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.