avant-garde intellectuals in a common assault on bourgeois morality. The Wobbly's "cheerful cynicism," as described by Solidarity—"his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society"— made him the natural ally of disaffected intellectuals like Reed. In his editorial announcement for The Masses, launched in 1912 as the organ of artistic and political emancipation, Reed urged contributors "to be arrogant, impertinent, in bad taste," and "to everlastingly attack old systems, old morals, old prejudices—the whole weight of outworn thought that dead men have settled on us." In Europe, the syndicalist movement, at least as interpreted by Sorel, combined political radicalism with cultural conservatism. In America, on the other hand, it joined forces with the enemies of the past.

Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, no less enthusiastically than The Masses, sided with every movement that "boldly tears the veil off ... forbidden subjects." Goldman endorsed syndicalism as the "economic expression of anarchism," but she also endorsed birth control, sex education, "free love," nudism, feminism, atheism, and modern art. She advocated the abolition of prisons, the abolition of the family, the abolition of national boundaries and national loyalties, the abolition of religion, the abolition of government, and the abolition of anything else that might interfere with personal freedom. Proudly declaring herself a "libertarian," she dismissed as "absurd" the "claim that ours is the era of individualism." It was the era of conformity and the "herd mind," she insisted. The only thing she had in common with Sorel, aside from her belief in the need for a "complete overthrow of the wage system"—itself a highly ambiguous slogan, as we have seen—was a hatred of democracy. But whereas Sorel objected to democracy because it left no room for heroic "pessimism," Goldman saw it as a drag on progress—on the individual's emancipation from tradition, from a misplaced sense of responsibility, and from social conventions that inhibited freedom of expression. Progress was always the work of enlightened minorities; under democracy, these were doomed to be "misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed."

Even Foster, whose syndicalism—while it lasted—was closer to the European type, subscribed to all the standard positions that now defined a commitment to cultural progress. "The syndicalist," he wrote, "is a 'race suicider.' He knows that children are a detriment to him in his daily

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