Terrorizing people for their political beliefs weakens the bonds
that hold our society together. It doesn’t matter whether the bombs or the
bullets come from the right or the left.
The pathetic Trump-loving wacko who last week mailed what appear
to be explosive devices — or dummy devices intended to intimidate — to
prominent Democratic politicians and high-profile party supporters continues a
tradition of abusing the US mail that goes back to desperate attacks on the
corporate and government establishment by a radical band of desperate
anarchists.
One hundred years ago anarchist bombings sent shock waves through the
American public, unsettled both powerful figures and the ordinary citizens,
prompted heavy-handed, wide-ranging retaliations, and ultimately led to the
wrongful convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti, those early 20th century martyrs to
racial and political injustice.
(Photo above: Federal agents round up immigrants in search for ‘dangerous bomb-throwing’ radicals.)
Last week a Florida resident apparently living in his van was
charged with sending package bombs to at least a dozen prominent Democratic
political figures and celebrities who have publicly criticized the current
occupant of the White House. (The Boston Globe headlined its Oct. 27 story
“Trump backer arrested over mail bombs.”)
Letter bombs have a scary history in this country. The Unabomber
specialized in them, targeting establishment figures in business and academia
over two decades in the 80s and 90s in a misguided attempt to spark a
‘revolution’ against modern technology. His bombs killed three people and
injured 23. Other extremists used the mail to send infectious disease germs or
poisons to government figures or the entire US Congress after nine-eleven.
But the wave of mailed explosives taking place in an earlier
period of social upheaval almost exactly 100 years ago left a bigger scar on
the national psyche.
In April of 1919, a group calling itself “the Anarchist Fighters”
used the US Postal Service to mail more than 30 bombs to politicians, a few
judges, and prominent capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller. Neither a
Rockefeller nor a high office holder opens their own mail, of course, and none
of these handmade bombs reached or harmed their intended target. One of the
bombs, unhappily, blew off the hands of a maid who was opening it in the home
of a Georgia senator; the senator’s wife suffered minor injuries. Those were
the only injuries sustained. Weaponry, bombs, and technology were far less
advanced than they are today, and some of those bombs simply didn’t go off.
Then the Postal Service quickly caught on to the scheme and intercepted 16
others before they reached their destinations.
Weaponizing the mails to attack the American establishment was
the tactic of an extreme left-wing group, whose ‘open war’ against the US
government had its origins in the major social and economic consequences caused
by the rapid industrialization of post-Civil War America. The profound change
in American society from a nation of small farmers and artisans to an economy
of replaceable-part factory workers led to the accumulation of great wealth in
the hands of a few, increasing numbers of poorly paid and ill-treated workers,
and a consequent sharpening of social divisions.
A second major social shake-up in America’s social order followed
a new wave of European immigration, even heavier than earlier migrations, that
brought millions of people from Southern and Easter Europe to a country with a
fast-growing economy. Jobs, however poorly paid, brought these immigrants to
this country, just as contemporary America’s desperation-wage, low-end economy
draws them from Central America and Third World countries today.
Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, Poles and nationals of other
Old World lands (on top of a continued flow from Ireland and the British
Isles), brought foreign cultures, religions, new political thinking, and social
tensions to a nation of majority white Protestants and assorted under-classes.
Among the new socio-political theories that diagnosed society’s ills and
proposed a revolutionary solution was “anarchism” — the rejection of all
established institutions — in its many flavors and national accents.
In the late 19th century workers rights and anti-capitalist
movements gained traction among immigrant groups, as they did also among many
of the native poor and exploited. Big business, a powerful political force in
the dominant Republican party, encouraged immigration to keep the labor pool
large and wages low. If you didn’t wish to work for long hours under poor
conditions for little more than bare subsistence wages, then the next desperate
new arrival was ready to take your job. In response, economic and social
philosophies such as Marxism that criticized the greed of ownership and the
impoverishment of the working class took root.
We’re familiar with these terms today — socialism, communism,
anarchism — but they were new to Americans then.
The battle ground where these ideas confronted the resistance of
big money and the (still extant) alliance of big business and major political
parties was the factory strike. Police and militia were commonly mobilized to
‘protect the property’ of owners against strikers, as bloody battles were
fought on the picket lines.
The use of explosives entered this industrial combat when
somebody threw a bomb — though almost certainly not the anarchists who were
scapegoated and later executed for this act — that killed a policeman during
the infamous Haymarket strike in Chicago in 1886. The explosion touched off a
riot that killed 11 people when police started firing at a crowd of demonstrators.
Bombs shake a people’s trust in their society’s promise of
normative civil peace. Civil society seeks a quick, dramatic response by
authorities, the restoration of order, the punishment of the guilty. If the
guilty are hard to find and criminality impossible to prove, people will settle
for punishment exacted on those who ‘might have’ committed the crime, or were
in sympathy with the crime, or merely shared the same general ideas as those
they believe to be guilty. Or, at last resort, those who come from the same
ethnic or ideological community as the people generally held to be disrupters
of public order.
Acts of political violence — regardless of who commits
them — provoke worse violence to come. That’s the lesson of the infamous
Haymarket trial, a lesson we are still failing to learn.
The Haymarket bomb-thrower was probably pleased by the outcome of
his crime: Eleven anarchists, including many who were not part of the
demonstration where the explosion took place, were tried and hanged.
Other examples of the cost of politically motivated violence
abound. Another bomb, on another continent — this one planted by Serbian
nationalists seeking independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire — killed an
Austrian royal and sparked World War I, the Western world’s first truly massive
indulgence in self-destruction.
When the United States entered the World War in 1917 to protect
the finances of American banks that had loaned heavily to the Allies (England,
France, Italy), the social costs of war came to this country, driving serious
wedgesinto America’s communal bonds. People of German descent, a
well-established and prosperous community, were treated as enemies and
outcasts, some driven from their homes.
An even more widely felt impact was the general repression of
basic civil liberties, including freedom of speech, the press, and assembly,
when Congress passed blatantly unconstitutional laws aimed at banning all
criticism of America’s participation in the war and the institution of a draft.
These laws and their broad-brush enforcement planted the roots of
the federal government’s hysterical fixation on so-called ‘subversive’
left-wing ideologies and organizations, an obsession that haunts and hamstrings
American civil society to this day.
The government doubled down on repressing political criticism
when it came from the mouths, presses, or rallies of new immigrants or the
descendants of those ‘second wave’ communities: Italians, Russians, Jews,
Poles, and other Eastern and Southern Europeans. Anarchists, with their
frightening European reputation for assassinating heads of state, particularly
ignited fears. The Serbian whose bomb ignited World War I was also an
anarchist. An anarchist had killed a Russian czar; another assassinated the
King of Italy. And an American President, William McKinley, was killed in 1901
by a young anarchist of Polish descent, Leon Czolgosz.
And when new investigative bodies were invented by the federal
government to stamp out wartime dissent, soon morphing into the FBI, the
dissident group they feared and focused on most was a ‘small’ collection — the
adjective that is practically redundant, since all anarchist networks are
‘small’ — of Italian speakers led by a fiery ‘maestro’ named Luigi Galleani. A
prolific theorist and writer, Galleani earned his reputation as a near-martyr
to state violence when he was shot in the eye by police on a picket line in New
Jersey. He subsequently left the US for Canada, then slipped back across the
border, and operated his printing press, producing an influential
Italian-language periodical, from a small town in Vermont. His influence was
strong among Italian radicals in New England.
One of his most famous publications centered on a recipe for
bomb-making. Scholars of the movement believe that Galleani’s notions of
aggressively confronting government repression motivated members of the
Boston-based anarchist gruppo to which shoemaker Nicolo Sacco and
laborer Bartolomeo Vanzetti belonged. Given the later prominence of their case,
many have argued that Sacco and Vanzetti were probable believers in Galleani’s
justification for political violence.
American law, however, makes a Constitutional distinction (as
does English common law) between what you think and say and talk about with
your intimates, and what you actually do.
What Luigi Galleani told his followers after the United States
entered World War I was that workers should not allow themselves to be drafted
to fight a war that serves the interests of the bosses, not their own. Why
should American workers fight German workers when the common enemy was the
capitalists?
Since wartime laws (a Patriots Act forerunner) made criticizing
the draft a crime, Galleani was prosecuted for his acts of speech, convicted,
and deported to Italy. Other trials and deportations followed. Emma Goldman, a
Russian Jewish anarchist but also an A-list celebrity to the New York City
press, was tried and deported.
These government acts of repression and the creation of the FBI
as a federal police force to investigate ‘subversives’ changed American history
in fundamental ways that still hamstring political discourse on fundamental
social and economic policies in this country today. Why is ours the only
country in the developed world without an influential Socialist party? The only
developed society without universal health care — demonized for generations as
‘socialist medicine’? The only country that refuses to restrict firearms
possession in the interest of public safety?
The suppression of anti-war dissent combined with the systematic
dismantling of the ‘Galleani group’ of Italian anarchists and prosecution of
its leaders ultimately led to the fear-filled domestic crisis America’s ruling
class and anti-immigrant nativists in the general population were seeking to
prevent. The survivors of the Galleani influenced gruppo, many of whom
had left wartime America for Mexico or Canada, filtered back into the US when
the war ended in 1918, and some nucleus of these reconstituted themselves as
“the Anarchist Fighters.” Declaring that the American government’s repression
had left them no course of peaceful resistance, they determined — as stated in
the leaflets that accompanied their bombs — to reply to the aggression of their
enemies with violence of their own.
After their mailed bombs produced headline hysteria but did
little harm to their enemies, they launched a second attack two months later,
this time hand-delivering explosives to chosen targets. These explosives were
targeted to government officials who had endorsed the laws that criminalized
anarchist speech or assisted in the deportation of anarchist figures such as
Galleani and Goldman.
Eight bombs went off this time, the headliner being the explosion
that destroyed much of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose
office was in charge of the prosecutions of anarchists and other war
protestors. Palmer and his family luckily escaped injury. A search through the
wreckage for evidence came up with the likely identity of the bomber, who had
accidentally blown himself up while planting the bomb. A young associate of
Galleani by the name of Carlo Valdinoci, he was already being hunted by the
FBI. They found his scalp in the wreckage.
While the damage and injuries the anarchists’ bombs caused were
slight, the enduring consequences proved severe for many radicals and workers’
organizations who agreed with the bombers’ critique of America’s
money-dominated class system. The government’s response was a broad-based
attack on those who openly supported strikes and unions, criticized the war,
and believed the very rich should share their wealth with the workers who
produced it. The heavy hand of repression also fell on immigrant groups whose
only crime was making native-born Americans nervous.
Acting on his own authority, but with widespread public support
from a frightened and outraged American public whipped up the hysterical
support of newspaper editors — who generally fostered a string-’em-up
mentality — Palmer’s revenge cut a wide swath through immigrant communities,
reasoning that these harbored the subversives. The so-called ‘Palmer Raids,’
marked by exaggerated threat-rhetoric, illegal searches and wholly extra-legal
detentions, rounded up foreign-speaking men on ‘suspicion’ of violating the
wartime espionage and sedition acts. Almost 4,000 people were detained without
evidence for any charge — including hundreds kept on an island in Boston Harbor
under inhuman conditions. Of these more than 500 aliens were deported, before
federal judges stepped in and shut down these abuses of authority.
The long shadow of the Anarchist Fighters’ futile war on the
government not only fueled worse repressions, but led to the judicial lynching
of two of their allies — Sacco and Vanzetti — who were accused of committing a
crime no anarchist would stoop to: robbing the weekly pay of workers in a shoe
factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. The two Italian anarchists fell afoul of a
police stakeout of another anarchist’s hideout, and since they were admitted
anarchists themselves they fit a local police chief’s preconception of the kind
of people who would commit a daylight robbery and kill the paymaster and his
guard.
For the small-town police chief the equation was simple:
anarchists equal criminals. Given the bombing campaign by the remnant of the
Galleani movement, anybody who saw the newspaper headlines probably agreed with
him.
The few witnesses who claimed they recognized the two men as
members of the criminal gang that committed the crime were both unreliable and
highly coached. They were the people the police discovered they had ‘something
on’ and could manipulate to their purpose. No substantial evidence connected
Sacco and Vanzetti to this crime, but guilt by association did. The two were
Italian anarchists, and an American-born jury thought any anarchists,
particularly Italian ones, should pay for their kind’s attack on American
institutions.
While the Anarchist Fighters’ ‘war’ with against the government
might have provided some satisfaction for its perpetrators, their turn to
violence did no one any good. Workers and the poor gained nothing from it.
Government police gained justification for bigger budgets, though their efforts
neither apprehended the bombers nor made anyone safer. Constitutionally
guaranteed civil liberties largely returned when the war hysteria was over. The
survivors of the Galleani network went back to Italy, or otherwise ‘moved on.’
But the American government’s fixation on ‘subversion’ from the
left also moved on to new targets. The FBI and right-wing Congressmen hunted
for members or supporters of the Communist Party during the infamous “McCarthy
period” and otherwise harassed and black-listed liberals who chose to back
Marxist parties in the fight against fascism in Europe. Well after World War
II, the FBI attempted to make anti-Communism and harassment of left-wing
intellectuals a nationalistic religion. This obsession was followed by a
blatantly racist infiltration, harassment, and entrapment of civil rights and
Black nationalist organizations. Government police infamously tried to and
frame and smear Martin Luther King,in defense of the segregationist status quo
in the South.
Today Trump backers warn against ‘left-wing mobs.’
Really? Where can I join up?
The truth of the matter is that for three generations the real
threats of political violence have come from right-wing haters rather than
left-wing radicals.
The bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building was the work of
‘anti-government’ fanatics. Many more people died in this single act than from
all the actions of early 20th century anarchists.
Racist anti-Civil Rights extremists murdered civil rights
activists and blew up children in a Birmingham church. Somehow the FBI never
managed to infiltrate these groups and prevent these killings.
More recently a white racist seeking by his own testimony to
start a race war killed innocent African-American worshipers in a South
Carolina church.
This is a list to which, unhappily, we can all probably think of
more examples to add.
Last week the demented Florida Trump-nut added to the list of
right-wing hate crimes by sending ‘pipe bombs’ to prominent Democrats.
So much, apparently, for public safety.
And last weekend a consumer of hate-speech on unabashedly
hate-speaking, racist and anti-Semitic websites offered his own example of
Violence from the Right. The consequence was the death of 11 Americans taking
part in a religious ceremony in Pittsburgh.
Yes, ordinary law-aiding Americans have reason to fear that
politically motivated violence will mar the civil peace and safety that all
societies must maintain and protect. Out history underlines this sad truth.
But our government has always been looking in the wrong
direction.
