Anarchist Terrorism 2.pdf

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The United States, International Policing

and the War against Anarchist Terrorism,

1900–1914

RICHARD BACH JENSEN

In 1901 the anarchist assassination of President McKinley aroused tremendous anger

throughout the United States and was the catalyst for diplomatic efforts to coordinate

transatlantic measures against the anarchists. Why, then, did America refuse to sign the

St. Petersburg Protocol on international anti-anarchist police cooperation agreed to in

1904 by much of continental Europe? This article seeks to answer that question as well

as to chart the little-known role in the war against anarchism of the Secret Service and,

beginning in 1910, of the nascent Bureau of Investigation.

At the turn of the century two spectacular assassinations demonstrated the

continuing threat of anarchist terrorism and the extent to which this problem

involved countries on both sides of the Atlantic. In September 1901, the

assassination of President McKinley shattered American complacency that,

as a republic and a democracy, the United States was immune to anarchist

‘propaganda by the deed’, which had been the scourge of Europe’s political

leaders and royalty during the 1890s. This was little more than a year after

an Italian anarchist residing in Paterson, New Jersey, had crossed the

Atlantic to shoot down King Humbert of Italy. European reaction to the

McKinley assassination was immediate. Germany and Russia dispatched a

joint diplomatic note calling for negotiations on international anti-anarchist

measures. After more than two years of discussion ten eastern, central and

northern European countries signed an anti-anarchist protocol in St.

Petersburg on 14 March 1904 that provided for police cooperation and

information exchange. Curiously, the countries which signed the protocol

did not include the two states most aggrieved, the United States and Italy.

Why did America refuse to join with much of continental Europe in

forming an anti-anarchist ‘Interpol’? Some of the answers are fairly

obvious. America’s traditions of isolationism, its abhorrence of European

entanglements and its antipathy for an increasingly overbearing Germany

and despotic Russia dissuaded it from adhering to the St. Petersburg

Protocol. But at the time Washington also had a purely utilitarian reason for

avoiding international commitments, whether it was directed against the

Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2001)

PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

anarchists or against other perceived threats to the established order. As this

article will demonstrate, the lack of a national American police force and

central criminal identification service prior to the full development of the

FBI in the mid-1920s restricted America’s freedom of action in ways that

have seldom, if ever, been noted by historians. Nor have historians

investigated the diplomatic efforts to bring America into the European anti-

anarchist dragnet after President Roosevelt called in December 1901 for

international treaties among all civilized powers to make anarchism a crime

against the law of nations and to empower the federal government to deal

with this crime. 1

Interestingly, Italy’s reasons for rejecting the St. Petersburg Protocol of

1904 and increased international anti-anarchist cooperation bear some

similarity to those of America. Italy, like the United States, wished to avoid

entanglement on this issue with the ultraconservative eastern and central

European states, a desire reinforced by the emergence in 1901 of a more

liberal and progressive government administration under Giuseppe

Zanardelli and Giovanni Giolitti. Italy also had a practical consideration for

avoiding an international anti-anarchist agreement. This was the fear that, if

it joined the anti-anarchist accord, thousands of Italian anarchists residing

abroad might be expelled back to Italy, and Rome would have no legal

means of preventing their unwelcome homecoming. 2

Given the fear, and even panic, that anarchist terrorism aroused

throughout the world, particularly after the onset in 1892 of a series of

anarchist bombings in Paris, it is somewhat surprising that the United States

and Italy proved so standoffish. A brief examination of the impact of

anarchist terrorism on western society makes this clear. The years 1892 to

1901 were the Decade of Regicide, during which period more monarchs,

presidents and prime ministers were assassinated than at any other time in

recorded history, before or since. The 1890s also became the era of the

terrorist bloodbath, as anarchists hurled deadly explosive devices into

crowded cafes, religious processions and opera audiences. During that

decade, in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, England, Switzerland, the Ottoman

Empire, and the United States, real or alleged anarchists killed about 60 and

injured over 200 people with bombs, pistols and daggers (during the entire

‘golden age’ of anarchist terrorism, 1880–1914, about 150 succumbed and

over 460 were injured). 3 While these figures may seem low by our

horrifying present-day standards (and was largely due to the lesser efficacy

of that era’s weaponry), at the time terrorism on this scale was still unheard

of and made all the more frightening by its successful assault on powerful

symbols of authority and stability such as the French stock exchange and

parliament, as well as the heads of state of nations on two continents. To

quote a popular British journal, anarchist terrorism seemed to have become

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THE US AND THE WAR AGAINST ANARCHIST TERRORISM

an ‘epidemic...almost as mysterious and universal as the influenza’ against

which ‘police precautions appear to be as useless as prophylactics against

the fatal sneeze’. 4 Writing in Harper’s Weekly in December 1893, an

historian from the University of Wisconsin described anarchism as ‘the

most dangerous theory which civilization has ever had to encounter’ and its

rebellion against the state comparable to Satan’s revolt against God. 5 In the

public mind ‘anarchist’ became virtually synonymous with ‘terrorist’, and

all political violence of a terrorist nature tended to be attributed to the

anarchists, although this was often inaccurate. 6

Despite warnings in the media, most Americans were complacent about

the dangers of anarchism. After the bloody repression of the anarchists at

the time of Chicago’s Haymarket bombing in 1886, only one major act of

anarchist violence took place in the United States prior to 1901. This was

Alexander Berkman’s unsuccessful attempt in 1892 to kill Henry Clay

Frick, the ruthless, strike-breaking general manager of Carnegie Steel.

Unlike in Europe, where anarchist violence was often followed by brutal

police repression and subsequent anarchist reprisals in an apparently

endless chain reaction, no one sought revenge for Berkman’s lengthy

sentence of imprisonment. During the 1890s the United States’ near

immunity to anarchist violence seemed natural to most Americans, who

believed not only that no native anarchists resided in the country, but also

that, given the freedom and liberty provided by American laws and

institutions, anarchists, whether of native or foreign origin, had no reason to

attack public officials. On 30 September 1893 the New York Times claimed

in an editorial that, ‘There are no native American Anarchists’. The

journalist Francis Nichols, in an article published a month before the

assassination of McKinley, alleged that, because anarchists were ‘at least

allowed the right of conducting a peaceful propaganda’ in the United States,

they hoped for the President’s ‘protection and preservation’, rather than his

murder, since they knew that ‘these favorable conditions would be reversed

if American sentiment were once aroused by an attack on the Chief

Executive of the Nation’. 7

In September 1901 the assassination of President McKinley by Leon

Czolgosz, a 28-year old man born in Alpena, Michigan, near Detroit,

shattered this illusion and shocked the nation. For months the country was

convulsed as many Americans went on a violent rampage against the

anarchists. 8 On the night of the murder attempt, one young man urged a

crowd in New York to follow him to Paterson, New Jersey, where many

anarchists lived, and ‘begin the slaughter’, burning Paterson to the ground.

‘If President McKinley dies’, shouted the speaker, ‘there will be 10,000

anarchists killed in Paterson to avenge his death.’ Police standing by made

no effort to stop over a hundred men and boys from beginning their

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TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

bloodthirsty march on the New Jersey textile factory town. 9 Presumably this

particular march fizzled out (the newspapers leave no record as to its fate);

but if it had made it to Paterson, the police might well have collaborated in

its participants’ murderous design. Paterson detective sergeant Henry Titus,

in charge of the district where the anarchists usually congregated, declared,

according to a September 9 article in the New York Times , that, ‘The only

proper way for the police to deal with these fellows [i.e., the anarchists] is

to go to their meetings armed with a sawed off gun and shoot the speakers

when they begin to rant’. 10

Across the country ordinary citizens as well as local officials acted out

detective Titus’s violent impulses. Mobs forced dozens of anarchists to flee

their homes and tried to wreck, in one case successfully, the offices of

anarchist publications. Without warrant the police arrested scores, perhaps

hundreds, of anarchists – more than 50 in Chicago alone – on mere

suspicion of involvement in the president’s assassination. 11 In Chicago the

police took into custody Emma Goldman, the well-known anarchist writer

and speaker. After Goldman protested against police brutality, one officer

slugged her in the jaw, knocking out a tooth and covering her face with

blood. ‘Another word from you, you damned anarchist, and I’ll break every

bone in your body!’ 12 Emma received this violent treatment although she

had only once, briefly, met Czolgosz and was uninvolved in any plot to

murder McKinley. In jail Goldman received letters denouncing her in these

terms: ‘You damn bitch of an anarchist, I wish I could get at you. I would

tear your heart out and feed it to my dog.’ Another writer promised: ‘we will

cut your tongue out, soak your carcass in oil, and burn you alive’. 13 While

the news media did not advocate such barbaric reprisals, it did call for a

variety of other responses to the assassination. Most frequently newspapers

and periodicals demanded the exclusion of anarchist immigrants from the

United States; they also asked that anarchism be treated by international

agreement as piracy and that anarchists be subjected to ‘police control’. 14

In his first message to Congress in December 1901, the newly installed

president, Theodore Roosevelt, delivered an incendiary condemnation of

the anarchists and called for severe measures against them. Roosevelt

claimed that the ‘harm done...to the Nation’ by the murder of McKinley was

‘so great as to excite our gravest apprehensions and to demand our wisest

and most resolute action’. He described Czolgosz, a handsome, inarticulate

recluse guilty of no prior offenses, as ‘Judas-like’ and as an ‘utterly

depraved criminal’. He said that the anarchists in general had no claim to

the status of social reformers. The anarchist was ‘merely one type of

criminal, more dangerous than any other because he represents the same

depravity in a greater degree’. Roosevelt went on to compare anarchists to

pickpockets, highwaymen and wife-beaters, and said their ‘speeches,

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THE US AND THE WAR AGAINST ANARCHIST TERRORISM

writings, and meetings’ were ‘essentially seditious and treasonable’. After

demanding legislation to keep foreign anarchists out of the country and

deport those who were already here, meting out ‘far-reaching’ punishment

to any who remained, Roosevelt called for an international anti-anarchist

agreement:

Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind

should band against the anarchist. His crime should be made an

offense against the law of nations, like piracy and that form of

manstealing known as the slave trade; for it is of far blacker infamy

than either. It should be so declared by treaties among all civilized

powers. Such treaties would give to the Federal Government the

power of dealing with the crime. 15

Roosevelt’s call for international action elicited a quick response. Ever since

the assassination of King Humbert of Italy in July 1900, the Russian

government had been putting out diplomatic feelers and looking for

agreement on ways to reinforce the anti-anarchist measures approved by all

of Europe, except Britain, at a conference held in Rome in 1898. 16 Those

measures, the Russian government pointed out, had only been partially

enforced. The legislative and political actions against the anarchists called

for at the conference had not materialized. The sole change after 1898 had

been the establishment of direct relations between the higher police

authorities of the different countries and the secret ‘exchange of

information...regarding the surveillance of the best-known anarchists and

their movements in the great urban centers’. While, according to the

Russians, this measure had ‘clearly facilitate[d] surveillance’, it had proved

insufficient to prevent new assassination attempts. 17

Germany readily supported Russia’s proposals for more effective anti-

anarchist measures; and, in November 1901, the two countries presented a

joint memorandum on the subject to all the European states. On December

12, encouraged by Roosevelt’s message to Congress, the German and

Russian ambassadors submitted a similar memorandum to the United

States. In this proposal they called for the ‘establishment of a rigorous

surveillance of the anarchists by the creation of central bureaus in the

various countries, by the exchange of information, and by international

regulations relative to the expulsion of anarchists from all countries of

which they are not subjects’. The memorandum also called for legislative

measures strengthening the various penal codes against the anarchists and

against the subversive press. 18

Secretary of State John Hay’s reply on 16 December 1901 expressed

President Roosevelt’s ‘cordial sympathy with the views and purposes’ of

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