Bugbears for each generation

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A hundred years ago, the evil menacing people purported to lurk in every shadow were anarchists. By the 1920s, and continuing of course through the 1950s and beyond, the Communists took over as Chief Bugaboo of the American imagination. (What ever happened to the anarchists as objects of fear, anyway? Were they just eclipsed by the Red Menace? I'm guessing Nick will be able to tell us. And who was it before the anarchists?) And now we've got terrorists. Each time around, some of the same things happen—taking away of civil liberties, mass panic, worries that civilization will fall to The Lurking Enemy. On the one hand, we seem to eventually get over it each time; on the other hand, it takes longer than would be ideal.

Thoughts sparked by this 2003 Swarthmore commencement speech from Jed S. Rakoff '64 (one of a distinguished line of Jeds who have attended Swat; I think there've been five or six of us). Thanks to Joe and (obliquely) Fred for pointing to that.

7 Responses to “Bugbears for each generation”

  1. Jon

    Hmm. Before anarchists? I think it was the suffragettes.

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  2. Vardibidian

    You’re not forgetting about the Yellow Peril, are you? Not that there were Palmer raids or Ashcroft raids as such, but I suspect that the background of the Japanese camps during WWII was Fu Manchu, the Yellow Hand, and even Ming the Merciless. It wasn’t hard for Americans to switch their hatred from Random Oriental Bad Guy to Hideki Tojo.

    And, like the Japanese in WWII, don’t forget that the anarchists really were attacking and killing people. They were advocating violent overthrow of the government, and were carrying it out to the best of their limited abilities. People think of them as comic-book figures, tossing big round black bombs with rope-like fuses, but in fact they were terrorists; one of them killed the President of the United States in 1901. Twenty years later, they were able to set off bombs in 8 cities (in addition to 36 bombs which failed to go off). That doesn’t make the Palmer Raids any better, but it does give a sort of perspective about the panic.

    Redintegro Iraq,
    -Vardibidian.

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  3. Nick Mamatas

    Much of the anarchist movement became subsumed into the communist movement. The Russian Revolution gave instant prestige to the notion of the vanguard party, while parliamentary socialists like the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs were split — different groups left the SP to form different elements of the American Communist Party.

    The Comintern, noting the anarchosyndicalist IWW’s prestige in the US, made many overtures to various sections of the union, integrating a lot of it into the communist orbit if not the CP proper (lots of IWW folks were also SP folks and were carried along by the split).

    Anarchism also declined due to its inability to tangle with the state: the flipside of various terror activities which led anarchists into direct confrontation with the state is syndicalism, which privileges workplace and economic issues much more than confronting statism. The IWW was also a “revolutionary” union, a difficult row to hoe given than unions must ultimately be instrumments of reform rather than revolution. What’s a revolutionary union with a contract for its members other than a sell-out, after all? (Needless to say, syndicalists would disagree with my estimation here.)

    Much of the non-anarchist far left would then suggest that anarchism’s worst problem was anarchism. The idea of “propaganda by the deed” wasn’t all the useful in the end.

    Prior to anarchism and Communism, the labor movement and the Populist movement were useful bugaboos, especially the latter as it proposed interracial class struggle against Southern bosses. Irish workers up north were the enemy within for quite a while as well — the terms ‘paddy wagon’ and ‘billy club’ don’t date from the time when the Irish started entering the police force, but from the time when they were the main targets of the police force.

    And of course, the American Indians were a great propaganda enemy and had been since the Puritans hit New England. Communism and anarchism emerged as major players just as the Indian wars were tipping over into utter genocide, and not long after slavery (and the idea of transforming all labor into slave labor) ended.

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  4. Nick Mamatas

    Quick note: Leon Czolgosz, the assasin of President McKinley, was a self-identified anarchist but nobody has ever managed to show that he was a member of an anarchist group. In 1901, anarchist organizations, mostly syndicalists, were fairly well-organized with membership cards, regular dues, and a variety of house organs.

    The only generally-agreed upon reference to Czolgosz within the anarchist movement is this mention of an agent provacateur in Free Society:

    ATTENTION!
    The attention of the comrades is called to another spy. He is well dressed, of medium height, rather narrow shouldered, blond, and about 25 years of age. Up to the present he has made his appearance in Chicago and Cleveland. In the former place he remained a short time, while in Cleveland he disappeared when the comrades had confirmed themselves of his identity and were on the point interested in the cause, asking for names, or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence. If this individual makes his appearance elsewhere, the comrades are warned in advance and can act accordingly.

    Certainly there were militant acts of what can be called “terror” on both sides of the coin, such as Berkman’s attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick in response to Frick’s masterminding of the armed suppression of the Homestead strike, but the Czolgosz dog won’t hunt.

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  5. Vardibidian

    Hm. Overreached myself; referencing Czolgosz hurt, rather than helped, my point. I don’t know much about him anyway, but I think that when people were getting riled up about the anarchist threat, the murder of the President twenty years earlier by a self-professed anarchist (even if not an actual member of the organization) played a part. Still, my main point was that Palmer didn’t invent the anarchist threat, and it’s even arguable whether he overreacted to it. What is certain is that he acted illegally, wrongly, and to the detriment of the US; that’s the lesson I take. Even if Ashcroft is right that there are sleeper cells or whatnot, it would still be wrong to hold prisoners without trial, or to try civilians in military courts, or to search without warrants, etc., etc.

    Redintegro Iraq,
    -V.

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  6. Nick Mamatas

    Indeed. And the threat of the American Indian and the freed slave and the terrorist were (or are) real threats as well. I was just making a note about ol’ Leon specifically.

    Generally, systems need a threat or two occasionally. Sometimes the threat may even need to win.

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  7. Fred

    Well, remember that we also suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and dispatched kangaroo court executions to those captured German saboteurs in World War II. I think the key is a credible threat: once an organization displays the power to knock off significant portions of the population (or to knock off government officials), enough to inspire fear among both the newspaper-reading population and the powers-that-be, it becomes the target of restrictive legislation that rubs off, to a greater or lesser degree, on the population at large.

    Be interesting to see if we cracked down on Puerto Rico after the nationalists shot up the Capitol.

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