Anarchives: The Labadie Collection

In 1938, Agnes Inglis, founding curator of the Labadie Collection of Radical Literature at the University of Michigan, wrote to labor organizer, Fred Beal, about tracking down the history of a man who had been active in the Chartist movement: “…and I found a little old trunk of this man….And in that trunk were things! They made a story!” (Inglis to Beal 1938, 1). The gentleman in question was John Francis Bray, whose relatives in Pontiac, Michigan, had contacted Inglis regarding an old trunk of political materials. Inglis made her way to Pontiac, perceived the story that was waiting to emerge from the things, and arranged to bring the materials back to Ann Arbor, where they became part of the large and growing collection that has become one of the most extensive archives of anarchist materials in the world.

Cleverly nicknamed “anarchives,” collections of literature, correspondence, and memorabilia of the anarchist movement have been created all over the world. The Labadie Collection initially was assembled by Detroit anarchist printer, Jo Labadie, whose wife Sophie painstakingly preserved and organized the material. Jo had donated his cherished library in 1912, and some years later asked his friend Inglis to see what had become of the material.

Agnes obliged. Finding the boxes untouched, she essentially launched an anarchist incursion on the University of Michigan library. Poaching furniture and supplies from other offices and mobilizing her radical networks, she worked there for 28 years until her death in 1952. She “was able to establish her own collection development program” (Herrada 2017, 152) because she was already a respected activist, having set up lectures for Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman when they visited Michigan, worked with the Detroit branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and participated in campaigns for the release of Russian anarchists arrested during the debilitating Red Scare following World War I. Other anarchists were willing to overlook the Labadie’s connection to the state because they trusted Inglis to enable the movement’s legacy to be expressed in its own terms. As University of Michigan student Arthur John (1941–1942, 33) wrote, “Like a stone cast into a pool, her efforts caused perceptible ripples in an ever-widening circle of anarchists, libertarians, free thinkers, and radicals of one stripe or another.”

With characteristic modesty, Inglis often referred to her work of curation as a supporting role, not an active contribution, to the anarchist movement. Yet that view undervalues the making of archives—preserving and organizing material is a type of political action. Inglis made her way through mountains of information, charting paths and observing or producing connections so that—as she had exclaimed about the Chartist find in 1938—things could tell their stories. She eventually came to see, rightly, that her contribution was not only making a record of the movement but also fully participating in the movement. Anarchists created many narrative trails to preserve their movement’s work for the future and to keep their histories from being written exclusively by their enemies. Much of this work was accomplished by women who found or inherited collections, realized their value, and stepped into the collecting networks to add to the public preservation and circulation of the movement’s histories. These collectors acted as unofficial archivists, selecting the material that beckoned and often bringing some initial organization to it before sending it to Ann Arbor.

Anarchists created many narrative trails to preserve their movement’s work for the future and to keep their histories from being written exclusively by their enemies.

The work of anarchivists can be seen as “hinge moments” in the life of the anarchist movement. In Turning Archival, Marshall and Tortorici (2022, 16) adopted this concept to speak about “multiple different starting points” in queer studies, “where the idea of teleological development and universal paradigm shifts have been problematized by scholars pointing to the performative interplay of multiple simultaneous epistemological formations.” The hinge moments within anarchiving emerge around shared understandings of how significance emerges in relation to other artifacts and events. In the temporal practices of states, anarchism literally is located outside of time, in a world of chaos or naiveté, where there is no proper order (Johnson and Ferguson 2019). Anarchivists’ hinge moments turn their—and our—attention to a distinct temporality, one in which scholars and activists discern not a lack of order but rather a different order: that is, a participatory order based on mutual aid and shared struggle to create the world they sought by living as though it were already here. Assemblages of anarchivists act on their shared understanding of what counts, what needs to be kept, and what should be grouped together to create meaning.

Through her prodigious correspondence and devotion to the care and expansion of the Labadie Collection, Inglis acted as a central node activating hinge moments in networks of anarchivists. She recruited dozens of others. Bertha Johnson, a Pennsylvania farmer, and her husband, Emery Andrews, inherited a collection of 1,200 books and other radical materials. They created a library in their kitchen pantry, adorned “with a steel engraving of Thomas Paine” as their “presiding genius or patron saint” (Johnson to Inglis 1933, 2) and, for 20 years, they sorted, clipped, and mailed materials to Ann Arbor. Bertha’s sister, Pearl Johnson Tucker, received a huge amount of material from her partner Benjamin Tucker, editor of the Boston journal Liberty, some of which went to the Labadie Collection (Tucker to Inglis 1945). Translator Joanna Clevans organized donations for the collection; she and her partner, printer and editor, Mark Mratchny, kept a drawer in their study called “Agnes’s drawer,” where they accumulated material destined for Ann Arbor (Clevans to Inglis 1936). Joanna and Mark assisted Minnie Fabijanovic in donating three large boxes from the personal library of her husband Stefan, also a printer and editor (Inglis to Fabijanovic 1940). Mary Gallagher contributed extensive materials from her work with the IWW, including the heavy red-satin ribbon inscribed “In Memoriam” that bundled the flowers at IWW activist Joe Hill’s funeral (Inglis to Carey 1936). Beatrice Fetz, daughter of the New York anarchists, George and Emma Schumm, sent her late father’s collection to Agnes (Inglis to Fabijanovic 1942). Anna Schwartz, a teacher at the anarchist school at Stelton Colony in New Jersey, helped Agnes secure materials; Agnes reciprocated with donations to the school (Schwartz to Inglis 1951). Movement heroine Emma Goldman sometimes rounded up material for the Labadie, and she visited there during her 90-day lecture tour in 1934 (Goldman to Inglis 1939).

And on and on and on. French writer René Furst wrote that “an active past is a past mobilized by and for a present activity….Our interest lies in what is implicit in our position, and in our lines of cohesion” (in Enckell 1999, 12). Anarchivists both encounter and create the past, finding as well as making what Furst called “the coherence which we will have brought to our current ideas” (in Enckell 1999, 12). Inglis and her network self-consciously summoned that coherence with a regard that can only be called love. Addressing the voices in the archive, Agnes wrote that visitors “will peruse these old records of voices and they will repeat your words and speak your names….And your thoughts and your acts—past tho they are—are not lost in it. And this, the record, will ever be beloved” (Inglis 1932).