Anarchist Terrorism in the United States
The United States has a long and bloody history of labour-related violence, which formed the backdrop for sporadic outbursts of terrorism. The first such eruption occurred in the eastern Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1860s and 1870s.
When a few dozen company managers and bosses were killed, the authorities blamed their deaths on the Molly Maguires, supposedly an underground group with roots in the Irish Whiteboys and other secret societies. Twenty miners were eventually executed after sensationalistic trials based on flimsy evidence. Today, historians doubt that the Mollies even existed as an organised group. But the spectre of conspiratorial violence carried out by immigrants with ties to Old World movements set the tone for much of what was to follow. Middle America, the country's political leaders and the mainstream media came to understand American terrorism as essentially the work of outsiders or hyphenated Americans. For the next fifty years, the dominant image of the American terrorist was of a heavily whiskered foreigner with an unpronounceable name and a bomb hidden under an overcoat.It is important to note, however, that the bulk of labour-related violence was carried out not by terrorists but by state militias or armed strike breakers, such as during the Homestead strike (1892), the Pullman strike (1894), the Ludlow massacre (1914) and the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921). A second key point is that the majority of the workers who went on strike or organised were relatively non-ideological, and those who did profess an ideology could be classified as socialists. Socialists and labour activists did occasionally use terrorism, though, such as the October 1910 bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which was locked in a debilitating dispute with its union. The blast killed twenty-one non-union employees. This sort of violence tended to be closely connected to specific labour grievances and economic issues.
Most sub-state labour-related terrorism in the USA was carried out by anarchists who always formed a radical fringe of the labour movement; one estimate puts the number of anarchists in the USA at the time of the movement's peak in 1885 at 7,000. Even then, violent anarchists lay at the fringe of the fringe. Not surprisingly, they attracted the lion's share of national attention, in part because of their violent rhetoric. One anarchist paper, for instance, exhorted its readers: ‘Dynamite!... It brings terror and fear to the robbers... A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots hollow - and don't you forget it!'[938] Anarchist rhetoric also differed from that of the mainstream labour movement by focusing significant energy on the state and its war against individual liberty. Quite tellingly, most anarchist violence in the USA was carried out by individuals or extremely small cells, even as it was characterised by authorities and the mainstream press as the leading edge of a massive and violent revolutionary movement.
The story of anarchist violence in the United States begins with the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886. After hundreds of thousands of workers marched and went on strike across the United States on 1 May demanding the eight-hour work day, demonstrations continued in Chicago, in part to protest police violence at a local strike. On 4 May, as a demonstration led by anarchists wound down, someone threw a bomb, killing eight policemen. What followed was America's first red scare, a nationwide panic during which the authorities went on a witch hunt for violent revolutionaries and newspapers fanned the fears of middle America. Chicago police rounded up anarchists and used the hysteria to suppress socialists and union activists.
Despite a paucity of evidence, eight defendants were found guilty and five were sentenced to death. Those on the left loudly denounced the verdict as a miscarriage of justice. By 1893, the governor of Illinois agreed and issued pardons.
But there had been a bomb, and trial evidence revealed that a small group of anarchists had made bombs and plotted to use them at some time.[939] In a country rife with labour-related tension and conflict, terrorism had become the fault line, crystallising for the bulk of the population the danger of labour, immigrants and even rampant individualism, while clarifying for those on the left the horrifying demagogic power of the state.The first red scare of 1886 stigmatised the American labour movement and the campaign for the eight-hour work day, but labour organisation soon picked up again. In fact, from 1897 to 1920, total union membership increased tenfold. Just as importantly, evidence suggests that wages grew and the average work week shrank during this period for unionised workers more than for non-union workers.[940] Ironically, the creeping success of American labour organisers alarmed not just industrialists and their government backers but also anarchists, who - as in Europe - feared that the slow amelioration of working-class disaffection threatened their claims that only a revolution could fundamentally right society's wrongs. Afraid that they would lose their audience, anarchists doubled down on terrorism. But they also shifted even more clearly towards a rhetorical emphasis on the evils of statism and the importance of individual liberty.
Thus it is significant that the most high-profile incidences of American anarcho-terrorism around the turn of the century were individual acts of propaganda of the deed. In 1892, the Russian-American anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to kill Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the board of Carnegie Corporation, in retaliation for Carnegie's violent clampdown on striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And in September 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot and killed US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Just before his execution, Czolgosz, an anarchist and former steelworker born in the United States to Polish immigrants, stated, ‘I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people - the good working people.
I am not sorry for my crime.'[941]Record-setting foreign immigration, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and American involvement in World War I stoked fear in the United States of Bolshies, workers, anarchists, terrorists and unassimilated foreigners. The Immigration Act of 1917 legalised the deportation of resident aliens who promoted assassination, and the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibited antigovernment speech. In 1919, these laws were used to take into custody Luigi Galleani, an Italian immigrant who had taken Johann Most's place as America's loudest and most notorious proponent of anarchism and propaganda of the deed. That June, eight bombs set off outside the homes of officials associated with the legislation produced three fatalities: a guard, a bystander and one of the bombers. Pamphlets signed by ‘The Anarchist Fighters' that were found at the scene stated, ‘there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions'. The dead bomber was a colleague of Galleani; no other terrorists were arrested.[942]
A new moral panic ensued. US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer declared that America was under assault from ‘alien anarchists', and a beefed- up Bureau of Investigation rounded up 10,000 suspects over seven months. The government eventually deported about 500 of those seized. The climax of American anarchist terror came soon after. On 16 September 1920, a bomb exploded on New York City's Wall Street, killing thirty-eight and wounding over 200 - the most destructive American terrorist attack until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The authorities never found the culprit, but suspicion fell on the few Galleanists who remained, in large part because of the discovery of a nearby note from a group claiming to be the American Anarchist Fighters. The note seemed to reference recent arrests: ‘Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.'[943]