John Turner (anarchist)

For other people named John Turner, see John Turner (disambiguation).

John Turner (24 August 1864 – 9 August 1934)^[1] was born near Braintree in Essex, England and was an anarchist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent."^[2] Turner achieved the distinction of becoming the first person to be sentenced to deportation from the United States for violating the terms of its 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act.

John Turner
Turner ca. 1900
Born	(1864-08-24)24 August 1864 Near Braintree, Essex, England
Died	9 August 1934(1934-08-09) (aged 68) Brighton, Sussex, England
Movement	Anarchist movement, labour movement

Early activism

Turner was a member of the Socialist League. However, he left it to become a member of the Freedom anarchist group. Then he founded the Shop Assistants' Union and became its general secretary.^[3] At one point the union tried to nominate Turner for Parliament. However, he declined because he preferred not to "waste his time in parliamentary debates".^[4]

Speaking tours in the United States

In 1896 Turner visited the United States, where he spent seven months lecturing throughout the country, during which time he met Voltairine de Cleyre, the American anarchist, feminist writer and public speaker.^[5] He returned in October 1903, seven months after the enactment of the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which barred anyone from entering the country who held anarchist views. Consequently Turner was arrested, on October 23, after he gave a lecture at the Murray Hill Lyceum in Manhattan, New York, and was charged with inciting and promoting anarchy. When he was searched, immigration officials found a copy of Johann Most's Free Society and Turner's speaking schedule, which included a memorial to the Haymarket Martyrs.^[6]

Turner's belongings were sufficient to order his deportation. Consequently, he was held in detention at Ellis Island for three months awaiting appeal of his case to the US Supreme Court. Before the final ruling, Turner was released on US$5,000 bail. He then proceeded to give lectures around the country, wrongly speculating that the Supreme Court would declare the law unconstitutional^[7] The Supreme Court declared the law constitutional, which resulted in Turner becoming the first person to be ordered to be deported from the United States for violation of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act. However, he returned to England before the judgment could be implemented.^[8]

Return to England

Upon Turner's return to England, he worked on Freedom and several other publications. He was a member of the collective that published Commonweal^[9]. And he was the editor of Freedom's syndicalist journal The Voice of Labour, which denounced the 'blight of respectability' of mainstream labour unions. The paper began as a weekly in 1907 and advocated direct action and the general strike.^[10]

In May 1920, after the Russian Revolution, Turner travelled to Russia as part of the British Labour Delegation^[11]. While he was there he tried to help Aron Baron, the Jewish Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary, obtain a reprieve from a death sentence. Baron was subsequently charged with having 'aroused public sentiment abroad against his imprisonment in the Solovietzki and having induced revolutionists visiting Russia to seek his release'. Baron was then sent to a prison in Siberia.^[12]

Throughout the many changes in the history of Freedom, Turner was its publisher from when it was renamed Freedom: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature in 1930 to his death in 1934.^[13]