Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past (The John Harvard Library)

In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called “Prison Blossoms.” This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism. Most of the "Prison Blossoms" were smuggled out of the penitentiary to fellow comrades, including Emma Goldman, as the nucleus of an exposé of prison conditions in America’s Gilded Age. Those that survived relatively unrecognized for a century in an international archive are here transcribed, translated, edited, and published for the first time. Born at a unique historical moment, when European anarchism and American labor unrest converged, as each sought to repel the excesses of monopoly capitalism, these prison blossoms peer into the heart of political radicalism and its fervent hope of freedom from state and religious coercion. Capital and the Battle on the Monongahela / by Carl Nold A fateful leaflet / by Henry Bauer Autobiographical sketches / by Alexander Berkman Jail experiences / by Alexander Berkman Further arrests / by Carl Nold An American court farce / by Alexander Berkman Two further court farces / by Henry Bauer A few words as to my deed / by Alexander Berkman The red bugbear / by Carl Nold and Henry Bauer Tolstoi or Bakunin? / by Carl Nold Our prison life : second half (February 1895-May 1897) / by Henry Bauer Penitentiary administration and treatment of prisoners / by Henry Bauer The treatment of Prisoner A-444 in his own words / by Prisoner A-444 The shop-screw / by Carl Nold The trusted prisoner / by Carl Nold Dialogue between two prisoners / by Carl Nold A morning conversation between Dutch and Mike (two prisoners) / by Carl Nold Prisons and crime : punishment : its nature and effects / by Alexander Berkman Prisons and crime : influence of prisons on morals / by Alexander Berkman Prisons and crime : crime and its sources / by Carl Nold Libertas : an orthographical study / by Alexander Berkman The vision in the penitentiary cell / by Carl Nold The sinking ship : a parable / by Alexander Berkman Winter sun for my prison colleagues M & G, 1 January 1896 / by Carl Nold.

Published here for the first time is a crucial document in the history of American radicalism—the "Prison Blossoms, " a series of essays, narratives, poems, and fables composed by three activist anarchists imprisoned for the 1892 assault on anti-union steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick.