I don't know why humans have such short memories. And yet we never forget anything. We invented writing, for crying out loud, and paper may not last forever but it lasts long enough to remind us that there is nothing so debased, so stupid or so awe inspiring that humans have not done it and or survived before, at least once. We have decrypted the ancient scribbles of Ur and yet I fear darn few people have ever read what the ancient Ur-ians wrote about; high taxes, climate change, drought flood and fuel prices, war and peace, child abuse, crime rates and government corruption, and of course, terrorists.
Our current President George Bush, likes to say that his usurpation of the constitution he swore to protect and defend is justified because we face such an unprecedented war, the war against terror, but that is simply not true. We've been through this all before, as the 19th century ran out of gas and the 20th century got it's feet wet, our enemy was not Islamic Terrorists, but anarchist terrorists. They had their own Improvised Explosive Devices - only they called them "infernal machines." They had their own Weapon of Mass Destruction, which they called Dynamite.
That period was so traumatic it is imbedded deeply in American culture. The 19th century's nightmare image of the anarchist, hat pulled low and collar pulled high to hide his maniacal grin denoting an insane love for irrational violence, a lighted bomb in his hand ready to be thrown, eventually devolved into the cartoon Spy verses Spy characters from Mad Magazine. And if you have ever laughed when one cartoon character lighted up a stick of cartoon dynamite, thinking it was a cigar, you are actually laughing at Louis Lingg, a German immigrant who was arrested for the Haymarket Square riots and condemned to be hung. The night before his scheduled execution a cigar stuffed with dynamite was smuggled into his cell. After his final meal he lit the cigar and literally blew his head off.
That the Anarchists have become today's jokes should not let us forget just how scary those stereotypes were at the time. Anarchists had a global reach and a mysterious common goal of overthrowing western civilization. Anarchists killed at least three kings and two Czars. In Chicago, on May the 4th., 1886, an anarchist tossed a bomb into a crowd killing nineteen people, eight of whom were police officers. The blinded and terrified cops opened fire on the crowd and eleven people more died. Five men where convicted of the crime and sentenced to hang, among them Mr. Lingg who beat the hangman's noose by taking up smoking.
On September 6, 1901 President William McKinley was shot in the chest at point blank range by independent anarchist Leon Czolgosz. McKinley died days later in great agony. He was the first American President assassinated since Lincoln.
Every steam engine that exploded, every fire that broke out, was blamed on the anarchist. The legend of Mrs. O'Leery's cow kicking over a lantern an dstarting the great Chicago fire was created to mock rumors that anarchists were actually responsible. In fact they might have been. In 1920 Sacco and Vanzetti were self admitted anarchist, a fact that District Attorney Katzmann carefully laid out for the jury at their murder trial. Both were convicted on evidence that jurist Felix Frankfurter called "flimsy at best". They died, in large part, because of their political leanings.
The profile of anarchists was first that they looked foreign. Italian looking men were tossed off trains and refused passage on ships in much the same way Arab looking men are thrown off airplanes, today. If your name should end in a vowel you might wind up on a "no -travel" or "no admittance" list, as today you might end up on a no fly list.
The fear was not totally irrational. Anarchists seemed possible of anything. On March 13, 1881 Czar Alexander II was returning through the streets of St. Petersburg after a review of Imperial marines. As his carriage passed her a woman on the sidewalk waved a white handkerchief. A man ran out into the street and tossed a package beneath the carriage. In an instant the was a huge explosion and the street was filled bits and pieces of the carriage, with the blood and limbs of dead and wounded men and screaming, thrashing, dying horses. Somehow the Czar emerged uninjured. "Thank God," he said. "Now let us help the wounded." But before he could act a second man ran out from the crowd, shouting, "God cannot help you, Nicolas Alexander." The man blew up. When the smoke cleared the Czar lay on the ground, both legs shattered, and his arms almost torn from his body.
Just as there are Sunni and Shite Muslim there were Christian Anarchists, Individual anarchists, Mutualist anarchists, Comuno-anarchists, Social anarchists and even anarcho-capitalists. There was a great production of literature to unveil the terrorists and warn of their evil deeds and intent - The 1889 book Anarchy and Anarchists by Micheal Schaack being one of the first. Schaack declared, "...Dynamite...is the weapon with which the "revolution" has armed itself for its assault upon society."
English police recorded, a May 1st 1881 anarchist attempt to blow up the police barracks at Salford, and a gunpowder explosion at the Mansion House...an attempt to blow up the police barracks at Liverpool, a June attempt to blow up the Town Hall, also in Liverpool, A pipe bomb exploded just outside the police station in Loanhead, near Edinburgh. Six "infernal machines" were intercepted by customs agents in Liverpool. There was an attempt to blow up the Weston House in Gelway. A package of 20 pounds of gunpowder was discovered against a wall of the Mansion House. In January of the next year there was a gunpowder bomb explosion in Westminster Hall that severely injured three persons, and a similar bomb that blew up at night, causing damage to the House of Parliament.
Englishmen were horrified by this damage to property and life, and it seemed a group of political lunatics had declared war upon England. But the government did not topple there, nor did it fall in the United States. For all their bombs and rhetoric and dead police officers, kings and presidents no government ever collapsed because of a terror attack, ever; not the oppressive Czars of Russian, the conservatives in Parliament, or the Republic of the United States.
For all the fear and horror, governments proved to be tougher stuff than any anarchist's dreamed.