The Global War on Anarchism

308 : diplomatic history
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.