Anarchism

Anarchism in the novel is a politics of class solidarity and resistance to capitalist power, encountered in the company of workers rather than as an abstract program. Its meaning develops through contrasting settings: a Paris picnic where radicals imagine collective struggle, and American workplaces where workers face wage manipulation, exclusion from meetings, and police intervention. The thread is neither a portrait of a unified organization nor a simple account of victory. It shows how radical convictions take shape through conversation and shared action, and how institutions constrain their expression.

Ideas and Social Locations

At an anarchist picnic in Garches, the gathering brings together young people and older men, including some in black artist ties; a young man reads a poem. The scene’s relaxed outdoor setting coexists with a sharp awareness of unequal resources. The narrator’s attention turns to the machine guns, printing presses, and other means of influence held by the powerful, set against the small gathering’s songs and bare hands. The contrast makes anarchism’s challenge material as well as ideological: collective aspiration confronts the organized resources of those who already command power.

The picnic’s language evokes humanity, the future, class struggle, and workers’ hardship. It does not present a detailed political platform. Instead, its form—a meeting, a poem, conversation, and shared attention to class—shows dissent being made in company. The gathering’s modest scale matters: the participants can articulate solidarity, but their own scene foregrounds the imbalance between their means and those of the institutions and interests they oppose.

Nick Gigli’s Influence on Ben Compton

The most direct account of anarchist teaching comes through Nick Gigli, whom Ben Compton meets while working at a construction camp in Pennsylvania. Ben keeps the canteen’s books while its boss, Hiram Volle, cheats the laborers in their accounts. At first, Ben pays little attention to the workers’ treatment; his friendship with Nick changes how he understands both the job and his own ambitions.

Nick, an eighteen-year-old worker from northern Italy, is lonely among a largely Sicilian crew. His father and older brothers are anarchists, and he introduces Ben to anarchist thinkers while arguing that a future as a wealthy businessman would make Ben part of the problem. Nick distinguishes education and professional skill from service to capital: Ben might study or become a lawyer, he suggests, but should use his abilities in the interests of workers and revolution. He describes businessmen such as Volle as exploiters and treats the prospect of a decisive future struggle as a reason workers must recognize their common position.

Nick’s outlook comes from a working life that has included labor in textile mills, shoe factories, and a cement factory, as well as time at sea and in jail during the Paterson strike. The camp workers call out for him when they see Ben alone, an everyday sign of the bonds Nick has built among them. His politics are personal and practical: he teaches Ben to roll cigarettes, talks with him on Sunday walks, and links their friendship to the question of whose interests their work serves.

Strikes, Solidarity, and Public Action

Ben’s political education becomes consequential when the construction workers strike over the bosses’ accounting. Nick tells him the men are going out; Ben answers that he will join them. When Volle sends him on an errand, Ben refuses because he is on strike. Volle responds by dismissing him and threatening him, while supervisors warn the men that anyone who does not return when the whistle blows will lose his job. The conflict places solidarity against the immediate pressure of wages, dismissal, and the threat of being treated as a vagrant. Ben leaves his job and goes to find Nick among the workers.

A later New Jersey textile strike brings a related conflict into Anne Elizabeth Trent’s experience with Webb Cruthers. At the mill town, police and special deputies surround the workplace; organizers have to hold their meeting in another town because the mills control the local space and no hall is available. When the doors are closed to the crowd despite the meeting’s limited occupancy, Ben speaks from a lamppost. He identifies the closure as an insult to workers and calls for them to stand their ground. Police remove him, and the crowd begins to disperse under mounted police pressure. Webb then addresses the retreating crowd in support of its right to use the hall. His intervention turns the scene from passive exclusion toward public protest, even as the authorities retain control of the streets.

Anne Elizabeth later joins Webb on a picket line before dawn. The workers sing and call out against strikebreakers as police break up the line. When a young woman falls and officers move toward her, Anne Elizabeth steps in; she is arrested and taken away with other demonstrators. The episode makes solidarity an act with personal consequences, not merely an agreeable principle. Her response grows from witnessing what is happening around her, while the arrest demonstrates the force available to those seeking to disrupt collective action.

Radicalism Under Surveillance

The novel also places labor activism in a wider field of radical politics, without treating anarchism, socialism, and support for the Russian revolution as interchangeable. At the Empire Casino in the Bronx, Ben attends a meeting intended to send greetings to Russia’s workers. Federal agents sit in the front row with a stenographer, police close the doors, and uniformed soldiers and sailors enter the gallery. The authorities’ presence shapes what speakers feel able to say and turns an assembly into a monitored political encounter.

Ben speaks against a war he sees as serving bankers and munitions makers, and argues that workers will learn from the violence imposed on them. The meeting ends with police converging on the speakers and Ben’s arrest. In questioning, he maintains that if released he will continue opposing the capitalist war; he is freed on bail after Morris Stein assures the authorities that he will not agitate before trial. The case shows the limits placed on radical speech by arrest, bail, and restrictions on political activity. Across the picnic, the strikes, and the meeting, anarchism’s significance lies in its insistence that workers’ shared interests can challenge established power—and in the repeated evidence that employers and state authorities can answer that challenge with economic pressure, surveillance, and force.