With Claw and Fang: A Fact Story in a Chicago Setting | Bernie Babcock & Trevor Blake | SA1135

The infamous late 19th-century book Might is Right has secured a unique place in the literature of extremism. Unlike so many utopian manifestos of the day, the bombastic yet lyrical text attributed to Ragnar Redbeard (a pseudonym) sought to upend all egalitarianism, all theism, and all political idealism. Such sacrosanct values were, by Redbeard’s stentorian decree, swept into the garbage bin—to be replaced with the singular might. To be sure, the author did not posit this to be a good way, or the best way, but merely the only way things exist and prosper: struggle and strife as the eternal state of life, even when gowned in the pious sackcloth of the church or the saffron sheets of the temple. Since its original publication in 1896, the influence of Might is Right has been found in curious places, from syndicalist broadsides of the IWW to the canonical texts of the Church of Satan, but perhaps the most surprising historical example of literary “Redbeardiana” traces to the puritanical