The Adversity and Empathy of Emma Goldman

Chapter 4 examines how Emma Goldman wrote her 1931 Living My Life to challenge the state authority that had deported her during the first Red Scare, turning inward before a global audience to analyze experiences in the family, factory, anarchist circles, prison, and in nursing. Through autobiography Goldman theorized two approaches to antiauthoritarian politics. Whereas an adversarial approach aimed to emancipate the people through targeting and removing agents of oppression, empathy would raise awareness of the people that suffer structural injustice. The chapter traces this shift in anarchist politics across Goldman’s descriptions of her assistance with the attempted murder of Henry Clay Frick and her response to the assassination of President William McKinley. Recognizing Goldman’s claim of experience elevates Living My Life among her anarcha-feminist essays and speeches, and it explains why she revealed her previously secret involvement with the attack on Frick though it made difficult her return to the United States.

Henry Adams on the Ends of Education

Chapter 3 examines how the author of The Education of Henry Adams confronted the developments in party politics, immigration, and technology that he believed had fragmented American democracy at the turn of the twentieth century. Henry Adams described education as the intellectual or social pursuits whereby we find ourselves and our place among others, pursuits that require a guiding authority figure or frame. Narrating his life as a failed attempt to find himself in Washington politics, journalism, and teaching, Adams revealed how modernity had outmoded an old form of education through the authority of republican statesmen. Inspired by advancements in biology and physics, Adams looked to the sciences for a new authority through which to understand himself and the nation, leading him to life writing. Adams sought to usher in a new American better fit to modernity than he was, insisting that those who survive him would need to seek new education.

Frederick Douglass, from Narration to Denunciation

Chapter 2 shows how Frederick Douglass issued two claims across two antebellum narratives. In his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he both challenged the diminished legal and moral authority of black Americans and analyzed what of the plantation had oppressed him. Yet after his political ideas and ties developed in the following decade, Douglass wrote his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom not as mere narrative but as denunciation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside moral criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs in Bondage implicated readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation. This claim depended on Douglass’s renewed authority to analyze his life and on an analysis that revealed how the conditions of slavery implicate abolitionists and readers. Douglass’s book reached outward to demand his audience join him in solidarity for racial justice.

Benjamin Franklin’s Imperfections

Chapter 1 analyzes The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin as an experimental text written across the revolutionary era and the development of Benjamin Franklin’s thought. Whereas Franklin is often seen as the archetypal rags-to-riches story that parallels American independence, reading the text across the diverse political circumstances that influenced each part reveals what for Franklin was the value of imperfection. Imperfections in the political subject or society do more than humble members or pave the way for a more perfect union: they motivate participants to collaborative efforts in improving themselves and their ties to one another. This chapter offers a new reading of Franklin on authority and shows how only through revision did his work become a claim of experience.

Whittaker Chambers and the Confessions of Ex-Communists

Chapter 5 places Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 Witness within the American panic over communism during the second Red Scare. In the late 1940s, Chambers took the stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee to confess that he and Alger Hiss, among others, had conspired against the United States from a Soviet underground cell. Though Hiss’s prison sentence was a legal victory, the autobiography claimed authority back from the trials and the state’s capacity to make meaning of Chambers’s life. Chambers argued for a return to the authority of God and fathers outmoded in a secular modernity exemplified by communism and New Deal liberalism. Although the trial of Hiss had publicized these accusations, Chambers turned to autobiography to achieve where he thought he had failed: to convert Americans to a Christian anticommunism and to compel present and former communists to confess, though he would ultimately fail to convert Hiss himself.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s argument: that many people and movements across American history have turned to life writing in times of political urgency to make a “claim of experience.” Drawing on Angela Davis’s reflections on her own autobiography’s politics, the introduction proposes a claim of experience as any life narrative that offers its audience new community by restoring to readers and author alike from prevailing political authorities the power to remake and make meaning of their lives. Whether written or spoken, a claim of experience draws the author’s attention in three directions: upward, inward, and outward. This framing rallies the rhetorical moves made in autobiography around a common concern with authority and accommodates a great variety of political goals. The introduction situates this theory in the development of autobiography and American democracy, also reviewing what recent studies in political theory and literature have prompted this book’s methods and subjects.

Conclusion

How should we understand claims of experience today? This conclusion reviews the underlying precarity of bearing witness evident throughout the book and in contemporary politics. Claims of experience are inherently tentative and risky: they are open to revision, may be misunderstood, or may be received by unintended audiences in unanticipated ways. This chapter proposes that we see these possibilities as not flaws but features of claims of experience. The book concludes with a call: we should acknowledge the diverse forms that claims take in contemporary politics and the diverse goals they seek, for we are responsible for what democratic politics we make of a person’s life and our own lives.