Liberty Is Not Anarchy

Published in Harper's Weekly (Vol. XXX, No. 1559), this wood engraving appeared during the anxious months following the Haymarket Square bombing of May 1886, when labor radicalism and anarchist violence had seized the American public imagination. A massive arm—labeled or implied as U.S. law—drives a broad sword downward through a clenched fist that clutches a cluster of small, writhing figures rendered with the grotesque ethnic caricature typical of the period: heavy-featured faces meant to read as foreign-born agitators, a common nativist shorthand Nast deployed to distinguish "dangerous" immigrants from legitimate workers. The caption below reads Liberty Is Not Anarchy—Nast's blunt argument that free societies retain the right, even the duty, to suppress violent radicalism. Order does not contradict liberty; unchecked violence destroys it.