Writing the Introduction to the Twenty-First Century?: The Practice of History and the "War on Terror"

In his September 20, 2001 speech to Congress—his first major address to the nation since the horrific events of 9/11—then-President Bush attempted to describe the enemy that had just attacked us on our home soil. To President Bush, there was something incredibly new about Al Qaeda: they shared very few of the characteristics of standard enemies of the state (they professed little loyalty to any nation-state, for example), they had little concern for killing women and children, and they had managed to turn a passenger airplane into a novel—yet incredibly deadly—weapon of mass destruction. Yet at the same time Bush felt the need to place these terrorists into a sort of historical narrative. "We have seen their kind before," noted Bush as he described Al Qaeda as "the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century." To Bush, Al Qaeda was following "the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism." We had seen their kind before, and we had soundly defeated such forces of evil. Such a rhetorical approach became increasingly useful for the Bush Administration as they sought public support for their antiterror policies: policymakers were able to cast the enemy as something both exceptional (thereby justifying the need for unprecedented programs) and familiar (providing a point of reference for Americans, as well as a belief that such enemies could be defeated).¹

Despite such references to the past, historians seemed to have little to say in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. For many academic historians, the wound of that day has remained too new, indeed too raw, to bear any sort of close scrutiny. Yet such silence has allowed others to offer their take on the history behind this tragic day. Observers from across the political spectrum—from Ann Coulter on the right to Ward Churchill on the left—have risen to various degrees of prominence based upon their ability to provide any sort of historical context for this now infamous day. But in many of these popular works, as well as within the realm of policy-making, the focus has remained squarely on the present and future of terrorism. Within such discussions of this important topic, history no longer explained; it merely comforted and justified.²

It is because of this environment that Moshik Temkin's The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial is so significant. Thankfully, it takes its place among a recent spate of books that have begun to view the rise of the current "War on Terror" through a more critical lens. Works such as Beverly Gage's The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (2009), John Merriman's The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2009), and Mike Davis' Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007), among others, all illustrate the long and troubled history of twentieth-century terrorism. These works supply a prologue to the current crisis of global terrorism, arguing that the actors, passions, and strategies that seemed so new in the early years of the twenty-first century—as well as the state mechanisms put in place to combat such forces—may not have been so entirely novel after all.

All of this is not to assert that The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair simply provides background information for our current moment. Temkin's work is, first and foremost, an excellent reassessment of the historical importance of this infamous case. Temkin notes how many accounts of the case are often primarily concerned with the guilt or innocence of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two working-class Italian immigrants and self-described revolutionary anarchists who, in 1921, came to be charged with robbery and murder by the state of Massachusetts (the two were put to death later, in 1927). Such an understandable emphasis has...