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Title: The Anarchist Beast Author: Nhat Hong Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: popular culture, the media, not anarchist, agency, critique, MSM Source: https://archive.org/details/the-anarchist-beast/
"With the crowd of commonplace chatterers, we are already past praying
for: no reproach is too bitter for us, no epithet too insulting. Public
speakers on social and political subjects find that abuse of anarchists
is an unfailing passport to popular favor. Every conceivable crime is
laid to our charge, and opinion, too indolent to learn the truth, is
easily persuaded that anarchy is but another name for wickedness and
chaos. Overwhelmed with opprobrium and held up to hatred, we are treated
on the principle that the surest way of hanging a dog is to give it a
bad name.” —Éliséee Reclus
"Hunger and Anarchy Stalk Nicaragua" blared a recent newspaper headline
designed to send shudders of apprehension through its readers. Ask
around about anarchy and you will get a litany of responses using
assassin, chaos, infamy in the various definitions offered. The word
anarchy rarely fails to invoke a passionate response from people. But
upon examination the reaction usually is not grounded upon experience or
knowledge of anarchy's definition, history or character. The question,
What are the origins of the public attitudes towards anarchism?, led me
to investigate the late 19th century periodical literature available to
Americans on the subject of anarchy.
This pamphlet seeks to examine the pattern of attack employed by the
mainstream press against anarchism, how that press fueled the attitudes
of the American people against anarchism, and how the campaign led to
the enactment of repressive laws against the anarchists. In doing this,
I have limited my investigation to the English speaking periodical
literature prior to the 1903 passage of anti-anarchist laws in the
United States Congress. It was my thought that magazine articles would
tend to more thoughtfully analyze controversial subjects and be less
prone to vagaries of the moment. The final passage of anti-anarchist
laws in 1903 was preceded by two decades of discussion, so that the
periodical literature's longer range and more tempered approach (in
contrast to the daily newspaper) offer an appropriate field for
examining the treatment of anarchism during this time.
Before reviewing the anti-anarchist crusade of the 19th century a brief
outline of the social context in which it occurred is in order.
Insurgent politics cannot expect a sympathetic hearing in the press of
the society that it is challenging. This is not strange, given the
position and relationship of the press of and to the economic system. In
the first place, the press is dependent on the advertising income from
the business sector and must generally avoid antagonizing this crucial
support. In the second place, newspapers and magazines are themselves
businesses that either sink or swim in the capitalist mainstream. The
economic principles that govern any capitalist enterprise apply equally
well to the media business.
Since any criticism of the status quo would apply to himself as well as
to his business and personal friends, the owner of a large newspaper or
prestigious magazine is an unlikely critic of certain things, e.g. the
right to private property or the rule of an economic elite. In fact,
persons of means often proceed to broadcast their opinions by purchasing
or starting a newspaper or magazine, a privilege beyond the reach of
ordinary people. So it is neither startling nor out of character that
the “free press” has by and large been an enthusiastic supporter of the
economic and political system of which it is a part and has generally
been an uncritical purveyor of the ruling ideology.
Thus anarchism, a new and radical challenge in the America of the second
half of the 19th century, did not find a friend in the mainstream papers
and periodicals of the time. Anarchism, the leftwing of the socialist
movement, challenged capitalism, class society, law, authority, and the
state at their very roots. It asked questions which provoked a new
thinking and anger among society's lower class, groping and trying to
understand their lives and social position. The appearance of anarchism
also precipitated a defensive reaction among the strata of society that
gained comfortable, often opulent, livings from the ownership of
industry and leadership in government. Anarchism condemned state/class
society and outraged its beneficiaries and defenders. This antagonism
naturally found its way into the press.
In the 19th century America experienced the development of industrial
technique and the rise of a capitalist class that took control of the
new industrial methods for its own benefit. As the machine, the factory,
the assembly-line changed the labor requirements of the owning class,
the small farmer and independent craftsmen began to disappear. The
emerging capitalism of 19th century America increasingly employed an
urban, often ethnic proletariat. To feed the owner's requirements for
labor, immigration increased and American colonization spread further
westward.
This urban, ethnic working class developed by industrialization was
frequently propelled into a politically radical understanding of its
situation in the new land. Capitalism, with its periodic crises and
everyday injustices in the workplace helped create class-consciousness
among working women, men and children. The need for a socialist
reconstruction of society became clear in the 19th century and the
United States was the home ground of a real variety of leftward
analysis, programs and parties. Capitalism, being in its young and
crudely laissez-faire stage of development, tolerated these radical
threats but little. Among the various groups promoting a new social
order, anarchism, the libertarian wing of the socialist movement, was
singled out for the harshest treatment.
To be more precise, among a number of different tendencies that might be
loosely grouped under the anarchist label the revolutionary
anarchist-communists were targeted for repression. For in addition to
the anarchist-communists of the immigrant working class communities, the
new land also harbored a largely native born group of libertarians such
as Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner which might be called
individualist anarchist. The individualists were mainly content with
isolated utopian communities, monetary reform and peaceful
propagandizing. The mainstream anarchist movement, however, was
anarchist-communist along the lines outlined by Bakunin and Kropotkin.
In the U.S. this mainstream tendency was important both numerically and
politically as a significant portion of the radical opposition and as
its most anti-authoritarian and militant wing. The anarchist-communists,
such as the Haymarket martyrs, Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Alexander
Berkman were the anarchists attacked by the 19th century press and this
pamphlet seeks to review this crusade the American anarchist movement
during the last century.
The pamphlet is not, however, an exercise in pinpointing the reason for
anarchism's inability to find wide acceptance among the American people.
In addition to the repressive campaign against the anarchist movement
other factors, both external and internal to the movement, contributed
to its isolation. But the 19th century anti-anarchist campaign is one
important cause of the American anarchist movement's difficulties and is
a legacy that a new, anti-authoritarian movement must understand, expose
and overcome in the present day. It is the intention of this pamphlet to
aid that process.
Anarchy was used for over three hundred years in the English language
before its meaning was radically changed in the mid-19th century.
Anarchy, from the Greek “αναρχια” means simply without a ruler, but the
word has a history of pejorative use going back to 1539. That year
Taverner was the first to use it in English print to protest "This
unleful lyberty or lycence of the multitude is called an anarchie.” [1]
Bacon spoke of “anarchy and confusion" in 1605 and two centuries later
the poet Shelley attacked “The anarch chiefs, whose force and murderous
shares has founded many a sceptre bearing line.” [2] Religious and
secular authorities were often the target of its use. Landon writing in
1824-29 spoke of the “anarchal doctrines of the popish priesthood" and
Blackwells magazine complained of the "high sated wealth, decorous pride
of place, Mankinds anarchal kings” in 1840. [3]
With this tradition of use, Pierre Joseph Proudhon strikingly employed
the word “anarchist” with a very different meaning to describe himself
an advocate of positive radical social reconstruction. In his book, What
is Property?, published in 1840, Proudhon declared himself an
“anarchist" to distinguish his political philosophy from those current
at that time. "What then is is to be the form of government in the
future? I hear some of my readers reply: 'Why how can you ask such a
question? You are a Republican.' ‘A Republican! Yes, but that word
specifies nothing. Res Publica, that is, the public thing. Now, whoever
is interested in public affairs—no matter under what form of government,
may call himself a Republican. Even Kings are Republicans.' 'Well, you
are a democrat.' 'No.' 'Then what are you?’ ‘I am an anarchist.’ [4]
Proudhon was not the first to articulate a political theory of anarchism
but was the first to designate it as a distinct tendency and to name it.
Most anarchists and scholars go back to Godwin in establishing the
modern origins of anarchism. In his history of anarchism, George
Woodcock places Godwin in the anarchist tradition thus: "In the positive
sense in which anarchism is now understood, Godwin stands at the head of
the tradition, for the arguments he put forward in 1793 with the
publication of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice embraced all the
essential features of anarchistic doctrine. He rejected any social
system dependent on government. He put forward his own conception of a
simplified and decentralized society with a dwindling minimum of
authority, based on a voluntary sharing of material goods. And he
suggested his own means of proceeding toward it by means of a propaganda
divorced from any kind of political party or political aims.” [5]
But it was Proudhon who popularized a libertarian approach among the
lower classes of France and laid the initial foundation for a political
theory of anarchism. Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin followed and
enlarged, elaborated and moved beyond Proudhon's mutualism to a
revolutionary collectivism, then anarchist-communism. The anarchism
current in the last two decades of the 19th century was primarily the
latter and its most articulate and influential exponent was Kropotkin.
In common with the rest of socialism, this anarchist-communism censured
capitalism for representing a monopoly which ran "against both the
principles of justice and the dictates of utility." [6] The anarchists,
however, continued their critique of unequal economic arrangements into
unequal arrangements of power and authority. Claiming that each propped
the other up, anarchism’s conception of a revolutionary future included
the destruction of both state and capital, replacing them with an
expansive and diverse network of federated groups on local, regional,
national and international levels. The administration of things, from
"production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary
arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of territory,” to
"scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs” would all be
achieved with a minimum mediation of people directly exercising their
power over these processes of life. [7] All the means of producing the
things a people require for a full life must become the common property
of all, used to benefit all. The anarchists distinguished themselves as
the left-wing of the socialist movement by insisting that the course
pursued by the state-socialists would result in class society again,
albeit in a new form.
This new positive meaning for the word anarchy had to contend with the
legacy of the old definition. As we know from the present usage of the
word, the positive meaning never did eclipse the pejorative meaning, and
the continuing contention and confusion around the term remains a
current political liability that anarchists in our own day have to
overcome. This continuing confusion is not merely the result of a
history of passive, undiscriminating use of the word anarchy as both
chaos and a political theory. Journalists in the late 19th century
promoted the confusion over the definition of anarchy.
Anarchism was attacked and undermined in the public eye in various ways,
few of which were honest or straight forward. It was a minority movement
without access to the widely read popular press and thus unable to
correct or challenge many of the charges and caricatures being printed
in the mainstream press. It was unable to satisfactorily rebut the use
of ridicule portraying anarchism as profoundly illogical nor the
frightening charge of senseless terrorism. As the accusations
accumulated against the anarchists a certain credibility must have
developed from the sheer numbers of charges, totally apart from their
content or accuracy.
In the period being examined anarchism received extensive and consistent
bad press. The periodical literature employed several common avenues in
attacking anarchism. Seven that predominated were:
1. The attack by way of negative definition.
2. The attack by way of identifying anarchism as the enemy of society.
3. The attack by way of refusing to admit anarchism’s political
identity.
4. The attack by way of dividing anarchists into opposing groups.
5. The attack by the religious community.
6. The attack by the scientific community.
7. The attack by nativists against immigrants and foreign influence.
Each of these attacks made its point and together formed a composite
picture of anarchism as antithetical to the best instincts of humanity,
as morally adrift, intellectually illogical, religiously unacceptable,
medically anomalous and dangerously unpatriotic. These attacks over a
twenty year period helped create the atmosphere in which congress and
states passed laws against the anarchists.
In the late 19th century the word anarchism was as definite a liability
as it is now in the late 20th century. Many anarchists accepted the
designation only grudgingly and set to work reforming the meaning of the
term. The label stuck for several reasons, not the least of which was
the refusal of anarchism's opponents to relinquish the easiest method of
discrediting this movement. The association of anarchy with chaos and
confusion tended to blur the political definition, and many writers
consciously reinforced this process. American Magazine was explicit on
the subject in 1888: "The name these Social Democrats have chosen for
themselves is as bad as their philosophy, as detestable as their
practices. Whatever the idea that the word 'anarchy' may convey to the
native of Continental Europe, no reference to Greek roots, no arguments
based upon the fact of philosophy, can ever rob it of its shocking
suggestions to an American. To the Anglo-Saxon, on either side of the
Atlantic, it means confusion, disorder, the assassin's knife, the
incendiary's torch, outrage upon womanly virtue, wholesale pillages: all
these superadded to the black and hopeless horrors of such a realm as
Milton describes:
'Where eldest night and chaos,
ancestors of nature,
hold Eternal Anarchy.' [8]
Both anarchists and anti-anarchists were aware that the
anti-authoritarian movement's viability was connected with the
definition and popular understanding of its chosen label. Half the
battle was won if the public mind was influenced to associate it with
everything unsavory or repugnant. As uneasiness and fears mounted by way
of the negative associations, curiosity about anarchism and an open mind
to its critique of society receded and the word became more or less an
epithet. No one could be expected to take a political theory of
sustained chaos seriously or view the embracing of such a theory by a
body of people with anything but apprehension. The climate of fear and
antipathy resulting from this crafty association of freedom with chaos
and anarchy with disorder of course killed the support or at least the
passive sympathy necessary for developing an insurgent politics.
While a very few writers honestly viewed anarchism as a serious
political movement, most lashed out at it as a threatening advocate of
chaos. These latter writers confused definitions unabashedly. In 1894
Public Opinion Magazine quoted the St. Paul Globe as giving this ominous
warning: "It is a life and death struggle. If government is strong
enough, anarchy must die. If anarchy obtains the upper hand, all order
will be swept from the face of the earth, and chaos will resume its
sway.” [9] Anarchists became the arch-demons of the social Armegeddon.
Open Court, 1901, painted this picture of the future in the hands of
these politico-chaotics: "Its doctrines can never become universal
maxims… The anarchist's notion of liberty is license, his ideal of
progress is the destruction and ruin of his betters, his propaganda
consists in preaching hatred and spreading terrorism, the methods he
commends are felony and murder. Should his ideas gain a foothold in the
minds of our people it would not lead us upward to a higher civilization
but back to barbarism, to a state of society in which the hand of
everyone is against that of every other and war is the general rule.
[10] That same year, U.S. Senator Hill was quoted as saying that an
anarchist "is a disturber of the peace of society. He believes in social
chaos." [11]
Anarchism became a political kiss of death and was used indiscriminately
against everyone from the true anarchists to the mildest of social
reformers. This isolated anarchism on the left as well for liberals and
social democrats scrambled over one another in their eagerness to join
the chorus of condemnation, hoping to prove their social acceptability
and avoid the dangerous label themselves. Eugene Debs, head of the
American Railway Union and on the way to becoming a socialist,
complained in the American Magazine of Civics in 1895 about writers who
hurled the cry anarchist at any social reformer. But he also attacked
what he then presumed anarchists to be: "Their discontent is equally
great and their vengeance equally fierce under all conditions. They are
not the enemy of any government, but of all governments. They would
annihilate government. They are advocates of chaos, and their method is
murder. [12]
Some writers, not content with the discrediting achieved by the
successful binding of disorder to anarchist politics, proceeded a step
further in their logic and tried to associate anarchism with another
phenomenon then current, lynching. Despite the prominence of an
anti-state figure such as William Lloyd Garrison in the early
Abolitionist movement and despite the anti-nationalist, anti-racist
principles of anarchism, several writers insisted on speaking of the
"horrible anarchy of negro burning." [13] None of the writers actually
attempted to claim that anarchists were lynching blacks in America;
however, the association of the gruesome image with the movement
undoubtedly furthered the confusion over the word anarchy. In a 1903
article in the Arena magazine, B. O. Flower was quite aware of the
gruesome game he was playing. "The recent burning of a negro in
Delaware, and the race riot in Evansville, Indiana, in which that city
was given over to a lawless mob for two or three days, are a tragic but
in no wise surprising culmination of the growing spirit of anarchy or
lawlessness that that for over a decade has steadily increased in
certain sections of our country; while the moral contagion has
continually spread over an everincreasing area. This breaking down of
civil government is, of course anarchy in the popular meaning of that
overworked term… [14]
Inaccurate as it was, this hodgepodge of negative meanings took hold and
the use of one word, anarchist, conjured up odious associations with
disorder, chaos and its attendant murders, rapines and pillages. This
confusion of definitions made the second method of attacking anarchism,
the attack by way of identifying anarchism as the enemy of society, an
easier task.
SOCIETY
Anarchism is the no government system of socialism. It believes that
society can function more smoothly and more equitably with everyone
owning the land, factories, businesses and banks in common. Unlike the
state socialists, anarchists insist that the administration of the
economy and of social affairs be done directly by the workers and
residents themselves, rather than by being nationalized into the state
apparatus. Under anarchism economic and social functions would be
controlled directly by those involved at the point of production or
geographic locality and coordinated on a larger scale through the
federation of groups by industry and common interest. Anarchists are
proponents of a decentralized, but also highly organized and
sophisticated society where the interests of the individual and the
community are pursued through the initiative and mutual aid of those
affected. They promote and seek to strengthen what they see as the
positive functions of their class and society in general. Anarchists
insist that genuine order and freedom cannot be produced by authority in
any form, but that it must spring from the solidarity and cooperation
among equal people. They reject the notion that the state, no matter how
benevolent, can create socialism by directives or dictation without
continuing or recreating class society. In rejecting the state the
anarchist calls for both the revolutionizing and the invigoration of
society.
The critics of anarchism in the 19th century could not separate their
ideas of state and society from each other. While not exactly
synonymous, one was unthinkable without the other. Public Opinion
magazine quoted the Syracuse Standard in 1886 as making this typical
pronouncement: "No compromise between society and anarchy is thinkable.
By their very definitions they exclude each other, and they can not
dwell side by side."
On a purely simplistic level this was true. Anarchism and the society in
which that writer lived were indeed inimical, not because anarchism
sought the destruction of society and all social relationships but
because of the anti-social activities of the upper classes and the
state. In its profound vanity, the ruling class could not conceive of
society without their leadership, their example, their selfless efforts
to keep order, to cultivate the arts and to provide employment and
charity to the herd of people beneath them. To them, their social class
and the state and society were practically synonymous and the
elimination of one doomed the other two.
Anarchism acknowledged the fact that social strife was endemic to an
unjust social order. Anarchists sought through agitation to awaken and
sharpen the consciousness of the many in the laboring classes to their
domination by the few in the ruling classes. Writers who could not
envision society in another form, and they were the majority—viewed and
described anarchists as the enemy of all, plutocrat and pauper alike. To
obscure the nature of class society and to retain the passive support of
the working class, they portrayed anarchists as the enemy of all and
presented the class war as the individual war against society as a
whole.
If we are to believe the writers of the time, anarchists were at least
consistent in one thing for two decades. Starting in 1887 they were
"murderers of society.” [15] In 1893 they "declared war on the human
race.” [16] 1897 saw the hatching of a ''great conspiracy against
society" with “a policy of assassination against society.” President
Roosevelt declared in 1902, "Anarchy is a crime against the whole human
race, and equally against all government.” [17] The American Law Review
echoed Roosevelt a month later and added that "Anarchists are insurgents
against civilization.” [18] The Saturday Review concluded that autumn
that anarchism “was a system to dissolve society and to leave it without
government.” [19]
People are social beings and their lives are interdependent on family,
neighbors, friends, and fellow workers. If anarchism was actually a
threat to society, was actually anti-social as these writers
claimed—then it was a threat to what is fundamentally human. Although
the charge could not have been more untrue, it served to isolate
anarchism from many people who believed it to be antagonistic to basic
sociability and human community. The anarchist as outlaw began to find
its first expression in this method of attack and was fleshed out
further in the periodical writers' refusal to admit anarchism as a
political movement.
IDENTITY
Anarchism is a social critique of authoritarian class society and has
the goal of moving society and persons toward greater freedom and
equality. It examines the domination by classes, races, sexes, age
groups, etc. and offers positive proposals for a society where classes
will be leveled, power reinvested in the lowest and most basic units of
society (the individual, the workplace, the community) and freedom
expanded in every aspect of life. Writers often ignored or distorted
this appealing political program. The 19th century writers refused to
admit anarchism Is political identity and instead attacked it for
lacking a foundation in life and politics.
At times anarchism was trivialized as flighty and inane. Writing in the
North American Review 1901, a Spanish nobleman described anarchists as
"a strange, oblique people, and no amount of education seems able to
cure them of their peculiar way of looking at things, for among them we
often find men of classical learning... No one apparently knows what
they want, least of all themselves.” [20] Saturday Review drew a
stronger conclusion about these "strange, oblique people" and the same
year wrote; "The anarchists are really a survival of a class of lunatics
which every country at some period or other of its history has
produced.” [21]
More often anarchism was condemned as a frightening world of wanton
criminality and menacing insanity. Politics was driven from mind as
anarchism was described as "a movement of ignorance, counseled by
desperadoes,” [22] "dreamers dreaming an evil dream" [23] "crypto
lunatics,” [24] "moral madmen,” [25] "hydra-headed monster of murderous
malevolence... a venomous snake... a covenant with hell.” [26] In a
lengthier portrayal of anarchists in 1894, the New Review stated: “They
are reckless ruffians, fugitives from foreign justice, habitual
criminals, or candidates constantly qualifying for imprisonment by daily
malpractices, the commission of all kinds of commonplace crime... They
are miscreants who are now aspiring to terrorize the world: the very
dregs of the population, the riff-raff of rascaldom, professional
thieves, bullies who batten upon the shameful earnings of the weaker
sex, cut-throats when opportunity offers, despicable desperadoes already
under the ban and always subject to close surveillance.” [27]
The effect of this vilification was to obscure, often deny the political
character of the anarchist movement. It was total defamation, avoiding
the unpleasant task of examining anarchism Is social critique or of
dignifying it by answering it in any serious way. It viewed anarchism as
utterly nonpolitical, as a sickness and a crime. Saturday Review clearly
voiced this view of anarchism in 1901. "Anarchism has no program but
murder, and any teaching that organized government might, could, or
ought to be abolished should be treated as part of the murderous
conspiracy... It has become a disease which is transmitted from one mad
anarchist to another as hydrophobia is transmitted from one mad dog to
another; and the mad dog and the mad anarchist have about the same
capacity of reasoning as to the source from which they get their virus,
or the objects they propose to themselves by biting.” [28]
What emerged from all this was a picture of anarchists so fearful as to
scare many people away and prevent them from enquiring further. Politics
and ideas were blotted out by the charges of criminality and
irrationality. It was done rather well and the negative image stuck. The
only drawback was the existence of several well known and well regarded
anarchists who did not fit the monster described in many a magazine
article. It needed explanation and in giving one, the periodical writers
further isolated the anarchists, even from themselves.
Anarchism experienced mounting repression in the 1870s and early 1880s.
To be an anarchist was to risk facing the judge, prison, exile and
sometimes death. As the area of freedom narrowed for anarchist
propaganda and activity, and anarchists increasingly faced the scaffold
or imprisonment, outraged individuals in the anarchist movement
retaliated through “propaganda of the deed”. No longer were the heads of
state immune from the consequences of their actions and a measure of
popular justice was served upon an elite unaccustomed to being held
responsible for its capricious maneuvers.
The last decade of the 19th century saw the rise and abandonment of the
propaganda of the deed. From many vantage points it can be judged unwise
and unproductive as a tactic. It cannot, however, be condemned as a
peculiarity to anarchism. Throughout history violence has been employed
by all types of political groups. Bloodshed is no stranger to periods of
social upheaval, and the anarchists of the late 19th century did not
invent political violence. The mounting death toll from poverty,
strikes, industrial accidents, job-related destruction of health, lynch
mobs, routine “justice”, etc. cannot compare to the handful of royalty
and rulers felled by an anarchist during this decade. The obvious,
systemic violence of capitalism and the state dwarfed, overshadowed and
ultimately provoked the limited, specific retaliatory violence of the
anarchist.
But the minuscule of anarchist violence was seized upon and exaggerated
out of all proportion by the press. Anarchists were presented as the
perpetrators of massive violence against civilization itself. The social
context of the anarchist violence remained unexamined and suppressed
rendering these events unintelligible. Readers accepted the writers'
caricatures of anarchists as lunatics, moral madmen, criminals, etc.
Save for one nagging contradiction—many well known persons in the
anarchist movement didn't fit the gruesome anarchist monster invented
for the occasion. Neither Élisée Reclus nor Peter Kropotkin, both
renowned geographers and scientists, could fit the lurid picture being
drawn of anarchists. Yet they embraced anarchism wholeheartedly and used
their wide talents and genius for the revolution, for the anarchist
cause. The contrast demanded explication.
The solution to this contradiction was both simple and useful. The
writers on anarchism proclaimed the existence of two different types of
anarchists. In 1887 The Nation announced that there was the "militant or
homicidal anarchists” and the "dreamy persuasive anarchists". [29] This
theory of two groups of anarchists was then repeated again and again by
subsequent writers. The New Review, 1894 tells of "two great classes" of
anarchists, the “ideal and the real." [30] 19th Century magazine spoke
of the "anarchy of reason and the anarchy of violence" in 1901. [31]
They became "evolutionary and revolutionary anarchists” in the pages of
Outlook the same year. [32] The next year in Arena magazine, R. Heber
Newt made a list of the two different types of anarchists. On the
philosophic side were Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Thomas Jefferson and the
Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. On the revolutionary side he included
the assassin of Czar Alexander II, Paris Communards, Johann Most and
Emma Goldman.[33]
The so-called philosophic anarchists were separated from their less
patient comrades and their political beliefs were trivialized. They were
accused of propounding "far-fetched preposterous theories." [34] The
reader was told that despite using the name anarchist, they ''have no
anarchy in them.” [35] Their politics were called hopelessly utopian and
likened to Catholic "councils of perfection.” [36]
On the other hand, the revolutionary anarchist was denounced in no
uncertain terms for developing a program and practice in the world. "Is
anarchism the social ideal?", R. Heber Newton asked rhetorically in his
Arena article. "Then say the sufferers of society, 'let us have it now!’
Plain folks turn an anarchistic creed into an anarchistic program, an
ideal into a platform, and try to realize it at once... Such ignorant
and unbalanced men, unfit to translate philosophic anarchism into
political and social practice, abound in our society.”
"The most appalling fact of life is the multiplication of the unfit.
Paupers, tramps, vagabonds, the diseased, the insane, criminals—These
become the parents of future generations. So there is spawned on the
world a host of degenerates, who form the raw material for every evil
and for every crime. Their feeble minds unbalanced by moral forces,
their ungoverned passions fired by vehement denunciations, their
unenlightened consciences warped by the suffering and misery of earth,
makes them the potential assassins of those upon whom they father the
cruel wrongs of man... Through such men, semi-insane ideas work out an
insane propaganda of the deed." [37]
This great division of anarchists that the writers projected onto the
public mind had two hoped for consequences. First, it was hoped that any
intelligent, persuasive advocate of anarchism could be divorced in the
public mind from the activist anarchist. The “upper class anarchist”,
the theorist, the arm chair revolutionist was acceptable in his or her
inoffensive crankiness and peculiarity. The “lower class anarchist”, who
mixed activity with words, was a different breed and must be shunned,
banned, eliminated. The anarchist movement was pictured as divided along
the lines of genius/moron, theory/action, idealism/criminality,
utopian/mercenary, pacifist/terrorist, etc. Anarchism Is political
appeal was diminished by this schizophrenic portrayal. Anarchism was too
unstable, unpredictable and incoherent to be taken seriously. Thus the
anarchist movement was further isolated from the mass of the American
people.
This alleged division among anarchists was also seen as an opportunity
to drive a wedge into the anarchist movement. Robert Pinkerton, of the
infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency, thought this division might be the
source of spies, infiltrators and stool pigeons. "With the anarchists, a
diligent and systematic search will not fail to bring to the surface
those similarly qualified, who can join groups wherever formed. There
would, of course, be lacking the strong religious sentiment and loyalty
to the church that accuated the man who risked his life to weed out the
'Mollie Mcguires'; nevertheless, it will be possible to secure the
desired persons. The great majority of anarchists in this country and
abroad are a sufficiently harmless body of men and women. They have what
they consider advanced ideas on government or lack of government, but
are unalterably opposed to all forms of murder and violence. They
realize that such an event as the assassination of President McKinley or
the King of Italy does more harm to their propaganda than anything else
that can happen. Therefor, they are violently opposed to the
perpetration of these deeds, and those who inspire them. From among this
class of anarchists, there doubtless could be secured the material
needed for the control and supervision of the 'Reds', as the members of
the violent branch of anarchists are popularly known." [38]
There were differences of opinions within the anarchist movement, mainly
between the native “individualist anarchism” and the main current of
revolutionary anarchism. In the anarchist movement proper
(anarchist-communist) these divisions were not as clear or definite as
many 19th century writers believed. Voltarine De Cleyre, writing in
1903, said that the division between “Quaker” and “Revolutionist”
anarchists was not antagonistic, each respecting each others role. [39]
Certainly differences were not so pronounced that anarchists were
willing to play police spy on other anarchists. It is also incorrect to
lump Kropotkin and Recluse among the “philosophic” anarchists, for they
were both activists as well as theorists.
In each of these modes of attack on anarchism, the attack by way of
negative definition, by way of identifying anarchism as the enemy of
society, by way of refusing to admit anarchism Is political identity and
by way of dividing anarchists into opposing groups—a genuine distortion
of anarchism was accomplished. Combined, they presented a composite
image of anarchism that would be repugnant even to the anarchist.
Anarchism and the church have always been antagonists. The basis for
their mutual dislike lies first in their different world views.
Anarchism, along with the rest of the socialist movement, is materialist
and scientific in its investigation of the world and society. The
church, on the other hand is idealist, fitting the world (however
uncomfortably) into the set of ideas it brings to it. From these two
divergent foundations, each developed very different ideologies, actions
in the world and the protection of antagonistic interests. The church in
Europe had until recently (in the 19th century) been a primary political
power in society. It was unrivaled in its intolerance of free thinking
and science and had fully supported the most crude displays of feudal
privilege The church had long played the role of a bulwark of reaction.
Its exercise of power over the masses by the sway of ignorance and
superstition stood firmly in the way of significant social change. The
cooperation between church, state and capital was more obvious and
integrated than now.* As a full partner in this worldly trinity, the
church was an ardent defender of the immutability of heaven and earth.
It blessed and defended social and political relationships with its
bestowing divine right to unequal social arrangements.
governor of New Hampshire tried to lower all the flags on Good Friday,
1978 to show appreciation for "the moral grandeur and strength of
Christianity as the bulwark against the forces of destructive
ideologies.” —Minneapolis Tribune, 3/25/78
The church saw anarchism as a challenge to itself and its allies. In
response, the church began its efforts to retain or capture the people's
hearts and minds. The Nation in 1886 announced religion's engagement in
this moral crusade: "Especially do they find an unfailing theme and
inspiration in the Chicago riots. ‘The Gospel is the only remedy for
Anarchism,’ they declare. 'The only way to save this country is to
prosecute the work of the home missions vigorously. We ask your
contributions not simply as Christians, but as patriots.’” [40]
Apparently the church had even more grandiose designs of capturing and
converting the anarchists themselves, which drew a caution from the
nation. "ls the hope cherished of converting the anarchists themselves?
'We must give them the Gospel,’ is a frequent expression. Is that the
hope? It is foredoomed to disappointment. The anarchists are not
strangers to Christianity. They are familiar with it in many forms, and
most reject it in all. They are demanding what they fancy to be their
rights, and they resent any effort made by the Church in their behalf as
a sort of scheme in aid of the police ('black gendarmes I they call the
clergy on the continent), or as a tub thrown to the whale. Moreover,
they understand perfectly that the churches look upon their doctrines
with abhorrence, and applaud the Chicago verdict. Next to the police and
the courts, the churches are, it is possible, the precise objects of
their strongest hate and denunciation.” [41]
Several other writers confirm this position of the anarchists by quoting
various anarchist pronouncements on religion. American Magazine, 1888,
stated "The extremists have no more respect for religion than for the
family. The Pittsburgh Manifesto, which was unanimously adopted,
declared that: 'The Church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of
the mass, and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising a
fictitious heaven.' The Verbote speaks of religion as destructive
poison. Freiheit exclaims at the end of an article on 'The Fruits of the
Belief in God:’ “Religion, authority and State are all carved out of the
same piece of wood” to the devil with them all.” [42]
An anonymous writer of a short story entitled "My Dream of Anarchy and
Dynamite" included this in his fantasy of anarchists seizing New York
City: "The special hostility of the Anarchists were directed against the
churches. In forty-eight hours after the police first faced the red flag
on Bowery, not a church spire rose above the cities outlines from Wall
Street to Harlem.*” The footnote then reads; "Among the writings of
Johan Most, which were alluded to at his trial in November, 1887, was a
description of the methods of using dynamite, and the amount required to
destroy a church.” (emphasis original) [43]
In neither of the above cases was any further comment made. By
implication these writers assumed anarchism stood self-condemned by its
statements on religion. That they were vigorous opponents of religion
was clear enough though and soon the church abandoned any desire for
converting these political heathens. Instead, an ideological attack was
begun on anarchism and the full weight of the authoritarian foundation
of religion was pitted against it.
Rev. William Doane, bishop of Albany, drew the line between anarchism
and religion in a 1901 sermon entitled "Anarchism and Atheism.” He
exclaimed, "before he has lifted his treacherous hand against the civil
magistrate, or laid his underground mines to break up social order, he
has dethroned God. He is an atheist before he is an Anarchist, he is an
Anarchist because he is an atheist. With the restless force of the
progress from a premise of unbelief to a conclusion of crime, the
unrelenting and infernal logic runs—there is no God to ordain powers,
there are no powers at all." [44] The Bishop then pleas for the people
to "bow down in silent submission" and that until all "are content to
sit silent in the dust; till, with no shadow of question, we acknowledge
God's presence and God's providence behind and in and over all, we are
on the side of 'the lawless and the profane', the libertine, the
Anarchist, and the assasin.” [45]
The ideological lesson the Bishop offers is quite explicit in the
sermon. The pursuit of freedom is demonic, while the acceptance and
worship of authority is right in God's eyes. The "whole thought of
riddance from rule, and abolition of authority, and destruction of
government, and escape from law, and independence in the sense of
freedom from control, is godless and inhuman and idiotic and
impossible.” [46] Bishop Doane concluded with this admonition to the
believers; "Begin today with the warning in your ears, and let it ring
there as the sound of waves in the sea-shells: 'Thou shalt not speak
evil of the ruler of thy people.’ 'Love the brotherhood, fear God, honor
the King.’” [47]
Other religious writers were equally bald about religion being a strong
prop for authority generally and earthly rulers specifically. The
Catholic World in 1901 stressed the utterances of Pope Leo XIII on
socialism and anarchism. In his first encyclical letter and on many
later occasions he denounced "the pest of socialism and anarchy.” [48]
"These teachings of the Sovereign Pontiff are directed to the working
classes and to people of various nationalities. They are all based on
truths of sacred Scriptures, on lessons of sound philosophy, and the
results of human experience. With our enjoyment of great liberty we need
also the chastening restraint of authority, of respect and reverence for
our rules, remembering 'there is no authority but from God.'" [49]
Here religion announced its unqualified support to the status quo and
the seats of earthly power. Its clash with anarchism stems largely from
this investment of the ruling classes with divine rights to their
position. An attack upon temporal power became indirectly an attack upon
God as the architect of society's configuration. The Catholic World took
the position that the anarchist ignored or forgot "what should be the
great dominant principle of political philosophy 'there is no authority
but from God.’" [50] Outlook magazine came from the same position in
advocating "let us teach in our churches and our schools and through the
press the divine origin, the divine sanctity, the divine authority of
law." [51]
Religion threw its considerable weight against the anarchist movement of
the late 19th century. Its hold on the spiritual (emotional) life of
many people was used to add its very respectable voice against anarchism
by counseling its adherents against the evil of freedom and revolution.
It went to some lengths to illustrate the gap between a good Christian
people and the anarchist. Bishop Doane beseeched, "God save us from this
other anarchy of men who call themselves and count themselves above and
beyond and independent of authority and law. We picture to ourselves an
Anarchist in the unlovely personality of man and woman plotting,
scheming, conspiring in the dark, or blatant and bitter in their
denunciation of all government; cruel and stealthy and deadly, with the
tail of a serpent and the tread of a tiger, and the snapping and
snarling of a mad dog—unsexed women and dehumanized men; such he is,
such she is, in the finished development of their rabies.” [52]
The church did its part to prevent contamination of it members by these
dangerous ideas and to isolate anarchists by exposing these obscene
proponents of liberation for what they were, unsexed women and
dehumanized men. The church came to its conclusions by the application
of centuries of dogma and superstition to the anarchist phenomenon. Its
judgement is not surprising, but it was an important contribution in the
campaign against anarchism.
A much more unexpected source of hostility to anarchism during this time
came from the scientific community. During the last two decades of the
19th century a nascent “science” of crime or criminology was growing up
around a Professor Lombroso in Italy. Lombroso was interested in the
study of criminals generally, but had a particular interest in the
political criminal, especially anarchists. His object in studying the
'political criminal' was dubious by definition, but more the suspect in
that his methods were both careless and self-serving.
His research consisted of the examining raw evidence gathered by legal
proceedings against anarchists. Photographs, drawings, descriptions,
etc. formed the basis of Lombroso's conclusions on the peculiarities of
anarchist physiology and psychology. After making scientific
pronouncements on anarchists for over a decade, Lombroso seemed to
become ecstatic in 1900. “While I have had the privilege of making
several indirect studies of anarchists by means of the data furnished by
legal processes, the journals, and the handwriting of the subjects, I
have only rarely been able to examine one directly and make those
measurements and craniological determinations upon him without which any
study can only be approximate, or, we might even say, hypothetical. I
had, however, an opportunity a short time ago to observe a real
anarchist in person…” [53]
Several illuminating admissions are evident in Lombroso’s statement.
First, that ten years of propounding a “scientific” theory that
anarchists are a physically and mentally differentiated group of human
beings rested at best on a hypothetical construction. Lombroso’s data is
initially unsound, coming from police stations. He used mug shots to
quantify the physiological abnormalities among anarchists. Anyone
familiar with the arrest and confinement procedures common to police
stations of all countries can testify that the surly image of the felon
in a mug shot bears little resemblance to the real person in normal
life, and that the enlarged ear or nose could just as easily be the
consequence of a recent beating by the cops as an inheritance of birth.
Police are not scientific field-workers, and all of Lombroso's data is
suspect.
This pseudo-science was prepared to confirm and echo conclusions already
arrived at. Lombroso and his fellow criminologists continued a line of
thinking begun earlier. Public Opinion quoted from the Pittsburgh
Commercial Gazette in 1886 in which the initial assumption of the
criminological study of anarchists was stated: "The revolutionary
anarchists belong to the criminal classes and ought to be viewed in
common with "burglars, pick-pockets, footpads, and garroters.” [54]
Several years later the physiological peculiarities of anarchists were
mentioned in a short story by Wood Clarke in Overland Magazine. In it an
anarchist sits down next to a capitalist on a train: "Gerald read on,
but soon became aware that his companion exhaled unsavory odors. He
glanced at the newcomer, who was of squat, brawny figure, broad, low
forehead, heavy perceptives, greedy eyes, pugnose, and crude face…” [55]
The 19th century press consistently attributed lunacy to the anarchist.
The Lombroso school of criminology with its “scientific proofs”
substantiated in the public mind three distinctive anarchists
characteristics. They were being a criminal type, having common
physiological anomalies and afflicted with mental illness.
An 1894 issue of the American Journal of Politics subscribed to the
criminal-type theory by writing: "That among, these 'isolated rebels'
there are many whom the Italian school denominates 'born criminals'
(criminalinati), is altogether beyond doubt. Prof. Lombroso, who was the
first to initiate scientific study of the different forms of political
crime; that swindlers, thieves, and murderers are always ready to join
revolutionary movements of any description whatsoever, in which they
find a safer and fuller outlet for their criminal tendencies.” [56]
The Italian school's theory asserted that criminal types have definably
criminal bodies. Lombroso claimed that the physiognomy of the political
criminal is identifiable and that this type ''frequently appears among
the Communards and the Anarchists. Taking fifty photographs of
Communards I have found the criminal type in 12 percent; and the insane
type in 10 percent. Out of forty-one Parisian Anarchists that I have
studied with Bertillon at the office of the police in Paris, the
proportion of the criminal type was 31 percent.” [57] Lombroso went on
to claim 34% of the Turin anarchists he studied were of the criminal
type and 40% of the police photos of the Chicago anarchists also
revealed this type. [58] Lombroso deduced these percentages by looking
for physical traits he claimed correspond to the criminal type. The
following table he drew up on the Turin anarchists illuminates his
method.
In Lombroso's later study of “a real anarchist in person” he applied the
same type of criteria to his lone subject and confirmed all his previous
conjectures. “His physiognomy presented all the characteristics of the
born criminal and of the foolhardy and sanguinary anarchist. He had
flaring cars, premature and deep wrinkles, small, sinister eyes sunk
back in their orbits, a hollowed, flat nose, and a small beard—in short,
he presented an extraordinary resemblance to Ravachol…” [59] Lombroso
hailed these results as "singular, and it seems to me that they should
cast some light upon the dark world of these agitators." [60] Later in
the article the reader finds out that no one but Lombroso thinks the man
is an anarchist. The police, whom Lombroso had relied on in the past
thought the man insane and talking nonsense. Lombroso used dubious
technique in his dubious project.
Mental instability was the third characteristic common to anarchists
according to the Italian school's theories. Being born criminal with a
felon's physique had its compliment in an appropriate mind also. William
Ferero wrote in 1894, “While, however, their moral faculties are
sufficiently sound, the intellectual are not… Modern psychiatry has
shown that there are many intermediate grades of intellectual weakness
between reason and insanity... Now many of the 'rebels' whose
characteristics we are examining are men that live 'on the borders of
madland' and belong to that class of anomalous persons.” [61]
Another Italian school scholar, Dr. Olindo Mala-Godi found the cause of
anarchist mental illness in the “prevalence of the imaginative over the
critical faculty…" When the "hypertrophy of the imaginative faculty" is
mixed with inaction and “mutual psychological excitation" it produces
"colossal imaginings of anarchical conspirators. And thus from the
gatherings of these generally half-mad, half-imbecile, half-criminal
individuals, from obscure clubs met for drinking and chatting in
suburban public-houses, there arises a continuous misty cloud of
terribly grandiose plots against society, grotesquely impractical,
perhaps, but beside which the most sensational revelations of the police
seem insipid.” [62]
A third member of the Italian school, Prof. G.M. Fiamingo, connected
anarchism and epilepsy in an 1899 article in Open Court. He declared,
"Science has demonstrated that the anarchist assassins are nearly all
affected with epilepsy, and beings who would not steal a pin or break a
single law, impulsively do the most atrocious deeds that cause the world
to shudder with horror.” [63]
What is striking about the Italian school's examination of anarchists is
the absence of genuine scientific method. Its approach is entirely
speculative and crudely political in its aim. Even in the case of
studying anarchist physiology, which might potentially be somewhat
objective, the class bias of the investigation renders it meaningless.
Compared with the bourgeois norm, the poor and working class person is
bound to manifest that she or he has worked hard and lived rigorously.
Lombroso’s school and theories seem preposterous and laughable from our
vantage point, but to ridicule them is to laugh off their significance
at the time. The Italian school's theories were given wide exposure and
enjoyed uncritical acceptance in their time. Their pompous
pronouncements were translated and appeared in dozens of American
magazines and papers. American writers incorporated the school’s
conclusions in their own articles. One such article, which was reprinted
in three magazines, included this appraisal: “As he is, so is his
aspect. His sanguine temper is reflected in the flat-gazing eye of
spurious prophecy, from which his low forehead recedes. A lack of
control is patent not only in his open mouth, but in the weak chin which
falls away suddenly from his lower lip. More often than not a feeble
body and unkempt, fluffy hair makes further advertisement of the idle
restlessness which his admirers mistake for activity.” The mental
afflictions were also accepted and described: "The Anarchist’s mind
appears to desire something, but his muscles jerk in an opposite
direction to his resolution; his hand is recalcitrant to his volition;
and when he would pretend to serve mankind, he is impelled to make a
dastardly assault upon a woman.” [64]
The Italian school's “scientific” conclusions on anarchists became an
accomplice to the religious condemnation. Science was the new god of the
century and many persons beyond the influence of the church stood in awe
of science and its “revelations”. Where the emotional judgements of
religion failed to turn people against anarchism, the condemnation of
science completed the effort. Thus science, unable to operate outside
the confines of ruling class ideology, became the apologist and defender
of bourgeois order.
The high school civics books have persuasively constructed the image
that the United States acted with great kindness and warmth in accepting
immigrants from many countries to its shores. Except for the Native
American, we are in fact a nation of immigrants. But just as the
genocide against the Native American by expansionist settlement is
obscured in U.S. history, equally ignored is a deep and ugly prejudice
against the foreign born that has persisted all through its national
existence, including the present.
Five million people immigrated to America in the first half of the L9th
century. Ireland was the point of origin for many of them as the potato
famine and hunger stimulated a significant migration to the U.S. Along
with it arose a strong antiforeigner and anti-Catholic feeling among the
American nativists. Riots against Irish enclaves and attacks upon
Catholic churches were not uncommon. Leaders of nativist prejudice
arose, including Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and James
Harper, of Harper Brothers Publishing Co. A series of anti-foreigner
groups rose and fell from 1820 onward. Sporting names like the Native
American Party, Order of the Star Spangled Banner, Know Nothing Party,
Order of United Americans, Ku Klux Klan, Patriotic Order of the Sons of
America and National League for the Protection of American Institutions,
they peddled a doctrine of hatred towards the foreign born and blamed
the immigrant for any contemporary difficulty.
At its height of political organization in the mid-1850s, the nativist
movement was on the brink of assuming national power. Already in 1855 it
had elected Know Nothing governors and legislatures in Massachusetts,
NewHampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Know Nothing Governors
occupied the state houses of Kentucky and California. Serious
speculation arose over the possibility of the election of a Know Nothing
President, as Congress was already significantly under Know Nothing
influence. The question of slavery deflected this promising future and
split the Know Nothings into North against South. National power quickly
slipped from their grasp, but the spirit of hostility towards the
foreign born remained a potent force among the established native born
population.
Irish immigration had produced a parallel antiCatholic prejudice. During
a later surge of immigration following the failure of revolutionary
events in Europe in 1848 anti-radicalism also became associated with the
nativist movement. German immigrant radicals became special targets of
nativist condemnation because of their political orientation, opposition
to Sunday laws, and oaths taken on the bible, and their undisguised
enjoyment of beer drinking. The Order of United Americans abandoned its
anti-Catholic stance after the Civil War in favor of a bitterly anti-red
foreigner position.
In the last half of the 19th century immigration quadrupled over the
first half. The political situation in Russia and Europe had an
influence on the pace of immigration, and the nativists often combined
their anti-foreigner campaign with attacks on radicals fleeing hardship
and repression in their native lands and seeking sanctuary in the U.S.
The Haymarket riot brought together anti-foreigner and anti-anarchist
prejudice and the two became inseparable concepts operating in the
American nativist movement. Of the eight anarchists framed by American
justice for the Chicago labor disturbances, seven were immigrant
workers, a fact that did not escape the attention of various writers.
Public Opinion magazine, May 15, 1886 printed seven pages of quotes on
the Haymarket incident from newspaper accounts and comments of the day.
Despite the number and variety of sources, a unanimity of anti-foreigner
sentiment pervaded. The Chicago Tribune set the pace of the reaction:
"These aliens, driven out of Germany and Bohemia for treasonable
teachings by Bismark and the emperor of Austria, have swarmed over into
this country of toleration and have most flagrantly abused its
hospitality. After warming these frozen vipers on its breast and
permitting them to become citizens, with the right to vote and hold
office and take part in the government of city, county, State, and
Nation, it has given them three or four times the wages they could
possibly get in their own country, given them free schools, free care in
case of destitution, and an opportunity to better their condition
limited only by their own ability. The ungrateful hyenas have repaid
this hospitality by organizing themselves into associations whose object
is the destruction of the property, law and government of the land that
shelters and feeds them.” [65]
The Washington Post pursued this theme further. "Anarchy is a tyrant. So
long as he is permitted to stalk abroad unchained, so long will society
be terrorized by evil threat and worse fulfillment. This is not freedom,
it is subjugation of the most intolerable kind. It is the assertion of
authority over the enlightened, progressive, liberal American citizen by
a horde of foreigners, representing almost the lowest stratum found in
humanity's formation.” [66]
The nativist's common reaction to immigrant activism and criticism of
American society was to feel abused and betrayed. Political
consciousness among the foreign born was proof of ingratitude to their
adopted country and their enlightened benefactors, the native born. The
patriotic concept of a virtuous America was personalized by many of the
native born. America and its institutions were incapable of giving rise
to radical politics, they argued. With its much touted freedom and
opportunity to climb the social ladder, the U.S. could not be be the
origin of the attitudes commonly found among immigrant workers. The
American Magazine, speaking in 1887, said, "The social atmosphere of
America could not, we believe, have bred an agitation so hostile to the
very foundation of the public order as this (Haymarket incident).” [67]
The Nation on the eve of the execution of four anarchists convicted for
the “riot” in Chicago, supported the idea of foreign roots of the
agitation in America. It insisted on the carrying out of the death
sentence because, if it were avoided, "It would, in fact, operate as an
invitation to all the ferocious malcontents of France, Germany, and
Russia to come here and work out their theories whenever they could
raise their passage money, or found the pursuit of the hangman in Europe
too hot for them.” [68]
It was generally true that anarchism did find more fruitful ground among
immigrant circles, but this was a function of class, not of geographic
or of national temperament. The immigrant composed the lowest section of
the American working class. Often their journey had been induced and
facilitated by American businesses seeking a cheap labor pool from which
to draw. Their position in American society did nothing to obscure the
antagonisms created by the division of rich and poor, ruler and ruled,
owner and worker. Anarchism, as well as all varieties of socialism, had
an attraction as both an explanation and solution for their troubles in
the new land. National identity and ignorance of American polity did not
produce a partiality to radical politics, but everyday life in the
American sweatshop did.
Writers in American periodicals did not look close to home for their
explanation for the presence of revolutionary aspirations among
immigrants. Often, on the basis of his own particular prejudice, a
writer would ascribe the worst influence to whichever nationality stood
strongest in his disfavor. The predominance of Italians in the anarchist
ranks provoked much comment, and the national characteristics of
Italians were enumerated. Italians were "Especially qualified by
training and predilection for the dark deeds of the conspirators,” the
New Review announced in 1894. [69] Outlook explained it by developing
the following theory in 1901: "To understand them we must understand the
Italian character and its capacities for devotion to a purely
theoretical liberty." Salvatore Cortesi, in the Independent , also in
1903, saw "the fact that human life is held much more cheaply there
(Italy) than in other civilized countries" as a main reason for the
number of Italian anarchists. [70] "Another reason which makes the
Italian a recruit of Anarchy is his hereditary leaning toward secret
societies," Cortesi adds, citing the Comorra in Southern Italy and the
Mafia in Sicily as examples. [71] But while the Italians were a favorite
scapegoat, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Russians and the French were also
cited as the particularly odious carriers of anarchist infestation onto
American soil. More often immigrants as a group were blamed for the rise
of radical politics and anarchism in America.
Even in cases where the facts did not support their bias, nativists fell
back on arguments against foreigners. McKinley was shot and killed by
Leon Czolgosz in 1901. The assassination naturally caused an uproar, and
despite Czolgosz’ American birthplace and a questionable grasp of
anarchist politics he was paraded for the public as an example of the
danger of foreign anarchists. R. Heber Newton, in a 1902 issue of Arena
magazine overcame this disparity by pointing out that "despite the fact
that the assassin of our President was born on our soil, be was to all
intents and purposes alien; he was of alien birth and alien stock; his
whole mind was alien.” [72]
The native born were higher in the social hierarchy and were distanced
from the immigrant by custom, language and social position. A similar
division was found among libertarians, with the immigrants generally
championing a revolutionary anarchism and the native anarchists pursuing
the establishment of utopian communities, currency reform, and preaching
as unbridled individualism. Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews,
Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker were home grown individualist
anarchists, but their form of anarchism fell on more fertile ground
among the native middle class than among immigrant proletarians. The
individualists rejected class struggle and violence, a stance which kept
the immigrant mainstream anarchism from any supportive association with
the native anarchist school.
To be an immigrant and an anarchist was to face a double hostility in
the larger American community. Each prejudice lent strength to the
other. The foreigner, already spotlighted as the origin of many problems
facing American society, was identified as the carrier of a new and evil
political disease. The anarchist, convicted in the minds of many by the
methods described in this pamphlet, was isolated further by nativist
reproach and barriers. A political minority, anarchism became a
political minority within an embattled immigrant community.
At the same time that periodical literature was busy inflaming sentiment
against the anarchists, many writers and politicians were carrying on a
discussion of how these rebel women and men ought to be dealt with. The
opinions varied some, but all called for harsh and bitter punishment and
extirpation of these discomforting advocates of equality and freedom. To
the defender of late 19th century American society, the remedies
suggested for the anarchist “problem" did not seem extreme or out of
line. A New Hampshire district judge noted at the time that in the case
of the anarchists any reaction, no matter how terrible, was appropriate
in suppressing their existence. Any means were appropriate because of
the natural and undisputed right of self-defense, in this case assumed
by the “person" of the state. The Judge asserted that "the right of the
government to defend, protect and preserve itself against whatever evil
may threaten is a natural, inherent, fundamental, self-evident,
incontrovertible, and paramount right.” [73]
With such emphatic logic largely unquestioned, the problem was not the
propriety of repressing anarchists but the method of procedure. For most
people, the much touted freedoms basic to a democratic society were
easily dispensed with in this surgery on the community. A contributor to
a British magazine minced no words describing the task at hand and its
lack of delicateness. He wrote: "What is now incumbent upon Governments
of every shade of opinion, of whatever party or politics, is to stamp
out anarchy at its inception, to attack it in its beginnings, and forbid
by every possible means, and wherever it is encountered, the malignant
propaganda of the Anarchist faith. Those who preach it should be
silenced forthwith; to profess such dangerous and subversive doctrines
should be held an offence of Lese majeste against the State." [74]
This temperament of the times produced many proposals for silencing
anarchists. Some proposed the blunt, impatient “justice” commonly
associated with the American wild west. But in this instance the cowboys
were members of the U.S. Senate. Some of these distinguished gentlemen
were heard advocating "stringing up" anarchists on sight. [75] A Senator
Hawley, in 1902, exclaimed with a fine frenzy, "I have an utter
abhorrence of anarchy and would give a thousand dollars to get a good
shot at an anarchist.” [76]
The lynching solution to the “anarchist problem” seems to have had a
certain popularity, inflamed from time to time by an anarchist outrage I
such as the Haymarket bomb explosion and the assassination of President
McKinley. But the popularity of lynching, judged by its frequent
mention, was not often borne out by such extreme action. Few anarchists
were put to death by mob and police action, although their offices and
meetings were sometimes attacked and destroyed. The more clear effect of
lynch talk was the prejudgment of guilt of the anarchist prisoner, and
the legal machinery had only to follow and repeat this first verdict
arrived at by the upper class and its public voices.
A second proposal aimed to suppress the communication of libertarian
ideas by outlawing the anarchist press. The Kansas City Journal argued
for this path in 1904, saying: “To strengthen the laws for the
punishment of crimes in anarchy's name, and to prohibit the public
utterance of anarchistic doctrines and the publication of literature
intended to disseminate the doctrines, would be healthfully repressive.”
[77]
The right of speech for anarchists, however, was never specifically
abrogated by federal law, but it was attacked by state law in a dozen or
so states and territories. However, actual suppression of speech did
occur regularly by police actions against anarchist publications and by
trials of anarchist writers and public speakers for “inciting to crime”
and “unlawful assembly". But this intimidation of the anarchist voice
was most often attempted under existing, broad criminal laws. Often the
general law was adequate for accomplishing the politically repressive
task of making the libertarian viewpoint difficult to hear.
Another strategy was proposed by Robert Pinkerton of the anti-labor,
anti-radical Pinkerton Detective Agency. He argued for creating a
special police service to spy and collect information on the anarchist
community. Pinkerton felt cheated that anarchists like Johann Most and
Emma Goldman had not been sentenced more harshly in their respective
trials and he hoped that “a service such as I have indicated should be
established to keep the authorities in complete touch with these private
utterances (of anarchist militants) which travel as fast and breed as
much damage in the end as speeches made in public. As for open
fulminations, these should be placed entirely under the ban, and the
police given practically unlimited powers to deal with the men and women
concerned." [78]
A special police service for use exclusively against the anarchists was
not formed nation-wide in the 19th century. However, city by city, there
were special police efforts concentrated on anarchists. After the
Haymarket explosion Chicago police made a gigantic effort to infiltrate
and disrupt a strong anarchist movement in that city. Pinkerton lauded
New York in his article: "There the police have always carried on a
relentless warfare against the ‘reds’. They have even gone to the length
of ‘illegally suppressing their meetings’." Local police efforts were
the rule, although information sharing among police departments and
labor spies undoubtedly increased after the Haymarket incident and
trial.
A fourth course of action proposed against anarchists included different
forms of banishment, declaring them to be outlaws, or enforced exile on
one of America's remote colonial islands. Pinkerton again was a strong
proponent of this technique. He argued against the "fetish of free
speech" and "Instead of having any squeamish scruples, we should attack
the evil in a rough-handed, commonsense way. I would advocate the
establishment of an anarchist colony... Let the government set aside one
of the islands of the Philippines" for this purpose. [79]
Pinkerton was not alone in calling for the creation of an American
Siberia. Henry Holt in two articles agreed with the detective and set
down a progressively harsh program to stop anarchism in America. It
began with the exclusion of anarchist immigrants, then declared domestic
anarchists outside the law and open game for any action by patriotic
mobs or citizens. Any anarchist not cowed or killed by the outlaw stage
of Holt's program would be targeted for exile, then death or life
imprisonment of any anarchist returning to U.S. shores.
Another writer scoffed at restricting immigration saying: ''What they
need is expulsion, and we have a few Asiatic islands to which they might
be deported. Let there be no mistake about it—there are many of these
people. It is not worthwhile to bother about importation unless we can
devise a system of exportation." [80]
Whatever the attractions an exile colony had for many in the ruling
class, it was not implemented for the anarchists. The nation’s history
as a refuge from foreign oppressions was still fresh enough to abort
this Russian style solution. But the tradition of free immigration was
not strong enough to turn back a proposal that pleased both the
anti-radicals and the nativist anti-immigrants. The proposal had some of
the attractions of exile and put the blame for anarchism in American
life on the foreign born. The restriction of immigration and deportation
of anarchist immigrants became federal law in 1903 after fifteen years
of debate on the question.
The political restriction of immigration had a record of failure in 19th
century American congresses. But many attempts were made in the last two
decades to legislate the exclusion of anarchists from American shores.
This was the first group to be targeted for exclusion on purely
political grounds.
The first bill introduced against anarchist immigrants was championed by
representative Adams of Chicago in 1888. The congressman was obliging
the paranoia stirred up after the Haymarket incident and trial of eight
anarchist labor militants. His bill provided for "the removal of
dangerous aliens from the territory of the United States." [81]
A Senator Mitchell introduced a bill in 1889 to "prohibit objectionable
foreign immigration, encourage desirable immigration, defend American
institutions and protect American Labor." [82] The bill would have made
it unlawful for anyone who was an “avowed anarchist or nihilist... to
land in any of our ports.” (89)
Other unsuccessful bills were introduced in 1891, 1893, 1894, 1895 and
1897. The most serious of these attempts occurred in 1894. Secretary of
the Treasury at that time, John Carlisle, and Secretary of State Olney
drew up a bill that was sponsored by Senator David Hill. It became known
as the Hill Bill and gained easy and unanimous passage in the Senate and
was reported out of the House Committee on the Judiciary favorably,
again by unanimous vote. But it was sidetracked by one congressman, John
Dewitt Warner from New York, in the House discussion of the bill.
Warner's opposition was attacked by congressman Boatner of Louisiana. He
warned that “the administration also urges the very great importance of
passing this bill at the present session of Congress, owing to the fact
that we are advised that a large number (500) of the most dangerous
anarchists in the world are now on their way to the United States and
that at this time there is no law on the statute books which prohibits
the landing of an anarchist in this country.” [83]
But Warner remained opposed; the bill died at the end of the
Congressional session, and the five hundred anarchists never showed up
to gain admission to American shores.
But what failed in the 19th Century was made possible by an event which
pitted the nation against anarchism as they bad learned to understand
it. Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President McKinley in Buffalo, New
York in September, 1901. Czolgosz was native born, only tenuously
connected with the anarchist movement* and not politically or mentally
perceptive about his act. But to those already disposed against
anarchists, the assassination confirmed the worst and most irrational
fears nurtured against anarchists. A wave of extra-legal suppression of
anarchists followed immediately.
Emma Goldman in St. Louis and had been in Chicago, where anarchist
circles found him so strange and disturbing that they printed a warning
in their newspaper about Czolgosz possibly being a police spy.
The Secret Service now declared that it had "complete records of every
known or avowed anarchist who has been in this country during the last
fifteen years.” Emma Goldman was arrested and held for a month as an
accomplice in the assassination, but was later released because of the
total lack of evidence connecting her to the crime. A community of
twenty-five anarchist miners' families near Pittsburgh was attacked at
night in the style of the Ku Klux Klan and driven from the area. Local
incidents of mob action against anarchists abounded. The widow and
children of the Italian anarchist [Gaetano] Bresci were ordered by the
Cliffside, New Jersey police to get out of town. Scores of reports from
around the nation gleefully announced that the utterance of any sympathy
toward anarchism or any against McKinley were met with tar and feathers,
swift jail terms, beatings, shootings, the lynch mob. [84] Hysterical
newspaper accounts had anarchists plotting to derail McKinley's funeral
train, to attack the funeral ceremony in Washington D.C., and to
assassinate the governor of New Jersey. Nothing of the kind occurred,
but anarchists paid a very dear price for an enigmatic stranger's pistol
shots in Buffalo.
The federal law restricting the immigration of anarchists was given
great impetus by the McKinley assassination. Congress did not, however,
move as quickly as the mob justice meted out across the country in the
fall of 1901. The new President, Teddy Roosevelt, announced that the
nation "should war with relentless efficiency not only against
anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with
anarchists.” [85] In his annual message to Congress of Dec. 3, 1901,
Roosevelt included as part of his program the exclusion of “all persons
who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles or members of
anarchistic societies.” [86]
By early 1903, Roosevelt's wish was law. Included in the Naturalization
laws and regulations was a requirement that immigrants swear that they
are “not a disbeliever in or opposed to organized government, or a
member of or affiliated with any organization or body of persons
teaching disbelief in or opposed to organized government.” This
repudiation of libertarian principles was incorporated into the
immigration and naturalization process and printed forms and became the
legal basis for excluding anarchist immigrants and visitors from
entering America and the deportation of anarchists with less than three
years residence.
The law was intended to wound the anarchist cause and make life
difficult for its members, to disrupt its internationalism, and to
protect America. The law itself was unwieldy and impractical, relying as
it did on the victims' willingness voluntarily to admit their political
“crime”. Thus the new law was not terribly useful for excluding the
“foreign anarchist menace”, if indeed such a thing existed. The numbers
affected by the anarchist section of the law are not spectacular. "From
1903 until 1921, the United States excluded only thirty-eight persons
for holding anarchistic beliefs, while it deported a mere fourteen
aliens of the anarchistic classes from 1911 until 1919 when the red
scare deportations began.”*
were refused entry by border authorities on the basis of the
anti-anarchist law.
The law's importance and impact, however, are belied by the figures. The
foreign libertarian was made insecure in his or her entrance and initial
existence in America. This could not but have a chilling effect on
anarchist circles where the news of exclusion and deportation was
discussed and followed with the greatest interest. The law also set a
unique precedent in American jurisprudence in that a person's beliefs
and associations were grounds for a judgment of law that meted out
punishment, in fact if not technically. The passing of the federal law
against anarchists, even in the limited area of immigration, resulted in
giving license to the states to legislate against anarchists in more
brutish, repressive ways than the national government dared at that
time.
The great length to which different states went to circumscribe
political freedoms in their campaign against anarchism is illustrated by
several categories of legislation approved shortly before, during and
after the passage of the federal law of 1903. For example, New Jersey
enacted a law that made it a high misdemeanor for “any person who shall,
in public or private, display a red flag, a black flag, or any ensigns
or sign bearing an inscription opposed to organized government, or the
flag, emblem or insignia of any organization, society or order opposed
to organized government, for the purpose of inciting, promoting or
encouraging hostility or opposition to or the subversion or destruction
of any and all government.” [87] Offenders were punishable “by a fine
not exceeding two thousand dollars, or imprisonment at hard labor not
exceeding fifteen years or both.” [88] The states of California,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan and West Virginia also approved similar
bills against the display of anarchistic flags of red or black color.
Another category of state legislation made being an anarchist illegal
and sought to muzzle the anarchist press. New York passed a “criminal
anarchy” law making the desire to overthrow government by force illegal.
“The advocacy of such doctrine either by word of mouth or writing"
became a felony. [89] Printing, publishing, editing, circulating,
selling, distributing or publicly displaying any book, paper, document
or written or printed matter containing the doctrine of criminal anarchy
or being a member of an anarchist group was punishable by a ten year
jail term and $5,000 fine. Anarchist assemblies were open to the same
penalties.
Criminal syndicalism laws belong in the same category of criminal
anarchy laws and were intended for use against the Industrial Workers of
the World as well as against anarchists. Striking at direct action
methods used and promoted by anarchists and IWW's alike, criminal
syndicalism made it illegal to have “any doctrine or practice which
teaches, practices or advocates crime, sabotage ..., violence or other
methods of terrorism, or the destruction of life or property, for the
accomplishment of social, economic, industrial or political ends," [90]
South Dakota made "the advocacy, teaching, support, practice or
furtherance of any such doctrine, whether by act, speech or writing, or
by any means or in any manner whatsoever" a felony. By 1921 seven other
states and one territory had passed equivalent criminal syndicalism
laws.
If the use of the New York state criminal anarchy law is any indication,
these state laws were much more frequently applied in suppressing the
anarchist movement than the federal law of 1903. During an anti-radical
witch hunt conducted by the New York Joint Legislative Committee
Investigating Seditious Activities, 1919-1920, the committee initiated
the prosecution of 83 people for "criminal anarchy". Not all those
accused were anarchists. Members of the Communist Party, ironically,
also were charged under the criminal anarchy statute. Those convicted by
1920 had been given 4 to 10 year sentences at hard labor in Sing Sing
prison. Others were never tried because they were handed over to Federal
authorities as undesirable aliens and were deported under the 1903
immigration law on the U.S. S. Buford to Russia. Among the deportees on
the ship were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
What is noteworthy of the period we have looked at is the beginning of
an anarchist-communist movement in America and the vigorous, hysterical
reaction against it among the American ruling class and its spokesmen,
thinkers, journalists and police. It is within this period that one can
discover the roots of many subsequent events and attitudes towards
anarchists and other radicals. The deportations of radicals, the
frame-up of Billings and Mooney, the Palmer raids, the murder of Salsedo
and the arrest and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and the continuing
prejudice and anti-anarchist disposition among people today, can all in
part be attributed to the antianarchist crusade of the late 19th
century. The crusade against the militant, anti-authoritarian wing of
socialism was taken up as a fight to the death by the system's
defenders, and any means was appropriate to win. The integrity and
objectivity of the press on the subject of anarchism was totally
lacking. It was war, class war, and the enemy had no rights, no
humanity, no rationality, and no good cause for rebellion. The freedom
fighter was made to appear as the demon, and the terrorist, as the
danger lurking against all good people.
What makes this review of 19th century history pertinent is that many oI
the same methods described in this pamphlet are today still employed by
the ruling classes. Italy bans anarchists to remote islands. Germany
tortures its political prisoners with sensory deprivation, impugns their
sanity and begs our credulity by having them "commit suicide"
individually and in groups. Great Britain concocts anarchist bomb
conspiracies on evidence such as common electrical wire, sugar, weed
killer and persons unknown. Greek police round up anarchists and use the
possession of a book, the Anarchist Cookbook, as a reason to pack them
off to jail. In Spain right-wing paramilitary groups and police attempt
to terrorize the anarchist labor union CNT with night tune beatings,
fire bombings, arrests and confinement. In America we have the exclusion
of Canadian anarchists at the border and militants such as Lorenzo
Kom'boa Ervin, Carl Harp, Rita Brown and ex-SLAers are singled out for
the wrath of our prison authorities.
Common to all these events is press coverage very similar to the 19th
century anti-anarchist crusade. That old crusade stands exposed with the
passage of time. Before joining the present day chorus condemning
libertarian activists one must examine the motives behind and methods of
these critical voices. Whatever tactical differences we may have with
these activists, let us strike at the calumnies and distortions our
mutual antagonists, the state and the ruling class, use against all of
us.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I have chosen to arrange the bibliography by periodical, rather than by
author. This is done to make it more useful in a reader's search for
them in a library setting.
The American
"The Significance of Anarchism,"November 19, 1887, pp. 71-72.
American Catholic Quarterly
Neill, Charles P., “Anarchism," vol. 27, pp. 160- 179.
American Journal of Politics
Ferrero, William, "Anarchical Elements in Society," Oct., 1894, pp.
336-349.
American Law Journal
Beck, J. M. , "The Suppression of Anarchy,” MarchApril, 1902, pp.
190-203.
Richards, John K., Solicitor General of the U.S., “A Present
Peril,”"May-June, 1902, pp. 405-411.
Winston, E. M., “A Prescription for Anarchists,”"Sept.-Oct. , 1895, pp.
681-687.
American Magazine
Anonymous (Pinkerton, Robert?), "My Dream of Anarchy and Dynamite,” May,
June, 1888, pp. 80- 94 and pp. 211-227.
White, Z. L. , "The Anarchists," March, 1888, pp. 605-613.
American Magazine of Civics
Debs, Eugene, "The Cry of Anarchist," April, 1895, pp. 408-412.
American Monthly Review of Reviews
Holt, Henry, "The Treatment of Anarchism,” Feb., 1902, pp. 192-200.
Appleton's Popular Science Monthly
Lambros, Cesare, “A Paradoxical Anarchist,” Jan., 1900, pp. 312-315.
Atlantic Monthly
Salter, William M., "Second Thoughts on the Treatment of Anarchy,” May,
1902, pp. 581-588.
Arena
Flower, B. O., "The Rise of Anarchy in the United States," Sept., 1903,
pp. 305-311.
Newton, R. Heber, “Anarchism," Jan., 1902, pp. 1-12.
Newton, R. Heber, "Political, Economic, and Religious Causes of
Anarchism,” Feb., 1902, pp. 113-125.
Roberts, Evelyn H., "The Gospel of Destruction,” Nov. 1901, pp. 449-458.
Yarros, Victor, "Anarchism: What it is, And What it is Not,” vol. VII,
pp. 595-601.
Bibliotheca Sacra
Holbrook, Z. S., "Errors of Anarchism,” April 1902, pp. 383-386.
Loba, Rev. Jean F., "The Evolution of Anarchy,” Oct. 1894, pp. 604-613.
Catholic World
Foote, John A. , "The Anarchist?," Oct. , 1902, pp. 59-63.
Joufroy, Theodore, “Warnings and Teachings of the Church on Anarchism,"
No., 1901, pp. 202-209.
Scholasticus, W. F. C., "Anarchy and Government,” Oct. , 1902, pp.
44-49.
The Chautauquan
Boglietti, B. G. , "The Anarchist Utopia,” Sept. , 1894, pp. 719-723.
Desjardins, Paul, “A Study of Anarchists and their Theories in Europe,”
March, 1894, pp. 691-694.
Seymour, Robert L. , "What Shall be Done with Anarchists?,” Sept., 1894,
pp. 732-734.
Contemporary Review
Blind, Karl, "The Rise and Development of Anarchism,” Jan. , 1894, pp.
140-152.
Dewey, Stoddard, "The Anarchist Movement in Spain," May, 1902, pp.
741-749.
Lee, Vernon, "Gospels of Anarchy,” July, 1898, pp. 75-90.
Reclus, Éliséee, “Anarchy: by an Anarchist,” May, 1894, pp. 627-641.
Critic
Strachey, Lionel, "Anarchism in Literature,” Dec., 1901, pp. 530-534.
Encyclopedia Brittannica, 11th ed.
Kropotkin, Peter, “Anarchism,” 1910-1911, pp. 914-919.
Fortnightly Review
Mahato, Charles, "Some Anarchist Portraits," Sept., 1894, pp. 315-333.
Forum
Adams, H. C., "Shall We Muzzle the Anarchists?,” July, 1886, pp.
445-454.
Holt, Henry, “Punishment of Anarchists and Others,” Aug., 1894, pp.
644-658.
Good Words
McDonald, Menzies, "Among the Anarchists," vol. 35, 1894, pp. 125-129.
Watson, David, “An Anarchist Meeting in Scotland,” vol. 35, 1894, pp.
445-447.
Harpers Monthly Magazine
Conrad, Joseph, “An Anarchist”, vol. 113, pp. 406-416.
The Independent
Cortesi, Salvatore, "Anarchy in its Birthplace, Oct. 3, 1901, pp.
2346-2280.
De Cleyre, Voltarine, "The Making of an Anarchist," Sept. 24, 1903, pp.
2276-2280
Littels Living Age
"How to Deal with Anarchists,” 4th quarter, 1901, pp. 128-131.
"Ideals of Anarchy,” vol. 211, 18Y6, pp. 616-636.
"The Real Anarchist,” 2nd quarter, 1900, pp. 780- 788.
The Monist
Lombroso, Cesare, "The Physiognomy of the Anarchists,"vol. 1, l:'P·
336-343-.
Schwab, Michael, “A Concicted Anarchist's Reply to Prcifesor
Lombroso,"vol. l, pp. 520-524.
The Nation
Godkin, E. L. , “The Anarchists in Paris,"May 5, 1812, i-,p. 335-336.
Godkin, E. L., "The Execution of the Anarchists," Nov. 10, 1887, f.'P·
366-367. ij The Nation cont.
Godkin, E. L., "The Supreme Court and the Anarchist,"Oct. 27, 1887, pp.
326-327.
Lamont, H., "Legislating Against Anarchists,"March 27, H02, pp. 243-244.
Langel, A., "Government and Anarchists in France,"Aug. 2, 1894, pp.
77-78,
Ogden, R., "The Bill Against Anarchists,"Feb. 20, 1902, pp. 145-14(.,.
Ogden, R., "For Control of Anarchists,"June 7, 1902, pp. 463-4G4.
Ogden, R., "Anarchism and the Home Missions,"Sept. 16, 1886, pp.
228-229.
Onslow, B., “Coq.ietting with Anarchy,"Sept. 1880, pp. 209-210.
New Review
"Anarchists: Their Methods and Organization,” Jan., 181;14, pp. 1-16.
Donisthorpe, W., "In Defence of Anarchy,"vol. z, 1894, l>P· 283-291.
Stepniak, S., “A Reply, Nihilism:As it is," vol. 2, 1894, pp. 215-222
Nineteenth Century
Holyoake;, George, “Anarchism,” Oct., 11;101, pp. 683-686.
Kropotkin, Peter, "The Coming Anarchy," Aug., 1887, pp. 149-164.
Kropotkin, Peter, ''The Scientific Bases of Anarchy,” Feb., 1887, pp.
238-252.
North American Review
Aldrich, Edgar, U.S. District Judge, "The Power and Duty of the Federal
Government to Protect its Agents,"Dec., 1901, pp. 740-757.
Arcos, Duke of, Spanish Envoy to the U. S., "International Control of
Anarchists,"Dec. 1901, pp. 758- 767.
Blind, Karl, "Anarchism and the Napoleonic Revival,” May, 1894, pp.
602-609.
Bryce, Lloyd, "Primitive Simplicity," Nov., 1887, pp. 544-552.
Burrows, J. C., "The Need of National Legislation Against Anarchism,”
Dec. , 1901, pp. 727 - 745.
Dodd, S. C. T. , "Congress and Anarchy: A Suggestion,” Oct., l';lOl, pp.
433-436.
Johnston, Charles, "The Anarchists and the President,” Oct., 1901, pp.
437-444.
Pinkerton, Robert, "Detective Surveillance of Anarchists,” Nov., 1901,
pp. 609-617.
Open Court
Carus, P., "Anarchism," Oct. 1901, pp. 579-581.
Fiamingo, G. M. , "Italian Anarchism,” Aug. , 1899, pp. 485-494.
Our Day
Cook, J., "Socialistic Anarchists and the Salvation Army,” Nov. -Dec.,
1894, pp. 532-540.
James, Edmund, "Socialists and Anarchists in the United States," Feb.,
1888, pp. 81-94.
Outlook
Abbott, Lyman, "Anarchism: Its Cause and Cure," Feb. 22, 1902, pp.
465-471.
“Anarchism—Its Cause and Cure,” Oct. 5, 1901, pp. 252-255.
"The Anarchist Exclusion Law,” Nov. 21, 1903, pp. 678-679.
Doane, Rev. William C., "Anarchism and Atheism, A Sermon on the Death of
President McKinley," Sept. 20, 1901, pp. 218-221.
Gladden, Washington, "The Philosophy of Anarchism,” Oct. 19, 1901, pp.
449-454.
Nichols, Francis, "The Anarchists in America,” Aug. 10, 1901, pp.
859-863.
Overland Monthly
Clark, Wood Ruff, "The Anarchist,” Sept., 1888, pp. 321-324.
Political Science Quarterly
Osgood, Herbert, "Scientific Anarchism," March, 1889, pp. 1-36.
Public Opinion
"The Chicago Anarchists," Nov. 12, 1887, pp. 99- lv2.
''The Red Flag in America," May15, 1886, pp. 81- 87.
"What Shall Be Done with Anarchists," July 5, 1894, pp. 306-307.
Saturday Review
"Advertisement and Anarchism," Aug. 11. 1900, pp. 166-167.
"Anarchism and Socialism,” Nov. 22, 1902, pp. 634-635.
"The Anarchist Law in France," July, 14, 1894, p. 36.
"Anarchy and Anarchists," April 12, 1890, pp. 450-452.
"Anarchy and Assassination,” Sept. 14, 1901, pp. 324-325.
"The Anarchist Beast,” June 9, 1906, pp. 712-713.
"The Paris Anarchists,” April 2, 1892, pp. 382-383.
"Ravachol and the Cowards,” April 30, 1892, pp. 497-499.
“Y're a Clever Chiel, But—,” June 25' 66 1892, p. 731. 67
The Spectator
"The Anarchist Blood Feud,” Aug. 14, 1897, pp. 201- 202.
"Anarchist Literature,” July 14, 1894, pp. 41-42.
''The Anarchists of Leipsic,” Dec. 27, 1884, pp. 1726- 1727.
''The Anarchist Plot in Vienna,” Oct. 16, 1886, pp. 1374-1375.
"The Spanish Wave,” Sept. 30, 1893, pp. 424-425.
"Anarchy in America," April 19, 1890, pp. 546-547.
"The Case for Anarchy," May 3, 1884, pp. 576-577.
"Mr. Asquith and the Anarchists,” Nov. 18, 1893, pp. 706-707.
"The Relation of Great Britain to Anarchy,” Feb. 24, 1894, pp. 257-258.
"The Spanish Anarchists,” April 9, 1892, pp. 484- 486.
"Vaillant on bis Defence,” Jan. 13,1894, pp. 36-3 7.
Temple Bar
Boglietti, G., "The Anarchist Utopia,” Dec., 1894, pp. 521-528.
Westminster Review
Malagodi, Olindo, “The Psychology of Anarchist Conspiracies,” Jan. ,
1897, pp. 87-91.
Wood, George, "Anarchism: An Outline and a Criticism," Feb., 1902, pp.
181-186.
Books
Several books helped fill in some of the background material for this
pamphlet.
Beals, Carleton, Brass Knuckle Crusade, New York, Hastings House
Publishers, 1960.
Chalmers, David, Hooded Americanism, The First Century of the Ku Klux
Klan, 1865-1965, Garden City, New Jersey, Doubleday, 1965.
Desmond, Humphrey, The Know Nothing Party, Washington, New Century
Press, 1904.
Halstead, Murat, The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred
President, Chicago?, 1901.
Hutchinson, Enoch, Startling Facts for Native Americans Called
Know-Nothings, New York, published at 128 Nassau St., 1855.
Preston, William, Aliens and Dissenters, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 1963.
Levy, Leonard, ed., Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and
Tactics, Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating
Seditious Activities, Filed April 24, 1920 in the Senate of the State of
New York, N. Y., reprint, De Capo Press, 1971.
[1] Oxford English Dictionary
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, cited by George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, His Life and Work, New York, Schocken, 1972, p. 50.
[5] Woodcock, George. Anarchism, a History of Libertarian Ideas and
Movements, New York, Meridan-New American Library, 1962, p. 61. .
[6] Kropotkin, Peter. “Anarchism" entry of the Encyclopedia Brittanica
11th edition, Cambridge England and New York, University Press, 1910-
1911, p. 914.
[7] Ibid.
[8] White, Z.L. “The Anarchists", American Magazine, March, 1888, p.
605.
[9] "What Shall be Done With Anarchists?", Public Opinion Magazine, July
5, 1894, p. 307.
[10] “Anarchism”, Open Court, October, 1901, p. 581.
[11] Burrows, Senator J.C. “The Need for National Legislation Against
Anarchism,” North American Review, December, 1901, p. 744.
[12] Debs, Eugene. "The Cry of Anarchist," American Magazine of Civics,
April, 1895, p. 409.
[13] Johnston, Charles. "The Anarchists and the President,” North
American Review, October, 1901, p. 444.
[14] Flower, B. O. "The Rise of Anarchy in the United States,” The
Arena, September, 1903, p. 305
[15] “The Chicago Anarchists," Public Opinion Magazine, Nov. 12, 1887,
p. 100.
[16] “The Anarchist Wave,” The Spectator, Sept. 30, 1893, pp. 424-425.
[17] “The Suppression of Anarchy,” American Law Review, March-April,
1902, p. 190.
[18] "The Present Peril,” American Law Review, May-June, 1902, p. 406.
[19] “Anarchism and Socialism,” Saturday Review, Nov. 22, 1902, p. 634.
[20] Arcos, Duke of. “International Control of Anarchists,'' North
American Review, Dec., 1901, p. 254.
[21] “Anarchism and Socialism”, Saturday Review, Nov. 22, 1902, p. 634.
[22] “The Red Flag in America”, Public Opinion Magazine, May 15, 1886,
p. 84.
[23] "The Spanish Anarchists,” The Spectator, April 9, 1892, pp.
484-486.
[24] “The Relation of Great Britain to Anarchy,” The Spectator, Feb. 24,
1894, pp. 257-258.
[25] "Anarchism and Advertisement,” Saturday Review, Aug. 11, 1900, p.
166.
[26] "The Suppression of Anarchy,” American Law Review, March-April,
1902, p. 190.
[27] "Anarchists: Their Methods and Organizations," The New Review,
Jan., 1894, p. 1.
[28] "Anarchy and Assassination," Saturday Review, Sept. 14, 1901, pp.
324-325.
[29] "The Execution of the Anarchists,” The Nation, Nov. 10, 1887, p.
366.
[30] "Anarchists: Their Methods and Organizations," The New Review,
Jan., 1894, p. 1.
[31] Holyoke, George. “Anarchism” Nineteenth Century, Oct., 1901, p.
683.
[32] Gladden, Washington. "The Philosophy of Anarchism,” Outlook, Oct,
19, 1901, p. 449.
[33] Newton, R. Heber. “Anarchism,” Arena, Jan., 1902, p. 3.
[34] "Anarchists: Their Methods and Organizations” The New Review,
.Jan., 1894, p. 1.
[35] Holyoke, George. “Anarchism,” Nineteenth Century, Oct., 1901, p.
684.
[36] Newton, R. Heber. “Anarchism", tf 1902, p. 4.
[37] Ibid., pp. 6-7. Arena, Jan.,
[38] Pinkerton, Robert, "Detective Surveillance of Anarchists,” North
American Review, Dec., 1901, p. 612.
[39] De Cleyre, Voltarine, “The Making of Anarchists," The Independent,
Sept. 24, 1903, p. 2280.
[40] “Home Missions and Anarchism," The Nation, Sept. 16, 1886, p. 228.
[41] Ibid.
[42] White, Z. L. “The Anarchists,” American Magazine, March, 1888, p.
611.
[43] “My Dream of Anarchy and Dynamite,” American Magazine, May-June,
pp. 219-220.
[44] Doane, Rev. William. “Anarchism and Atheism,” Outlook, Sept. 20,
1901, p. 218.
[45] Ibid., p. 219.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid. , p. 221.
[48] Jouffrey, Theodore. "Warnings and Teachings of the Church on
Anarchism,” Catholic World, Nov., 1901, p. 202.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid. , p. 209.
[51] Abbott, Lyman. "Anarchism: Its Cause and Cure,” Outlook, Feb. 22,
1902, p. 472.
[52] Doane, Rev. William. Op. Cit. , p. 219.
[53] Lombroso, Cesare. “A Paradoxical Anarchist” Appleton's Popular
Science Monthly, Jan., 1900, p. 312.
[54] "Red Flag in America," Public Opinion, Op. Cit., p. 85.
[55] Clarke, Wood. "The Anarchist," Overland Monthly, Sept. , 1888, p.
321.
[56] Ferero, William. ''Anarchical Elements in Society,” American
Journal of Politics, Oct., 1894, p. 338.
[57] Lombroso, Cesare. “Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology,"
The Monist, vol. 1, p. 337 70. Ibid., p. 83.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Lombroso, Cesare. Appletons, Op. Cit., p. 313.
[60] Ibid., p. 312
[61] Ferero, William, American Journal of Politics, Op. Cit. , p. 341.
[62] Malagodi, Olinda. "The Psychology of Anarchist Conspiracies,"
Westminster Review, Jan. 1897, pp. 88-89.
[63] Fiamingo, G.M. "Italian Anarchism,” Open Court, July 5, 1899, p.
493.
[64] Ibid.
[65] "Red Flag in America," Public Opinion, Op. Cit., p. 81.
[66] Ibid., p. 83
[67] “The Significance of Anarchism,” The American, Nov. 19, 1887, p.
71.
[68] "The Execution of the Anarchists,” The Nation, Op. Cit., p. 366.
[69] "Anarchists: Their Methods and Organizations," New Review, Op. Cit.
, p. 1.
[70] Cortesi, Salvatore. "Anarchy in its Birthplace,” The Independent,
Oct. 3, 1901, p. 2347.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Newton, R. Heber. "Anarchism," Op. Cit., p. 8.
[73] Aldrich, Edgar. “The Power and Duty of the Federal Government to
Protect its Agents," North American Review, Dec., 1901, p. 748.
[74] ”Anarchists: Their Methods and Organizations,” Op. Cit. pp. 9-10.
[75] “Legislating Against Anarchists," The Nation, March 27, 1902, p.
243.
[76] ”The Anarchists in Paris,” The Nation, May 5, 1902, p. 335.
[77] "What Shall Be Done With the Anarchists?," Public Opinion, July 5,
1894, p. 307.
[78] Pinkerton, Robert. "Detective Surveillance of Anarchists,"Op. Cit.,
p. 613.
[79] Ibid., p. 614.
[80] Halstead, Murat. The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our
Martyred President, Chicago?, 1901, p. 74.
[81] Burrows, Senator J. C. “The Need for National Legislation Against
Anarchism,” Op. Cit., p. 739
[82] Ibid.
[83] Ibid., p. 736.
[84] Ibid.
[85] Preston, William. Aliens and Dissenters, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 1963, p. 31.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Levy, Leonard:editor. Op. Cit. , p. 2055.
[88] Ibid.
[89] Ibid. , p. 2056.
[90] Ibid. , p. 2067.