Athens or Anarchy?

Soapbox Oratory and the Early Twentieth-Century American City

Author(s): Mary Anne Trasciatti
Source: Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum , Vol. 20,
No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 43-68
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/buildland.20.1.0043

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/buildland.20.1.0043?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
m a r y a n n e tr a sci a tti
Athens or Anarchy?
Soapbox Oratory and the Early Twentieth-­Century
American City
Soapbox oratory was an integral part of early
twentieth-­century American city life. A type of
outdoor impromptu speaking, it was named for
the makeshift platforms that orators devised
from sturdy wooden crates in which soap was
delivered to stores, although curbs, ladders, stair-
ways, the backs of trucks (known as “cart-­tails”)
and anything else that made a speaker more
visible to the audience were also used. Soapbox
orators provided political education and enter-
tainment for people of limited means, recruited
members for labor, suffrage, antiracist, and other
movements, and attempted religious conversions.
They constituted a dynamic element of the city’s
physical environment.
In this essay I explain soapboxing as a type of
performance that temporarily disrupts and redi-
rects the activities and attention of people in the
surrounding area. Using Michel de Certeau’s
distinction between place and space, I explore
the tactics by which soapboxers transformed city
streets, parks, and squares from thoroughfares,
commercial districts, picnic grounds, and such
into aesthetically vibrant spaces for intellectual
and political engagement. Nineteenth-­century
efforts to impose order on the city in the form
of permits for parades and public speaking and
increased policing constrained the activities of
soapboxers. The advent of city planning in the
early twentieth century brought additional scru-
tiny of the practice. Through comparative analy­
sis of soapboxing in three American cities—­
Chicago, New York, and Spokane—­I consider
how the dialectic of disruption and order, repre-
sented by soapboxing and city planning, respec-
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
tively, was managed in the years before World
War I. I then discuss the decline of soapboxing
in the 1920s amid the repression of the post-
war Red Scare. Soapboxing remained a popular
practice in Harlem, however, and enjoyed resur-
gence in other neighborhoods in the 1930s and
intermittently throughout the remaining de-
cades of the twentieth century. A surge in street
speaking in U.S. cities with the current Occupy
movements further suggests that the trajectory
of soapboxing is characterized by waves and
troughs of activism and suppression.
Historical Antecedents of Soapboxing
Soapbox speaking is the offspring of two ex-
pressive traditions: outdoor political oratory and
public meetings/protests. The former was part
of American culture from the nation’s earliest
years.1 As far back as 1806, outdoor itinerant
speaking was called “stump speaking,” an ex-
pression that reflects the rural character of the
United States at the time. During elections it was
the habit of political canvassers (although not
candidates themselves) to travel throughout the
country making open-­air speeches. Public halls
and platforms were rare and the stumps of trees
were numerous and furnished convenient places
from which to speak. Hence the expressions
“stump speaker,” “stump orator,” and “stump-
ing.”2 Speakers stumped for social movements,
like abolition, temperance, and suffrage, as well
as political candidates, although the term was
most often associated with electioneering.
Stump orators addressed public meetings that
typically included music, pageantry, and parading.
43
 The public meeting, staged for an electoral cam-
paign, to mark a holiday like the Fourth of July,
or for an event like the opening of the Erie Canal,
was the sacred civic act of antebellum democ-
racy, according to historian Mary Ryan.3 Indeed,
throughout the 1800s, campaign rallies were
better attended than religious services or the
meetings of itinerant preachers. 4 This kind of
political spectacle, which dominated American
elections until the turn of the twentieth century,
fostered record voter turnouts.5
Not all outdoor events celebrated the exist-
ing social order. Along with the community-­
sanctioned public meeting, a tradition of popular
protest runs deep in American culture. Urban
riots, occasioned by ethnic, racial, economic, and
religious issues, were common in the nineteenth
century, especially before 1870.6 As strikes be-
came increasingly widespread in the antebellum
period, a more organized form of workers’ pro-
test emerged: the strike demonstration. Striking
workers formed themselves into processions and
marched through city streets, expressing group
presence and communicating angry and pow-
erful unity.7 The 1880s saw the emergence of
Labor Day and May Day as occasions for workers
to march, demonstrate, and celebrate working-­
class solidarity.8 Demonstrations continued into
the 1900s, with particular militancy during the
series of strikes between 1885 and 1887.9
Oratory was a vital component of popular pro-
test. Rousing orators fired people up at the start
of a march, and good speakers were the highlight
of an outdoor gathering. The United States had
its own pantheon of celebrated speakers and ca-
nonical addresses that informed and inspired
would-­be orators. Oratory was an essential ingre-
dient of European working-­class activism as well,
and immigrant activists brought public-­speaking
practices with them from their respective places
of origin, just as they brought music, religious
symbols, and other rituals that they wove into
their protest activities.10 In the 1880s the expres-
sion “cart-­tail orator” emerged as a designation
for a speaker who addressed audiences on city
streets from the back of a horse-­drawn wagon,
but the term gradually disappeared in the twenti-
eth century along with horse-­drawn wagons. The
44 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
label “soapbox orator” was commonly applied to
outdoor speakers in the city, particularly those
who addressed immigrant and working-­c lass
populations, beginning in the early twentieth
century.
The soapbox—­literally, a wooden box in which
manufacturers delivered soap to stores for retail
sale—­was a mundane object, an inexpensive,
disposable artifact of the industrial city. Why was
the soapbox, and not some other object, associ-
ated with street speaking in the United States?11
Perhaps because soapboxes suited the needs of
itinerant orators perfectly: they were widely avail-
able (storeowners sometimes gave them away);
they were light enough to be portable but sturdy
enough to support the weight of an average-­
sized person; and, with a height of anywhere
from six to twelve inches, they elevated a speaker
just enough to attract attention and command
space. Appropriation of the soapbox for use as
a speaker’s platform infused a discarded object
with new meaning and value. By World War I,
“soapbox” became a metaphor for impassioned,
impromptu, unofficial public speaking.
The history of public meetings and popular
protests includes efforts to discipline and control
them. Local authorities in the nineteenth cen-
tury deployed police and the militia to restore
order when riots broke out, often with deadly
effect.12 The invention in the 1870s of permits
for parading and public speaking offered an
additional way to limit use of the streets as an
expressive domain.13 So too did changes in the
built environment. In her study of civic activity
in nineteenth-­century American cities, Ryan
argues that the form of the antebellum city fos-
tered civic consciousness. City halls and other
architectural arenas for public deliberation en-
joyed privileged status and were recognized as
the center from which all other activity radiated.
Accidents of urban geography, haphazard plan-
ning, and private real estate development cre-
ated outdoor locations—­public and quasi-­public
squares—­that hosted a variety of civic activities.14
Beginning in the 1870s, changes in the built en-
vironment channeled urban life into a private di-
rection. The physical center of the city shifted to
comprise the office buildings of corporate capi-
tal, rather than the seat of local government, and
initiatives to create large open spaces encouraged
a genteel form of solitude more than sociability.15
Soapbox orators resisted legal and architec-
tural constraints on public gatherings and ex-
pression. They circulated within and between
cities, briefly taking over locations not neces-
sarily intended for public discourse, speaking
without a permit and slipping away to avoid ar-
rest or physical violence at the hands of police
when necessary. Manipulating voice and body,
sounds, words, and images, they enacted an aes-
thetic and political performance to entertain,
educate, and persuade passersby about matters
of social and political import.16 Their ephemeral
presence transformed streets, squares, and parks
into lively and important, if temporary, forums
for civic engagement. The practice of soapbox-
ing infused political significance not just to city
spaces but also to the daily life that transpired in
and around them.
The Performance of Soapboxing
Street speaking is an act different from speak-
ing on a fixed platform in a legislative chamber,
auditorium, or meeting hall. These places clearly
exist as sites for public communication; those
who enter them expect to be addressed in some
way and act accordingly. In contrast, the street
speaker situates him or herself on a temporary
platform at a location that is not always already
given over to public discourse. People going
about their business on the street do not neces-
sarily expect to be auditors of a speech. The ora-
tor’s challenge, therefore, is to engage passers-
­by and transform the immediate environment
to create a speaking situation where one did not
previously exist.
Transforming Place into Space
What is a useful framework for explaining this
transformative process? In The Practice of Every­
day Life, Michel de Certeau distinguishes be-
tween place and space. Place is a locus ordered
by relationships of coexistence. Each of the vari-
ous elements that constitute a place occupies its
own position. No two elements may occupy the
same position at the same time. Thus place “im-
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
plies an indication of stability.”17 Space is about
movement. The elements of space are mobile,
and they intersect. Put another way, “space is a
practiced place.”18 As a planned urban thorough-
fare, a street is a place; walkers transform it into
a space when they move along it or traverse it in
patterned, if not completely predictable, ways.
De Certeau further illustrates the distinction be-
tween place and space by juxtaposing a map and
a tour. The former presents a picture, enables
knowledge of an order of positions; the latter or-
ganizes movements.19
Other theorists explore how groups considered
disorderly or unruly by the dominant society have
fought their way into the political public by de-
manding and creating public space. What makes
a space public, Don Mitchell argues in The Right
to the City, “is often not its preordained ‘public-
ness.’ Rather, it is when to fulfill a pressing need,
some group or another takes space [here he means
what de Certeau calls “place”] and through its ac-
tions makes it public.”20 Soapboxers in the early
twentieth century played an essential role in this
endeavor. The orator who positioned a soapbox,
ladder, or any other platform outdoors began the
process of transforming a place—­street corner,
square, park—­into a space. The transformation
continued as the speaker mounted the platform
and worked to gather an audience, using words,
images, sounds, nearby objects, and persons as
enticements. These practices—­of seizing on
available elements to draw an audience and cre-
ate a speaking situation where one did not pre-
viously exist—­are examples of what de Certeau
calls “tactics.” In contrast to “strategies,” rules
and plans put forward by powerful institutions
to impose some sort of logic on and control over a
location, “tactics” are the methods by which wily
but relatively weak entities—­and soapboxers, for
various reasons, fit this description—­poach on a
place without taking it over permanently.21
Tactics for outdoor speaking aimed to make
an audience out of disparate denizens of the city,
all of whom have the option of walking away with-
out consequence. In a 1913 essay in which she of-
fers practical advice to socialist soapbox speak-
ers, Grace Silver aptly sums up the challenge: “A
street crowd is the most critical gathering in the
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 45

Figure 1. “The Four Old
Maids and the Socialist
Orator.” From Puck,
October 23, 1912, 18.
O rator .—“It is
generally accepted as
a fact that the Socialist
Party advocates free love.
Let me tell you——”
“——that it does not.
Well, what do you know
about that?”
46 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
world. Once you get men and women into a hall
they will stay. . . . The man who listens to a street
speaker will move on inside of two minutes un-
less something has been said which awakens his
interest.”22 The magazine Puck illustrates Silver’s
point in humorous fashion, showing what hap-
pens when a socialist speaker fails to treat the
topic of free love in a manner that excites the in-
terest of his adult female audience (Figure 1).
Setting the Scene
Soapbox orators deployed a variety of tactics to at-
tract and keep an audience. Advance work, such
as publishing the route of a cart-­tail campaign in
a local newspaper or announcing that an orator
would be speaking on a particular street corner,
sometimes despite having been denied a per-
mit by local authorities, aroused curiosity and
directed would-­be audience members to sites
where something interesting was likely to hap-
pen. Carts festooned with banners, streamers,
luminary devices, placards, flags, and live music,
usually supplied by a brass band, created a vi-
brant scene that engaged the senses.23
This kind of spectacle was popular in immi-
grant and working-­c lass neighborhoods. Can-
didates for public office used aural and visual
tactics to attract workers who toiled outdoors:
stevedores, street pavers, bricklayers, construc-
tion workers, street vendors, and a host of oth-
ers. These workers tended not to frequent in-
door spaces for campaign speaking, especially
those beyond the boundaries of the neighbor-
hood. Thus cart-­tailing enabled politicians to
get a message across to prospective voters whom
they might not reach otherwise. A turn-­of-­t he-­
century illustration of a horse-­d rawn, banner
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
strewn, lantern-­lit cart with a finely dressed ora-
tor holding forth at the tail, which was published
in Harper’s Weekly and captioned “Politics among
the Tenement Houses in New York City—Lis-
tening to a Cart-­tail Orator,” explicitly identified
this form of outdoor political speaking with New
York’s immigrant, working-­class neighborhoods
(Figure 2).24
Some late nineteenth-­century commentators
found the scene too festive. A writer for the De-
troit Free Press on electioneering in the New York
1897 mayoral campaign suggested that pomp
and pageantry had trumped political content.
The piece offered verbal and visual commen-
tary on “remarkable devices to win votes in New
York.” It claimed, “the day has gone when a popu-
lar candidate, a rallying cry and speakers of leath-
ern lungs and inexhaustible lung power formed
a sufficient equipment for a campaign.”25 The
accompanying illustration depicted “campaign
oddities” designed to attract voters, including
bicycle-­powered incandescent lamps, lantern-­lit
kites, the cinematograph (a film camera/projec-
tor), and images of a tiger and an elephant (Fig-
ure 3). This visual analogy likened the campaign
for Republican candidate Seth Low to a circus and
revealed a perception that politics had become in-
distinguishable from entertainment. Such a per-
ception undoubtedly fueled the turn away from
spectacular electoral politics toward a more di-
dactic style that began in the 1880s.26
Voice and Body
No matter how engaging the scene, an audience
would not remain long if the speaker was inau-
dible. Orators needed physical energy and moxie
to bellow above the everyday sounds of a dynamic
urban environment. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, or-
ganizer for the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), a radical union dedicated to organizing
all workers in all industries, was one of the most
renowned soapboxers of the early twentieth cen-
tury. She attributed her success in large measure
to her ability to bellow with bravado. She once
told a reporter after being released from prison,
“I agitate a listener. I know how to get the power
out of my diaphragm instead of my vocal chords
and I’m happy to be free to give capitalism hell.”27
 In neighborhoods where norms of middle-­
class propriety prevailed, more subtle tactics
might yield greater rewards. An illustrative ac-
count of tactics deployed by birth control advo-
cates in New York to gather middle-­class crowds
for street corner speeches about this taboo topic
appears in Margaret Sanger’s Autobiography.

During the warm evenings of one summer, Kitty,

Helen Todd, and I, often accompanied by George
Swazey, a friendly Englishman, proceeded to the
neighborhood of St. Nicholas Avenue above 125th
Street, where many white collar families lived.
We used to buy a soapbox at the nearest delicates-
sen, and Helen, who had a lank, swarthy pictur-
esqueness which attracted attention, mounted it;
Swazey, standing behind, held aloft an American
flag. Though not a soul might be in sight except
our little group with its bundles of literature and
Kitty with her Reviews, Helen began in her beau-
tiful voice, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” bowing to
the trees, “we welcome you here tonight.” When
nobody appeared, she began again. “Ladies and
Gentlemen,” and this time one or two stroll-
ers usually lingered. Immediately we raised our
pasteboard banners with “birth control” printed in
black letters. She was off in full swing, and in a few
minutes we had our audience.28

Helen Todd used polite tone, diction, and gesture

to win notice on a street where manners mat-
tered. She illustrates the “polite petty” acts that
maintained the contours of acceptable behavior
specified by dominant norms, even as they un-
dermined them.29 Sanger’s reminiscence also
suggests that a speaker’s own body could serve
as a visual enticement to the speaking scene,
especially if the speaker was female. Despite a
half-­century of women’s insistence on the right
to engage in public political activity, even into the
first decade of the twentieth century, cultural dis-
courses directed the American woman to the do-
mestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space.30 The
female public speaker, especially she who took to
the streets, was therefore, at best, a curiosity.
The physically striking woman orator was
a spectacle. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn attracted
crowds with her youth, slender figure, and raven-­
haired beauty, and kept them with her fiery ora- Figure 2. “Politics among
tions.31 Portia Willis, known as “the suffrage the Tenement Houses
beauty,” reportedly drew throngs of men when in New York City—
Listening to a Cart-Tail
she took to the soapbox. A Boston Daily Globe Orator.” From Harper’s
account of a street-­corner suffrage rally in July Weekly 40 (October 31,
1914 described her as “a brunette with dark eyes 1896): 1069. Courtesy of
and a velvety skin, much tanned from outdoor Special Collections, The
campaigning in New York State, where she has City College of New York,
CUNY.
gained much fame.”32 The attention paid to fe-
male speakers’ looks was not lost on suffrag-
ists. In 1912, the Woman Suffrage Party pub-
lished Mother Goose as a Suffragette, a whimsical

ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 47

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Figure 3. “Devices for
Getting Votes in the illustrated booklet that set women’s rights is-
New York Campaign.” sues to nursery rhymes. One of the rhymes,
From Detroit Free Press, “Little Miss Horner,” showed a young and pretty
October 31, 1897, 18.
woman speaking on the street of an indetermi-
Figure 4. “Little Miss
nate city. An older woman handing out flyers
Horner.” From Mother stood near her. A couple of dandies in the au-
Goose as a Suffragette dience ogled the orator, oblivious to the older
(New York: Woman woman and her flyers (Fig­ure 4). Embedded in
Suffrage Party, 1912), 8. this lighthearted representation was another
critique of visual spectacle in political rhetoric.
The illustration and accompany­ing verses dem-
onstrated that physical beauty might attract au-
diences, but it did not inform or persuade them.
Men derived pleasure from the physical form of
the suffrage orator while ignoring the content of
suffrage oratory.
Beauty was not the only thing that drew at-
tention to a suffragist soapboxer. Class status
was another draw. Portia Willis was a respect-
able middle-­class woman, in fact, the daughter of
a New York Congressman. The beauteous Miss
Horner was clothed in a manner that suggested
similar respectability. Other female suffrage ora-
tors drew crowds with sartorial signs of middle-­
class status. Thus the Boston Daily Globe reported
in 1911:

Great interest and curiosity prevailed about the

corners of Hudson and Harvard Street last night
when a group of well-­d ressed women stopped
there, planting a soap box in the middle of the
street and one of them stepped upon it and began
to talk. In a twinkling the women were sur-
rounded, windows all the way up and down the
streets went up with a bang and heads completely
filled the openings.33

Suffragists incorporated street corner speaking

into their repertoire of tactics precisely because
it garnered this kind of attention. Like the cart-­
tail political orators, they found in soapboxing a
way to reach audiences who were not likely to at-
tend indoor meetings, such as the “dark-­haired
and swarthy skinned” crowd that surrounded
the women at Hudson and Harvard streets. That
they drew such crowds, in turn, got the attention
of the press, which further enlarged the audience
for their message.34 Male speakers, whose gender

48 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
presumably gave them the right to occupy urban different perspective. The positive social value
public spaces, had to resort to more overt tac- attached to elevation and height meant he or
tics to make themselves spectacular. Examples she merited a more exalted social status, if only
include dressing up in costume, escaping from temporarily.
a straightjacket, and shouting provocative state- Geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan offers a way of under-
ments like, “I’ve been robbed!”35 The notable ex- standing the bodily dimensions of space. Tuan
ception, of course, was men of color who dared to considers place and space as interconnected as-
Figure 5. “Enough Street
speak outside their own communities. pects of the lived experience of human life. Like Preachers in Chicago
Black street speakers were a rarity in pre- de Certeau, he links place and space to concepts to Convert a Nation.”
dominantly white city spaces, although black of stability and movement, respectively. “Place From Chicago Tribune,
soapbox orators addressing black audiences in is security, space is freedom,” he writes. “We November 13, 1898,
urban locales, especially Harlem, were increas- are attached to the one and long for the other.”38 50. Image published
with permission
ingly prevalent from World War I into the 1920s Whereas de Certeau emphasizes human social
of ProQuest LLC.
and 1930s. Around the turn of the century, the activities as the force that transforms a place into Further reproduction
Chicago Daily Tribune represented a black street a space, Tuan explores the dialectical tension be- is prohibited without
corner preacher in white downtown Chicago as tween the two: the universally human wish to permission.
an oddity on par with a woman speaker hold-
ing forth on the subject of political economy or
a whole family of musician preachers (Figure 5).
African American socialist Huber Harrison
earned notoriety for the scathing critiques of
capitalism that he delivered in front of the Stock
Exchange on Wall Street; in 1912, this “most
incendiary speaker” gave an address in Union
Square (where he was the only nonwhite ora-
tor) in support of the Bread and Roses strike in
Lawrence, Massachusetts.36 Native American
speakers who addressed white audiences were
perhaps even rarer. The Tribune highlighted
Tall Beaver, a Comanche Indian chief who was
to stump for William Jennings Bryan in the up-
coming electoral campaign (via railroad bicycle),
as an “Oddity of the Political Campaign,” along
with a pretty girl stumping Maine for her father
(a Democratic candidate for governor of West
Virginia who minded babies and fiddled for
country dances on the campaign trail), an insane
man elected to Congress, and an “unconscious
freak.”37

Spatial Presence of the Speaker and Audience

A speaker who mounted a soapbox distinguished
him or herself from others in the same location.
Elevation of the body widens a person’s horizon
and provides new social orientation. Humans are
assertive when standing. Elevated on a soapbox,
cart-­tail, curbstone, or ladder, the orator stood
taller than everyone else and saw things from a

ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 49

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Figure 6. Alexander
Berkman addressing a
crowd in Union Square,
1914. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs
Division, http://hdl
.loc.gov/loc.pnp/
ggbain.15715.
50 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
dwell comfortably within a center of established
values and at the same time to transcend the
present condition through an elementary power
to move.39
The body’s sensory organs and experiences
allow human beings to have strong feelings for
space and spatial qualities. Individual passersby
who see an orator, and stop and gather of their
own volition, temporarily resist the biological
imperative to move and experience a form of col-
lective embodiment. Participation in the collec-
tive body changes the way space is experienced.
Tuan observes, “Every person is at the center of
his world, and circumambient space is differ-
entiated in accordance with the schema of his
body. As he moves and turns, so do the regions
front-­back and right-­left around him.”40 But it is
the soapboxer who orients the collective body of
the audience. The elevated human form defines
and occupies the focal point of a shared space. A
savvy orator is mindful of this spatial calculus
and positions the soapbox in a spot that offers
good visibility and a strategic backdrop (if the
desire is not to expose one’s back) to passersby.
An indoor stationary speaking environment
takes up the same amount of space on the urban
landscape no matter how large the crowd that
comes to hear the speaker. In contrast, the space
commanded by an outdoor speaking situation
varies. A poor speaker might draw a handful of
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
people whose presence barely fills a street corner.
A really compelling speaker could attract a crowd
with a much larger spatial presence (Figure 6).
The sheer numbers of bodies gathered to hear a
speaker like anarchist Alexander Berkman was
undoubtedly an impressive sight for onlookers.
The spatial presence of the audience was visual
proof of the orator’s power and the appeal of his
ideas. 41 Like all rhetorical displays, this visual
proof was performative: the individuals who con-
stituted the audience enacted a shared, somatic
experience. Surrounding buildings contained
and compressed the space so that audience mem-
bers stood in close proximity. Looking out across
the dense crowd they felt themselves one among
many. Their respective visual and auditory focal
points were the same. They felt the same sun,
or wind, warmth, or cold. Perhaps they touched
one another as they maneuvered to hear better
or get a better look at the speaker; commented to
one another in agreement or disagreement about
what was heard or not heard, seen or not seen; ex-
pressed mutual pleasure or displeasure by cheer-
ing common allies and booing common foes.
The Speaker–Audience Dynamic
Soapbox speaking is not linear communication.
Speaker and audience enjoy a reciprocal, dy-
namic relationship that draws upon both shared
knowledge and new ideas. Speakers tell stories,
make arguments, and appeal to the intellect,
emotions, and values of their listeners, but audi-
ences play an active role as well. The aforemen-
tioned Atlantic Monthly illustration depicts an
orator addressing a crowd packed so as to make
the street impassable. The faces of the men in
the background are barely discernible; however,
in the foreground we see individuals whose facial
expressions, body postures, and gestures suggest
active listening: one man, hat-­in-­hand, extends
an arm to the speaker; another, just below him,
seems as though he may be saying something;
two men in the lower right-­hand corner are pos-
sibly elaborating or refuting one of the speaker’s
points in their own conversation. No doubt,
someone is heckling.
Democrats, Republicans, socialists, suffrag-
ists, all seem to have been targets for heckling,
although this behavior was likely not always
unwanted or uninvited. Analysis of heckling at
Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London, reveals
that speakers implicitly or explicitly elicited some
forms of heckling, and audience members, in
turn, actively responded to those invitations in
ways that suited their own interests and aims. 42
Heckling, in other words, was a two-­way street,
a means of engagement between speaker and
audience that transformed an apparently linear
interaction into a kind of public, conversational
transaction. 43
Individuals heckled to indicate positive or
negative reactions to a speaker; other, collective
audience responses included applause, usually
triggered by the speaker, and booing, which
made either allies or adversaries of speaker and
audience, depending on the nature and content
of the statement being booed. 44 Unlike walk-
ing off, heckling and booing were direct ways
by which audience members registered displea-
sure with a speaker. 45 In Harlem, where expec-
tations for street speakers were high, audiences
commonly expressed disapproval by heckling
and booing. Occasionally, a negative audience
response involved something other than words,
nonverbal utterances, or symbolic gestures. Dis­
gruntled audience members were known, for ex-
ample, to hurl rotten produce at a speaker. One
seasoned orator advised students at the Spell­
binder School in New York that such occurrences
were part of the job and indicative neither of the
moral failings of the perpetrator nor the oratori-
cal shortcomings of the victim.
Every cart-­tail spellbinder is expected to send in a
bill for laundry and cleaning and pressing clothes.
An attack made on you, especially on the east side,
must not be construed into lack of patriotism or
to your poor oratory. Remember that the pushcart
men have to do something with a stock of vegeta-
bles and fruit when it is no longer salable. 46
Speakers engaged with audience members and
with one another. It was not unusual for an ora-
tor to mount a soapbox, cart-­tail, or ladder within
hearing distance of a rival and engage in verbal
sparring and counterargument in order to dis-
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
credit the other and curry favor with a larger au-
dience. Music was a very effective tool for this
kind of contest. In Spokane, soapboxers for the
IWW belted out bitingly humorous tunes from
the Little Red Songbook to harass Salvation
Army speakers who taunted them with “blare of
trumpet and banging of drum.”47 Preachers were
known to draw audiences with trumpet blasts or
other musical invitations; one in Chicago, who
sermonized from the back of “a two-­horse wagon
with organ and gospel singers,” also drew the ire
of nearby orators discoursing on political themes
because he took away their audiences. 48 A con-
gressional candidate stumping in South Boston
hired male singers with powerful megaphones
that allowed their voices to be heard two blocks
away to lure crowds from rival candidates with
captivating songs like “That’s within the Law”
and “I’m Glad You’re with Me and I Won’t Detain
You Long.”49
Like all live performance, soapbox oratory is
ephemeral. A successful speaker temporarily
halts people from moving through the landscape
and going about their business. Once the speech
is over, audience members take their leave and
commence their prior activities. Speakers like-
wise abandon the scene and circulate elsewhere
in the city and beyond. Perhaps the most well-­
known example of large-­scale circulation of
speakers is the recruitment of would-­be IWW
soapboxers from across the United States and
their deployment to western cities, includ-
ing Denver, Colorado; Spokane, Washington;
Missoula, Montana; and San Diego, California,
where pitched battles for free speech were waged
between 1909 and 1916.50 Suffragist speakers
also circulated through various regions of the
country.51
Orators typically traveled by rail from one city
to another. Around World War I, however, the
increasingly affordable and popular automobile
emerged as the preferred vehicle for mobile speak-
ing campaigns (Figure 7).52 An advertisement
in the July 1916 International Socialist Review
offered a free five-­passenger Ford Touring Car
to any “hustler” who sold seven hundred yearly
subscriptions.53 The ad suggests reasons for the
popularity of the automobile for public speaking
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 51

Figure 7. Advertise­
ment for a free Ford
5-Passenger Touring
Car. From International
Socialist Review 17, no. 1
(July 1916): 2.
52 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
campaigns. Like a train, a car could serve as both
a means of transportation between one city and
another and as a speaking platform, but it had
other advantages. “Nothing attracts a crowd like
a GOOD SPEECH from an automobile,” trum-
pets the ad copy, “It will save you railroad fare. It
will help you get about quickly and to cover much
ground.”54 Cars attracted attention, and brought
speakers to more audiences for less money.
Although soapbox orators sometimes trav-
eled great distances from one speaking site to
another, the most successful ones cultivated
knowledge of the local environment wherever
they landed. Audiences did not respond well if a
speaker did not share their sense of place. If can-
didates could not readily cultivate a shared sense
of values, attitudes, and interests with local au-
diences, a well-­regarded resident of the commu-
nity might be tapped to speak instead. In such
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
cases the speaker presented a kind of embodied
link between a neighborhood scene and a larger
political network.55 “The orator should be indige­
nous to the soil,” one successful cart-­t ail cam-
paign organizer advised. “A noted orator from
Massachusetts made a speech a few years ago in
Cooper Union, and while what he said had tone
and all that sort of thing he got the North River
and the East River so mixed up that the audience
was at sea regarding what boat it was to take.”56
Soapboxing and the Early
Twentieth-­Century City
In myriad ways, soapbox speaking transformed
urban locales into vibrant, dynamic, and con-
tested spaces. This practice continued to make
sense in American cities as they grew rapidly
from the middle 1800s to the first decade of
the twentieth century and absorbed a seem-
ingly endless flow of migrants from outside the
country as well as rural areas within the United
States. It did not live easily with the demand for
comprehensive city planning that emerged in the
early 1900s in response to problems associated
with the rapid growth and population density of
urban centers. City planners aimed to provide
expert, rational solutions to problems like in-
sufficient open space, slums, and congestion.57
Because they inherited ideas from nineteenth-­
century moral reform movements these progres-
sive reformers aimed to uplift urban populaces
and promote a positive and constructive vision
of citizenship.
This goal—­to create social order out of per-
ceived chaos—­demanded a coordinated physical
transformation of the city.58 It was allied with the
City Beautiful movement, a philosophy born from
the perception of many business and community
leaders and municipal officials that unfettered
and unplanned growth had made American cities
ugly. This physical ugliness was not regarded as
merely an aesthetic problem; it was a sign of po­liti­
cal dysfunction and moral decay. City Beautiful
advocates promoted initiatives that used architec-
tural beauty and grandeur as a means to instill
civic pride among residents, which, in turn, was
supposed to generate moral virtue.59 Although
sincere in their belief that these plans would im-
prove city life, City Beautiful advocates “are jus-
tifiably open to the charge,” the urban historian
Carl Smith has argued, “that theirs was an elitist
top-­down approach that expressed self-­interested
anxieties about polyglot urban democracy and a
desire to impose their own vision of an orderly
metropolis on immigrants and workers in the
hope of asserting social control.”60 In de Certeau’s
terms, they used beauty as a strategy for mapping
order onto an undisciplined metropolis.
City planning and soapboxing comprised dif-
ferent ways of seeing the city and engaging and
dominating its public spaces. The urbanism of
city planning was visually and spatially cohesive,
and expressive of hierarchy; soapboxing empha-
sized free speech and free assembly. Their di-
verse ideals—­respectively, order and rationality
and disorder and unpredictability—­constitute
what Don Mitchell refers to as “the dialectic of
public space.”61 Case studies of Chicago, New
York, and Spokane illustrate how these differ-
ent spatial imaginaries intersected around 1910
and provide evidence for how residents managed
differently the tension between order and un­
predictability in each city until World War I.
Chicago
Chicago is a key site for analysis. This center of
street speaking was also home to experiments
that inspired the nascent profession of city plan-
ning. City planners and street speakers coexisted
in time, if not always in space. These strategists
and tacticians occupied different zones of the
city, but the separation between them was not
complete. Permit requirements and policing re-
mained in effect even in areas where street speak-
ing prevailed. Division of the city into distinct
zones provided Chicagoans a way to manage the
disjuncture between order and unpredictability
without tipping the balance entirely in favor of
either.
Chicago cart-­tail speakers were crucial fig-
ures in one of the most riveting events of late
nineteenth-­century history: the 1886 Hay­market
Affair. During the evening of May 4 at Hay­market
Square, workers gathered to protest against police
violence at a rally for the eight-­hour day the previ-
ous evening. After anarchist orators addressed a
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
crowd of 2,500 people, a bomb exploded, killing
seven policemen on hand to break up the rally
and at least four workers (Figure 8).
The party responsible for detonating the bomb
was never caught. Thirty-­one anarchists and so-
cialists were arrested; eight anarchists (seven of
whom were immigrants) were tried and convicted
for having incited violence with their rhetoric;
four of them were executed.62 News of the explo-
sion and its aftermath flashed around the coun-
try, embossing the image of the sinister, bomb-­
throwing anarchist deeply into American culture.
It also rippled through radical circles worldwide,
transforming the men into heroes and martyrs
for labor, and inspiring the adoption of May Day
as an international working-­class holiday.
Illinois governor John P. Altgeld pardoned
the three remaining prisoners in 1893, citing
prejudice and the impossibility of a fair trial.
He issued this controversial pardon in the same
year that Chicago made news for playing host to
a very different affair: the World’s Columbian
Exposition. Chicago architect Daniel Burnham
designed the well-­lit, classically inspired, statue-­
studded exhibition halls, which were situated on
Frederick Law Olmsted’s ground plan. The arca-
dian landscape of the White City, as this area was
called, established City Beautiful principles as
the standard for urban design.63 Burnham went
on to design the McMillan Plan for Washington,
D.C., another for San Francisco, and the Plan
of Chicago, released in 1909, sponsored by the
Commercial Club and coauthored with Edward
Bennett. Burnham and Company offered a vi-
sion of a grander Chicago inspired by the reorga-
nization of Paris earlier in the century by Baron
Eugene Haussmann.
Orators occupied streets and squares in Chi­
cago’s working-­c lass residential and commer-
cial neighborhoods. Haymarket was chosen as a
rally site because it was located near the bustling
meatpacking and lumber districts. Soapboxers
also abounded in the downtown business dis-
trict, “the Loop.” An 1898 Chicago Daily Tribune
article declares the ubiquity of outdoor preach-
ers in this area. “A stroll along State Street, from
Madison to Harrison, or a walk about the South
Clark Street district upon any Sunday with even
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 53
Figure 8. The Anarchist
Riot in Chicago:
A Dynamite Bomb
Exploding among
the Police. Thure
de Thulstrup, wood
engraving published
in Harper’s Weekly 30
(May 15, 1886): 312–13.
Courtesy of Special
Collections, The City
College of New York,
CUNY.

moderate pretensions to fine weather would
seem to suggest that if Chicago people are finally
damned it will not be for any lack of opportuni-
ties for hearing the gospel.”64 State Street was
the city’s busiest thoroughfare, filled with pe-
destrians, streetcars, and horse-­drawn carriages.
Orators with a compelling message might draw
sizable crowds, if they had windpipes to compete
with the ambient noise: horse hooves clumping,
wheels clamoring, bells clanging, street peddlers
crying, all topped off by the screech of the ele-
vated train, opened in 1897.
In the twentieth century, street speaking was
increasingly regulated in the commercial dis-
trict. Radical orators who dared to speak with-
out permits faced arrest and physical violence
at the hands of police.65 The heart of soapboxing
migrated from the architectural landscape of
the skyscraper within the Loop to Washington
Square Park, a green space further north where
the working classes congregated. In 1910, the
Tribune made a bold claim for a different thor-
oughfare: “Chicago’s Seat of Soap Box Oratory
and the Talk-­Center of the World is on North
Clark Street Where the Wild Word Artists Fore-
gather.” The illustration depicts a neighborhood
teeming with orators making rapturous and
hortatory gestures to audiences (Figure 9). It is
matched by the text, “This feast of gab is cele-
brated nightly in Summer, but to behold it at its
best, if you are willing to take the chance of being
talked to death, you should walk from Ohio Street
to Washington Square on a Sunday evening.”66
Washington Square Park was the most im-
portant place that soapboxers defined as a site
for outdoor public deliberation in Chicago. This
place was known also as Bughouse Square, a
slang term for mental illness or an institution
serving the mentally ill.67 The “secret” of the
sizeable audience for Bughouse Square orators
was the large population of migratory workers,
or hobos, who came to the city to find employ-
ment in the numerous industries located there
and lodged temporarily in the cheap hotels and
boarding houses just off North Clark Street. In
1910, Chicago was the “hobo capital of the world”
because of its central location, numerous em-
ployment agencies, hotels, saloons, brothels, and

54 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
other gathering spots, and the dense concentra-
tion of railroads, which supported the various
industries and readily enabled workers who ex-
hausted employment opportunities in the city to
find work elsewhere.68 Bughouse Square orators
included union organizers, evangelical preach-
ers, campaigners, cranks, and hobos themselves.
They provided entertainment, education, and ex-
hortation on any number of topics on a nightly
basis. The Tribune provided a partial list:

God, the devil, heaven, hell, golden harps, fire

and brimstone, John Huss, martyr, Pope Gregory,
Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Jack Johnson, the history
of the church, progress of agnosticism, socialism,
capitalism, wage slavery, child labor, what shall we
do with our millionaires? Pocahontas, Jeffries,
Powhatan, Taft, Captain John Smith, Roosevelt,
Galileo, the management of our jails, astronomy,
graft, what’s the use of living anyhow? The myth
called “patriotism,” the need for social revolution,
the Cubs, the bread line, Ingersoll, and war.69

A mere fifteen years after Haymarket, police took

a sanguine approach to Bughouse oratory. They
treated the nightly performances like a safety
valve that kept the economic and political dissat-
isfactions of individuals from coalescing into se-
rious social problems through regular catharsis.
Every night, at ten o’clock sharp, a beat police­
man announced the time, “and the socialists,
and the agnostics, and the others, in the midst
of their rolling sentences, cease. . . . The Feast of
Gab is over, until tomorrow night.”70 The Tribune
insisted that although this urban space appeared
to be given over to chaos and subversion, it was ul-
timately subject to order and control. Flamboyant
Bughouse orators were part of the summertime
scene, a treat for perambulators looking to savor
Chicago’s eccentric side.
New York
Early in the twentieth century, after the consoli­
dation of the five boroughs, New York was rela-
tively tolerant of street speakers. This develop-
ment was an improvement from the previous
century, when, observes historian Lisa Keller,
“public order in New York was not achieved
without bloodshed and death, which was greeted Figure 9. “Chicago’s
by the public and authorized as unfortunate, but Seat of Soapbox Oratory
not disastrous.”71 The civil violence included the and the Talk-Center of
the World Is on North
1849 Astor Place Riots, the 1863 Draft Riots, and Clark Street, Where All
the 1874 Tomkins Square Riot, to name a few the Wild Word Artists
of the more well-­known episodes. By the dawn Foregather.” From
of the new century, authorities had decided that Chicago Daily Tribune,
permitting and controlling public demonstra- August 28, 1910, B1.
Image published
tions was less troublesome than banning them
with permission
in New York.72 New Yorkers valued order, and of ProQuest LLC.
they had a high sensitivity to breaches of civil Further reproduction
liberties. To strike a balance between order and is prohibited without
liberty, they qualified and regulated the use of permission.
public space: street speaking was allowed, pro-
vided that orators and their audiences refrained
from harmful or dangerous acts.73
Orators mounted the soapbox in Brooklyn,
the Bronx, but especially in Manhattan, includ-
ing Rutgers (now Straus) Square in the working-­

ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 55

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 class immigrant community of the Lower East New York’s Union Square came to be defined by
Side, the tony neighborhood of Madison Square soapboxing as an extraordinary site for outdoor
Park, Wall Street, Morningside Heights, Harlem public deliberation.77
(so many meetings were held at the corner of Denial of a permit and arrest for defying the
125th Street and Seventh Avenue, someone la- law and speaking without one were not unknown
beled one of the trees there “Liberty Tree”), and for New York soapboxers. Religious speakers
Union Square.74 were rarely bothered, despite a ban on open-­air
So named because it marked the place where preaching in city streets and parks in force since
Broadway and the former Bowery Road (Fourth 1871.78 Radicals did not get off so easily under
Avenue) came together in the nineteenth cen- the 1902 Criminal Anarchy Act, passed after the
tury, Union Square drew sizable crowds. They assassination of President McKinley. This law
gathered for Labor Day and May Day demonstra- made it a felony to advocate the overthrow of the
tions and speeches by the most talented and re- United States government. Goldman and other
nowned radical orators on a range of subjects.75 anarchists were frequently denied permission
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was there for a 1907 to speak; more moderate Socialist campaigners
May Day rally and numerous occasions after- were denied periodically. Police arrested Flynn
ward. Emma Goldman spoke in 1911 to raise for stopping traffic when she spoke on social-
support for the Mexican Revolution.76 The mas- ism at West 38th Street and Broadway, which was
sive crowd that came to hear Berkman deliver then in the heart of the theater district.79 To avoid
his 1914 speech assembled for a memorial cer- police intimidation, radical speakers and audi-
emony for anarchists and Wobblies killed when a ences relocated from one venue to another.80
bomb they were making exploded in a Lexing­ton Radical soapbox orators called attention to is-
Avenue apartment. The likely target: oil magnate sues that for many Americans represented the
Figure 10. New York
Public Library, New York,
John D. Rockefeller. Like Bughouse in Chicago, “dark side” of New York: rapacious commercial-
N.Y., between 1910 and ism, poverty, crowded and unsanitary living con-
1915. Courtesy of Library ditions, to name just a few. In so doing, they com-
of Congress Prints and plicated efforts to promote an appealing image
Photographs Division, of the city for widespread consumption.81 But
Detroit Publishing
street speakers could be interpreted as a positive
Company Collection, LC-
D4-70675 B: http://www element of the urban landscape. United Press
.loc.gov/pictures/item/ reporter Carlton Ten Eyck suggested that street
det1994020519/PP/. speakers made New York like ancient Rome, with
Broadway functioning like the Forum, the center
Figure 11. Grand Central of Roman public life.82 Another newspaper ar-
Terminal, East 42nd
Street at Park Avenue,
ticle linked New York to ancient Athens, using
New York, N.Y., 1913. City Beautiful principles to craft the analogy.
Courtesy of the Frances New York did not adopt a “City Beautiful
Loeb Library, Graduate plan,” although the mayor’s office supported the
School of Design, movement, and a number of civic monuments
Harvard University, and
and sculptures were built in the first decades
made available by the
Library of Congress, of the century under the auspices of the New
American Landscape and City Public Improvement Commission.83 Major
Architectural Design, buildings and public spaces were also designed
1850–1920, http:// in line with City Beautiful principles, such as the
memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ New York Public Library (Figure 10) and Grand
query/h?ammem/alad
:@field%28NUMBER
Central Station (Figure 11).
+@band%28mhsalad The allusions to classical architecture, an inte-
+230062%29%29. gral element of City Beautiful aesthetics, suffuse

56 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
a 1910 New York Times article on soapboxing.84
The title, “Peripatetic Philosophers of This Many
Sided Town,” is set in a classic font that alludes
to the text on an Athenian temple or some other
such structure. Underneath the title is an image
that resembles a frieze, representing seven fig-
ures in ancient garb (sandals and tunics), with
the Parthenon and a sculpted bust (of Pan?) in
the background. Of the six figures wearing con-
temporary clothing, several appear to be artists
(one carries a cello and bow) and one a business-
woman (Figure 12).
With words and images, the article claims
that street speaking transformed New York into
a latter-­day Athens.
There is a Scriptural authority for the statement
that the ancient Athenians were never content
unless discussing some new thing. New York, all
Parthenon-­less as it is, is in this respect the legiti-
mate successor of the glory that was Greece. It is
the talkiest city in the world. There are more new
ideas set forth to a benighted universe in Man­
hattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx (the Bronx es-
pecially must not be omitted) than in any area of
similar size on the globe.85
The theme of New York-­as-­Athens extended
even into Harlem, where socialist orator Hubert
Harrison was known as “the Black Socrates.”86
Like peripatetic philosophers of old, New
York’s street speakers were mobile. They sur-
faced in the spring and circulated mostly
throughout the poorer neighborhoods. Reflect-
ing the city’s status as a primary debarkation
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
point for new arrivals from southern and east-
ern Europe, a great number of them were im-
migrants. Russian Jews were the first of these
immigrants to speak in the streets in significant
numbers. They traversed East Broadway, called
“The Nevsky Prospect of America” (after the
main thoroughfare in St. Petersburg, Russia)
for that reason. But the strolling and speaking
eventually spread elsewhere.
The philosophers of East Broadway have gone
northward to Harlem and the Bronx, and even to
Brooklyn, while the custom has not been aban-
doned by their successors on the “Nevsky Pros-
pect,” and other nationalities are acquiring the
habit. Fifth Avenue around 116th Street is even
more than East Broadway the happy hunting
ground of the peripatetics. From that point down
to the Park all philosophers know that the school
will meet every fine day in Summer. Another
school used last year to walk along Seventh Avenue
north from 125th Street.87
As represented in the Times article, the eloquent
soapbox orator was a symbol of urbanity and in-
tellectual sophistication. This sign of New York’s
cosmopolitanism was a contemporary embodi-
ment of the striving for perfection that animated
so lofty a civilization as ancient Athens. Perhaps
more important, the soapboxer was an agent of
democracy, creating spaces where New Yorkers
who lacked significant financial means might
obtain knowledge of a vast array of important is-
sues and engage in public deliberation. “The rich
man has his clubs in which he may discuss Wall
Figure 12. “Peripatetic
Philosophers of This
Many-Sided Town.” From
New York Times, May 29,
1910, SM11.
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 57
 Street and such phases of present-­day problems
as interest him,” notes the Times. “The clubless
poor man has the streets wherein to talk of wages
and that part of the social structure which con-
cerns him and his.”88
Spokane
Some form of tolerance for soapbox oratory was
perhaps easier in an established city like Chicago
or New York than in a newer one in the West,
especially a city that wanted to attract new busi-
nesses and middle-­c lass residents from other
regions of the country. A reputation for labor dis-
turbances was not likely to advance either aim. In
order to keep the IWW and other radicals off the
streets, a number of western cities passed local
ordinances between 1909 and 1916 that banned
street-­corner speaking with a prolabor mes-
sage. Wobblies and their allies fought back by
recruiting members from around the country to
violate the speaking ban. This action filled pris-
ons, clogged the court system, and in other ways
called outside attention to the laws in an effort to
have them repealed.89 The soapbox became a site
of struggle over the meaning of free speech.90
The first of these “free speech fights” to gain
national attention was in Spokane, Washington,
in 1909. Spokane’s economy was not primarily
industrial, but miners and lumbermen migrated
there in warm weather to look for seasonal em-
ployment. As in Chicago, saloons, brothels, and
gambling halls sought their patronage, as did
dishonest labor brokers who recruited for non­
existent jobs. Billy Sunday’s revival tent, provid-
ing food and shelter, was another draw. IWW
orators aimed to disrupt the trade in nonexistent
jobs by organizing drives among the workers—­
often right in front of the hiring halls.91
Wobblies took to the streets to challenge
employment agencies while Spokane was in
the midst of a City Beautiful campaign. Local
residents founded a City Beautiful Committee
to make Spokane “more cleanly, healthful, and
attractive” so that it “shall be a source of justifi-
able pride to her citizens of the present and of
the future.”92 The Committee exhorted residents
to pick up trash, to keep their houses and yards
neat, and to support efficient government, and it
called for large-­scale beautification projects. City
58 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Beautiful advocates feared that Spokane’s exist-
ing park system, comprising less than two hun-
dred acres, was insufficient to accommodate its
ever-­rising population, and that too much of the
remaining natural landscape was being surren-
dered to developers for unsightly and unhealthy
urban, industrial use. In partnership with the
150,000 Club, an organization dedicated to in-
creasing Spokane’s population to 150,000 within
ten years (an ultimately unrealized goal), the
committee endorsed an amendment to the city
charter that called for the establishment of a new
Park Commission. Voters in the 1907 election
approved the amendment and hired the land-
scape architects Olmsted Brothers to develop
a comprehensive plan for city parks, parkways,
and streets.93 This strategy to map an ordered
and aesthetically pleasing built environment
onto rough-­and-­tumble Spokane dovetailed with
a strategy for moral reform. The 1907 election
brought Herbert Moore into the mayor’s office on
a platform that included controlling prostitution,
gambling, and drinking.
Reformers and City Beautiful advocates rec-
ognized the problem of jobs fraud and supported
efforts to regulate hiring practices. They also
feared Spokane’s reputation as a place to invest
and relocate would be marred if the city became
known as a refuge for migrant workers and a
stronghold for the IWW. The city council passed
a law that banned public meetings “on any of the
streets, sidewalks or alleys within the fire limits,”
effective January 1, 1909. The fire limits were de-
fined by the thirty-­two-­block range touched by the
Great Fire of 1893—­essentially, the entire down-
town area. Supporters claimed the law was not
an assault on free speech because outdoor meet-
ings in public parks and vacant lots were allowed,
but as is the case with all free speech zones, this
one kept orators and their audiences out of public
view and away from the very people and activities
with which they had issue. “The streets are for
traffic, and street meetings block traffic and are
therefore in conflict with the essential purpose
of public highways,” explained the Spokesman-­
Review, mouthpiece for city boosters.
Street gatherings had become a nuisance and a dis-
grace in Spokane. They drew together idle and vi-

cious characters, interfered with the orderly course
of business and gave the city a disreputable appear-
ance which had long been criticized by visitors from
other towns.94
To many Spokanites, soapboxing was a malady
that threatened to unravel the city’s social fabric
and disrupt its forward momentum to surpass
Seattle as Washington’s most prosperous and
prominent metropolis.95 The Spokesman-­Review
represented IWW soapboxers as “riotous and de-
structive,” “vicious, weak and foolish,” and “wor-
shippers of the red flag.” Additional effort was
made to discredit speakers by calling attention
to their foreignness, in terms of race and coun-
try of origin, or simply on account of being from
somewhere outside of Spokane.96 Those who as-
sembled to listen to the speakers were not an au-
dience but rather a “street mob.” This expression
suggested, perhaps, the influence of the work of
French social psychologist Gustave LeBon, who
popularized the notion that when individuals
amass in a large group they lose their critical fac-
ulties and behave in an irrational, impulsive, and
irritable manner.97 The soapboxer who had the
potential to influence a crowd, rather than being
allowed to circulate freely through the streets, the
itinerant philosopher discoursing about this and
that, was in Spokane riff-­raff to be controlled and
silenced. This impulse is clearly conveyed by an
illustration on the front page of the November
3, 1909, Spokesman-­Review depicting a female
figure in classical attire, the embodiment of the
city, holding a much smaller, scruffy, male figure,
a representative of the IWW. She has one hand
around his neck, another holds his mouth closed,
although he just manages to mumble, “Haven’t
I the right of free speech?” “Certainly,” replies
Spokane, “but you haven’t the right to ram it
down my ears without my consent” (Figure 13).98
If an allegorical woman repressed the claim
of working-­class men to free speech (and thus
assaulted masculinity), a real woman defended
the rights of both men and women to agitate for
a living wage. Led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
the Wobblies fought back. They recruited hobos
from around the country to come to Spokane, get
on the soapbox, and get arrested for the cause
of free speech. One of the most capable orators
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Figure 13. Untitled
cartoon about free
speech fight waged by
the Industrial Workers
of the World. From
Spokesman-Review,
November 3, 1909, 1.
was an Englishman who honed his skills at the
Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park; most,
however, were first-­time speakers who were able
to state little more than the standard salutation—
“Fellow workers and friends . . .”—before being
pulled off the soapbox by police. In many cases,
they were clubbed violently. The union mocked
the city’s pretensions in publications with arti-
cles titled “The Shame of Spokane” and “Barba-
rous Spokane.”99 One Wobbly poet derided the
entire City Beautiful movement as superficial
and inhumane in a poem titled, appropriately
enough, “City Beautiful.” The following stanza
is illustrative.
Look!
Her marts are groaning with the golden grain
That flows to her from many fertile plain,
Yet, famine gnaws her vitals night and day,
And lo! Her fairest must take harlot’s pay.100
Such publicity brought precisely the kind of
scrutiny that the city of Spokane wished to avoid.
Negative publicity and the depletion of city cof-
fers (it cost lots of money to hold scores of men
in prison and bring them to trial) secured victory
for the IWW in 1910. Although the ban was not
repealed, Wobbly orators were granted leave to
speak on the streets unmolested.
War and Repression
Over the next decade soapboxers would become
targets of increasingly hostile criticism. By the
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 59
Figure 14. “A Remedy for
the Soap-Box Traitor,” by
A. B. Walker. From Life,
November 1, 1917, 715.
1920s they were identified as a dangerous and
disruptive element in the urban landscape.
This development came in response to the in-
stitutionalization of soapboxing as a practice
for radical anticapitalist critique. Before World
War I, anarchist, socialist, and Wobbly orators
60 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
occupied urban public spaces alongside political
candidates, reformers of various stripes, evan-
gelical preachers, and suffragists. Ratification
of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920
spelled an end to the need for suffrage speakers,
although women continued to speak for other
causes, like socialism. The development of radio
gradually drew political speakers from the street
into the broadcast studio.101 Soapbox preaching
continued, but it was radical orators who received
the most attention.
Federal laws empowered local officials to si-
lence soapboxers, as wartime legislation se-
verely limited the content of political oratory.
The Espionage Act, passed in June 1917, autho-
rized up to twenty years imprisonment and up
to $10,000 in fines for anyone who interfered
with military recruitment or encouraged “dis-
loyalty.” The terms of the Espionage Act were
strengthened by the Sedition Act of 1918. This
law authorized penalties for speaking against the
American government, constitution, flag, or uni-
form; interfering with wartime production; pro-
moting the cause of America’s enemies; inciting
refusal of military duty; obstructing military re-
cruitment, and more.102 More than two thousand
people were prosecuted under the wartime laws
for written or oral expressive activities, and more
than half of the cases resulted in convictions.103
Legal restrictions on speech were not enough for
some prowar patriots. They advocated extralegal
penalties for antiwar orators, as suggested by an
illustration in Life, which proposes public lynch-
ing as a “remedy” for “traitorous” soapboxers (Fig­
ure 14).
Wartime representations of soapboxers char-
acterized them as “preachers” of sedition.104 In
New York, citizens were called upon to heckle
outdoor speakers, or take to the streets and argue
against them, so as to resist the un-­American
heresies they expounded, like the notion that
war served powerful economic interests, and to
fill the air with patriotic truths, such as the in-
evitable triumph of American democracy over
German autocracy. The vision of city streets as
spaces for civil–religious conflict is made explicit
in a 1918 article in the Outlook, titled “Conver­
sion of the Soap-­Box.”
 The soap box is now being used for more patriotic
purposes than the long associations with it have
indicated—­nearly every kind of wild-­eyed and
harum-­scarum social, political, economic, and re-
ligious heresy has been preached from it. The soap
box has been converted into a street pulpit from
which to preach the winning of the war.105
Postwar economic instability seemed all the
more potentially dangerous given the surprising
success of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and
the Bolsheviks’ tenacious hold on power dur-
ing the ensuing civil war—­despite Allied sup-
port for  the counterrevolutionary White forces.
The radical speaker was perceived as the convey-
ance of Bolshevism in the United States, and in
extreme cases, representations of soapboxers
described them as vermin spreading a political
plague through American cities.106 A Saturday
Evening Post article in 1920 reported on efforts
by soapboxers to radicalize economically dis-
advantaged communities in various urban lo-
cales, including displaced farmers in Detroit and
under­employed blacks in northern and south-
ern cities. The author warned that because of
soapboxing, “radicalism became so strong in
Bridgeport, Connecticut, that quarantine mea-
sures were taken to prevent its spread to neigh-
boring communities.”107 Few who mounted a
soapbox and criticized capitalism escaped vilifi-
cation. An article in the Chicago Tribune warned
of one particularly dangerous orator “gifted
with the startling power of oratory, the ability to
marshal distorted facts into the realm of logic,”
and “possessed of a keen and retentive mind
that is stored with all the insane and danger-
ous phraseology of Red revolution.”108 That he
was an eleven-­year-­old boy talking to his school
mates in no way diminished his power or his de-
structive potential.
As the verbal contest between radicals and so-­
called patriots continued, street-­corner speaking
increasingly entailed violence, usually when hos-
tile audience members pulled radicals off soap-
boxes and physically assaulted them. Police and
elected officials did not necessarily intervene to
protect speakers, thus suggesting that such vio-
lence had the imprimatur of the state.109 In what
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
is perhaps the most egregious example of this
kind of unofficially sanctioned violence, war vet-
eran and pop culture icon Arthur Guy Empey ex-
horted returning soldiers who were frustrated by
a lengthy job search in the poor postwar economy
to let off steam through the “sport” of beating up
radical orators. Empey advocated violence in the
pages of Treat ’Em Rough, a publication for veter-
ans of the Army Tank Corps and their families.
When he began writing for the magazine in 1918,
it was a modest outlet for informative articles and
first-­hand accounts of military life by soldiers. In
February 1919, he became managing publisher
and immediately switched to glossy paper and
steered the magazine on a decidedly antiradical
course. The following excerpt is illustrative of the
kind of screed he regularly printed in Treat ’Em
Rough.
Millions of men cannot suddenly find employ-
ment. It takes time. Some will have to wait longer
than others for that job. If you are one of the un-
lucky ones, show the stuff in you and grin and bear
it. It won’t be for long. Do not become a Bolshevik.
If you feel like fighting go out and smash a Red—
it is a great sport knocking them off soap boxes.110
Not content to confine his antiradicalism in the
pages of a magazine, Empey announced in the
April 1919 issue that he had purchased two elec-
tric signs on the north side of Times Square that
flashed “Treat ’Em Rough Declares War on the
IWW” and “Treat ’Em Rough Declares War on
Bolshevism” alternatively every few minutes for
a month.111
This kind of encouragement of violence
against radical soapboxers effectively made city
streets off limits as spaces for questioning the
status quo in any meaningful way.112 Academic
studies of persuasion, especially when aimed at
ordinary people, further fueled suspicion of ora-
tors. Walter Lippmann’s widely regarded Public
Opinion questioned the ability of most individu-
als in modern society to make sound political
judgments.113 Critics of soapboxing seized on this
idea and represented orators as devious manipu-
lators who commandeered city streets and used
persuasive techniques to incite the mob—­a mass
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 61
 of docile conformists subjected to influences
that shaped their behavior and values in ways
they barely realized—­to violence in the service
of a destructive, foreign ideology. This vision of
the chaos wrought by the soapboxer was graphi-
cally depicted in an illustration by “Shanks” pub-
lished in Treat ’Em Rough that showed speakers
in an unspecified city extolling the “virtues” of
Bolshevism (laziness) and anarchism (lust) to
unruly crowds oblivious to bombs exploding
around them, destroying buildings and killing
people114 (Figure 15).
By the mid-­1920s, in part because of the suc-
cess of efforts to suppress it, soapboxing had
fallen into disrepute in many radical circles,
and even the most patriotic and conservative
Americans seemed less concerned about its
deleterious effects.115 The practice remained an
essential element of civic life, however, in the
African-­American community of Harlem. Po­
litical activists like Hubert Harrison, A.  Philip
Randolph, and Marcus Garvey launched their ca-
reers on the streets.116 These and other orators—­
overwhelmingly male—­were called “lecturers,”
and the northeast corner of West 125th Street
and Seventh Avenue, site of the “Liberty Tree,”
became known as “the Campus.” This language
pointed to the exclusion of black Americans from
a white-­dominated higher education system.
Ora­tors, including a number of Caribbean im-
migrants, spoke on a range of local, national,
and international issues that intersected with
the interests of black New Yorkers, thus trans-
forming local streets into global spaces.117 Har-
lem audiences valued street oratory for its con-
tent, which made the status of black Americans
central to any conception of democracy or social
justice, and also for its sound. Oral discourse
is noisy, and making noise, explains Clare Cor-
bould, “was a way to build community through
collective action that always had the potential to
offend the sensibilities of white listeners.”118
Conclusion
The increasing use of radio for news, education,
and entertainment diminished street speaking’s
role in electoral politics by the 1930s. From about
1925 onward, newspapers that once celebrated or
62 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
derided the practice began calling soapboxing
“passé” and lauding radio as the great democratic
medium. One article went so far as to praise radio
as the development that has made Election Day
“safe and sane” because it has done away with
the excesses of soapboxing.119 As with all innova-
tions in communication technology, this kind of
positive enthusiasm would eventually give way
to grave concern about the persuasive power of
the medium and the perils of public deliberation
without the give-­and-­take of face-­to-­face interac-
tion that soapboxing permitted.
Although soapbox orators no longer had a
dominant role in establishment politics, they
continued to be important agents of resistance.
Orators were a vital element of the landscape dur-
ing the Harlem Renaissance. They drew upon
Caribbean and African American models of
oratory as well as socialist principles. Historian
Joyce Moore Turner explains that Harlem soap-
boxers “castigated the oppressors, quoted data
on disparities in the economic system, portrayed
images of Ku Klux Klan lynchers in their streets
terrorizing African American communities in
the night, and related historic events and acts of
courage and defiance.”120 The resurgence of left
labor and political organizing in the 1930s had
orators once again addressing huge audiences for
May Day. The year 1934 brought crowds to hear
speeches in Union Square, Los Angeles Plaza,
and other urban spaces. That same year, orators
rallied workers for marches during the San Fran-
cisco Longshoremen’s Strike and the subsequent
General Strike. Street oratory returned again in
force with the social movements of the 1960s. In
1964, William Epton, a Maoist African Ameri-
can communist, was arrested for street speaking
in Harlem; he was the first person convicted in
New York for criminal anarchy since 1919.
The most recent resurgence of soapbox speak-
ing began in 2011, when Occupy Wall Street activ-
ists, inspired by protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square
earlier in the spring, entered Zuccotti Park in
lower Manhattan and transformed a lunch spot
for workers in the financial district into a cen-
ter for outdoor, face-­to-­face deliberation about
corporate influence in democratic society. The re­
invented form of soapboxing practiced by Occupy
 Figure 15. “A Quiet
Day of Reform.” This
cartoon, illustrating the
deleterious effects of
soapbox oratory, was
published in Shanks,
Treat ’Em Rough 2, no. 4
(April 1919): 33.

ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 63

This content downloaded from

132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 activists, amplified—­but not eclipsed—­by elec-
tronic media, has spread from this space to cities
around the country and the world. Depending
on one’s own politics and ideas about what con-
stitutes good and appropriate use of city space,
Occupy Wall Street and its various incarnations
are, alternatively, the quintessence of democracy
or harbingers of chaos. Athens or anarchy.
To view illustrations for this article, please see
the digital edition.
au t hor bio gr a ph y
Mary Anne Trasciatti is associate professor of
rhetoric in the School of Communication at
Hofstra University. She is writing a book about
the spatial implications of Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn’s free speech activism.
no t es
Thanks to Johan Åhr, Lisa Merrill, Matt Sobnosky,
participants in the Boston Immigration and Urban
History Seminar at the Massachusetts Historical So-
ciety, anonymous reviewers and the editors of Build-
ings & Landscapes for helpful comments and sugges-
tions at various stages of this work.
1. Spoken eloquence emerged in the colonial era
as the first major verbal art in British North America.
See Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory
and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2000), xiv.
2. “On the Stump,” Hobart Daily Republican,
May 13, 1918, 3.
3. Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public
Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1997), 58–78, 96–97.
4. Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture
of Northern Democrats in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 269.
5. Baker, Affairs of Party, 269; Michael E. McGerr,
The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North:
1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),
22–39.
6. Lisa Keller, The Triumph of Order: Democracy
and Public Space in New York and London (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 152–63.
64 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
7. Susan G. Davis explains strike parades as a
type of communication. See “Strike Parades and the
Politics of Representing Class in Antebellum Phila-
delphia,” The Drama Review: TDR 29, no. 3 (Autumn
1985): 106–16, and Parades and Power (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1986); David Montgomery,
“Strikes in Nineteenth-­Century America,” Social Sci-
ence History 4, no. 1 (1980): 87.
8. Such events could attract large numbers of
spectators as well as participants. A case in point is
the first Labor Day parade, held in New York City’s
Union Square in 1882, where from 10,000 to 20,000
men and women marched, and as many as 250,000
people watched. See Michael Kazin and Steven J.
Ross, “America’s Labor Day: The Dilemma of a Work-
ers’ Celebration,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4
(March 1992): 1301.
9. Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-­Century
America,” 95.
10. European radicals practiced and taught ora-
tory. Public speaking was offered at England’s Cen-
tral Labour College as well as the Workers’ Academy
in Helsinki. See Robert Pitt, “Educator and Agitator:
Charlie Gibbons, 1888–1967,” Llafur 5 (1989): 72–83;
Richard Altenbaugh and Rolland G. Paulston, “Work
People’s College: A Finnish Folk High School in the
American Labor College Movement,” Paedagogica
Historica: International Journal of the History of Edu-
cation 18, no. 2 (1978): 239. For examples of how vari-
ous cultural traditions shaped immigrant protests
in the United States, see Herbert G. Gutman, “Work,
Culture, and Society in Industrializing America,
1815–1919,” The American Historical Review 78, no. 3
(June 1973): 577–80.
11. In Germany, for example, street speakers stood
on an “Obstkiste,” a “fruit box.”
12. On the use of police and militia in New York
City, see Keller, Triumph of Order, 151–67. Ryan ob-
serves that the role of the municipal police force in
disciplining public behavior increased throughout the
century until it grew to be the second largest expendi-
ture after public schools; see Civic Wars, 218.
13. Davis, “Strike Parades,” 113.
14. Ryan, Civic Wars, 31–40.
15. Ryan, Civic Wars, 202–9.
16. For discussion and various illuminating
examples of soapbox oratory as performance, see
Thomas U. Walker, “Mounting the Soapbox: Poetics,
Rhetoric, and Laborlore at the Scene of Speaking,”
Western Folklore 65, no. 1/2 (Winter 2006): 65–97.
17. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,
trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), 117.
18. De Certeau, Practice. This distinction corre-
sponds more or less with Henri Lefebvre’s categories
of representations of space (planned, controlled, or-
dered) and representational space (space-­in-­use). See
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-­
Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
19. De Certeau, Practice, 119.
20. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Jus-
tice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford
Press, 2003), 35.
21. Mitchell, Right to the City, 34–39. Sara McDowell
and Catherine Switzer apply de Certeau’s concepts of
strategies and tactics in a study of commemoration in
Londonderry, Northern Ireland. See “Violence and the
Vernacular: Conflict, Commemoration, and Rebuild-
ing in the Urban Context,” Buildings & Landscapes 18
no. 2 (Fall 2011): 83–84.
22. Grace Silver, “Public Speaking: Practical Soap
Boxing,” International Socialist Review 13, no. 10 (April
1913): 737.
23. Descriptions and/or examples of tactics de-
ployed by street-­corner speakers of various stripes
to create a scene abound. See, for example, “Oratory
by Truckloads,” New York Times, October 18, 1895, 5;
“Campaign Oddities,” Detroit Free Press, October 31,
1897, 18; Jacob Margolis, “The Streets of Pittsburgh:
Italian Socialist Band at the Big Meeting,” Inter­
national Socialist Review 13, no. 4 (October 1912):
319.
24. “Politics among the Tenement Houses in New
York City—Listening to a Cart-­tail Orator,” Harper’s
Weekly 40, October 31, 1896, 1069.
25. “Campaign Oddities,” Detroit Free Press, 18.
26. McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics, 76.
27. St. Petersburg Florida Times, September 6, 1964,
quoted in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Words on Fire: The
Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 10.
28. Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1938), 258–59.
29. Mona Domosh, “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongrui-
ties’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets
of Nineteenth-­Century New York City,” Annals of the
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Association of American Geographers 88, no. 2 (June
1998): 212.
30. Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in
American Life, 1866–1910 (Carbondale: Southern Il-
linois University Press, 2002), 2.
31. See Baxandall, Words on Fire, 2–11.
32. “Suffragists Twice Invade State Street,” Boston
Daily Globe, July 29, 1914, 9.
33. “Suffragists Cheered,” Boston Daily Globe, Sep-
tember 8, 1911, 11.
34. On the adoption of street corner speaking
as a suffrage tactic, see Ellen Carol DuBois, “Work-
ing Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance:
Harriet Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suf-
frage Movement, 1894–1909,” Journal of American
History 74, no. 1 (June 1987): 34–58; Michael McGerr,
“Political Style and Women’s Power: 1830–1930,” Jour-
nal of American History 77, no. 3 (December 1990):
864–85; Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffrag-
ists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1997), 23–51.
35. For a summary of these tactics, see Walker,
“Mounting the Soapbox,” 68–69. See also Joyce
Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology, New and
Enlarged Edition (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publish-
ing Company, 1988), 94–126.
36. “Threats to Kill at Protest Meeting,” New York
Times, September 15, 1912, 3.
37. “Oddities of the Political Campaign,” Chicago
Daily Tribune, September 16, 1900, 15.
38. Yi-­Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective
of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1977), 3.
39. Tuan, Space and Place, 52–58.
40. Tuan, Space and Place, 41.
41. Berkman likely drew crowds as much for his
literary reputation and his foiled 1892 effort to assas-
sinate steel magnate Henry K. Frick as for his speak-
ing talent. By all accounts he was a capable, but not
exceptional, orator.
42. Paul McIlvenny, “Heckling in Hyde Park:
Verbal Audience Participation in Popular Public Dis-
course,” Language in Society 25, no. 1 (March 1996):
27–60.
43. Not everyone appreciated the transactional di-
mension of heckling. “Uncle Dudley” offered a cranky
assessment of the practice in “Mr. Heckler Has the
Floor,” Boston Daily Globe, October 29, 1919, 14.
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 65
 44. Steven Clayman, “Booing: The Anatomy of a
Disaffiliative Response,” American Sociological Review
58, no. 1 (1993): 110–30.
45. See Clare Corbould, “Streets, Sounds, and Iden-
tity in Interwar Harlem,” Journal of Social History 40,
no. 4 (Summer 2007): 873.
46. “Words to Wise Orators: Tips for the Cart-­tail,”
New York Times, October 22, 1906, 2.
47. Richard Brazier, “The Story of the I.W.W.’s
‘Little Red Songbook,’” Labor History 9, no. 1 (Winter
1968): 92–95.
48. “Within the Gates of the City,” The Advance,
September 14, 1911, 347.
49. “Singers Lure Crowds,” Boston Daily Globe,
April 5, 1914, 18.
50. Don Mitchell, “Controlling Space, Controlling
Scale: Migratory Labour, Free Speech, and Regional
Development in the American West,” Journal of His-
torical Geography 28, no. 1 (2002): 63–84.
51. “Westerners to Aid Suffragists Here,” New York
Times, July 23, 1915, 10.
52. See, for example, “5,000 Stampeded by Police
Clubs; Women and Children Felled in Flight at Union
Square May Day Rally,” New York Times, May 2, 1914,
1 and 3; “Police Clubs End Soapbox Sedition in Broad-
way Riot,” New York Times, August 30, 1917, 1 and 4.
53. “A Free Ford Five-­Passenger Touring Car or
Runabout for You or Your Local,” International Social-
ist Review 17, no. 1 (July 1916): 2.
54. “Free Ford,” 2.
55. Republicans, at least, used this tactic; see “More
Cart-­tail Campaigners,” New York Times, October 23,
1898, 2.
56. “Words to Wise Orators,” Times, 2.
57. The first national conference on city planning
was called in 1909 in Washington, D.C. For explana-
tion and analysis of the movement and its aims, see
Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United
States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2003), and “The Birth of Organized City
Planning in the United States, 1909–1910,” Journal of
the American Planning Organization 75, no. 2 (Spring
2009): 123–33; John William Reps, The Making of
Urban America: A History of City Planning (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). A contem-
porary account of the movement by one of its prime
movers is Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., “The Town
Planning Movement in America,” Housing and Town
Planning. The Annals 51, no. 1 (January 1914): 172–81.
66 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
58. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in
America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1978), 268–74.
59. Jon A. Peterson, “The City Beautiful Move-
ment: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings,” Jour-
nal of Urban History 2, no. 4 (August 1976): 415–34;
Boyer, Urban Masses, 264. See also William H. Wilson,
The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989).
60. Carl Smith, Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham
and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2006), 15.
61. Mitchell, Right to the City, 203.
62. A thorough and engaging account of the Hay-
market Affair is James Green’s Death in the Haymar-
ket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and
the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
63. Smith, Plan of Chicago, 19.
64. “Enough Street Preachers,” Tribune, 50.
65. “Socialists Outwit Police,” Chicago Daily Tri-
bune, July 12, 1911, 3; “Policemen Fight 3,000 in the
Loop,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 29, 1912, 1; “Police
Arrest Twelve Socialists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Au-
gust 1, 1912, 3; “Police Disperse Loop ‘Radicals’: Eight
Arrested,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 25, 1915, 7.
66. “Chicago’s Seat of Soap Box Oratory and the
Talk-­Center of the World Is on North Clark Street
Where the Wild Word Artists Foregather,” Chicago
Daily Tribune, August 28, 1910, B1.
67. Bughouse Square was a renowned center for
countercultural and revolutionary left oratory and
other forms of political activity, especially during
the 1920s and 1930s; see Frank O. Beck, Hobohemia
(Rindge, N.H.: Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1956) and
Franklin Rosemont, ed., From Bughouse Square to the
Beat Generation: Selected Ravings of Slim Brundage,
Founder and Janitor of the College of Complexes (Chi-
cago: Charles H. Kerr, 1997).
68. Todd De Pastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century
of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003), 95–105.
69. “Chicago’s Seat,” Tribune, B1.
70. “Chicago’s Seat,” Tribune, B1.
71. Keller, Triumph, 46–47.
72. Keller, Triumph, 32.
73. Keller, Triumph, 123.
74. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recounts the “Liberty
Tree” anecdote in Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My
First Life (1906–1926) (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1955), 62.
75. See Isidore Wisotsky, “Echoes of the Union
Square That Was,” New York Times Magazine, Octo-
ber 12, 1958, SM15.
76. “Emma Goldman Speaks,” New York Times,
August 27, 1911, 14.
77. Union Square has a long history as a site for po-
litical discourse; it became an especially active political
space during the Depression. See Matthew Josephson,
Infidel in the Temple: A Memoir of the Nineteen-­thirties
(New York: Knopf, 1967), 126–27, and Daniel Opler,
“Monkey Business in Union Square: A Cultural Analy­
sis of the Klein’s–Ohrbach’s Strikes of 1934–1935,”
Journal of Social History 36, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 154–55.
78. Keller, Triumph, 31.
79. Flynn, Rebel Girl, 62.
80. See, for example, “I.W.W. Again Assails Mayor
as ‘Puppet,’” New York Times, March 8, 1914, 1.
81. On efforts to craft a new image for New York,
see Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American,
1890–1924 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2006).
82. “That crookedest, longest street in the world fits
every demand of that ancient talk spot.” Carlton Ten
Eyck, “Every Sort of Discussion Is Heard on Broad-
way,” Mansfield Shield and Banner, June 22, 1914, 2.
83. Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the
Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1994), 69–70.
84. See Mark Rabinowitz and Robin Gerstad, “‘Let
Us Raise a Standard . . .’: The Preservation of Wash-
ington Square Arch in New York City,” APT Bulletin
36 (2005): 47.
85. “Peripatetic Philosophers of This Many-­Sided
Town,” New York Times, May 29, 1910, SM11.
86. Wilfred D. Samuels, “Hubert H. Harrison
and ‘The New Negro Manhood Movement,’” Afro-­
Americans in New York Life and History 5, no. 1 (January
1981), 29; John G. Jackson, Hubert Henry Harrison:
The Black Socrates (Austin, Tex.: American Atheist
Press, 1987). A deft exploration of Harrison’s oratori-
cal skill, political career, and significance is Jeffrey B.
Perry’s Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radical-
ism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009).
87. “Peripatetic Philosophers,” Times, SM11.
88. “Peripatetic Philosophers,” Times, SM11.
89. On the IWW free speech fights, see Melvyn
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial
Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle, 1969),
173–97; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement
in the United States, Vol. 4: The Industrial Workers of
the World 1905–1917 (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1965), 172–213; Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 103–8,
170–73, 177–78.
90. David M. Rabban makes a strong case for the
significance of IWW free speech fights to the devel-
opment of First Amendment freedoms in Free Speech
in Its Forgotten Years, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997), 77–128.
91. On I.W.W. soapboxing as a form of direct con-
frontation, see John Duda, ed., Wanted: Men to Fill the
Jails of Spokane! (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing
Company, 2009), 2–4.
92. “Do You Vote Yea or Nay on Plans to Make Spo-
kane a Beautiful City?” Spokane Chronicle, January 2,
1906, 10.
93. Many of the Olmsted recommendations were
put into effect, and the firm’s report continues to
guide park planners. See John Charles Olmsted, Re-
port of the Board of Park Commissioners, Spokane, 1908,
http://www.historicspokane.org/HeritageTours/
olmsted/Olmstead%20Brothers%20Report.pdf.
94. “Streets Are for All the People,” Spokesman-­
Review, March 9, 1909, 4.
95. Lucille F. Fargo summarizes reactions to the
IWW among reformers in Spokane Story (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1950), 211–23.
96. “For Law and Order,” Spokesman-­R eview,
March 6, 1909, 4; “’Reds Defy Law; 19 More in Jail,”
Spokesman-­Review, March 8, 1909, 1; “Misguided and
Contentious,” Spokesman-­Review, November 3, 1909, 4.
97. “Asks Suppression of Street Riots,” Spokesman-­
Review, February 19, 1909, 9; “Dealing with Agita-
tors,” Spokesman-­Review, November 4, 1909, 4; “Turn
Hose on Mob, Stop I.W.W. Talk,” Spokesman-­Review,
November 5, 1909, 7. See also Gustave Le Bon, The
Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola, N.Y.:
Dover Publications, 2002), reprint of an English
translation originally published 1896.
98. Untitled image, Spokesman-­R eview, Novem-
ber 3, 1909, 1.
99. Elizbeth Gurley Flynn, “The Shame of Spo-
kane,” International Socialist Review 9, no. 7 (January
1910): 610–19; Fred Heslewood, “Barbarous Spo-
kane,” International Socialist Review 10, no. 8 (Febru-
ary 1910): 705–13.
ma ry anne trasciatti, Athens or A n a r chy ?  | 67
 100. Jack Phelan, “City Beautiful,” International
Socialist Review 10, no. 8 (February 1910): 713.
101. Socialists made the case that suffrage made
women more likely to take to the soapbox. See, for ex-
ample, Pippa, “Women Love Soap-­Box Since They Can
Vote,” New York Evening Call, September 4, 1918, 5.
An excellent analysis of the affects of electronic media
on live political oratory is Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s
Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of
Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988).
102. For an extended analysis of government ef-
forts to quell dissent, see William Preston, Aliens and
Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals: 1903–1933
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).
103. Margaret A. Blanchard, Revolutionary Sparks
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 70.
104. “Roosevelt Enters Fight on Sedition,” New York
Times, August 18, 1917, 6; “Ways to Stop Seditious
Speeches,” New York Times, August 26, 1917, 55; “The
Soap-­Box Preachers of Sedition,” New York Times, Sep-
tember 16, 1917, E2.
105. “Conversion of the Soap-­Box,” Outlook, Au-
gust 14, 1918, 581; another such account is “New
York’s City-­Wide Evangelistic Campaign,” New York
Times, October 5, 1919, 86.
106. A few examples are Arthur Guy Empey, “The
Soviet Government of America,” Treat ’Em Rough 2,
no. 4 (April 1919): 9–10; “Says Bolsheviki Are Run-
ning Wild, with No Check, in U.S.,” Toledo News-­Bee,
August 28, 1919, 7; “Washington Spirit Red Peril’s
Offset,” New York Times, February 23, 1920, 13; “The
Story of Karl Marx—­T he Thinker, Law Giver of the
Socialist Movement,” Milwaukee Sentinel, Novem-
ber 17, 1921, 6; “How Soap-­Box Orators’ Half-­Truths
Cause Trouble,” Hartford Courant, September 10,
1923, 13.
107. James H. Collins, “When Soap Box Meets
Soap Box,” Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1920,
19, 146, 149–50, 153.
108. “Silver Tongue of Boy, 11, Guides Baby Anar-
chists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 28, 1923, 6.
109. See, for example, “Arrest Mayor for Dous-
ing a Radical,” New York Times, June 5, 1919, 2; “Red
68 |  B ui l di n g s & La n dsc a p e s 20, no . 1 , sp r i n g 2013
This content downloaded from
132.174.250.101 on Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:21:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Propagandists Lose Their Soap Box,” New York Times,
June 9, 1921, 18.
110. Arthur Guy Empey, “Treat ’Em Rough on Bol-
shevism,” Treat ’Em Rough 2, no. 3 (March 1919): 10.
111. Untitled, Treat ’Em Rough 2, no. 4 (April 1919):
50.
112. On these ideas, see Don Mitchell, “The End of
Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public,
and Democracy,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 85, no. 1 (March 1995): 115.
113. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922).
114. “A Quiet Day of Reform,” Treat ’Em Rough 2,
no. 4 (April 1919): 33. No other identifying informa-
tion for the illustrator was provided.
115. See, for example, “Socialists Scrap Soap Box
Oratory,” New York Times, May 22, 1923, 21; “Letters
to the Editor: A Few Thoughts on Socialism,” Bank-
ers Magazine (December 1924): 1089; “Let Reds Air
Views, This Bishop’s Advice,” New York Times, Sep-
tember 21, 1924, 12.
116. Contemporary accounts of their oratorical
abilities include William H. Ferris, “Ferris Reviews
History of Negro Leadership,” Pittsburgh Courier, Au-
gust 13, 1927, 2; “Garvey Aid and Author Passes Away,”
Chicago Defender, December 24, 1927, 2.
117. Irma Watkins-­O wens, Blood Relations: Ca-
ribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community,
1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996), 100–111.
118. Corbould, “Streets, Sounds,” Social History, 862.
119. “Soap Box Orators Want to Harangue Via
Radio,” Schenectady Gazette, May 30, 1922, 4; “Soap
Box Now Passé as Stand for Oration,” Los Angeles
Times, September 6, 1925; “Socialist Party Plans
Radio in Place of Soap Box Orators,” New York Times,
May 4, 1926, 1; “Election Day Has Been Made Safe and
Sane by Means of Radio,” Hartford Courant, Novem-
ber 7, 1926; Florence Murray, “The Negro and Civil
Liberties during World War II,” Social Forces 24, no. 2
(December 1945): 211–16.
120. Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and
the Harlem Renaissance (Champagne–Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2005), 44.