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NOTE Anarchism and Terrorism in the '90s

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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As Alex Butterworth tells the tale, it was in the early years of the 21st century when

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a British Home Secretary recommended that those wishing to understand what at that time

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was still termed The War on Terror, should look back to the 1890s.

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Parallels were widely drawn with the wave of bombings and assassinations that had swept

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Europe and America at the end of the 19th century, perpetrated by anarchists and nihilists

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for whom London and Switzerland had provided refuge.

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Then, as now, it was remarked, disaffected young men from swollen immigrant communities

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had been radicalized by preachers of an extremist ideology and lured into violence.

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Young Butterworth was intrigued.

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Could it be that history really was repeating itself in this way?

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He began looking into the 1890s, with particular reference to that wave of bombings and assassinations

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perpetrated by anarchists.

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What he discovered he has now reported in a book called The World That Never Was, a

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True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents, published on this side

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of the Atlantic four months ago, in June 2010, by Pantheon Books.

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And what precisely did he

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The truth, however, was far murkier. Infiltration and surveillance comprised one part of the

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and its first furious appearance, anarchist cells carried out a wave of bombings and assassinations

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across Europe and in America, or so at least the governments of France, Britain and especially

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Russia liked their populations to believe.

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The truth, however, was far murkier.

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Infiltration and surveillance comprised one part of the armory of the security services,

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And equally important was the use of agent provocateur and black propaganda.

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In other words, not to put too fine a point upon it, but what Alex Butterworth learned

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from his research on the 1890s was that the wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated

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by anarchists during this period was largely a fiction.

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To some extent it was frankly invented by sensation-mongering writers for newspapers.

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In other cases, unscrupulous newspaper writers, who did stop short of outright fictioneering,

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failed nevertheless to display much discernment or professional judgment when it came time

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to decide whether to pass along rumors and unverified police reports as established facts.

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Together, these newspaper men had a sizable fraction of the literate public convinced

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Most of what Butterworth calls the fanciful notion of an internationally coordinated anarchist

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revolution, of which the isolated attacks with bombs, knives and revolvers marked the

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first skirmishes.

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Frank Harris discovered when he researched the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago for

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The Bomb, the 1909 novel he wrote about the incident, that with the connivance of most,

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Although not all the important newspapers, the whole American population was scared out

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of its wits by the Haymarket bomb.

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Every day the Chicago police found a new bomb.

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I thought they had started a special manufactory for them, till I read in the Leader of New

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York that the same piece of gas piping had already served as a new bomb on seven different

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occasions.

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Harris learned that a similar hysteria had prevailed after one of the men falsely convicted

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of the Haymarket bombing, Lewis Ling, blew himself up in his jail cell the night before

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his scheduled execution.

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The news of the explosion quickly spread beyond the prison walls, Harris wrote, and a crowd

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collected demanding information, a crowd which was soon swollen by reporters from every paper

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in the city.

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The news got out in driblets and was published in a dozen prints.

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The city seemed to go mad.

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From one end of the town to the other men began to arm themselves and the wildest tales

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were current.

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There were bombs everywhere.

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The nervous strain upon the public had become intolerable.

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The stories circulated and believed that afternoon and night seemed now, as one observer said,

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to belong to the literature of Bedlam.

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The truth was that the bombs found in Ling's cell and his desperate self-murder had frightened

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the good Chicagoans out of their wits.

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One report had it that there were 20,000 armed and desperate anarchists in Chicago who had

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planned an assault upon the jail for the following morning.

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The newspaper offices, the banks, the board of trade building, the town hall, were guarded

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night and day.

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Every citizen carried weapons openly.

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One paper published the fact that at 10 o'clock on that Thursday night, a gun store was still

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open in Madison Street and crowded with men buying revolvers.

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The spectacle did not strike anyone as in the least strange, but natural, laudable.

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The dread of some catastrophe was not only in the air, but in men's talk, in their faces.

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Of course, not all the violence attributed to anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s was merely

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made up or uncritically publicized by the mass media of the time.

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Some of it was quite real.

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But it was perpetrated not by anarchists at all, but by people who falsely called themselves

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by that name, or were falsely called anarchists by the authorities, by the newspapers, or

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by both.

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There were plenty of young men in the 1890s who longed to call attention to themselves,

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make a name for themselves and show everyone how daring they were.

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They weren't much for reading or political philosophy, these young men.

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To them, an anarchist was somebody who dressed all in black and liked to break things.

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There are still such young men.

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In more recent years, they've been breaking shop windows and vandalizing parked cars in

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in cities where meetings of the World Trade Organization were being held.

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Other young men, more intellectual in their tastes, call themselves anarchists for reasons

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that seem obscure at best.

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The Haymarket martyr Lewis Ling, for example, called himself an anarchist.

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Butterworth says he was accused of the Haymarket bombing, though there was no evidence he was

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even there in Haymarket Square that evening, because he was one of the city's leading

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Anarchist Speakers and Journalists Yet, according to Frank Harris, Ling supported

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a minimum wage established by the state.

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Excuse me?

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A minimum wage established by the state?

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An anarchist is supposed to be working to abolish the state, not give it new regulations

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to enforce.

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This would seem elementary, though again we see this same phenomenon today.

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Self-Professed Anarchists Who Worked to Grow Rather Than Shrink the State

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Then there were the terrorists and assassins of the 1880s and 90s who were passed off as

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anarchists by the authorities and the newspapers, even when their connection to the anarchist

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movement was pretty tenuous.

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Consider as Alex Butterworth does, the case of Leon Cholgosch, the anarchist who assassinated

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U.S. President William McKinley in 1901.

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The members of the Chicago Anarchist Group, whose meetings he did attend a few times earlier

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that year, had found, on getting to know him a bit, that he had read little anarchist literature.

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Little wonder, then, that according to Butterworth's account, by late August his colleagues had

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begun to suspect him as a police provocateur, and had arranged for his description to be

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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When it became that anarchists were advocates and perpetrators of violence, the more young people with a taste for violence flocked to join the movement.

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There was violence committed by police officers, too, police officers working undercover and posing as anarchists.

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Butterworth writes, for example, about the belief common among the working men of Chicago just after the Haymarket bombing

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One of the most vociferous calls for vengeance came from a certain Heinrich Danmeier, a deep-cover agent of the Imperial German police.

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A decade later, in the mid-90s, a bomb went off outside the Greenwich Observatory, killing the young man who was carrying it.

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He was, the police and the newspapers assured everyone, an anarchist.

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He had, however, been recruited for the job and supplied with his explosives by an undercover

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police officer.

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The basic details of this story are retold with the names changed to protect both the

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innocent and the guilty in Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent, which was published

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about a decade after the events it describes.

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Indeed, Butterworth writes that The Secret Agent, at the same time that it presents a

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is a rather schematic cross-section of the anarchist world of the period,

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also may come closer to illuminating the truth about the Greenwich bombing

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than documentary sources that are so often partial and distorting.

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As Butterworth notes, the period around the turn of the 20th century

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was one in which radical politics and cultural bohemia frequently rubbed shoulders,

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and the art and literature of the period are uncommonly revealing

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about both the life of that milieu and the ideas that informed it.

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Yet he makes surprisingly little use of the fiction of the period beyond his comments on Conrad's well-informed storytelling in The Secret Agent.

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He includes only a single passing reference, for example, to Henry James' 1886 novel The Princess Casemassima,

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In which a young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, becomes involved in radical politics and agrees to perpetrate an act of terrorist violence, only to discover that he hasn't the stomach for it.

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He had been drawn to anarchism in the first place because it seemed to offer a means of ameliorating the human suffering he saw all around him.

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And now he is to create more suffering in the name of anarchism?

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Robinson turns the revolver he has been given on himself.

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It is odd that Butterworth should pass over this novel so lightly,

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since one of his own favorite themes, one he dwells upon at length in his book,

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and returns to over and over, is the idealism of the anarchists of a century ago,

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and their devotion to a world of peace and harmony.

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He repeatedly stresses that anarchism was premised on an optimistic view of human nature,

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and a Belief in Mankind's Inherent Perfectibility.

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He repeatedly frets that the majority of people in Europe and North America in the last years of the 19th century

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failed to differentiate between the political ideals anarchists like Peter Kropotkin espoused

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and the simpler impulse to destruction which so many younger colleagues in the movement were eager to indulge.

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There is not a single reference in Butterworth's book to Frank Harris, or to the bomb, Harris's 1909 novel about the Haymarket incident.

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Nor is there a single reference to G.K. Chesterton's 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday.

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And this is particularly extraordinary since The Man Who Was Thursday comes closer to encapsulating in its central symbolism the main point of Butterworth's study

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The Man Who Was Thursday is the story of a London undercover police detective named Gabriel

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Syme who infiltrates an anarchist group and gets himself elected as the English representative

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to the European Anarchist Council.

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There are seven members of this council, each codenamed for a day of the week.

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Syme, by winning the election, has become The Man Who Was Thursday.

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He travels to the continent to meet with the other members of the council, only to discover

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that all the other members are also, like himself, undercover police detectives who

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have infiltrated the organization.

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Nonetheless, flaws and all, Alex Butterworth's book, The World That Never Was, a true story

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of dreamers, schemers, anarchists and secret agents, is a welcome and readable reminder

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of why we need revisionist history, to fight the state's never-ending efforts to promote

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an alternative version of history that makes it look good.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.