The description fits, but for the delusions to become active there is required a certain climate of protest—and an example. This the Anarchist creed and deeds provided. There may be at any time a hundred Czolgoszes living mute, inactive lives; it took the series of acts from Ravachol to Bresci to inspire one to kill the President of the United States.
The public was by now thoroughly aroused, and the public was composed not only of the rich but of the imitators of the rich. The ordinary man, the petty bourgeois, the salaried employee, associated himself—as Emile Henry knew when he threw his bomb in the Café Terminus—with his employers. His living, as he thought, depended on their property. When this was threatened, he felt threatened. He felt a peculiar horror at the Anarchist’s desire to destroy the foundations on which everyday life was based; the flag, the legal family, marriage, the church, the vote, the law. The Anarchist became everybody’s enemy. His sinister figure became synonymous with everything wicked and subversive, synonymous, said a professor of political science in Harper’s Weekly, with “the king of all Anarchists, the arch-rebel Satan.” His doctrine, said the Century Magazine after the death of McKinley, “bodes more evil to the world than any previous conception of human relations.”
The new President, an extraordinarily mixed man equally capable of subtle understanding, courageous action and extremes of banality, saw in the Anarchist simply a criminal, more “dangerous” and “depraved” than the ordinary kind. In his message to Congress on December 3, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Anarchism is a crime against the whole human race and all mankind should band against the Anarchist.” He was not the product of social or political injustice and his protest of concern for the workingman was “outrageous.” The institutions of the United States, the President insisted, offered open opportunity “to every honest and intelligent son of toil.” He urged that Anarchist speeches, writings and meetings should henceforth be treated as seditious, that Anarchists should no longer be allowed at large, those already in the country should be deported, Congress should “exclude absolutely all persons who are known to be believers in Anarchistic principles or members of Anarchistic societies,” and their advocacy of killing should by treaty be made an offense against international law, like piracy, so that the federal government would have the power to deal with them.
After much discussion and not without strong objections to the denial of the traditional right of ingress, Congress in 1903 amended the Immigration Act to exclude persons disbelieving in or “teaching disbelief in or opposition to all organized government.” The amendment provoked liberal outcries and sorrowful references to the Statue of Liberty.
Of the dual nature of Anarchism, half hatred of society, half love of humanity, the public was aware only of the first. It was the bombs and explosions, the gunshots and the daggers, that impressed them. They knew nothing of the other side of Anarchism which hoped to lead humanity through the slough of violence to the Delectable Mountains. The press showed them Malatesta, for instance, as the evil genius of Anarchism, “silent, cold, plotting.” It did not show him as the man whose philosophy of altruism caused him to deed two houses he inherited from his parents in Italy to the tenants inhabiting them. Since the public likewise knew nothing of the theory of propaganda by the deed, it could make no sense of the Anarchist acts. They seemed purposeless, mad, a pure indulgence in evil for its own sake. The press customarily referred to Anarchists as “wild beasts,” “crypto-lunatics,” degenerates, criminals, cowards, felons, “odious fanatics prompted by perverted intellect and morbid frenzy.” “The mad dog is the closest parallel in nature to the Anarchist,” pronounced Blackwood’s, the dignified British monthly. How was it possible, asked Carl Schurz after the murder of Canovas, to protect society against “a combination of crazy people and criminals”?
That was the unanswerable question. All sorts of proposals were put forward, including the establishment of an international penal colony for Anarchists, or disposal of them in hospitals for the insane, or universal deportation, although it was not explained what country would receive them if every country was engaged in sending them away.
Yet the cry of protest in the throat of every Anarchist act was heard by some, and understood. In the midst of the hysteria over McKinley, Lyman Abbott, editor of the Outlook and a spokesman of the New England tradition which had produced the Abolitionists, had the courage to ask if the Anarchist’s hatred of government and law did not derive from the fact that government and law operated unjustly. So long, he said, as legislators legislate for special classes, “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor,” so long will Anarchism “demand the abolition of all law because it sees in law only an instrument of injustice.” Speaking to the comfortable gentlemen of the Nineteenth Century Club, he suggested that “the place to attack Anarchism is where the offenses grow.” He was echoing a concern that was already expressing itself in movements of reform, in Jane Addams and the social welfare work she inspired from Hull House, in the Muckrakers who within a year or two were to begin exposing the areas of injustice, rottenness and corruption in American life.
With McKinley the era of Anarchist assassinations came to an end in the western democracies. Even Alexander Berkman in his prison cell recognized, as he wrote to Emma Goldman, the futility of individual acts of violence in the absence of a revolutionary-minded proletariat. This second disavowal sent his correspondent, who still believed, into “uncontrollable sobbing,” and left her “shaken to the roots,” so that she took to her bed, ill. Although she retained an ardent following, especially among the press, who referred to her as the “Queen of the Anarchists,” Anarchist passion on the whole passed, as it had in France, into the more realistic combat of the Syndicalist unions. In the United States it was absorbed into the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, although in every country there remained irreconcilables who stayed lonely and true to the original creed.
In the two countries on Europe’s rim, Spain and Russia, each industrially backward and despotically governed, bombs and assassinations mounted as the world moved into the Twentieth Century. When in Spain a bomb was thrown at King Alfonso and his young English bride on their wedding day in 1906, killing twenty bystanders, it spread a fearful recognition of the deep reservoir of hatred which could have impelled such a deed. The reciprocal hatred of the ruling class was confirmed in 1909, when as a result of an abortive revolt in Barcelona known as “Red Week,” the Government executed Francisco Ferrer, a radical and anticlerical educator, though not a true Anarchist. The case raised storms of protest in the rest of Europe, where, as usual, Spanish iniquities provided a vent for liberal consciences. In 1912 a Spanish Anarchist named Manuel Pardinas stalked the Premier, José Canalejas, through the streets of Madrid and shot him dead from behind as he was looking into the window of a bookstore in the Puerta del Sol. It was a poor choice, for Canalejas, carried into office in the wake of Ferrer’s death, was attempting some reforms of the unbridled power of Church and landlords, but it was evidence that in their continuing combat against society, Spanish Anarchists were moved, as Shaw wrote, by “consciences outraged beyond endurance.”
In Russia the tradition of revolution was old and deep and as full of despair as of hope. Each generation turned up new fighters in the long war between rebel and despot. In 1887, the year the Haymarket Anarchists were hanged, five students of the University of St. Petersburg were hanged for the attempted murder by bomb of Alexander III. Their leader, Alexander Ulyanov, justified the use of terror at his trial as the only method possible in a police state. He was one of three brothers and three sisters, all revolutionaries, of whom a younger brother, Vladimir Ilyich, swore revenge, changed his last name to Lenin, and went forth to work for revolution.
Increasing unrest during the nineties encouraged the revolutionists to believe that the time was ripening for insurrection. A new Czar who was that most dangerous of rulers, a weak autocrat, marked his ac
cession as Nicholas II in 1895 by flatly dismissing all pleas for a constitution as “nonsensical dreams,” thereby causing democrats to despair and extremists to exult. In the cities, strikes by newly industrialized workers followed one upon another. Over all, exerting a mysterious intangible pull, like the moon upon the tides, loomed the approaching moment of the end of the century. There was a sense of an end and a beginning, of “a time to break.”
All the groups of discontent felt the need to prepare for a time of action, to gather their strength in parties and to state their program. But there was conflict between the followers of Marxism, with its hardbitten insistence on organization and training, and the inheritors of the Narodniki tradition, who believed in spontaneous revolution brought on by some deed of terror. As a result, two parties took shape in the years 1897 and 1898, the Marxist Social-Democratic party on the one hand, and on the other, the Populist Socialist-Revolutionaries, whose various groups merged into a definitive party in 1901.
In so far as they accepted organization as a party, the Socialist-Revolutionaries were not Anarchists of the true breed, but they shared the Anarchists’ belief that deeds of terror could precipitate revolution. Like them they saw revolution as a sunburst on the horizon under whose benevolent beams the future would take care of itself. The public’s identification of Anarchists with Russians stemmed partly from their addiction to the bomb, which, ever since the killing of the Czar in 1881, seemed peculiarly a Russian weapon, and partly from the unconscious syllogism: Russians were revolutionists; Anarchists were revolutionists; ergo, Anarchists were Russians. Orthodox Anarchists, of whom there were small groups who published Russian-language journals in Geneva and Paris, and took their inspiration from Kropotkin, were not a significant force inside Russia.
In 1902 Maxim Gorky put into The Lower Depths all the woe, the wretchedness and the despair of Russia. “Man must live for something better!” cries the drunken cardsharp in the play, “something better,” and searching for words, for meaning, for a philosophy, he can only repeat, “something better.” Toward that end, in the years 1901–03 the Terror Brigade of the Socialist-Revolutionaries assassinated the Minister of Education, Bogolepov; the Minister of Interior, Sipiagin, who directed the Secret Police; and the Governor of Ufa, Bogdanovitch, who had put down a miners’ strike in the Urals with particular brutality. On July 15, 1904, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, they disposed of a second Minister of Interior, Wenzel von Plehve, the most hated man in Russia. An ultrareactionary, Plehve was if anything even firmer than the Czar in the belief that autocracy must be kept unimpaired by the slightest concession to democratic processes. His sole policy was to smash every possible source of antipathy to the regime. He arrested revolutionaries, suppressed the orthodox “old believers,” restricted the zemstvos, or village governments, victimized the Jews, forcibly Russified the Poles, Finns and Armenians and, as a result, increased the enemies of Czarism, and convinced them of the need for a final change.
A method he favored for diverting popular discontent was expressed to a colleague in the words, “We must drown the revolution in Jewish blood.” Stirred up by his agents, watched tolerantly by the police, Russian citizens of Kishinev during the Passover of 1903 burst into a frenzy of violence against the eternal scapegoat, killing and beating, burning and plundering homes and shops, desecrating synagogues, tearing the sacred Torah from the arms of a white-bearded rabbi whose horror at seeing it defiled by Gentiles was shortened by his death under their clubs and boots. The Kishinev pogrom not only resounded around the world but succeeded in penetrating under the skin of the leader of the Terror Brigade, Evno Azev, who was at the same time an agent of the Secret Police and also happened to be a Jew. Azev took care not to inform on the plan for the assassination of Plehve which duly took place. It made an enormous impression upon everyone in Russia as a terrible blow against the system of which Plehve was the incarnation. So ominous did it seem that the assassin was condemned to hard labour in Siberia for life instead of to death by Plehve’s successor, Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, in the hope that a mild policy might accomplish something.
Six months later, in January, 1905, occurred the massacre in front of the Winter Palace known as “Bloody Sunday,” when troops fired on a crowd of workingmen who had come to petition the Czar for a constitution. About one thousand were killed. The terrorists now made plans to assassinate the Czar and his uncles, the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was held responsible for the massacre, and the Grand Duke Sergei, who was said to be the person with the greatest influence on the Czar. As Governor-General of Moscow, Sergei was known for the merciless brutality of his rule, for a capricious and domineering character and extremes of autocratic temperament bordering on derangement. According to an English observer, he was “conspicuous for his cruelty and renowned, even among the Russian aristocracy, for the peculiarity of his vices.” Although in the pay of the police, Azev had to allow the Brigade enough successes to satisfy them and to maintain his position as their chief, without which he would have been of far less value to the police. In February, 1905, Sergei was blown up with a bomb thrown by a young revolutionary named Kaliaev who was left standing alive in the midst of the debris, in his old blue coat with a red scarf, his face bleeding, but otherwise unhurt. All that was left of the Grand Duke and of his carriage and horses was “a formless mass of fragments about eight or ten inches high.” That evening when the Czar heard the news he came down to dinner as usual and did not mention the murder, but, according to a guest who was present, “after dinner the Czar and his brother-in-law amused themselves by trying to edge one another off the long narrow sofa.”
At his trial in April, 1905, Kaliaev, thin, haggard and with eyes sunken in their sockets, said to the judges, “We are two warring camps,… two worlds in furious collision. You, the representatives of capital and oppression; I, one of the avengers of the people.” Russia was in the midst of war, outside against the Japanese, and inside against her own people, who were in open revolt. “What does all this mean? It is the judgment of history upon you.” When sentence of death was pronounced, Kaliaev said he hoped his executioners would have the courage to carry it out openly and publicly. “Learn to look the advancing revolution straight in the eye,” he told the Court. But he was hanged, dressed in black, after midnight in the prison yard and buried beneath the prison wall.
In October the Revolution came; propaganda of the deed, in the murders of von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, had helped to excite the nerves of the masses toward the point of insurrection. Neither organized nor led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social-Democrats or Anarchists, it was the spontaneous revolution Bakunin had believed in and did not live to see. In accordance with Syndicalist theory it erupted out of a general strike by the workers, and during the regime’s first fright, succeeded in forcing the concession of a constitution and a Duma. Although these were subsequently withdrawn, and the Revolution, when the regime had recovered its nerve, ferociously suppressed, it heartened the Syndicalists’ belief in “direct action” through the general strike, and re-enforced the movement of Anarchists into the industrial unions. In Russia the Terror Brigade accomplished several more deaths before it disintegrated under the shock of the exposure of Azev in 1908. By the time the Premier, Stolypin, was assassinated in 1911 the half-lunatic world of the Romanov twilight had so darkened that it was never clear whether the assassins were genuine revolutionaries or agents provocateurs of the police.
However self-limited its acts, however visionary its dream, Anarchism had terribly dramatized the war between the two divisions of society, between the world of privilege and the world of protest. In the one it shook awake a social conscience; in the other, as its energy passed into Syndicalism, it added its quality of violence and extremism to the struggle for power of organized labour. It was an idea which drew men to follow it but because of its built-in paradox could not draw them together into a group capable of concerted action. It was the last cry of individual man, the last m
ovement among the masses on behalf of individual liberty, the last hope of living unregulated, the last fist shaken against the encroaching State, before the State, the party, the union, the organization closed in.
3
End of a Dream
THE UNITED STATES: 1890–1902
3
End of a Dream
IN THE United States on the opening of Congress in January, 1890, a newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives was in the Chair. A physical giant, six feet three inches tall, weighing almost three hundred pounds and dressed completely in black, “out of whose collar rose an enormous clean-shaven baby face like a Casaba melon flowering from a fat black stalk, he was a subject for a Frans Hals, with long white fingers that would have enraptured a Memling.” Speaking in a slow drawl, he delighted to drop cool pearls of sarcasm into the most heated rhetoric and to watch the resulting fizzle with the bland gravity of a New England Buddha. When a wordy perennial, Representative Springer of Illinois, was declaiming to the House his passionate preference to be right rather than President, the Speaker interjected, “The gentleman need not be disturbed; he will never be either.” When another member, notorious for ill-digested opinions and a halting manner, began some remarks with, “I was thinking, Mr. Speaker, I was thinking …” the Chair expressed the hope that “no one will interrupt the gentleman’s commendable innovation.” Of two particularly inept speakers, he remarked, “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” It was said that he would rather make an epigram than a friend. Yet among the select who were his chosen friends he was known as “one of the most genial souls that ever enlivened a company,” whose conversation, “sparkling with good nature, was better than the best champagne.” He was Thomas B. Reed, Republican of Maine, aged fifty. Already acknowledged after fourteen years in Congress as “the ablest running debater the American people ever saw,” he would, before the end of the session, be called “the greatest parliamentary leader of his time,… far and away the most brilliant figure in American politics.”