Hartmann The Anarchist

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Cara Canellas

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:11:43 PM8/3/24

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Hartmann the Anarchist or The Doom of the Great City is a science fiction novel by Edward Douglas Fawcett first published in 1893.[1] It remained out of print for over 100 years and has only recently been re-published.

The plot centers around Mr Stanley, a young moneyed gentleman who aims to stand for election as part of the Labour party in the early 20th century. Through his associations with many of London's most prominent socialists and anarchists, he encounters and befriends Rudolph Hartmann and 'goes along' with Hartmann's plan to attack London using his airship The Attila. Much of London is destroyed by fire and shells in the beginning of their plans to replace civilization with anarchism:

From the early 1900s through the 1930s, there was a plethora of radical press periodicals in the United States. Many of these magazines used visual arts to grapple with the issues of capitalism and labor. They were usually politically socialist, communist, or anarchist in nature. The images in the radical press incessantly critiqued capitalism and often depicted a dichotomized worldview of us vs. them: capitalists as evil and workers as good. This artwork was called Proletarian Art or Revolutionary Art as it took on the mantle of the inequalities the working class faced. Labor imagery showed workers as icons of resistance or as victims of oppression. The artwork included ranged from fine press to political cartoons. The artists were often called social realists. Into the 20s and 30s more abstract styles were seen in the magazines such as cubism, Russian constructivism and social surrealism.

This article re-examines the research on evolutionism in Spain and updates knowledge on this topic in light of the work of Thomas Glick, the more philosophical work of Diego Nez and contributions in recent years from the Latin American network of historians of biology and evolution, who have dealt with the more polemical aspects of the reception of evolution theory. It includes new arguments, such as identification of the drawings in El Museo Universal, whose Lamarckian or Darwinian nature has been a subject of ongoing debate. It also covers the crucial role of the acceptance of Haeckel's work in Spain in comparison to the weaker support for a strictly Darwinian perspective, the role of the Spanish histology school, and the impact of evolutionism on literature.

Este artculo realiza una revisin de los estudios sobre el evolucionismo en Espaa y actualiza los conocimientos sobre el mismo tras los trabajos de Thomas Glick, la obra ms filosfica de Diego Nez y las aportaciones en los ltimos aos de la red latinoamericana de historia de la biologa y la evolucin, incidiendo en los aspectos ms polmicos de la recepcin de esta teora. Incluye novedades como la identificacin de los dibujos de El Museo Universal, siempre en discusin sobre su naturaleza lamarckiana o darwinista, el papel fundamental de la recepcin de la obra de Haeckel en Espaa frente a una recepcin estrictamente darwiniana ms dbil, el papel jugado en la escuela histolgica espaola y el impacto en la literatura.

The Comisin Cientfica del Pacfico [Scientific Commission on the Pacific] played a special role. This Spanish expedition constituted one of Spaniards' earliest contacts with defenders and opponents of evolutionist theories, since on first arriving in Brazil they made contact with Fritz Mller, who had discovered the fundamental law of biogenetics later publicized by Ernest Haeckel. Later, in Buenos Aires, they met a well-known anti-evolutionist, doctor Burmeister, and in Chile they collaborated enthusiastically with the German Darwinist Phillip, who was then director of the Museum of Natural History in Santiago (Puig-Samper, 1988PUIG-SAMPER, Miguel ngel. Crnica de una expedicin romntica al Nuevo Mundo. Madrid: CSIC. 1988.). Given the biography used by naturalists from the Scientific Commission in their subsequent works, those years prior to the restoration of the Spanish monarchy in the last third of the nineteenth century were characterized by exemplary eclecticism in terms of scientific practice.

Among Machado y Nez's collaborators were Gngora, Prieto, Chiralt, Tun, Caro etc., and especially his own son, Antonio Machado y lvarez, who pioneered the study of folklore in Spain. Machado y Nez also wrote an 1884 prologue to a Spanish translation of a work by Hugo Magnus, Historia de la evolucin del sentido de los colores [A history of the evolution of color sense], in which he used natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism to explain color sense and claimed that Aristotle was the most important figure in Antiquity, just as Charles Darwin was to the modern era. We should also note Romualdo Gonzlez Fragoso, managing editor of the Biblioteca Biolgica [Biological Library], who in 1887 translated Haeckel's work El reino de los protistas [The kingdom of protists]; and also Lanessan's tract La lucha por la existencia y la asociacin para la lucha [The struggle for existence and association in that struggle], with a prologue by Antonio Machado y Nez.

Another member of this Andalusian group of evolutionists, even though he was born in Catalunya, was the sociologist Manuel Sales y Ferr, initially an orthodox Krausist who gradually evolved into a positivist in a process that led him to confront Federico de Castro at the Ateneo (Athaeneum) in Seville. In 1874, he had moved to Seville to become the chair of geography and history at the university. In that same year, he wrote a prologue for the Spanish translation of Quatrefages' book Historia natural del hombre [The natural history of man]. Five years later, he translated Hartmann's book La verdad y el error en el darwinismo [Truth and error in Darwinism], and shortly thereafter he published Prehistoria y origen de la civilizacin [Prehistory and the origin of civilization, 1880] and El hombre primitivo y las tradiciones orientales: la ciencia y la religin [Primitive man and oriental traditions: science and religion, 1881]. In these works, he contrasted the idea of evolution with that of creation (Nez Encabo, 1976NEZ ENCABO, Manuel. Manuel Sales y Ferr: los orgenes de la sociologa en Espaa. Madrid: Cuadernos para el Dilogo. 1976.; Jerez Mir, 1980JEREZ MIR, Rafael. La introduccin de la sociologa en Espaa: Manuel Sales y Ferr, una experiencia frustrada. Madrid: Ayuso. 1980.).

A leading member of the second generation of Spanish anthropologists or naturalist anthropologists was Manuel Antn Ferrndiz (22 abr. 1895)ANTN FERRNDIZ, Manuel. El Anthropopithecus? La Ilustracin Espaola y Americana, ao 39, n.15, p.247-250. 22 abr. 1895.. In 1895, he reviewed and commented on the discovery of Pithecanthropus Erectus (Java Man) in the journal La Ilustracin Espaola y Americana [The Enlightenment in Spain and America] in Spain. Although Antn argued that there was not enough data to accept Dubois' proposal of a new genus and species, he acknowledged that it was a human race inferior to Neanderthals, more similar morphologically to simian-anthropoid features. In any case, he wrote, its geographic location was a new clue supporting Haeckel's hypothesis, which placed the origin of man on the ancient, vanished continent of Lemuria.

It is clear that this spirited defense of evolutionism occurred because anti-evolutionist critiques were sufficiently strong in Spain, as Diego Nez Ruiz (1975NEZ RUIZ, Diego. La mentalidad positiva en Espaa: desarrollo y crisis. Madrid: Tcar. 1975., 1977NEZ RUIZ, Diego. El darwinismo en Espaa. Madrid: Castalia. 1977.), Thomas Glick and Francisco Pelayo showed some time ago. It is true that, from a scientific point of view, there were not many adversaries of the caliber of the paleontology professor Juan Vilanova (Pelayo, 1999aPELAYO, Francisco. Ciencia y creencia en Espaa durante el siglo XIX. Madrid: CSIC. 1999a.) or the forestry engineer Antonio Garca Maceira (Pinar, 1999PINAR, Susana. Darwinismo y botnica: aceptacin de los conceptos darwinistas en los estudios botnicos del siglo XIX en Espaa. In: Glick, Thomas; Ruiz, Rosaura; Puig-Samper, Miguel ngel (Ed.). El darwinismo en Espaa e Iberoamrica. Madrid: Unam-CSIC-Doce Calles. p.133-149. 1999.). One of the first opponents of Darwinism in Spain was Emilio Huelin, who gave a fairly respectful analysis of Darwin's theory in 1871 in the Revista Cientfica section of the Ilustracin Espaola y Americana, although he did not share Darwin's views. But he made some fairly harsh statements about Haeckel's doctrine (Huelin, 15 feb. 1871HUELIN, Emilio. Revista Cientfica. La Ilustracin espaola y americana, ao 15, n.5, p.83-87. 15 feb. 1871.), calling him the most fanatical supporter of those who claimed that man descended from apes.

These two naturalists were also very involved with the Sociedad Espaola de Historia Natural [Spanish Natural History Society], founded in 1871 by a group of naturalists of differing ideological views. This diversity is clearly reflected in their stance on Darwinian evolution. Notable among the conservatives were Juan Vilanova, Miguel Colmeiro, Federico Botella, Jos Solano, Gernimo Macho, Estanislao Vayreda and Jos Landerer; while among the progressives most loyal to Darwinism were Salvador Caldern (mentioned earlier), Jos Macpherson, Francisco Quiroga, Vctor Lpez Seoane, Eduardo Bosc and especially Ignacio Bolvar and his disciples or collaborators at the Museum of Natural Sciences such as Manuel Cazurro, Enrique Rioja, Jos Royo, ngel Cabrera, Vicente Sos, Margarita Comas or Antonio de Zulueta. As Fraga has pointed out, Darwinism had little impact on naturalists' scientific practice, although it did influence their taxonomic activities and helped to change the Cuvier model of nature and to draw more attention to variability.

Curiously, in 1898, when the regenerationist journal Vida Nueva [New Life] called for a research institute for Santiago Ramn y Cajal, they put a citation from Haeckel on the importance of studying biology on a par with the neuro-histological work of the Aragonese scholar. Despite this, we cannot conclude that Cajal entirely agreed, from a theoretical standpoint, with all of Haeckel's evolutionist theses, since in the pages of that same journal, in the same year, he seemed closer to being a positivist in favor of the hypothesis of evolution.