muses of the typical Irishman in these ranks: "the trouble with him is he thinks when he is bid to do a thing." Independence may be idealized by patriots, but not among the military. "That ain't a good trait in a soldier." Barry channels through Thomas a liberal sympathy for those he must shoot, whether Native Americans or "yellowlegs" with strange accents in butternut rags. The latter foe shrinks as thin as wraiths. Rebels weaken on "fingers" of cornbread, filthy water.

The latter part of this chronicle continues in the pattern of the Western first half. As with another saga which took up the adventures of the Irish during this era, the film Gangs of New York, the scope of Barry's project strains to encompass both the tumult of the decades before the Civil War as well as the conflagrations in the days of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. While Barry avoids repetition, such elaboration of suffering weighs down Days Without End to resemble its eternal title. Thomas repeats the moral of all this mess. "Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too."

The soldiers respect justice despite slaughter. Their "cold brutal war" on the plains and in the hollows reveals how an armed man keeps "a queer spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that's just a fact." Thomas as he retraces his itinerary into "o'erwhelming country" to rescue Winona, a Sioux girl he had adopted fifteen years earlier (it's a winding subplot), reflects on parallels between the persecuted in his homeland and the Irishman's fate as another empire's cannon fodder and shock troops. "Now we make them this American paradise. Guess it were strange so many Irish boys doing this work." In Indian Territory Thomas peers at displaced natives. "Every face before us looks like it were slapped."

Through many plot complications, Thomas tries to sustain his hard-won family, with one old black veteran, Winona, and himself, part of "a white couple." He tries to settle down. "I hitch up my skirts good as any country girl and I work beside the men. Yet, no retreat from guns and violence lasts long in a violent depiction of more than one American lust. "Flowers draw bees and gold draws thieves."

As Days Without End rambles on, its body count rises. Old haunts spark new hatreds. Reconstruction and the clearance of natives from the supposedly tamed frontier wear down resistance against this relentless Union. "We blunder through and call it wisdom but it ain't." Facing his latest in a series of forced emigrations, Thomas reasons: "The ones that don't try to rob me will feed me. That's how it is in America." Dramatizing an omnipresent imperial force, this picaresque yarn speaks for its perpetrators and victims, ordinary men, women, and children. Even if Thomas's yarn relies more than once as a Western tall tale may, on sudden coincidence and daring rescues in the nick of time: "He just appeared like an angel, I says." So does Thomas, but readers of his account may forgive him for these interventions. After all, Thomas won his place on stage and behind a skirt, fooling in turn many.
(PopMatters 3-27-17)

David M. Emmons' "Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910": Book Review

"Beyond the pale" originated from the limits, the palisades that the Normans erected around their incursions encircling Dublin. Outside of that tamed territory, Hibernian natives lurked, uncivilized according to the conquerors' suppositions. David Emmons, historian at the University of Montana, adapts this title cleverly. For in the American expansion, the immigrant Irish were also seen by Protestant counterparts as inferior, and relegated to the margins socially and spatially. In the growing U.S., contrary to stereotype, some “two-boat” Irish Catholics settled for neither shanty nor tenement. 

Industry demanded cheap, expendable frontier labor. The mines and mills erected, often by Protestant capitalists, attracted desperate Irish. Outnumbered, they formed communities and institutions to secure themselves in hostile territory. Having studied this phenomenon in the Irish-dominated enclave of Butte, Emmons in this follow-up expands his focus to eight different concepts of "the West" in the American imagination and fact. He compares or contrasts Irish Catholic experiences with those of black slaves and Native Americans, broadening this 2011 book's relevance today. 

It rewards careful reading. It's accessible, with folk stories and testimonies drawn from archival research. Its hundred-page list of documentation attests to Emmons' scope and discipline. Attention to detail regarding his claims, therefore, is expected.

The local insistence on camaraderie given dangerous jobs and social prejudice meant many Irish newcomers rallied together in their camps and towns. Emmons suggests that in a land where the future meant to go West, the Irish for their own survival might have cut themselves off from joining this enormous juggernaut. Faced with anti-Catholic discrimination and anti-Irish sentiment, they found themselves beyond the pale again, gathered in their clans, defensive against an all-too-familiar aggressor. (Spectrum Culture for "Our Favorite Books Read in 2016" staff list 12/18/16; Amazon US 11/16/16)

"A Clann Díbeartha"

To follow-up my previous entry on the Irish in Montana, here's a link to the Indiegogo crowdfunding project. This is to help generate income for three documentary films proposed by the local historians. This is a worthy endeavor to document the contributions to Irish culture from its Western heartland, part of Big Sky dynamism.

Information about the three films is here. There's one on Thomas Francis Meagher, the Fenian felon turned famed escapee, then Civil War veteran, and finally two-time Territorial Governor. There's another on Marcus Daly, who rose from poverty in Co. Cavan as the Anaconda mining magnate and one of America's richest men. Finally, there's a tribute to two founders of the Gaelic League in Butte, Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Séamus Ó Muircheartaigh, who inspired today's transmitters there of a renewal for an teanga beo. The Friends of the Irish West sustains this energy.

I encourage you to support this enterprise. I saw in Missoula at last month's ACIS-West conference the RTÉ documentary by Breandán Feiritéar, Scéal ar Butte, a bilingual presentation of three brothers in the copper mines, and their fates. The same director plans to make these films in Gaeilge + Béarla.

The blog entry title today is "her exiled children." This phrase resonates for the diaspora, as these words are taken from the 1916 Proclamation of Irish independence. They remind us that the call for freedom spanned the seas, and that many, as this exhibit displays, responded to that cause from here.

"Her Exiled Children": The Irish in Montana

A month ago, I attended this gathering of scholars and supporters in Missoula. The American Conference of Irish Studies-West regional meeting coincided with the exhibit "Her Exiled Children". In turn, to my surprise, these events dovetailed with a visit to Big Sky Country from the Irish Ambassador to the U.S., and the Governor of the state. The locals were out to welcome us delegates.

Professor David M. Emmons, Irish West expert and retired historian at the U. of Montana, guided our bus tour. We rode past the Clark Fork named after the explorer, and then the back way on Highway 1 to skirt more riparian valleys. The weather forecast was for rain, so I dressed the part, but I did not need to, as the climate was brisk but clear. Recent snowfalls speckled peaks. Far away from 90· L.A.

We stopped after an hour and a half in Anaconda, a copper mining town that stood out not only for its stack (my seatmate compared it to Sauron's tower) but its hardscrabble endurance as an Irish-managed production hub for that mineral much of the past century. It was a bustling region where the bosses were Catholic, as well as the workingmen and women. Little cabins attested to the life of the miners and their families, who walked out to the mines and back, by the railroad, self-contained.

The steadfast Corkonian, Dr. Traolach Ó Riordáin, told me that the children of Seámus Moriarty only spoke Irish at home back then, but that such fidelity to Gaeilge was the exception. But I never heard such an amount of an teanga beo in America before, for he and others chatted away in it, naturally. My two halting attempts failed to rouse responses. When I complimented his young son on his tweed hat, or when I warned him to be careful as he lugged a concrete block in the cemetery, both attempts at conversation were ignored by him. Will nobody ever understand my bleats, as exiled Gaeilgeoir?

You can see me in this snapshot at the AOH breakfast hosted for us at the Anaconda branch, one of the few west of the Mississippi, and one still, I am happy to report, thriving today after decades on. I never expected such a reception and it testified to unapologetic pride I felt during my too-brief visit. This mortás cine is perpetuated by the Friends of Irish Studies in the West, which I've happily joined.

Butte dramatically perches on the side of a massive pit. So much so that neighborhoods of Italians and Eastern Europeans were dug into, for the resources beneath outweighed the value of those on the top. The memorial to hundreds who died in one of many accidents is moving, with flags of many nations around to commemorate the losses of those from around the world driven to that far corner.

I heard the daughter of the famed poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill exclaim "there's Turkey!": land of her father, as we all entered the marker area. Sure enough, the lists of the dead were diverse, although mainly Irish. Back then, almost 100,000 lived there. Now as in Anaconda, far fewer: a third of that.

Montana boasts even today at 27% the highest percentage of Irish-identified U.S. residents. That cheered me. I knew historically there'd been many miners, but I did not realize how many stayed.

Vowing to return, to the Mining Museum, the town excited me. The downtown again struggles, but its buildings preserved from that boom era could entice the bold and brave today, to restore and care for them a mile high. Up by Walkerville, dwellings stretched out in precarious, attenuated, thinning lines, presumably to avoid the subsidence that would swallow them up from those voracious excavations.

The archives there attracted me. I wanted to scrabble in them, especially for Fr. Michael Hannan's diary where he lamented his stay among the squabbling clergy and all those non-recalcitrants from Hibernia not sharing his belief in a particular brand of Fenian payback. Professor Emmons showed me the scrawl of photocopies of the priest's diary: not easy to decipher. But he published his findings in The American Journal of Irish Studies (2012 issue; abstract only, alas, online for we the curious).

The cemetery walk in Butte also alerted me to the many graves from the Spanish American War, next to a Mass Rock memorial. I wondered why the amount. The number seemed disproportionate for the city. I suppose to me, any death toll is more than it should be, going to fight in such dubious battles. A lesson for all who labor to resurrect the names and deeds of those rallied to a cause, and with arms.

Gerard Cappa's "Black Boat Dancing": Book Review

Con Maknazpy is an odd name, one that was explained in the intricately plotted 2012 debut of his character, "Blood from a Shadow." That anticipated Obama's re-election, full of Iranian intrigue and the current situation that continues to reveal Western (and here, Eastern) superpowers battling over control of "Pipelineistan" and where oil from not only the Middle East but Eurasia will wind up. Gerard Cappa continues the mix of subtle allusion, rapidly paced violent set-pieces, and character reflection, for Con encounters from the earliest pages the "red frenzy" inherited, and perhaps passed on, from Irish ancestors, and in turn, the Ulster Cycle and Cú Chullain's "warp spasms."

Cappa handles these references lightly, such that you may not realize the preparation he gives in both tales to their literary and mythic resonance. Here, I reckoned the plot might be calmer than the frenetic and wide-ranging mayhem of the first installment. However, very soon, we leave the Yonkers of the narrator, as he is recruited and sent off off to Lisbon, where this story takes Con and his friend Ferdy McIlhane into an international conspiracy, one that again draws in current geopolitics, along with immigrants, CIA, Russian no-good-niks, Chinese eager for cash, police from all over, an old fisherman, a whore with if not a heart of gold than a familiar tale of pain and compliance, and black hat (well, maybe gray for one key talent who is trapped in this global, sticky, darknet web) hacking.

Cora Oneale (Cappa's spelling), Jack Gallogly, and, off stage for their own reasons, Rose and Con's son return. No plot spoilers but we find Lisbon evoked lovingly, and Sintra memorably. The chapters move along efficiently, with space for reflection and self-hatred galore, before another bloody sequence sets up another chance for Con to spread the "red frenzy" all over whomever opposes him. And that number of foes adds up over the course of this noir thriller. It's not my usual genre, I confess, so my reaction may not be that of readers who subsist on this fare, but I do like the conversations his characters engage in about politics, capitalism, greed, and history, even if as one remarks (perhaps speaking for readers?) that he tires of this blather (another word is used instead).

"An outlier. Pain and isolation for him. Extreme and random. A life of heartbreak and loss for anyone who had ever loved him." Con considers his father's legacy as he tries to prevent from passing it on. "The underworld never changes." He reflects on the same old temptations that sustain sins and crime. His nemesis opines how a "propensity to exacerbate collateral damage comes wrapped up" in Con's "collective baggage." He contends against how he causes such damage, as "their awareness of the real presence of my evil seeped through their numbed heads, my own brain retreated into self-defense mode, as if the real Con Maknazpy couldn't exist or function without this ancient imposer usurped my skin." He finds "China is a civilization, America is a business," at least from one informed p-o-v.

Against that, he tries to rally the patriotic defense. While Con has some trans-Atlantic connection, and while his military service may tip the word choice to measure in meters a distance, I am not sure a Yonkers man would say "shopping trolleys" rather than "carts," or "holiday" instead of "vacation," and whether an American would identify an overheard language spoken as "Latino" rather than "Spanish or Portuguese," but these are slight slips in a fast tale that conveys a lot of plot twists. I like the breaks from the action more than the action, often, but Cappa seems at his best when he is in the thick of the brawl, and in cinematic style, you see the scenes vividly. The author's in his element here and compared to volume one, his focus on place helps plot coherence, even if it remains as complex. This may prove a transitional story in what I surmise will be a longer series, as Con labors to evolve.

A couple of crucial characters, as more than one enemy of Con reminds him, don't enter his thoughts or at least his words. Their absence from the plot, except as motivation, provides a curious tilt. While I assume this is very intentional, and portends more novels in the series, it left me feeling left out as to this emotional ballast, even if it goads Con on. There may be references hidden here to older stories, perhaps. Cappa certainly embedded many in his earlier novel that introduced us all to Con.

From this Belfast-based writer, "all mouth and no trousers" is a nice turn of phrase no matter its origin; such sentences (others I cannot repeat lest I bowdlerize) as "The bar was silent, like they were all straining to hear the drama on a misfiring radio" recall quaintly the pulp fiction idiom. "When the devils burn out you'll find your true spirit," Con is told by one who knows. I predict that future adventures, for after all, he tells this one to us, will find Con eager to spit in the face of other devils. (Amazon US 1-5-15)

Ludlow Massacre: 101 years ago

 

Yesterday marks the centennial+ 1 day of a crime. It was committed by those hired to not only suppress but to fire upon strikers and their families. United Mine Workers opposed the Rockefeller control over Colorado mines with their awful conditions. My father told me stories of his father, born in the aftermath of the Molly Maguires, and how he had dropped out of school around nine or ten, to work as a "breaker boy" picking slate out of the anthracite in Avoca, a company town full of immigrants from Ireland, bent over heaps for a quarter a day.

So, when I learned of this event, I was curious. I had read a dramatization in Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, but few seem to have remembered this since in our nation; even USA by John Dos Passos gives this event more of an aside, although logically it was as infamous then, a decade or so after, as 9/11 today in the U.S. Layne and I stopped there last October as it was just off the main interstate as we drove north to Colorado. Only a small off-ramp and unassuming brown sign marked the turn. A slow quarter-mile or so led us past a tiny market and crossroads. The sun set as we headed west, to a place beside the railroad tracks. Dark hills behind us, as cattle and horses could be heard in the quiet distance. She took the photo above, crafted of wrought iron, at the door of the simple metal union hall next to the site. This is a haunting place, and indeed a enormous freight train rumbled past as we looked at the stone monument. It marks the site where two women and eleven children died in a fire as they hid in a dugout. National Guardsman set off flames as they killed the main camp leader and some of his fellow miners, as Brandon Weber narrates with period photos in Upworthy.

Many were Greek, so the day had begun with Orthodox Easter festivities. The blazes from kerosene lit up the tents, and more people were trapped in the flames, and then shot down as they tried to flee. Over 18 months of struggle, almost two hundred people died. The union lost, but Congress investigated. Out of this tragedy, at least the start of eight-hour workdays and no child labor began.

Joanna Higgins' "The Anarchist": Book Review

Writing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.

Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Ms. Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels. 

When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Ms. Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?

Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.

How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain. 

Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide. 

We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then, we hear a young Emma asserting, after she has read the militant newspaper which radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest. 

This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike. 

Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for.  Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive. 

In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country. 

Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon effect the President, after another botched act of violence. 

Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)

He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him. 

Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So, it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic. 

Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents. 

The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.

This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma. 

When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon-- gains its own place in the spotlight. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully. 

Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position. 

In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time. 

From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all. (NY Journal of Books 5-2-14.)

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
- See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/anarchist#sthash.4MJeN1tP.dpuf

Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.
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Reviewing this on May Day, the international workers’ celebration less heralded now, the relevance of this historical novel dramatizing Emma Goldman, “The Major” President William McKinley, and his assassin Leon Czolgosz remains vibrant.
Joanna Higgins imagines the inner monologues of these three main characters, along with a few of their family members and associates, to illustrate century-old struggles for social change and political reform. By dramatizing the tension between Leon, who advocates violence, and Emma, who sympathizes with it while not condoning it, Higgins explores the challenge faced by radicals bent on overturning the system that McKinley and the American way of life represent, which determines to wipe out dissent and defeat its rebels.
When the events, elaborated from the archives and books Higgins credits, are a foregone conclusion from a hundred years ago, the challenge for a novelist rises. How does she draw the reader in, given “The Major” McKinley’s assassination, Leon’s execution, and Emma’s release and eventual ill-fated stint in the new Soviet state are the results?
Higgins shifts perspectives to keep us off-guard. Gradually, the reader perceives how a few outliers try to rouse people into revolt against injustice, and how the protesters fare when a purported justice system attempts to encourage law and order while sustaining capitalism’s power.
How she manages to do this without siding with one proponent or another, allowing sympathies to move between characters, makes this not a contest of rabble-rousing activists against fat-cat affluence but a depiction of human frailty, as anarchic ideals contend against democratic aspirations and economic gain.
Higgins begins with the formative influences on both Leon and Emma within the Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish great emigrations. The author depicts their hard labor and their simmering resentment as they contribute to profits rewarding the Carnegies far more than foundry workers. The Haymarket bombing during a Chicago march reveals, from Higgins’ vantage, class divide.
We watch the event first through the mayor. He observes and identifies particular protesters before a deadly explosion shatters the street. Then we hear a young Emma asserting after she has read the militant newspaper that radicalizes her, that some of those named as setting off the terrorism were nowhere near the protest.
This nuanced approach suits the novel well. One of freethinking Emma’s many lovers (this can get confusing, for a slight flaw is Higgins’ attenuated manner of introducing a few), and the most famous, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, does not gain the prominence which may be assumed given the jacket copy. He spent most of the time of this novel imprisoned for a botched murder of Carnegie’s trusted industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, who had championed the Homestead steel mill against a bitter strike.
Settling that strike, an Irish-American named Eamon wanders in as a Pinkerton security guard, who understands nothing of what he has been hired for. Higgins, whose previous novels include an award-winning Civil War account, excels in the fiery riverside clash that follows, and she brings the uneasy showdown between strikers and goons vividly alive.
In the aftermath, a recuperating Eamon is taken in by “The Major” on a hospital visit to the surviving Pinkerton recruit. In turn, he is informally adopted by him, and he grows to serve the President as a valet in the White House. Elaborating this character, Ms. Higgins provides a smart narrative to connect immigration, radicalism, and the threat against the establishment to the situation around 1900 in the country.
Some slow spots follow, as we find parts of Congressional debates included, and Ida, Mrs. McKinley, slows the pace down in a necessary fashion perhaps to show what more than one character will share, the breakdown of the body and the mind. This will soon affect the president after another botched act of violence.
Leon has met the lecturing revolutionary Emma after her cause elevates her to some fame and more infamy. (The book’s cover hints at her nickname “Red Emma” but her dislike of communism overwhelmed her advocacy, arguably well before her own Soviet residency soured; the inclusion of a small hammer-and-sickle and the dominance of red in the book’s design plays up rather than down this association, which dogs her despite her lifelong articulation of anarchism: this distinction must be kept in mind by modern readers who may confuse two diverging philosophies. On the other hand, anarchism at this time lacked its own icon as readily polarizing or as identifiable as that later spray painted by punks.)
He goes to Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition after his brief encounter with Emma starts to unsettle him. His mental control lapses, and the summer of 1901 becomes eerie in the heat for him.
Waiting in a receiving line at the fair, he shoots McKinley. His demise, although rather rapid due to gangrene setting into the poorly treated bullet wounds, feels drawn out for much longer than the historical record, but Higgins uses this chronology appropriately to convey the distortions felt within as McKinley and Leon suffer, as Ida too had broken down. This pain separates each, oddly triangulated, but they are linked by the target of the assassin, and then the true anarchist, Emma Goldman, who in the wake of the shooting will be incarcerated. Leon lets on she was his inspiration. So it does not take long before parallels to future cases of police and media frenzy appear, in a search for a fatal conspiracy linked to foreign bodies within the ailing body politic.
Higgins lets this congruence emerge naturally. We understand the repetition of this, as we do another within a McKinley administration taking on an uneasy imperial obligation as it seeks to liberate the Philippines from first Spain and then its own ungrateful insurgents.
The lessons to be learned endure, but on their own.
This distancing works to the novel’s favor.  The later chapters accelerate, as the death of McKinley and the execution of Leon both are rendered effectively personal. The politics recedes and the reader views both men as victims of their mental or emotional needs to be driven on by their careers, oddly juxtaposed as they are, and this necessity compels them as it does Emma.
When the journalist Nellie Bly, in one of the novel’s best scenes, visits her in jail for a scoop, the familiar manner in which the press treats those elevated to notoriety to tell their side of the story--as if in its telling tabloid truth can somehow avoid its implication in commerce, gossip, and abetting the system itself that selling depends upon—gains its own place in the spotlight. Ms. Higgins explores the debate between not advocating violence while expressing sympathy for the sensitive misfits who turn to it, as Emma defends, with the rebuttal by Bly that this distinction cannot be sustained within a democratic society that seeks to advance equality peacefully.
Whether those who labor on the Lower East Side in its factories and tenements, Emma suggests and Higgins avers, share this lofty confidence in progress, remains doubtful. Yet, the author lets each crusader articulate her position.
In the end, after a president and an assassin die, Emma is left with the pursuit of more love, as well as less fame. Her reputation sends her underground under a false name as a dressmaker, and as her previous time running a lunchroom illustrates, she determined to raise consciousness and suggest alternatives, to one person at a time.
From the common worker’s ranks, the self-taught, ill-tempered, bold Emma continued to make mistakes, doubt her own resolution, and claw her way forward against enormous opposition. Basing this fiction on the adventurous facts of her life and those with whom she associated or opposed, The Anarchist enlivens a violent, edgy period not so far away from the assassination of William McKinley by a deranged, misguided idealist’s immigrant’s son, after all.