Where Quiet Treasures Lie

This is the newspaper & microfilm room at the free Library of Philadelphia. I have spent thousands and thousands of hours here, reading century-old newspapers. Very little of the material I seek has been indexed or made available on line, and i started doing the research before any of that was true.

The early anarchists were a surprising bunch of people. I know more about them than anyone else on the planet, but still they surprise me.

The clipping I patched in surprises me. Voltairine de Cleyre was an anarchist intellectual of international reputation and by far the most formidable anarchist leader who ever lived here. Her crazed former pupil and fellow anarchist Herman Helcher shot her and nearly killed her in 1902. This was a year after President McKinley was killed by yet another crazed anarchist, and an anti-anarchist hysteria swept the country. And yet from the day of Voltai's wounding, she was treated quite kindly by the mainstream Media because she flatly refused to testify against Herman and saised money for his legal defense and release for psychiatric care.

I've know that much for many years, but I never knew about the petition described in this clip. At the time (Summer of 1904) she was very ill and would soon have another close call with death. The illness was referred to in public as tuberculosis, but actually she suffered from the complications of syphilis, which was not to be spoken of then.

But it's not the petition that surprises me. It's the Mayor of Philadelphia signing the damned thing! this means that now I have to get inside John Weaver's head and spot all his connections. My best guess is that Weaver did it to make himself seem independent of the prevailing Republican Party machine, which was then under great scrutiny and pressure after enjoying decades of unchallenged corruption. Also, many lawyers, physicians, and other professionals either friends with anarchists or were anarchists themselves.

It's like paddling across a lake and bumping into a rock. Now I must dive down and find where and how the rock meets the lake's muddy bed.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1904, page 2.