Masks of Anarchy by Michael Demson

Author:Michael Demson [Demson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-229-6
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

PREFACE

MICHAEL DEMSON

I first came across the connection between Shelley and Newman in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which describes how Newman recited Shelley’s poetry after the Triangle Fire. My discovery was quite serendipitous. I had just defended my dissertation on Percy Shelley and how so many of his political writings had been suppressed in his day. To see his great political poem “The Mask of Anarchy” quoted in such a different context, but put to such potent use, was thrilling. I began digging around online, and discovered that Newman’s papers were held along with many of the ILGWU documents at Cornell University—only an hour from where I was living at the time in Binghamton, New York. Naturally, I wrote the union asking for permission to visit this archive. I had no idea what to expect as I drove up to the Kheel Center, but it became one of the most exciting days of my life. The quote Zinn had used turned out only to be the tip of the iceberg. References to Shelley and selections of his verses where ubiquitous in the union papers.

I published an article on Shelley and Newman in European Romantic Review, a journal on Romantic literature. I was proud of the finished product, but still felt that I had not done enough to celebrate Newman’s own career. Newman overcame every barrier set in her path: she was a foreigner, she was Jewish, she was a woman, she lost her father at a very young age, she did not speak English, she was compelled into brutal labor conditions and lived in poverty as a child—and yet, she learned English, she fought for a decent life not only for herself and her family but also for whole communities, and she became a driving force in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. My article had focused more on Shelley and literary criticism of his work than on Newman’s story and how Shelley’s poetry affected her. I did not want to abandon this story, nor did I want to relegate her life to a footnote of Shelley scholarship. Of course, there have been a number of excellent historical accounts of Newman’s life, including Anelisse Orleck’s Common Sense and a Little Fire, but I wanted to do something different, something in a more popular form, more accessible, more New York, and, like Newman herself, edgy.

Newman’s career began at roughly the same time as the American comic strip emerged, at a time when NYC newspapers were regularly running single-panel, xenophobic, anti-immigration “witty” caricatures. In contrast, the first strips, with their multiple frames, opened up the possibility of graphic narratives that were accessible to a public only semiliterate in English, though many immigrants could read at a sophisticated level in their native languages. Eager for new markets, newspapers started printing strips that celebrated immigrant life and hybrid American identities, such as Outcault’s Irish American Yellow Kid, which featured the carnivalesque antics of an impoverished Irish kid on the Lower East Side.

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