Students of left-wing history may have heard of the “Pittsburgh Manifesto” — the 1883 statement that launched the American anarchist and syndicalist movements. The document, drafted by renowned anarchist-socialists including Albert Parsons, Johann Most and August Spies, would set the scene for the bloody Haymarket repression three years later.
What’s less well-remembered is exactly where in Pittsburgh the anarchists met. There are no markers or plaques to remind visitors where the conference took place. In fact, the anarchists met at two locations: one on the North Side and the other directly under today’s PPG Paints Arena. It was there, at a German hall near today’s David McCullough bridge and a saloon along Fifth Avenue, that American anarchism first took shape.
Forming a movement
The roots of American anarchism go deeper, to the mostly German-American socialist movements that formed before the Civil War. The short-lived U.S. branch of the International Workingmen’s Association split in the 1870s, mirroring a break in Europe between anarchists on the one hand and allies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the other.
In the U.S., the Workingmen’s Party of the United States emerged from the rubble, drawing together Marxists, Lassallean socialists and other anti-monopoly strains in an awkward alliance (the party was formed after a conference in Downtown Pittsburgh).
The Workingmen’s Party, later renamed the Socialist Labor Party, soon faced its own splits. Battles over labor and election strategy, as well as over armed organizing, led some members to form their own revolutionary groups. Chicago socialist Albert Parsons, newly arrived German radical Johann Most and others called for a nationwide conference of these militants — still called “socialists” or “communists” in the press, and often embracing the terms themselves — in Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh conference
The conference opened on Saturday, Oct. 13, 1883 at the Allegheny Turner Hall. The hall, located at the corner of South Canal Street and Cherry Street (now called Chesbro Street), was host to the local Turnverein, a German fraternal and athletic society. The hall was a frequent meeting place for leftists: The Socialist Labor Party had held an 1879 congress there, and it would later host talks by Parsons and commemorations of the Paris Commune. A few years later, the hall was claimed by a fire and replaced; today the red-brick building that stands there is home to a packaging business.
Hundreds of local leftists welcomed a few dozen delegates, who represented groups as distant as Canada and Mexico, as Paul Avrich detailed in The Haymarket Tragedy. “The red flag was displayed and red badges were worn by everybody,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported. Local anarchist Joseph Frick issued a welcome speech while a Masonic sextet provided music.
The manifesto
Amid a weekend of social events, music interludes and communications from comrades overseas, the delegates gathered at Turner Hall approved a declaration of principles that drew together competing strands of radicalism. This Pittsburgh Manifesto, approved Oct. 14, would represent the ideology of American anarchism for decades to come. Demanding the overthrow of the ruling class and the replacement of the state by free cooperatives, the manifesto ends: “Tremble, oppressors of the world! Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawns the scarlet and sable lights of the JUDGEMENT DAY!”
The conference helped spread the so-called Chicago Idea, the ideology of anti-state, pro-worker militancy that would inform American syndicalism, and later communism. “[It’s] misleading to simple label people like Parsons and Spies ‘anarchists,'” historian Paul Le Blanc notes. “The word had a different connotation for them than it does today. The sharp differentiation between socialism and anarchism developed only in later years.” Thus, the Pittsburgh Manifesto represents a key point in the history of the entire American left.
Speaking in a host of languages, the delegates moved swiftly to print thousands of copies of their new manifesto. By Monday, Oct. 15, the conference moved to Brockman’s Hall — a saloon owned by August Brockman along Fifth Avenue. The hall, now long gone, stood at today’s southeast corner of PPG Paints Arena, across the street from a law office.
Forgotten sites
At Brockman’s, the radicals debated strategy and approved a host of resolutions, including one supporting striking Clearfield County miners and another proclaiming their enmity toward Europe’s monarchs. On Tuesday, Oct. 17, the delegates concluded their work and called the convention to an end. A particularly hostile report in the Daily Post, dripping with sarcasm, detailed the final day:
“Some twenty lonesome, dejected-looking delegates, all strangers, were assembled around a beer table. In the rear of the room a keg of beer was on tap. Each delegate seemed bubbling over with expedients guaranteed to secure an equal and exact division of all the wealth in the world.”
After the better part of a week, divided between the North Side and Uptown, the delegates returned to their home cities under the auspices of the International Working People’s Association, the so-called “Black International.” They would go on to launch at least two major strains of American radicalism — the more secretive, revolutionary anarchy of Most and his New York allies, and the union-oriented ideology of the Chicago delegates. They would organize what Avrich called a “rich libertarian counterculture,” despite government crackdowns and the brutality that followed the 1886 Haymarket riot.
From their twin Pittsburgh meeting places, these militants would influence nearly every branch of the American left to this day. While the Turner Hall is remembered by a few, including the makers of a radical bike tour, neither site is formally marked or widely remembered.
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