_The Anarchist Fighters._
The same evening a watchman was killed in New York when a bomb
exploded on the steps of the town house of Judge Charles Nott. Our
Lady of Victory Church in Philadelphia was bombed, and in Pittsburgh
there were blasts at the homes of United States District Judge W. H.
Thompson, who had once presided over a prosecution of Carlo Tresca,
and Chief Inspector W. W. Sibray of the Bureau of Immigration.
In Boston Judge Hayden, who had dealt severely with the arrested
May Day paraders, had his house almost demolished by a bomb made
of iron pipe stuffed with shrapnel and dynamite. In suburban
Newtonville, a similar bomb blew off the side of the house belonging
to Representative Leland Powers, who had sponsored an anti-anarchy
bill in the state legislature. Copies of PLAIN WORDS were found in
the vicinity of both explosions.
Except for the watchman and the obliterated carrier, no one was
injured in any of the bombings, but the effect over the country was
one of dismay at the recurring challenge and indignation against
the alien radicals held responsible. The New York _Times_ might
consider the bombings of “Bolshevik or I.W.W. origin,” but the
public generally believed them the work of anarchists. Ever since
Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre of 1886, when six policemen were
killed by a bomb thrown at an anarchist meeting, Americans had been
haunted by the image of the terrorist alien. President McKinley’s
assassination by the half-mad half-anarchist Leo Czolgosz hardened
the image. Such acts were in the tradition of the propaganda of
the deed, as proclaimed by anarchist patriarchs like Malatesta and
furthered gleefully by disciples like Johann Most in his _Science
of Revolutionary Warfare—A Manual of Instruction in the Use and
Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating
Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poison, Etc., Etc._
But for their rare spectacular gestures of political violence,
the anarchists would doubtless have been left to wither in the
obscurity of their cult. The nobly absurd anarchic conception of
a governmentless future when, in Vanzetti’s words, man would no
longer be wolf to the man, was held in America by only a miniscule
group—mostly immigrants from the more backward countries to whom it
seemed quite feasible that workers could run factories cooperatively.
Because by his philosophy of freedom each anarchist made his own
basic decisions, there was no way of separating the theorist from the
activist. Sacco and Vanzetti were said to be quietistic anarchists—as
opposed to the activist bombers of June 2—yet the dividing line was
as difficult to establish in 1919 as it was two generations before
with the abolitionists, whose ranks could include John Greenleaf
Whittier and John Brown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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