Most of the protesters who occupied Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 were unaware that just a few blocks away stood the building that once housed Johann Schwab’s saloon, arguably the historical epicenter of anarchism in America. Though the Occupy movement expressed a number of anarchist principles—a studied avoidance of leadership, a movement economy based on free sharing of resources, a radical critique of capitalism and the economic exclusion of the “99 percent,” and a levelling ethos that created “general assemblies” rather than formal organizations—few in the movement thought of themselves as following in the footsteps of anarchist forebears (222, 225). As Tom Goyens points out in his insightful and important collection of essays, Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, this was because there actually was no direct connection between the anarchists of a century earlier and the Occupy eruption. How...
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