Liberty Is Not Anarchy

Published weeks after the Haymarket bombing shook Chicago and panicked American cities, this cartoon shows a towering Columbia gripping a broadsword labeled U.S. in one fist while her other hand clutches a writhing knot of tiny men—anarchist agitators—upside-down and helpless. The caption below reads simply: LIBERTY IS NOT ANARCHY. Nast's argument is blunt: the republic's tolerance has limits, and lawful authority—not mob violence—defines American freedom. The anarchist figures receive no individual dignity; they are vermin-scaled, anonymous, and foreign-looking, reflecting the era's nativist anxiety that immigrant radicals (many Haymarket defendants were German-born) threatened the social order. Nast does not caricature a single ethnic group here as crudely as in some of his anti-Irish or anti-Chinese work, but the smallness and grotesquerie of the figures carries the same contemptuous visual grammar his contemporary readers understood immediately.