The Global War on Anarchism

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.