The Global War on Anarchism

mary s. barton

The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and

International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904*

Termed the first phase of modern terrorism, anarchist violence during the late

nineteenth century and early twentieth century resulted in the assassination of

seven heads of state in Russia, Europe, and the United States, along with civilian

casualties and injuries in the hundreds. 1 Most continental European governments

desired a coordinated response to anarchist terrorism and advocated international

cooperation, shared information and surveillance, and uniform laws regarding

extradition and punishment. 2 The systematic efforts of European officials and

police to monitor terrorists and suppress acts of anarchist violence represent the

first multilateral counter-terrorism initiatives. 3

In response to anarchist outrages, a term used interchangeably with terrorist outrages

by government officials and the media until the 1930s, European governments

convened two international anti-anarchist conferences: the International

* This article began as a seminar paper under the guidance of Melvyn Leffler. I am most

grateful for his and my adviser William Hitchcock’s many readings of this article, and their

kind assistance and mentorship throughout the process. The final version has also benefited enormously

from the keen editing of the anonymous reviewers at Diplomatic History. I would like to

thank them and express my appreciation to Brian Balogh, Stephen Schuker, Philip Zelikow,

Edmund Russell, Elizabeth Thompson, Alon Confino, Elizabeth Varon, Mark Thomas, and

Jeffrey Rossman for their conversations with me on the subject and the article. Additionally, I

am indebted to Timothy Naftali, Hal Brands, Jessica Pliley, Eric Kurlander, and Katherine

Unterman, who also generously shared one of her research papers with me, for their insightful

questions and suggestions on a shortened version of this article, as well as my friends and colleagues:

Kelly Richter, Alexander Noonan, Zachary Blackburn, the diplomatic reading group at

UVa, especially Harold Mock and Lauren Turek, and Maxim Spektor. With the deepest gratitude

I thank my parents for their support and encouragement.

1. David C. Rapoport, “Reflections on ‘Terrorism and the American Experience’,” Journal of

American History 98 (2011): 116; Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of

Mass Destruction (Oxford, 1999), 12–13; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York, 2006), 5, 21.

The Russian experience and casualty rate was quite different during this period, as terrorism was

widespread from 1900 to 1917, and particularly during the Russian revolution of 1905–1907.See

Anna Geifman’s Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton, 1993).

2. John Callan O’Laughlin, “To Suppress Anarchy: Probability of Early International

Negotiations: The Views of Count Cassini,” Washington Post (1877–1922), June 22, 1902;

Richard Bach Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and the United States

from the Nineteenth Century to World War I,” in Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism,eds.Brett

Bowden and Michael T. Davis (Queensland, Australia, 2008), 134–60.

3. PeterRomaniuk,Multilateral Counter-Terrorism: The Global Politics of Cooperation and

Contestation (New York, 2010), 20.

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304 : diplomatic history

Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists in 1898 and the St.

Petersburg Conference of 1904, where representatives signed a second international

agreement to combat anarchist crimes. Those two anti-anarchist conferences

attempted to deter political violence through multilateral treaties and the

coordination of law and policy. 4

Despite European overtures for American involvement in an anti-anarchist

league during the early 1900s, and especially after the assassination of U.S.

President William McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz in

1901, the U.S. government did not attend the St. Petersburg conference or sign

any international treaties against anarchism. 5 Rather, U.S. policy makers rejected

collective multilateral action with European governments in favor of a unilateral

national response through exclusionary immigration legislation. 6

By employing immigration law as a form of counter-terrorism, U.S. officials

believed that they could detain the specter of anarchist terrorism at the border.

Beginning in the late 1880s, and in almost every congressional session of the 1890s,

Congress had considered legislation to ban alien anarchists from entering the

United States. 7 However, all of those initiatives failed to gain congressional ratification

until McKinley’s assassination. In the wake of the president’s death, which

followed a decade of political assassinations in Europe, Congress came to view

anarchism as a foreign and revolutionary doctrine that threatened domestic security,

taken to mean American institutions of government, democratic processes, and

beliefs about citizenship and civic participation. Restrictive and exclusionary immigration

law, therefore, became a means of safeguarding the United States from

an external danger. 8

After a difficult two-year process that caused considerable controversy and debates

about the constitutional rights and civil liberties of alien residents, Congress

passed the Immigration Act of 1903, colloquially known as the Anarchist Exclusion

4. Ibid. Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police

Cooperation (Oxford, 2002), 66–68.

5. Richard Bach Jensen, “The United States, International Policing and the War against

Anarchist Terrorism, 1900-1914,” in Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, ed.DavidC.

Rapoport, vol. 1, The First or Anarchist Wave (New York, 2006), 369–400.

6. The fact that Czolgosz, the son of eastern European immigrants, was a U.S. citizen, born in

Michigan, was often overlooked in the media and congressional debates.

7. Nathaniel Hong, “The Origin of American Legislation to Exclude and Deport Aliens for

their Political Beliefs, and its Initial Review by the Courts,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 18 (1990): 6.

8. Current immigration historiography stresses the racialization of immigrants and immigration

policy during this period. Of note are Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race,

Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford, 2003) and Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal

Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2004). Older works by John Higham and

William Preston Jr., John Higham and William Preston Jr., focused on nativism and anti-radicalism.

This article sits at the intersection of those two literatures, emphasizing that restrictive

legislation based on political affiliation built off previous Chinese exclusion cases and resonated

with a great majority of Americans because of racial and social concerns. The enforcement and

expansion of the law, however, occurred most frequently after episodes of violence by alleged

anarchists and radicals.

The Global War on Anarchism : 305

Act. That law prohibited alien anarchists from entering the United States and

allowed for their deportation at any time within three years of arrival. 9 With its

enactment, Congress set a pattern of designating an “abstract political idea” rather

than conduct as grounds for exclusion and deportation. 10

Beginning with the category of anarchists, federal immigration officers gained

the ability to exclude, arrest, and deport foreign born residents if they held or

espoused political beliefs deemed subversive, dangerous, or undesirable by

Congress. 11 The federal government gradually enlarged the immigration law to

include affiliation with organizations or groups that supported or printed anarchist

principles as grounds for arrest and deportation. 12 During the first two decades of

the twentieth century, Congress expanded the Immigration Act of 1903,culminating

in the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 and the first Red Scare.

The 1903 immigration law also led to an important Supreme Court case, U.S.

ex rel John Turner v. Williams, 194 U.S. 279 (1904), which gave Congress absolute

power to legislate in the area of immigration control. 13 The Turner case marked

the first time that the Supreme Court held exclusion and deportation, based purely

on political conviction and ideology, to be constitutional. Judicial support for the

Immigration Act of 1903 and its apparent approval by a majority of Americans

reveals that the public at large, with some notable exceptions, considered the

measure within the parameters of congressional power. 14

Few studies exist that consider the long-term consequences of early anarchist

terrorism on American foreign and domestic policies. 15 In light of the European

origins of terrorism and counter-terrorism, much of the scholarship on this topic

9. Alien Immigration Act, ch. 1012, 38 Stat. 1213, 1214 (1903).

10. Hong, “The Origin of American Legislation,” 8. TheAlienActof1798 was the first

federal law to consider expelling foreigners from the United States for political activity, and notably

combined executive order with judicial enforcement. After two years the Alien Act expired,

but only after causing a storm of indignation throughout the country. With its expiration, writes

Jane Clark, “the idea of removing aliens for political reasons during periods of peace became

quiescent.” See Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (New

York, 1969, 1931), 38–39.

11. Hong,2; William Preston Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals,

1903-1933 (New York, 1963), 28–34.

12. E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy 1798-1965

(Philadelphia, PA, 1981), 424–25.

13. United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U.S. 279 (1904); Hong, 17–18.

14. Sidney Fine, “Anarchism and Assassination of McKinley,” American Historical Review 60

(1955): 796–98.

15. This article relies on the work of His-Huey Liang, Mathieu Deflem, and Peter Romaniuk.

These authors examine the international anti-anarchist conferences of 1898 and 1904 in relation to

the growth of police systems and surveillance networks in Europe. In addition, I use the work of

Richard Bach Jensen, who has studied the topic of international anarchist violence in-depth and

from a trans-Atlantic perspective. Scholars have examined anarchist violence during and after the

First World War to a greater degree because it was during that period that anarchist terrorism

reached its height in the United States. See Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of

America in Its First Age of Terror (New York, 2009).


has focused on Europe. However, an examination of the 1903 immigration legislation

indicates that America’s first encounter with modern terrorism set significant

legal precedent, orienting the United States away from international

cooperation and toward domestic policies of exclusion and deportation.

This article, therefore, examines American perceptions and responses to international

anarchist terrorism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Heeding historian Beverly Gage’s call for further studies on the history of

terrorism and counter-terrorism, it specifically considers the 1903 U.S. legislation

in relation to continental Europe’s simultaneous shift toward multilateral agreements

and treaties in the global “War on Anarchism.” 16

***

Modern international terrorism developed in a context of “early globalization”

and state modernization. 17 By the late nineteenth century, steamships and railways

linked empires and continents, while the new mass media connected the world on a

global scale. Aided by these innovations in transport and communications, the

movement of revolutionary ideologies, peoples, and weapons across national borders

quickened in both pace and scope.

The first modern terrorist organizations developed in Russia during the 1870s.

These radical groups, including the infamous Party of the People’s Will

(Narodnaia Volia), carried out multiple political assassinations and terror campaigns,

often in response to police brutality and state repression. The term terrorist

in relation to nonstate actors also emerged in the Russian context and became

associated with social revolutionaries after Vera Zasulich’s attempted killing of

General Fydor Tepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, in January 1878. At her trial,

Zasulich professed to be a “terrorist not a killer” to distinguish her act as politically

motivated. 18

The successful assassination of the Russian Czar Alexander II on March 1, 1881

by the Party of the People’s Will changed attitudes toward terrorism among social

revolutionaries in Europe. Proponents of terrorist tactics believed that such symbolic

and public acts of defiance would inspire revolutions across Europe and lead

to the overthrow of oppressive governments. 19 Four months after the czar’s assassination

in July 1881, an international congress of anarchists met in London and

officially endorsed the use of terrorism, or “propaganda by deed.” 20 The official

sanction of terrorism by the London Congress, however, did not produce an

16. Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” The Journal

of American History 98 (2011): 73–94.

17. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination

(London, 2005), 1–3.

18. David Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe

(Cambridge, 2011), 180.

19. Ibid., 5.

20. Nunzio Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian Anarchist Terrorism in the United States,”

in Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, ed. David Rapoport (London, 2006), 198–99.


onslaught of anarchist violence in Europe. Many anarchist circles continued to

view the terrorist act as the ultima ratio: “Political terror as a form of struggle is

acknowledged only as an extreme and exceptional measure for certain special

circumstances.” 21

In July 1881, three months after the International Social Revolutionary

Congress of London, social revolutionaries in the United States met in Chicago.

This was less than a year after the founding of the first revolutionary club in New

York and highlighted the growth of the anarchist movement in the United

States. 22 The Chicago convention denounced private property and “wage slavery”

and also upheld propaganda by deed, along with other insurrectionary methods of

struggle. Furthermore, the congress declared itself “in favor of ‘armed organization

of workingmen who stand ready to resist, gun in hand, any encroachments

upon their rights’.” 23 In October 1883, socialists and revolutionaries met again in

Pittsburgh to found the International Working People’s Association. The group

issued a manifesto calling for the “Destruction of the existing class rule, by all

means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international action.” 24

During the 1880s the most famous act of anarchist terrorism occurred not in

Europe but in the United States. The Chicago Haymarket bombing and the subsequent

trial of eight anarchists that followed caused an international sensation. 25

Clashes between strikers, strike breakers, and police at the McCormick Harvester

Company plant in early 1886 led to a violent confrontation that killed one and

wounded several others. The Chicago press blamed the strikers, leading anarchist

leaders, and newspaper publishers to call for a peaceful protest meeting on May 4,

1886, in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. At this rally an unidentified assailant threw

a dynamite bomb, causing the police to open fire. The bombing and gunfire killed

eleven, seven police officers and four civilians, and wounded several hundred.

Although no evidence was produced to suggest that any of the defendants tried

for the crime threw the bomb, eight anarchists were found guilty because of their

ties to the radical press. Four were hanged, while another committed suicide in

prison. 26

21. Bloxham and Gerwarth, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, 182.

22. Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 55.

23. Ibid., 55–60.

24. Fine,Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley, 779.

25. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the World Before the War

1890-1914 (New York, 1962), 67. The Haymarket trial also profoundly influenced European

anarchists. According to Carl Levy, before 1917 “the two defining moments for much of the

European Left were the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886.”

See Carl Levy, “Anarchism, Internationalism, and Nationalism in Europe, 1860-1939,” Australian

Journal of Politics and History (2004): 334.

26. LaurenKessler,The Dissent Press: Alterative Journalism in American History (Beverly Hills,

CA, 1984), 123; Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (New York, 2006), 46.

In 1893, the new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three remaining imprisoned

defendants and issued a report which condemned every aspect of the trial. Altgeld’s

criticism of the conduct of the police and judge, however, cost him his political career.


Anarchism grabbed headlines again in the United States when Alexander

Berkman, a Russian-born communist anarchist, attempted to kill the industrialist

Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike of 1892. Berkman justified his

attack as a means of drawing attention to the wrongs of capitalism and the

plight of the working classes. 27 Later, in his prison memoirs, he claimed that his

deed represented “the first terrorist act in America.” 28 By the late 1880s, the association

between anarchism and Haymarket, along with Berkman’s attack on

Frick, conditioned many Americans to view anarchism as a dangerous foreign

doctrine that sanctioned violence against civilians and government officials. 29

In the 1890s this view was reinforced, as the epicenter of extremist violence

shifted back to Europe, and political assassinations and terror bombings exploded

across the continent. 30 Young militants bombed the Barcelona Liceu Opera House

on November 7, 1893 and the French Chamber of Deputies on December 9,

1893. 31 The technological development of dynamite in 1862 and its refinement

into gelignite in 1875 contributed to the “decade of the bomb,” as anarchists could

now leave explosive devices in public places, which often intentionally or unintentionally

killed civilians and “innocents.” 32

The most famous dynamiter of the 1890s, François Ravachol, set off a number

of bombs throughout France, targeting judges, public prosecutors, and the police.

His execution by the government of the Third Republic initiated a wave of reprisal

attacks. On February 12, 1894, Émile Henry left a bomb at the fashionable Café

Terminus in Paris, killing one and injuring twenty. Arrested shortly thereafter,

Henry used his trial to give a resounding defense of his political principles and to

justify propaganda by deed as a legitimate response to the violence perpetrated by

the state and its “bourgeois supporters.” 33

The press, eager to sell newspapers, capitalized on the public’s taste for excitement

and entertainment and routinely published highly sensationalized stories of

bomb-throwing anarchists. 34 Novelists of the era also published a number of fictional

works on anarchism, often portraying social revolutionaries as “insidious”

27. Fine, “Anarchism and Assassination of McKinley,” 780.

28. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York, 1912), 59.

29. Fine,780–81.

30. Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and the United States,” 142-43.

31. James Joll, The Anarchists (Cambridge, MA, 1964, 1979), 113; Carr, The Infernal

Machine, 47.

32. MartinA.Miller,The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of

Political Violence (Cambridge, 2013), 112; Martin A. Miller, “The Intellectual Origins of Modern

Terrorism in Europe,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park, PA, 1995),

46; Rosemary H. T. O’Kane, Terrorism (Harlow, UK, 2007), 14.

33. Miller,The Foundations of Modern Terrorism, 112–17; Whitney Kassel, “Terrorism and the

International Anarchist Movement of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,”

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32 (2009): 242; John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a

Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (Boston, 2009).

34. Jensen,147.


destroyers of civilization. 35 Observers at the time, including the prime minister of

Great Britain, Lord Salisbury, were quick to underscore the intimate relationship

between publicity and terrorism, and the ways in which press coverage heightened

fears, albeit unfounded, of an international anarchist conspiracy, known as the

“Black International,” to topple Western society. 36

Yet, in terms of eliminating high-ranking officials and monarchs, anarchists

during the ère des attentats were terribly and frighteningly successful. 37 Within

the interval of five years, Italian anarchists assassinated the president of France

(June 1894), the prime minister of Spain (August 1897), and the empress of

Austria-Hungary (September 1898). 38 The scope and scale of attacks attributed

to anarchists prompted European governments to overlook national differences

and to rally behind collective action in the fight against international terrorism.

The emergence of political terrorism in late nineteenth-century Europe led many

continental governments, in the words of an Austro-Hungarian official, to advocate

for “better systems of co-operation” and for a “practical scheme of common

defense against this common danger.” 39

ROME CONFERENCE OF 1898

The revival of anarchist terrorism in Europe during the 1890s galvanizedinternational

police countermeasures. Three months after the murder of the Empress

Elisabeth of Austria by an Italian anarchist in Geneva, fifty-four delegates from

twenty-one countries, including all major European powers and the Ottoman

Empire, met in Rome for the International Conference of Rome for the Social

Defense Against Anarchists. 40 This gathering included government representatives,

diplomats, ambassadors, and police officials from the participating countries.

The Rome Conference lasted from November 24 to December 21, 1898 and had

three objectives: “(1) to define anarchism so as to make the advocacy and the

practice of this doctrine a criminal offense throughout Europe; (2) toproduce

an international agreement on the treatment of anarchists by magistrates and

35. RichardD.Sonn,Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Lincoln, NE, 1989),

1, 303;Carr,The Infernal Machine, 46. These works included Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872),

Emile Zola, Paris (1898), Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1908), G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who

Was Thursday (1908), Frank Harris, The Bomb (1909), and Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

(1910).

36. Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and the United States,” 143–44,

147; Carr,41.

37. Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001), 14-15.

38. Jensen,143, 146–47.

39. The National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter TNA): Sir F. Plunkett to the

Marquess of Lansdowne, 13 December 1901, Public Record Office (hereinafter PRO), FO 881/

7711.

40. Deflem,Policing World Society, 66–67; Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 103. Accordingto

His-Huey Liang, twenty-two states attended the Rome Conference. See Hsi-Huey Liang, The

Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War

(Cambridge, UK, 1992), 162.


police; and (3) to decide on technical arrangements between the appropriate

authorities of the participating states to further the fight against anarchism.” 41

At the request of the Russian ambassador, the final protocol of the conference

defined crimes related to anarchism as nonpolitical and subject to extradition

agreements, thereby denying anarchists the protection of political rights in certain

countries. 42 Furthermore, delegates agreed to prohibit the possession and use of

explosives within their countries and to ban anarchist organizations and publications.

43 With several delegations abstaining, representatives recommended the

death penalty as mandatory punishment for all assassinations of heads of state. 44

However, the final agreement of the Rome Conference lacked enforcement

powers, as all participating states retained the right to endorse the protocol’s resolutions

with qualifications or reservations. 45

The Rome Conference ended on December 21, 1898, and by early 1899 most

governments declared their allegiance to the final protocol with slight reservations.

In practice, few nations implemented any of the legal changes of the final agreement.

In terms of police work and establishing methods for information exchange,

the conference achieved some success.

In secret meetings, separate from the rest of the conference, police specialists

agreed to monitor anarchist activities, establish central agencies to oversee that

task, and organize a system of exchange among national agencies. 46 The police

provisions of the Rome protocol stated:

Every country undertakes to keep the anarchists on its territory under strict

surveillance and to establish a central office to this end. The central offices are

to communicate to each other all useful information concerning anarchist

activity.

All foreign anarchists are to be deported to their home states.

All states are to adopt the “portraits parlés” method of criminal

identification. 47

Great Britain was the only participating government to abstain from the set of

operational procedures proposed by the police chiefs. 48 Nevertheless, the British

representative Sir Philippe Currie affirmed that his country supported the goals of

the Rome Conference and recognized the existence of “an international duty to

41. Liang,The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System, 163.

42. TNA: Sir P. Currie to the Marquees of Salisbury, Rome, 30 November 1898, PROFO

881/7179.

43. Liang,164–65; Deflem, Policing World Society, 67.

44. Romaniuk,Multilateral Counter-Terrorism, 23.

45. Liang,163.

46. Deflem,Policing World Society, 67; Romaniuk,24.

47. Liang,165.

48. Deflem,67.


protect, as far as possible and by legitimate means, other countries besides the

United Kingdom against the violent acts of anarchists.” 49

British involvement in the conference stemmed from domestic terror bombings

by Irish nationalists, known as “Fenians,” in the 1880s and because of the many

political refugees in London. According to Currie, the British declined to endorse

the final treaty because of its definition of anarchism. As he told the conference, Her

Majesty’s Government did not “...prosecute opinions. The only question with us is,

is there crime or not? If the act is a criminal one, e.g, murder or incitement to

murder, it is not more so because done out of anarchism.” 50 In the eyes of many

British policy makers, the Rome protocol broadened the law so as to make criminal

the “dispensation of anarchist ideas,” a legal definition that was inconsistent with

English law and English traditions. 51 Moreover, the Foreign Office did not believe

Parliament would enact the necessary domestic legislation called for by the protocol,

especially with regard to censoring the press or limiting the right of asylum.

Continental European governments, however, enacted a number of the protocol’s

police provisions, as they could do so through administrative decrees. 52

While the Rome Conference failed in most of its legal initiatives, it did succeed

in setting a foundation for interstate police surveillance and information exchange

regarding anarchists. European officials believed that such operational procedures

and mechanisms were vital to protecting national and international security and

stability.

U.S. officials did not participate in the first international anti-anarchist conference.

According to a confidential dispatch from William F. Draper, head of the

U.S. Legation at Rome, to Secretary of State John Hay, the Italian government

only extended invitations to other European powers and excluded the United

States because of “the difficulties which might be encountered under [the

American] form of Government if repressive legislation should be agreed upon

by the conference.” 53

Lack of U.S. participation in the Rome Conference, however, did not hinder

American press coverage of the meeting. Newspapers in New York, Chicago, and

Los Angeles kept Americans informed of the conference’s progress throughout

November and December 1898. 54 The Chicago Daily Tribune included a full-page

illustration of the delegates in attendance, while the Los Angeles Times described the


50. TNA: Foreign Office to Sir P. Currie, 27 October 1898, PROHO45/10254/X36450.

51. Ibid.

52. Liang,165.

53. William F. Draper, Embassy of the United States, Rome, Italy to John Hay, Secretary of

State, Washington, D.C., 20 October 1898, M90, Dispatches from U.S. Ministers to the Italian

States, 1832–1906, Record Group 59 (hereafter RG 59) U.S. National Archives (hereafter NARA).

54. “Anti-Anarchist Conference,” New York Times (1857–1922), December 22, 1898.


proceedings and resolutions of the supposedly “secret” conference in detail. 55 By

December 29, 1898, a “dispatch to the World from Rome” informed Americans

that the Europeans had agreed to establish an international police bureau, based in

Berlin, for the surveillance of anarchists and that all governments involved in the

conference planned to negotiate and adopt uniform extradition treaties governing

anarchists. 56

The media’s portrayal of anarchists and of anarchist violence as particular to

Europe prompted many U.S. policy makers to call for stricter immigration legislation.

As early as 1889, a report (H.R. 12291) by the Select Committee on

Investigation of Foreign Immigration, known as the Ford committee, noted that

“anarchists were being driven out of European countries” and recommended that

they be “rigidly excluded.” 57 Nonetheless, legislation to ban alien anarchists from

entering the United States failed to gain congressional ratification, including the

most serious attempt in 1894 when the assassination of French President Marie

François Sadi Carnot by an Italian anarchist caused anger and fear among

American policy makers. The French assassination led Congressman W. A.

Stone of Pennsylvania to attack anarchists vehemently and describe them as

“enemies to society and the country ...[who] should be exterminated.” 58

However, those opposed to adding anarchists to the proscribed classes of immigration

law won the day by pointing out the difficulties in accurately defining

the term anarchist and in enforcing a law that excluded individuals for their political

beliefs and convictions. Along with the problems of definition and efficacy, a few

congressmen also declared that banning anarchists contradicted America’s traditional

role as a place of refuge for the politically oppressed. 59

THE ASSASSINATION OF U.S. PRESIDENT WILLIAM MCKINLEY

Despite the Rome Conference of 1898, political assassinations by anarchist terrorists

continued. In July 1900, Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-year-old immigrant anarchist,

traveled from Paterson, New Jersey to his native Italy and assassinated

King Humbert. 60 Diplomatic correspondence between the U.S. government and

the German government in October 1900 indicates that European governments

responded to this assassination by calling on the United States to become actively

involved in an international anti-anarchist league. Moreover, German officials

declared that the U.S. government had a responsibility to monitor anarchists

living in the United States and to suppress the dissident press.

55. “The International Anti-Anarchist Conference in Session at Rome,” Chicago Daily Tribune

(1872–1922), December 25, 1898; “Anti-Anarchist Conference,” Los Angeles Times (1886–1922),

December 29, 1898.

56. Ibid.

57. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 423.

58. “An Anti-Anarchist Bill: Congressman Stone purposes extermination for Santo’s Kind,”

New York Times (1857–1922), June 26, 1894.

59. Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 28–29; Hong, “The Origin of American Legislation,” 7–8.

60. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 104.


On October 13, 1900, the Department of State received a German memorandum

describing the final protocol of the 1898 Rome Conference and asking the

U.S. government to consider adopting similar measures. On October 15, 1900,the

Department of State replied that

in regard to the reciprocal furnishing of information concerning the movements

of anarchists, and stating that while the United States would welcome

all information that might aid in the application of the immigration statutes,

and would endeavor to procure, through either State or Federal agencies reports

of the movements of any suspicious characters who might be indicated to

it, yet, in the absence of Federal laws or means for adequately detecting and

watching suspicious characters, it would be impracticable for the Government

of the United States to assume a reciprocal obligation, the value of which would

lie mainly in its effective execution. 61

At this time the United States lacked a national police force. Not until 1908,when

Congress was adjourned for the summer, did President Roosevelt secretly instruct

Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte to create an investigatory agency within the

Department of Justice. 62 In 1909, this division became known as the Bureau of

Investigation, later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. 63

Prior to 1908, national criminal investigations usually fell to the U.S. Secret

Service, formed in 1865 under the auspices of the Treasury Department and tasked

with uncovering counterfeiters. Federal departments had also used private detectives

to help with investigations and police work. The controversial involvement of

the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the 1892 Homestead strike, however, ended

such federal contracts, as a public outcry led Congress to prohibit government

agencies from employing private detectives. 64 A number of municipal police departments

in large American cities in the early 1900s also began to organize “anarchist”

or “bomb” squads. Those divisions investigated anarchist activities and

61. James Basset Moore, A Digest of International Law (Washington, DC, 1906), 96.

62. Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York, 2002), 9–10.

63. Richard Bach Jensen, “The United States, International Policing, and the War against

Anarchist Terrorism, 1900-1914,” Terrorism and Political Violence (2001): 31–32.In1919 and 1920,

the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division, also known as the Radical or

Anti-Radical Division, led by J. Edgar Hoover would be largely responsible for the mass deportations

of over 500 foreign residents during the Palmer raids.

64. Charles H. McCormick, Seeing Reds: Federal Surveillance of Radicals in the Pittsburgh Mill

District, 1917-1921 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1997), 9. Along with the Secret Service, which continued to

conduct small-scale domestic counterintelligence until 1916, the War and Navy Departments

carried out clandestine operations, while the Post Office Department monitored and suppressed

suspicious foreign and radical publications. Nonetheless, McCormick argues that at the start of

World War I in August 1914 the United States lacked the capabilities to engage in large-scale

internal security operations.


conducted political surveillance of radicals and unions, usually relying on informants

and undercover agents. 65

In 1901–1902, the director of the Secret Service, John E. Wilkie, instructed his

special agents to work with municipal police departments to draw up lists that

included the names and addresses of anarchists living in the United States.

However, the lack of a centralized system for tracking criminals or disseminating

information on their whereabouts rendered these lists ineffective. Moreover, the

fifty or sixty agents in the field, many of whom were simultaneously involved in

other duties such as counterespionage and presidential protection (not congressionally

funded until The Sundry Civil Expenses Act of 1907), further hindered

federal surveillance of anarchists at home or abroad. 66

Scarcely a year after King Humbert’s assassination, on September 6, 1901,

Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-

American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. 67 Among European governments,

McKinley’s assassination fueled further efforts to engage the Americans in collective

action against anarchists. Europeans did not view McKinley’s assassination as

an isolated event but rather as another politically motivated murder of a national

leader that typified the 1890s and now the new century. In the United States, the

killing of McKinley shattered American beliefs that their government was safe

from anarchist violence. 68

Three days after McKinley’s shooting, the then vice-president, Theodore

Roosevelt, still believing that McKinley would survive, wrote to Henry Cabot

Lodge:

Moreover, the surgeons who have in all probability saved the President’s life,

have thereby saved the life of his assailant. If he is only indicted for assault with

intent to kill, and behaves well while in jail, he will be a free man seven years

hence, and this, after having committed a crime against free government, a

thousand times worse than any murder of a private individual could be. Of

course I feel as I always have felt, that we should war with relentless efficiency

not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with

anarchists. 69

65. Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States,

1919-1943 (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2000), 39; Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads

and Political Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 20.

66. Jensen, “The United States, International Policing,” 20, 26–27; PhilipH.Melansonand

Peter F. Stevens, The Secret Service: A Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency (New York, 2002), 3,

28–33.

67. JosephT.McCann,Terrorism on American Soil: A Concise History of Plots and Perpetrators

from the Famous to the Forgotten (Boulder, CO, 2006), 25.

68. Jensen, “The United States, International Policing,” 15.

69. Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, September 9, 1901, The Selected Letters of

Theodore Roosevelt, ed. H. W. Brands (New York, 2001), 267–69.


McKinley died eight days later from infection, and on September 19, 1901,Lodge

posted a return letter to Roosevelt from Paris:

All you write about McKinley, his representative character and his nearness to

the people is profoundly true. But the scoundrel who murdered him is not the

weak man of unbalanced mind brooding over an imaginary wrong like

Bellingham, or Lawrence, or Guiteau, a sporadic type known at all periods of

history; he is the legitimate result of an organized body formed among other

things for the murder of the representatives of government, law and order.

These men are the enemies of government, society and patriotism. We

should fight them as we would fight any other armed enemy. I hope and believe

that we shall pass stringent legislation against them, and for the restriction of

immigration; break up these gangs in Paterson [New Jersey] and elsewhere and

have a law making it a capital offense to attempt to injure or kill the President or

Vice President. 70

Czolgosz was arraigned on first-degree murder charges on September 23, 1901.

Within two months, he was tried, sentenced, and executed. 71 His trial lasted just

over eight hours. 72

On December 3, 1901, Roosevelt delivered his first presidential speech to

Congress. He remarked that Congress assembled “under the shadow of a great

calamity.” 73 Echoing Lodge’s letter, the president stated that McKinley’s assassin

differed from those of presidents Lincoln and Garfield: “President McKinley was

killed by an utterly depraved criminal belonging to that body of criminals who

object to all governments, good and bad alike, who are against any form of popular

liberty if it is guaranteed by even the most just and liberal laws, and who are as

hostile to the upright exponent of a free people’s sober will as to the tyrannical and

irresponsible despot.” 74 The “anarchist is a criminal,” elaborated Roosevelt and

“merely one type of criminal, more dangerous than any other because he represents

the same depravity in a greater degree.” 75 Similarly, the new president condemned

the anarchist press, defining anarchist speeches, writings, and meetings as

seditious and treasonable. 76

Without mentioning the fact that McKinley’s assassin was a citizen of the

United States, born in Michigan in 1873, the president recommended legislative

70. Henry Cabot Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt, September 19, 1901, Selections from the

Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge 1884-1918, eds. Henry Cabot Lodge

and Charles F. Redmond (New York, 1971), 504–506.

71. Jeffrey D. Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America’s Experience with Terrorism (Bloomington,

2001), 38.

72. Don Sneed, “Newspapers Call for Swift Justice: A Study of the McKinley Assassination,”

Journalism Quarterly 65 (1988): 367.

73. Addresses and Presidential Messages of Theodore Roosevelt 1902-1904 (New York, 1904), 285.

74. Ibid., 285.

75. Ibid., 288–89.

76. Ibid., 289.


action from Congress. He declared that current immigration laws were unsatisfactory

and needed to exclude individuals known “to be believers in anarchist

principles or members of anarchistic societies.” 77 In addition, Roosevelt advocated

an international treaty against anarchism:

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

against the anarchist. His crime should be made an offence against the law of

nations, like piracy and that form of man-stealing known as the slave trade; for it

is of 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. 78

Both the New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune printed a transcript of the

president’s message to Congress the next day on December 4, 1901. 79

In the days following Roosevelt’s congressional speech, the governments of

Germany and Russia delivered a joint diplomatic note to Secretary Hay, imploring

the United States to help “check the anarchistic movement.” 80 The German and

Russian memorandum dated December 12, 1901 stated:

The assassination of President McKinley, together with the anarchist crimes

and attempts upon the lives of chief magistrates committed in recent years, have

rendered it terribly evident that a struggle against the menace of anarchy is an

urgent necessity for all governments and a duty whose performance can not be

postponed.

It is evident that concerted action on the part of the governments interested

can not be really successful unless the uniform and strict enforcement of the

measures that may be adopted against the anarchists can be secured by an

international understanding. It would be preferable, it seems, to attain that

end by an exchange of views among the governments rather than by convoking

a new conference.

The German and Russian ambassadors declared that the resolutions of the

1898 Rome Conference provided a template for future initiatives to combat anarchist

terrorism. They advocated adopting uniform administrative measures,

establishing central bureaus in various countries for the “rigorous” surveillance

77. Ibid.,289, 301.

78. Ibid., 290.

79. “President Roosevelt’s First Message,” New York Times (1857–1922), December 4, 1901;

“New President’s First Message,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872–1922), December 4, 1901.

80. Anarchists—Proposed Joint Action Against, Memorandum handed the Secretary of State

by the German and Russian ambassadors, 12 December 1901,vol.I,Papers Relating to the Foreign

Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902),

196–97.


of anarchists, and enacting international regulations for the expulsion of anarchists

to their native countries. 81

The German and Russian governments also saw a need to define the crime of

anarchy more precisely and to strengthen the provisions of the penal codes against

anarchists and “the subversive press.” The ambassadors concluded their message

by expressing

the hope that the United States Government will not refuse to recognize the

necessity of energetically resisting the development of the anarchistic movement.

The representatives of the two governments, therefore, beg the United

States Government to inform them as speedily as possible of whether it is

disposed in principle to cooperate with the German and Russian governments

in establishing an exchange of views that may lead to common action based,

either in whole or in part, upon the propositions set forth.

In case of an affirmative reply, the details regarding the enforcing of the

measures in question might be subsequently elaborated. 82

On December 16, 1901, Hay responded to the German and Russian ambassadors,

relaying “the President’s cordial sympathy with the views and purposes above

set forth.” 83 Hay remarked that the president’s message to Congress on December

3, 1901 demonstrated his desire for stricter immigration laws against anarchists

and for a treaty among all civilized powers declaring anarchy a crime against the

law of nations. Yet, Hay cautioned that the U.S. Constitution limited the president’s

powers and that only Congress could enact legislation against anarchists:

The President will be glad to adopt such administrative measures as are within

his constitutional power to cooperate with other governments to this end.

So far as concerns the legislative action which may be necessary, the large

number of bills which have been introduced in both Houses of Congress during

the present session sufficiently show the trend of public sentiment in the same

direction. The President will take all proper means to urge upon Congress the

adoption of such measures for the suppression of anarchy as may be found

acceptable to the National Legislature and which may enable the Executive

to act in the matter with greater effectiveness in concert with other powers. 84

Hay concluded that the president was committed to “eradicating the deadly

growth of anarchy from the body politic.” 85 In April 1902, Roosevelt again

81. Ibid.; TNA: Memorandum of the Protocol of 1904 Respecting Anarchist Crimes, 23 July

1906, PROHO144/757/118516.


by the German and Russian ambassadors, 12 December 1901, FRUS 1901, 196–97.

83. Mr. Hay to Mr. von Holleben, 16 December 1901, FRUS 1901, 197–98.

84. Ibid.

85. Moore,ADigestofInternationalLaw, 96.


considered the German proposal to “do something in reference to anarchists” but

declined to take legislative action without congressional consent. 86

Between 1901 and 1903, Roosevelt and Hay believed that Congress would pass

federal legislation against criminal anarchy because of the large number of antianarchist

bills under congressional review. Most of these bills focused on measures

to protect the president and considered the appropriate punishment for those who

attempted to assassinate a public official, or even disbelieved in organized government.

Debate centered on two bills: the Ray Bill in the House and the Hoar Bill in

the Senate. These bills were named for the congressmen who rallied their causes

and eventually became known as “An Act for the Protection of the President of the

United States, and other purposes,” and the “Protection of the President and the

Suppression of Crime against Government.”

Worried about congressional opposition, Representative George Ray of New

York stressed that Congress needed to “prevent certain crimes of increasing frequency

against government” and that every government “possesses the inherent

power to protect itself.” 87 Moreover, Ray emphasized that the United States had “a

duty to all foreign nations with which we hold diplomatic relation to prevent the

formation of conspiracies in the United States to encourage or perpetrate crime

against government in foreign countries.” 88 He continued:

If we would establish and maintain friendly relations with the powers of the

world we must see to it that our domain is not used as a harbor of refugee for

murderers and assassins or a safe place in which murder to be perpetrated

abroad may be planned. We owe the same duty to foreign nations in this

regard that a man owes to his neighbor. Our safety and honor as a nation

among nations is involved, and these considerations amply justify the provisions

of the bill relating to the subject.

Your committee [Judiciary Committee] is conscious of imperfections, and we

are hampered somewhat by want of constitutional power, but, on the whole,

this bill will satisfy the public demand, repress crime, and add to the dignity and

security of the nation of which every American is justly proud. 89

Congressmen opposed to the bills, generally southerners who decried the expansion

of federal powers at the expense of states’ rights, managed to sideline the

measures in committees. 90 Representative Samuel W. T. Lanham of Texas, who

opposed “anarchy in all its shapes and forms,” nonetheless staunchly maintained

86. Theodore Roosevelt to Secretary of State, 30 April 1902, Reel 416, Theodore Roosevelt

Presidential Papers (Microfilm), U.S. Library of Congress.

87. Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 6235.

88. Ibid., 6245.

89. Ibid.

90. Fine, “Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley,” 790–93.


that “there ought to be no obstruction of the respective lines of State and Federal

power.” 91 Likewise, Charles Bartlett of Georgia declared:

I want to say that we have such a small percentage of foreign-born population

that the red flag of anarchy has never been seen in the South, and I apprehend

never will be seen here.

The people of the South generally will approve of and uphold any legitimate,

lawful, and constitutional legislation that will destroy anarchy in this country or

that will keep from our borders every anarchist and every teacher of anarchy

...but I am unwilling to say that the Government shall invade the

domain of the States and enact a law which shall give it the exclusive jurisdiction

over such offenders .... 92

Other congressmen questioned the constitutionality of the bills, the appropriate

type of punishment for assassination attempts, and whether the same law should

apply to legislative and judicial government officials. While congressmen were

quick to point out their desire to suppress criminal anarchy and assassination,

devilish details hindered progress. 93

Finally, in 1903, the House and the Senate approved separate bills designed to

deal with different aspects of the crime of anarchy, but failed to reach a consensus

on the wording of the final bill. Therefore, the only congressional legislation to

develop on the subject of anarchism dealt with immigration restrictions. On March

3, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1903, which added anarchists to the list

of excluded classes. President Roosevelt signed the bill into law the next day. 94

In the end, the only early twentieth-century domestic legislation in the United

States to prohibit criminal anarchy developed at the state level. Three states, New

York, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, enacted criminal syndicalism statutes that

banned and punished the crime of anarchy. New York became the first state to

take action when, on April 3, 1902, its governor signed into law a measure that

“struck at criminal anarchy, defined as ‘the doctrine that organized government

should be overthrown by force or violence, or by assassination of the executive

head or of any of the executive officials of government, or by any unlawful

means.’” 95 New Jersey and Wisconsin modeled their criminal anarchy laws after

the New York legislation, but New Jersey expanded the definition of criminal

91. Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 6246.

92. Ibid., 6392.

93. Fine,Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley, 790–93; Congressional Record, 57th Cong.,

1st sess., 2269, 2275–76, 2288, 2356, 2428–35, 2483–92, 2953–63, 2995–3006, 3045–66, 3113,

3115–23, 3126–29, 6235–45, 6246–52, 6283–6305, 6332–60, 6361, 6392–6420, 6421–26,

6450–59, 6460–67, 6468–76, 6506–6508, 6564–65; Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 2nd sess.,

2407, 2419–20, 2703–2704, 2953, 2956–64.

94. Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 2984, 6014, 6044; Congressional Record, 57th

Cong., 2nd sess., 2805–2806, 2809, 2867–68, 2894–95, 2918–19, 2949–50, 3010–11, 3077:

Fine, 793; Preston,Aliens and Dissenters, 31–32.

95. Fine,793.


anarchy to include all those hostile or opposed to “any and all government.” 96

Eventually, forty states followed suit and passed laws modeled after New York’s

criminal syndicalism statute. Most of these laws are still operative today. 97

The anarchist press also came under attack through both legal and extralegal

means following McKinley’s death. Vigilantes across the United States violently

attacked foreign-language anarchist presses and editors. 98 In Chicago, police arrested

Emma Goldman on conspiracy charges, along with other anarchist leaders

associated with the publication of Free Society, the leading English-language communist-anarchist

journal in the United States. 99 Additional arrests included the

German exile and militant radical Johann Most, whose journal, Freiheit, had coincidently

published an earlier article by the German revolutionary Karl Heinzen

in which he had called tyrannicide a “chief means of historical progress.” 100

Detained in New York, Most was charged with violation of Section 675 of New

York’s penal code, which made it a misdemeanor to commit an act that “‘seriously’

disturbed ‘the public peace’ or ‘openly’ outraged ‘public decency.’” 101 He was

sentenced to one-year imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island. At his trial, Justice

Hindale declared that Section 675 was “applicable to the teachings of anarchy,

which he defined as ‘the doctrine that the pistol, the dagger and dynamite may be

used to destroy rulers.’” 102 In April 1902, New York State’s Criminal Anarchy Act

officially prohibited the publication and distribution of anarchist literature. 103

The federal government also took steps to stop the dissemination of anarchist

publications. In the tiny anarchist colony of Home in Pierce County, Washington,

federal agents twice brought several residents to trial for violating the Comstock

Act, which provided penalties for sending obscene materials or indecent pictures

through the mail. Concomitantly, postal authorities attempted to suppress the

dissemination of the colony’s anarchist journal, Discontent. Finally, on April 30,

1902, the Home post office was abolished. 104

96. Ibid., 794.

97. Colin M. MacLachlan, Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo

Flores Magón in the United States (Berkeley, CA, 1991), x. In the 1960s, a number of Southern states

revived their criminal anarchy and criminal syndicalism laws in an attempt to stifle the Civil Rights

movement and crush governmental dissent. Activists were charge with violently trying to overthrow

the state government. See Charles E. Cobb Jr., “Part Three: State and Local Terror,” in This

Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Leslie G. Kelen (Jackson, MS,

2011), 127.

98. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New

Brunswick, NJ, 1955), 112.

99. Fine,Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley, 781–82.

100. Ibid.,783

101. Ibid.,784.

102. Ibid.

103. Kessler,The Dissent Press, 123–24.

104. Fine, 785–86.

IMMIGRATION ACT OF 1903


Although Roosevelt had called for a number of actions against anarchism in 1901,

including an international treaty, legislators failed to limit debate or reach a consensus

regarding domestic legislation to punish criminal anarchy. When Congress

adjourned in March 1903, only the Immigration Act of 1903 had been enacted,

which included provisions to exclude and deport anarchists. 105

The restrictive legislation of 1903 emerged in a period of change and flux for

U.S. immigration policy. Prior to the late nineteenth century, states had regulated

immigration, but with the Immigration Act of 1875, the federal government

assumed authoritative powers. In 1891, Congress established the Office of

Superintendent of Immigration, the first federal immigration and naturalization

administration, placing it in the Treasury Department. By 1903, theOfficeof

Superintendent of Immigration, now known as the Bureau of Immigration, was

housed in the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor. 106

Rates of immigration to the United States boomed at the turn of the twentieth

century with industrialization and urbanization further changing American society.

107 The social and economic upheaval of the time, coupled with mass migration

from eastern and southern Europe, fueled a new wave of American nativism and

fears of the enemy within. A vigilant nationalism based on scientific racism

emerged that called for immigrants to become “100 percent” American and to

demonstrate complete loyalty to American institutions. 108

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, therefore, witnessed the

creation of a regulatory regime and deportation system that actively used immigration

policy to nation-build. 109 The Immigration Act of 1882, colloquially called

the Chinese Exclusion Act, initiated a pattern of employing federal immigration

law to shape American society by empowering Congress to exclude and deport

certain classes or groups deemed undesirable. 110 Subsequent legislation developed

from this exclusionary framework.

In his message to the fifty-seventh Congress, Roosevelt called on Congress to

expand immigration restrictions to ban and deport aliens and foreign residents for

105. Preston,Aliens and Dissenters, 31.

106. USCIS History Office, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, http://www.uscis.

gov/about-us/our-history; in the years that followed, the bureau changed names numerous times,

and in 1940 moved into the Department of Justice where it stayed until 2003. Currently, the

Department of Homeland Security oversees issues related to immigration and naturalization.

107. Preston,3; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919

(New York, 2008, 1987), xxix–xxx.

108. Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History: Documents and Essays, ed. Jon

Gjerde (Boston, 1998), 307–308; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 11.

109. Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America

(Cambridge, MA, 2006), 1–3; Zolberg argues that states attempted to regulate entry prior to

federal regulation in the late nineteenth century; See also Bill Ong Hing, Defining America through

Immigration Policy (Philadelphia, PA, 2004); Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in

American History (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

110. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965, 66, 85.


their political beliefs and opinions. 111 Berating the country’s current immigration

regime, the president emphasized the need for a comprehensive overhaul of the

system:

Our present immigration laws are unsatisfactory. We need every honest and

efficient immigrant fitted to become an American citizen; every immigrant who

comes here to stay, who brings here a strong body, a stout heart, a good head,

and a resolute purpose to do his duty well in every way and to bring up his

children as law-abiding and God-fearing members of the community. But there

should be a comprehensive law enacted with the object of making a threefold

improvement over our system.

First, we should aim to exclude absolutely not only all persons who are

known to be believers in anarchistic principles or members or anarchistic societies,

but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation.

This means that we should require a more thorough system of

inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration

ports, the former being especially necessary. 112

Roosevelt’s message caused an outpouring of bills designed to deal with immigration

regulation. In addition, the approaching expiration of the ten-year suspension

of Chinese immigration by the 1892 Act produced additional legislative

proposals. 113

Along with the president’s strong plea for the exclusion of anarchists and other

persons hostile to government, the Industrial Commission issued a report on immigration

two days later that also recommended the exclusion and deportation of

anarchists. 114 Congress finally complied with the Immigration Act of March 3,

1903 (32 Stat. 1213). 115 Anarchists in the United States denigrated the bill as the

Anarchist Exclusion Act. 116

Earlier predictions that a law targeting political beliefs and social associations

would be impossible to enforce proved true. 117 According to the Annual Report of

the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for

the fiscal year of 1904, zero anarchists were excluded in 1903.In1904, the Bureau

of Immigration excluded one person out of 812,870 for being an anarchist.

111. William C. Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law

and Procedure (New York, 1932), 9; Higham,Strangers in the Land, 112; Hutchinson,Legislative

History of American Immigration Policy 1798-1965, 127.

112. Addresses and Presidential Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 301–302.

113. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy 1798-1965, 129.

114. Ibid.,423.

115. Moore, A Digest of International Law, 96.

116. JohnC.Chalberg,Emma Goldman: American Individualist (New York, 2008), 91.

117. Ibid.


Immigration officials denied entrance to 7,994 aliens in 1904, most often citing

pauperism as the cause for exclusion. 118

While the anarchist exclusion law proved largely ineffective, it did lead to the

deportation of John Turner, an English anarchist and trade unionist, in May 1904.

He is presumably the one excluded alien mentioned in the Commissioner-

General’s immigration report. Turner’s Supreme Court case, Turner v.

Williams, 24 S. St. 719 (1904) was highly controversial as well as extremely important

for future immigration law. 119 The case marked the first time that the

Supreme Court found exclusion and deportation on the grounds of political conviction

to be constitutional. 120

Turner had journeyed to the United States from Great Britain in mid-October

1903 for a public lecture tour. 121 Agents of the Department of Commerce and

Labor arrested him shortly thereafter for a speech he gave on “Trade Unionism

and the General Strike,” although the Secretary of the Department of Commerce

and Labor had issued a warrant for his arrest just a few days prior. Immigration

officers imprisoned Turner on Ellis Island where a Special Board of Inquiry

deemed him an anarchist under the definition of the 1903 immigration law and

ordered his deportation. 122 Turner’s friends, including Emma Goldman, responded

to his impending deportation by initiating habeas corpus proceedings

and holding a rally at Cooper Union in New York City on December 3, 1903.

Goldman later wrote:

Turner was given the honor of being the first to fall under the ban of the Federal

Anti-Anarchist Law passed by Congress on March 3, 1903. When I announced

to the audience that John Turner had been arrested and would be deported, the

meeting unanimously resolved that if our friend had to go, it should not be

without a fight. 123

The agitation surrounding the Turner case led to the creation of the Free Speech

League in New York City and a general debate over the status of political freedoms

in the United States. 124

Two noteworthy attorneys, Edgar Lee Masters and Clarence Darrow, argued

Turner’s case before the Supreme Court. They attacked the constitutionality of

118. Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and

Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1904, United States Department of Commerce and Labor,

Bureau of Immigration (Washington, DC, 1904), 7–8.

119. William Williams was the United States Commissioner of Immigration for the Port of

New York.

120. United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U.S. 279 (1904); Hong, “The Origin of

American Legislation,” 18; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 32.

121. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 112–13.

122. Julia Rose Kraut, “Global Anti-Anarchism: The Origins of Ideological Deportation and

the Suppression of Expression,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (2012): 183–84.

123. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931; reprint, New York, 2006), 213.

124. Chalberg, Emma Goldman: American Individualist, 93.


the anarchist exclusion legislation and argued that within the territorial limits of

the United States, constitutional guarantees should apply equally to all persons,

regardless of nationality. 125 The appellee’s brief refused to engage First

Amendment issues. James Clark McReynolds, the assistant attorney general handling

the case for the Department of Justice, insisted that earlier Chinese exclusion

cases had already affirmed the power of Congress to expel any and all classes of

aliens. 126 In his peroration, McReynolds declared that

An awful experience forced our lawmakers to conclude that the presence of

alien anarchists in the United States would be contrary to the public good, and

in that opinion the vast majority of law abiding, enlightened American citizens

undoubtedly concur ....

To exclude from a land, governed by law, those aliens whose mission in the

world is to defend the action of the fiendish individuals who threw bombs

among Chicago policemen who inspired the murder of a President [sic], and

who preach the religion of assassination, is rather a mild precaution against men

who seek the destruction of what all true Americans hold essential. Prudent

proprietors do not entertain in hospitable security strangers whose declared

purpose is to burn down the house which protects them ...An alien with a

leprous mind is certainly less entitled to generous treatment than are such

unfortunates as “idiots, insane persons, and epileptics,” all of whom are

barred from entry.

The policy of the United States, long and well established, is to exclude aliens

whose presence it believes would be peculiarly baneful. There is nothing important

in the present case which is new, and no substantial ground is perceived

for the alarm expressed by counsel, who declare (Br. 98), “If anyone doubts that

civilization and liberty are upon a treacherous foundation, he only need recur to

the spectacle of the law of 1903.”

I submit that, in the opinion of this court, anarchy is manifestly opposed to

both civilization and liberty and neither would be endangered by its

extinction. 127

On May 16, 1904, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld Turner’s deportation

and found that all issues connected to due process had been dealt with by the

Chinese exclusion cases. 128 The court ruled that the 1903 act did not infringe the

First Amendment because congressional authority extended to excluding any alien

for any reason. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice M. W. Fuller held that

125. Appellant’s Brief, Turner v. Williams, Supreme Court, Oct. Term, 1903, No.561,

102–103, in Hong, “The Origin of American Legislation,” 13. For his description of the

Turner case, Sidney Fine relies on United States ex rel John Turner v. William Williams, Brief

and Argument of Appellant (Chicago, IL, 1904).

126. Appellant’s Brief, 16.

127. Appellee’s Brief, ibid., 17.

128. Turner v. Williams, 24 S. Ct. 719 (1904), 723.


“Congress had unrestricted power to exclude aliens, including ‘merely political

philosophers,’ so long as Congress regarded their views as ‘so dangerous to the

public weal that aliens who hold and advocate them would be undesirable additions

to our population’.” 129 The court’s opinion, therefore, found that the Immigration

Act of 1903 did not violate the Federal Constitution, nor were its provisions,

including the exclusion of alien anarchists, unconstitutional. 130

ST. PETERSBURG PROTOCOL OF 1904

After the Rome Conference of 1898, continental European governments began to

exchange police bulletins on anarchism. Typically, those reports dealt with only a

handful of individuals at a time, and governmental participation varied. While

France and Italy regularly circulated monthly accounts of anarchist meetings

and publications, New Scotland Yard rarely distributed files on anarchists living

in Great Britain. Surprisingly, the two governments that had led the call for another

anti-anarchist conference, Germany and Russia, hardly ever issued

reports. 131

Nonetheless, by March 1904, the initiatives of the German and Russian governments

to revitalize the 1898 Rome protocol resulted in the secret St. Petersburg

Conference. Delegates from nine European countries and the Ottoman Empire

attended the conference and signed a second treaty for international anti-anarchist

measures. 132 The 1904 protocol focused on synchronizing national policies for the

expulsion, transport, and return of anarchists to countries of origin. Additionally, it

sanctioned the establishment of bureaus within the central police of each participating

country for the exchange of information regarding anarchists and potential

criminal plots. Each central bureau was to inform the other bureaus of the expulsion

or voluntary departure of any anarchist from within their territory, along with

a criminal history, physical description, and photograph, if available. In cases

where an anarchist covertly left a region, all bureaus were obligated to aid in an

international search for the anarchist at large. 133 All the neighboring states of

the Russian and German empires endorsed the administrative measures of the

protocol, as the Austrian ambassador to St. Petersburg reported on February 2,

129. Chalberg,Emma Goldman: American Individualist, 93.

130. United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U.S. 279 (1904).

131. Liang,The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System, 168–69.

132. Jensen, “The United States, International Policing,” 375. The ten countries in attendance

included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Russia, Rumania,

Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. According to Jensen, Spain, Portugal, and

Switzerland (by de facto accord) also agreed to adhere to the St. Petersburg protocol.

Additionally, on 8 May 1904, Luxembourg conducted a separate anti-anarchism treaty with

Germany and Russia alone.

133. “Au Protocole du 1/14 Mars 1904, Le Protocole au sujet des mesures internationales

contre les anarchistes,” Strictly Confidential, 9 May 1904, Notes from the Legations of The

German States and Germany, 1817–906, M58, T33, RG59, NARA. I am grateful to Zachary

Blackburn for his assistance in translating this document.


1904: “When Austria-Hungary joins, all of Eastern Europe will become a bloc of

states consolidated in its fight on anarchism.” 134

England, France, and Italy declined to participate in the conference. The

British Home and Foreign Offices, however, were aware that continental governments

viewed London as “the headquarters of anarchist propaganda and the centre

from which anarchist propaganda radiated.” 135 Nonetheless, as with the Rome

protocol, Lord Lansdowne of England stated that English public opinion would

not support expelling all foreign anarchists living in Great Britain. 136 British officials

promised to provide international assistance with police matters relating to

criminal anarchy, but stipulated that within the United Kingdom the task of monitoring

anarchists fell to the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police. 137

Internally, the Home Office maintained that it was “very desirable that the

action of the English police in dealing with anarchists should not be fettered by

hard and fast agreements with continental police authorities.” 138

The U.S. government also refused to sign the Secret Protocol but was kept

informed of its statutes by German and Russian officials. 139 Most illustrative is

a confidential memorandum attached to the 1904 agreement in the Department

of State’s Russian Legation file. Unsigned, but dated July 14, 1904, thenote

reads:

This communication was submitted to the President. No written answer has

been made, but the Secretary of State has acquainted the Ambassador with the

facts, first that this country possesses no national system of police, secondly, that

no secret treaty can be made in accordance with our traditional policy, and,

thirdly, that no secret treaty can be entered into, as all treaties require the advice

and consent of the Senate, and that this advice and consent cannot be obtained

in this country without publicity.

The Secretary added that the President was inclined to do everything in his

power under existing laws and statutes to prevent conspiracies in this country

and plots for the assassination of foreign chiefs of state; that he had urged


135. TNA: Home Office Registry, 14 Jan. 1907, PROHO144/757/118516.

136. Liang,172.

137. Deflem, Policing World Society, 68; TNA: The Marquess of Lansdowne to Count

Benckendorff, 17 June 1904; PROFO881/9281; TNA: Memorandum on the Protocol of 1904

Respecting Anarchist Crimes, Foreign Office, 24 July 1906, PROHO144/757/118516.

138. TNA: Home Office to Foreign Office, 30 May 1904, PROFO881/9281.

139. Copiesofthe1904 St. Petersburg protocol are available in both the Department of State’s

Notes from the Russian Legation (1909–1906) and Notes from the Legations of the German

States and Germany (1817–1906); American newspapers at the time did not report on either the St.

Petersburg conference or the secret protocol, and neither is mentioned in the Papers Relating to the

Foreign Relations of United States during the years 1902–1905.


legislation to this effect upon Congress, hitherto without effect, but that he

would continue to call the attention of Congress to the matter. 140

A similar note can be found on a memorandum regarding the enactment of an

international agreement in May 1904 to “suppress the trading of women.” 141 This

protocol called for participating governments to “keep a strict watch over the

trading of women, particularly at seaports and railway stations” and to “institute

a central department for the purpose of combatting the trading of women.” 142 As

the German government claimed that “numerous cases of women trade are said to

occur in New York and it is alleged the German women figure among them,” the

U.S. secretary wrote Alvey A. Adee, the second assistant secretary of state, the

following note on December 16, 1904:

We might prepare a counter memorandum in reference to this subject, saying,

in substance, that the Government of the United States, having no national

system of police, is unable to enter conventional arrangements with other

powers in regard to this subject ...[nonetheless] the President is greatly interested,

and he will be happy to employ all the means at his disposition in the

sense indicated by the international agreement. The measures of precaution so

generally adopted in Europe are very much the same as those which are adopted

in the United States by the officers of the Immigration Bureau, and it is thought

that these are already very efficient, and that instances of the evasion of our laws

by the introduction of women for immoral purposes are extremely rare.

The President would be glad if the Imperial German Government would

give notice ...in all cases where it is possible of any instances of such crimes,

either accomplished or intended, in which event he would put into exercise all

the powers at his disposition for punishment or prevention. 143

These memoranda bring up two notable points regarding U.S. acquiescence to

international treaties in the early twentieth century. First, U.S. officials repeatedly

stressed that lack of a national police force precluded them from binding

140. “L’arrangement conclu et signé le 1/14 Mars a.c., au sujet des mesures à prendre en vue

de combattre les menées anarchistes,” April 26 to May 6, 1904, Notes from the Russian Legation,

1809–1906, M39, Roll12, RG59, NARA. The typed memorandum is in English.

141. Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, December 15–16, 1904, Notes

from the Legations of the German States and Germany 1817–1906,M58,T33,RG59,NARA.

The following plenipotentiaries signed the international agreement in Paris on May 18, 1904:

Germany, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia,

Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, and Spain. Jensen first stressed the importance of this document

in “The United States, International Policing and the War against Anarchist Terrorism,

1900-1914,” 379–80.

142. Ibid.

143. Ibid.;In1905, the Senate agreed to the international treaty on suppressing white slave

traffic and in June 1908 Roosevelt announced American adherence to the agreement. Not until

June 1910, however, did the White Slave Traffic Act, often referred to as the Mann Act, become a

federal law. Its enforcement was tasked to the Justice Department’s newly created Bureau of

Investigation.


agreements with European governments. Second, because the United States

lacked such an institution, the Immigration Bureau assumed those duties, giving

immigration inspectors law enforcement powers to patrol the border and ports of

entry. 144

Also at this time, the Senate played an important role in checking presidential

powers and influencing diplomatic relations. As with arbitration treaties and the

creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the activist and internationalist

Roosevelt administration faced considerable opposition to any agreement that

threatened the Senate’s privileged position to ratify treaties or jeopardized its legislative

purview. 145 In short, the configuration of U.S. governmental institutions—the

limits on federal authority, the small size of the executive branch, and

the power of the Senate—all influenced the policy options that the Roosevelt

administration had in combating terrorism.

CONCLUSION

The history of anarchist terrorism brings to light the intimate relationships between

terrorism and publicity, unilateral versus multilateral action, counter-terrorism

and immigration law, and anti-terrorism legislation and domestic politics.

Governmental campaigns against anarchism depended on perceptions of threat

and the frequency and proximity of terrorist attacks. Government structure also

played a role, as domestic political culture and representative bodies in the United

Kingdom and the United States limited international cooperation but opened the

door for internal surveillance programs and stricter immigration laws. 146

At the same time, continental European governments negotiated a number of

multilateral treaties against anarchism. European policy makers viewed anarchist

terrorism as a transnational threat that necessitated a European-wide security

system, which officials initiated in 1898 with the International Conference at

Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists. Following these multilateral

talks, European delegates adopted a final protocol that attempted to synchronize

national laws and police networks for the purpose of monitoring, arresting, and

prosecuting anarchist terrorists.

While U.S. policy makers did not participate in the Rome conference, the

growing global media, epitomized by the advent of mass-circulation newspapers,

144. Preston,Aliens and Dissenters, 18–19. Preston writes that “In the years before World

War I, Immigration Bureau customs became steadily more repugnant to normal judicial procedures

and to commonsense notions of fair play. There was neither mystery nor conspiracy behind

this trend. It was the natural growth of an administrative technique unrestrained by publicity or

opposition.” Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern

Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), xiv.

145. David S. Patterson, Towards a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement

1887-1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 128; WarrenF.Kuehl,Seeking World Order: The United

States and International Organization to 1920 (Nashville, TN, 1969), 113–15, 138–39.

146. In the United Kingdom, Parliament enacted restrictive immigration legislation for the

first time with the Aliens Act of 1905.


kept the American public informed about European efforts. The New York Times,

Chicago Daily Tribune, andLos Angeles Times all covered the international anti-anarchist

conference during November and December 1898. The escalation of anarchist

violence during the 1890s did not go unnoticed by American policy elites,

but for many the ère des attentats seemed specifically European. 147 Most American

policy makers believed that the United States, as a democracy and republic, offered

legitimate ways to challenge authority, and consequently, they did not see a reason

to join the Europeans in a league or alliance to contain anarchism. 148

This changed with Roosevelt’s first congressional message following

McKinley’s assassination. In his speech, Roosevelt advocated an international

treaty to suppress anarchism, indicating his awareness of the Rome Protocol of

1898 and the European initiatives to fight terrorism. 149 European governments

responded immediately. On December 12, 1901, GermanandRussianambassadors

dispatched a joint diplomatic note to Secretary of State Hay calling for

trans-Atlantic measures to stop the spread of anarchism and suppress anarchy.

In their message, the German and Russian governments advocated adopting uniform

administrative measures, creating an international penal code, and establishing

central bureaus in various countries for the surveillance of anarchists and the

exchange of information regarding their whereabouts and activities. In addition,

the German and Russian ambassadors reiterated the importance of censoring the

anarchist press, which they believed operated out of the United States and the

United Kingdom. 150

Hay’s response expressed the president’s “cordial sympathy” with the views and

initiatives of the two governments and his desire to “cooperate with other governments

to the end of eradicating the deadly growth of anarchy from the body politic.”

151 However, Hay noted that the U.S. Constitution severely limited the

president’s powers to engage in diplomatic alliances without congressional approval.

In the end, the United States did not attend the secret St. Petersburg

Conference of 1904. Nor did it sign any international treaties with Europe to

fight anarchist terrorism.

Two factors pushed the United States toward national laws instead of international

treaties. First, the United States lacked a federal police force. While the

Secret Service had begun to keep dossiers on suspected anarchists, no centralized

database or national criminal identification system existed to store and effectively

use such information. 152 Even with a treaty, the United States could not have

147. Laqueur, A History of Terrorism, 14–15.

148. Jensen, “The United States, International Policing,” 369.

149. Addresses and Presidential Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 285.


by the German and Russian ambassadors, December 12, 1901, inFRUS 1901, 196–97.

151. Moore, A Digest of International Law, 95–96.

152. Jensen,16.


participated to the same degree as European governments in monitoring anarchists

and sharing information.

Second, the Roosevelt administration faced considerable opposition in

Congress to signing a treaty with European powers, especially a secret treaty. 153

Suspicious of the growth of executive powers and the emergence of international

institutions that challenged the Senate’s treaty-making powers, such as the

Permanent Court of Arbitration, congressmen thwarted international treaties

that portended entangling alliances or that augmented presidential authority.

The congressional debates over enacting a federal criminal anarchy bill between

1901 and 1903 also made Roosevelt and Hay realize that an international treaty

against anarchism would be time consuming and difficult. Merely adding alien

anarchists to the list of excluded classes in 1903 had resulted in public protests and

acontroversial1904 Supreme Court case. Therefore, as the Department of State

observed in its memoranda attached to the 1904 St. Petersburg protocol and

Suppression of White Slave Traffic agreement, the administration employed commissioners

and officers of the Immigration Bureau, empowered by restrictive immigration

legislation, to achieve desirable policy goals.

America’s first experience with international terrorism thus oriented the nation

toward a strategy of national legislation rather than collective action. Conversely,

continental European governments believed that suppressing anarchist violence

required intergovernmental cooperation and coordination. These two models of

combating terrorism, unilateral and multilateral, came into conflict again in the

mid-1930s when the League of Nations took up the subject and drafted the 1937

Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of Terrorism. 154

The 1937 League of Nations terrorism conference in many ways echoed the

1898 anti-anarchist conference and the 1904 St. Petersburg conference. They all

occurred in the wake of assassinations of heads of state and sought to institutionalize

a strategy for combating international terrorism. The United States did not

attend any of those conferences. Policy makers who opposed U.S. involvement in

multilateral initiatives stressed that signing a convention or protocol against terrorism

would embroil the nation in European political affairs, and they claimed

that European “problems” had only limited relevance to the United States. 155 By

1937, however, the U.S. tendency toward a unilateralist counter-terrorism strategy

had a long history.

153. Hay to Adams, August 5, 1899; Hay to Henry White, August 11, 1899, Letters of John Hay

and Extracts from Diary (printed 1908; published,NewYork,1969), 156, 160–61.

154. Conférence sur Répression Internationale du Terrorisme, Registry Files 1934–1939,

CONF. R.T. General, Boxes R3758 and R3759, League of Nations Doc C.546(I).M.383

(I).1937, V(1938), League of Nations Archives, United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG)

Library, Switzerland.

155. Department of State to the American Minister, Bern, October 5, 1937, General Records

of the Department of State, 1930–1939, Central Decimal File 510.8B1/1—511.1C 1/44, Box

2555, RG59, NARA.

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