The Global War on Anarchism

330 : diplomatic history
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.