within that. i suppose in some ways i think the charter school system does have the potential to show that when you give schools autonomy and you hold them accountable, that this might be a good model that we can learn from. >> i'm standing in front of commencement bay here in tacoma, washington. it is home to the port of tacoma and is one of the most active commercial ports in the world. as we continue our coverage of tacoma's literary culture, we will learn the history of the anarchist movement in washington. >> to be an anarchist in the early 20th century was to be -- put yourself in a pretty challenging position in relation to the contemporary society. people had a lot of ideas and biases against anarchists, and they also wrote in newspapers, and they were putting out ideas

about free love, criticizing the government. and a lot of times they were arrested for their writing. and so the first main chapter in the book is "the mother of progress finds home." i titled it that because one of the newspapers that was published in home was called "discontent: the mother of progress." and the founders of home were inspired by the political philosophies of their day, and they were responding to social conditions. and so that's really where the title of that newspaper came from. and so i was trying to talk about how the ferment that they were experiencing inspired them to create this i utopian experiment. and so they found home both literally in that they found a town called home, but they found their home in that place as well. and they deliberately named it

that because they had been moving around a lot, they had tried a lot of different places to live, and they called it home because they were tire of moving, and they wanted to stay there. many of them did end up living there the rest of their lives. so home is a short distance from tacoma, washington, just on the key peninsula which is called the key peninsula because from from above it looks like a key. and there's a little notch in that key which is called joe's bay. it's a little bay, and home is right there in that sort of first inform on the key peninsula -- first notch on the key peninsula. when it was founded, the dense forests of these peninsulas in pew gent sound -- puget sound eventually turned these settlements into island communities because the travel over land was almost impossible to get there, so you had to get there by boat. in my research i found that the

families that founded home weren't so much inspired by the long tradition of anarchists' political philosophy when they were putting together the ideas of home. instead, they were reacting to the, they were reacting to the socialist utopia that they had participated in. so they actually were, like, refugees of this failed utopia which had too many rules, and some people did no work, and some people did all the work, yet everybody benefited. and we're like, we need to go the opposite direction and have the minimum amount of rules and a community that's really organized around volunteerism. so they came up with these ideas, and they were talking to their other friends about this, and somebody said, hey, what you've come up with is an anarchist community. and so then they adopted that term. so it wasn't so much that they were -- i'm sure they had heard

of anarchism, but they weren't necessarily anarchists to start out with as much as they adopted this idea and this label. and hen once they did that -- and then once they did that, they started actually attracting people who were anarchists. the years that i'm covering are 1896 to 1921. well, it starts a little bit before 1896, but roughly the 25-year period that home existed legally as this utopian experiment. in their contemporary society, they saw a lot of unjustice. they saw government allied with money and power, saw people being treated unfairly, wars started for the benefit of corporations and things like that.

and there were really kind of two different responses that you could have had to that. one was to, you know, a lot of the really prominent anarchists like emma goldman, for instance, were speakers who went to the cities and really were trying to create a movement within, you know, the working class and within industrial america. well, the anarchists of home were really sort of broke off from that and trying to create their own alternative to the that in home which was kind of a, you know, an a agrarian throwback to living off the land. they each had two acres that they claimed and would work together for the benefit of the community. in terms of their challenges or the difficulties that they encountered, going back to that

idea of anarchism being chaos and then also the sense that anarchists are really trying to throw out government there were people who were putting forth that as an idea, and then there were people who acted on that like leon -- [inaudible] who kill president mckinley. and when that happened, it really polarized the response to the the people who said they were anarchists. and so the challenges that that they encountered really had to do with the writing being interpreted in a certain way and then getting arrested for that and ending up in these free speech cases. so with the president mckinley assassination, there was real uproar near tacoma -- here in

tacoma about this community of anarchists in pierce county. and soon after the assassination, a citizens' organization formed. it was the grand army of the republic which was the veterans association more the civil war -- for the civil war. you know, all these civil war veterans were living in the city, and they -- and mckinley sort of made a name for himself during the civil war. so hay felt like they had to to -- they felt like they had to kind of stand up and protect their compatriot. and they really, you know, they were, they talked about going to home to investigate it and really wanted to stamp out anarchism in pierce county. and the language that they used was really vehement.

they called them vipers and adders and talked about them as, like, a disease aha needs to be removed from the body politic. the threat of actual violence. that eventually morphed into real interest in the publications coming out of home, and there were two people -- well, there was like two different events where people were arrested for articles that they published in discontent, and then lois wasteberker, she published a paper called clothed with the son which was a reference to the book of revelation, not nudity. but she wrote about contraception, and for that she was, she was arrested for her writing and then also there was another group. so they -- and she, the first group was acquittedded, but she

ultimately did get a sentence for her writing. but during the mckinley assassination, the washington state legislature passed a law that said -- or it wasn't during it, but sort of in the aftermath of it. during -- in the aftermath of the assassination, the washington state legislature passed a law that essentially said it was against the law to publish or write matter that showed disrespect for the law and its courts or police officers and so on. and ten years after the mckinley assassination there was another resident of home who was arrested under that law for his writing, and that was jay fox who published an article titled the nudes and the prudes in the

agitator which spoke to the controversy happening in the colony at that time. he was an anarchist, a professed an or around cus who -- anarchist who grew up in chicago. he had lived through the haymarket affair as it's sometimes, as it's called, haymarket event. and he was a well known anarchist before he moved to home. he was pretty prominent this those circles. that case went to the supreme court. first, it was tried here in home. and jay fox was found guilty under that law. and then it was appealed to the washington state supreme court, and then it went to the united states supreme court. what's really interesting about that case is that oliver wendell holmes wrote the opinion upholding the lower court's decision that jay fox was guilty

of publishing matter intended to disrespect the law. what's interesting about that is that oliver wendell holmes would later become, you know, not too long after this known for his free speech opinions and upholding the first amendment. so, and actually a lot of the ideas that jay fox and his attorneys were putting forward in favor of free speech would later -- in a somewhat different form -- be used by oliver wendell holmes in his opinions. so, you know, but it was really, i think, it was during world war i when the espionage and the sedition act were passed, and those were much more stringent rules, and also they were federal. and it was during that time that his thinking changed.

i respect what they did in home even though it wasn't successful because they were trying to experiment with something that was better. and i think even though they failed, they actually gave us a gift in terms of a model. we get to learn from their experience. and is so i think when there are people who are trying to improve their situation and not just being resigned to conditions as they are, then there is that possibility. and i think, you know, i wrote to this book three years ago -- i wrote this book three years ago, and the big surprise for me of writing the book and one of the funnest aspects of it has been the response that i've gotten from the people who are

descendants of home or people in the book. i went to a writing conference in kenyan, ohio, and i was talking to some of the other people at this writing conference, and a woman i was talking to -- i, you know, i had just published the book, and she said -- and i was telling it's about this utopian experiment on puget -- wait a minute, is that home? and she was, like, a direct descendant of the founders of home. like, they were her great grandparents. so, and, you know, like, after writing the book i've gotten connections to all these different people. and i've just really enjoyed that. and so i think it says something about what they did in home that there is this, that continued connection that their descendants feel.

>> booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/booktv. or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. [inaudible conversations] >> ladies and gentlemen, i am tonya, i want to thank you ever so much for coming in this evening. we have a great lineup of different authors throughout the year. we do upwards of 400 events, so ubookstore.com or this handy little flyer will tell you more information about different can events that are coming up. but right now we're so happy to welcome a new northwest author, we'll claim her as long as we can with