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Title: Assassination
Author: William C. Anderson
Date: September 6, 2022
Language: en
Topics: Anarchist movement, History, repression, Leon Czolgosz
Source: Retrieved Sept. 7, 2022 from https://offshootjournal.org/assassination-anarchism-and-the-birth-of-the-fbi/

William C. Anderson

Assassination

“The anarchists were reflex to an evil history which penetrated their

own remarkable and macabre achievements.”– Cedric Robinson

The history of classical anarchism is filled with radical foresight,

mistakes, and persecution. Its past helps explain how the word

“socialism” became conflated with state-building. Important awareness of

anti-state or stateless socialism(s) and the broader historical

socialist movement has been neglected. Though now often seen as an

aesthetic term, or an utopian desire, or a signifier for

disorganization, anarchism’s story is one of uncompromising

confrontation. As an international, anti-colonial, and revolutionary

movement many of its proponents prioritized direct violent action of the

highest order, going as far as to assassinate monarchs and heads of

state. While some people may have a general understanding of the “Red

Scare” and Mccarthyism, less know how insurrectionary anarchism led to

the birth of The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

To understand why anarchism led to the creation of one of the most

dangerous police forces in the history of nation-states, it’s necessary

to witness anarchist history as a universal threat. At the turn of

century in the early 1900s, anarchists made members of the world’s

ruling establishments increasingly fearful. As a radical ideology that

doesn’t try to reform or create new states, it questioned the

fundamental need for their existence. Therefore, it’s condemned as a

chaotic impulse by ruling classes that depend on state formations to

govern. To make matters terrifying for the world’s reigning elite, some

anarchists engaged in what was known as the “propaganda of the deed” as

a model method to try to provoke a revolutionary uprising among the

masses. These were insurrectionary tactics that took on the form of

violent attacks on police, political assassinations, bombings, and

revolutionary expropriations. Enough of it had occurred to conjure the

image of anarchists as “bomb throwers.” These actions would work to

redefine national security apparatuses.

When self-professed anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot President William

McKinley on September 6, 1901, it transformed the nature of law

enforcement in the United States. The assassination of King Umberto of

Italy on July 29, 1900, by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci set the stage to

portray anarchism as a global threat. Writing for the

American Historical Review in 1955

, historian Sidney Fine recalled that The Outlook correspondent Francis

H. Nichols made an important note. Nichols “asked…whether the nation’s

government and the President were themselves secure from anarchist

attack.” Fine writes, “Anarchism was regarded as ‘the most dangerous

theory which civilization has ever had to encounter.’” After all,

European anarchists assassinated President Carnot of France on the

24^(th) of June in 1894, Prime Minister Canovas del Castillo of Spain on

August 8^(th), 1897, and Empress Elizabeth of Austria on September

10^(th), 1898 – and they weren’t the only ones. The President of the

United States was but the latest victim.

Stateside, the Russian-American anarchist Alexander Berkman had already

tried to kill U.S. industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892 during the

Homestead strike. The Haymarket Bombing of May 4, 1886, in Chicago, led

people to further associate anarchism with violence when a bomb attack

on police was blamed on eight anarchists. “Who were the pioneers of the

eight-hour movement,” asked a formerly enslaved Black woman and

anarchist

Lucy Parsons

, “Those martyrs who were strung from the gallows in Chicago on November

11, 1887, the much-lied-about and abused Anarchists.” A labor organizer

herself, she and other anarchists had been active in pursuing better

conditions for workers around wages, hours, and safety. Her pointing to

the lies being told about those who were ultimately executed revealed an

early acknowledgment of anarchists as scapegoats. Czolgosz’s

assassination of President McKinley was preceded by and framed this

anarchist reputation. Today,

The White House website

still carries this enduring anti-anarchist sentiment. In its description

of Mckinleys killing it states, “He was standing in a receiving line at

the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition when a deranged anarchist shot him

twice. He died eight days later.”

Questions about Czolgosz, his dedication to anarchist politics, and his

mental health arose. What’s clear is that a president with

highly imperialist foreign policy

that “brought America into the world arena as a world power” through the

Spanish-American War was the authoritarian target. Authorities

responding to the assassination set their sights on noteworthy anarchist

Emma Goldman and others like her. Leon had seen Goldman speak and said

all he knew about anarchism was from “one speech delivered by Emma

Goldman in Cleveland.”[1] The targeting of prominent anarchists and the

increased persecution led others to distance themselves from the

movement’s visibility. It was a problem that would manifest in the way

nation-states would begin to go after anarchists worldwide.

Theodore Roosevelt inherited the presidency when Mckinley died. Through

Roosevelt, the campaign against anarchism took special precedence.

Roosevelt told Congress, “we should war with relentless efficiency not

only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers

with anarchists.” Roosevelt continued, stating how, Mckinley had been

killed by a “depraved criminal belonging to that body of criminals who

object to all governments, good and bad alike.” The policy against

anarchism was used to reshape social life, target dissidents globally,

and bolstered the police state for generations to come.

The Immigration Act of 1903 or the Anarchist Exclusion Act

set a precedent as one example of how anti-anarchist sentiment was used

to target immigrants, sex workers, and the disabled. Much of this was

rooted in xenophobia aimed at “undesirables” since anarchists in the

U.S. were often Italians, Russians, and other immigrants who were looked

down upon by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

The desire for more power to surveil and police at the federal level

grew. Roosevelt appointed a reformer named Charles Bonaparte (the grand

nephew of Napoleon) as his second Attorney General. He pushed him to

create what would later become the FBI by drawing from Secret Service

agents and other departments’ resources. The FBI website currently

prides itself on this origin story. Though on its history page it

incorrectly describes anarchism as an “often violent offshoot of

Marxism,” there are other admissions that show this was an opportune

moment. It goes further to say “The anarchists, in a sense, were the

first modern-day terrorists.” And “anarchist” would function similarly

to the way “terrorist” does today as a floating label that can be

plastered onto one’s enemies for the purposes of violent repression. It

also shows how the two terms were given a synonymous relationship.

This moment wasn’t exclusive to the U.S; it was international. In

Menace to Empire

, Moon-Ho Jung details how Roosevelt’s foreign policy in the Philippines

was shaped by anti-anarchist militarism. Writing, “Although the

congressional hearings emanated from McKinley’s assassination and

Roosevelt’s war against anarchism, debates over immigration could not

but harken back to their anti-Asian roots.”[2]

The antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism were very much

a part of the suppression of anarchism in the name of empire. After all,

anarchism had spread to East Asian countries like Korea, Japan, China,

and more. Its embrace among oppressed people, especially colonized

subjects, called into question the legitimacy of U.S. expansion. This

became an opportunity for the U.S. state to use its opposition against

whatever it labeled “anarchism” in order to carry out the political

agenda of international policing and neocolonialism.

It wasn’t just monarchies or capitalist states that targeted anarchists,

but even state-socialist projects practiced this repression. Alexander

Berkman and Emma Goldman observed as much firsthand. Goldman documented

this in the U.S.S.R. in her manuscript titled My Disillusionment in

Russia. She had offered to help the Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir

Lenin in support of the Russian cause. But Lenin told

her

, “There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period.” Anarchism was

positioned as a common poison to states that had to be rooted out to

preserve the infrastructure granted to ruling classes. Since the state

is their machinery, no matter what economic model they endorse, they can

always use the state to maintain power. At the core, what’s so dangerous

is the idea that people would challenge the capitalist world order

permitted through the nation-state form.

The killing of a president represented a disastrous opportunity to push

reformism. Just as post-9/11 was a moment for the state to reconfigure

and reform itself in increasingly fascistic ways, so too was the

post-Mckinley moment. The authoritarianism of the state cannot let a

good tragedy go to waste. Perhaps this is why, in part, for the FBI

anarchists were “the first modern-day terrorists.” This history birthed

disastrous consequences and highlighted issues that remain unresolved

for contemporary anarchists.

When we assess the past and look at present conditions we can write new

theories and live new praxis. Anti-state politics don’t operate

according to global capitalist rules and that’s absolutely necessary.

This is also why these politics scare governments, politicians, and

their patriotic supporters so much. However, being daring enough to go

against the capitalistic order of the world doesn’t mean every act will

have revolutionary results. Of Czolgosz, Emma Goldman

said

, “What results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one

thing, however, is certain: he has wounded government in its most vital

spot.” What did that wound reveal then and what does it say now? Though

much has changed, the need to overcome what assassinations did not stop

remains

[1] Rauchway, Eric. Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore

Roosevelt’s America. United Kingdom: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007,

103.

[2] Jung, Moon-Ho. Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the

Transpacific Origins of the US Security State. United States: University

of California Press, 2022, 52.