Book-Anarchists on Bomb-Anarchists: Free Society, Diversity of (Textual) Tactics, and Anarchist Counternarratives of the McKinley Assassination

Introduction

When self-professed anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley, the event set off a wave of anti-anarchist repression in the United States. Anarchists faced widespread condemnation as they were denounced in the mainstream press and many were subject to arrest, harassment, and threats of violence; it was as though, writes Jeffrey W. Seibert, "most Americans thought that anarchism itself was responsible for the death of McKinley, and that Czolgosz was merely the instrument."¹ At the same time, many anarchists made statements opposing the assassination and distancing themselves and their beliefs from Czolgosz. The majority of the English language anarchist press took this position—in Living My Life, Emma Goldman writes that although many would protest her arrest following the assassination "they would have nothing to do with" Czolgosz's case—"Czolgosz was not an anarchist, his deed had done the movement an irreparable injury, [the] American comrades insisted."² The anarchist newspaper Free Society, however, was an exception—Free Society was unparalleled in both the high proportion of pages allotted to the assassination and its aftermath as well as the wide array of perspectives represented; therein, the authors employ a variety of strategies to offer their own understandings of Czolgosz's deed and counter those proliferating in both the mainstream press and in other anarchist papers at the time.

The anarchist periodical press played many roles in the movement, and anarchists considered their papers tremendously important; as Kathy Ferguson writes, "anarchist publications were the heart of anarchist communities."³ Yet even Free Society, described by Paul Avrich as "the foremost revolutionary anarchist paper in America around the turn of the century,"⁴ has received little attention. These publications offer a number of valuable insights into anarchism's history that are distinct from other texts. Given the frequency and regularity with which they were published, newspapers reveal their authors' most immediate views and analyses of events as they were occurring; their immediacy—with Free Society, for instance, appearing weekly—is particularly revealing of the debates that anarchists engaged in, how they responded to their ever-changing political landscape, and how their arguments unfolded over time. In addition, papers that, like Free Society, include contributors from a wide array of perspectives often directly addressing one another, illuminate the ways in which anarchists' analyses emerged out of not only their own individual observations and experiences, but in the context of lively conversation. I agree with Matthew S. Adams, who writes that our understandings of anarchism would be enriched by a greater emphasis on historical context and attention to "the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts in which these ideas grew, thinking … about the particular problems to which anarchist writers were responding."⁵

It is my contention that the anarchist periodical press is a fruitful site to explore these contexts; intertextual approaches to anarchist periodical publishing allow for simultaneous attention to anarchists' writings, the generic forms through which they wrote, their approaches to the publishing process, and the wider contexts into which they most immediately wrote. This has the benefit of drawing attention to overlooked figures and thereby serves to decenter canonical approaches to anarchist history, while at the same time revealing the extent to which anarchism's emergence, theorization, and praxis was a collective effort at every step as its authors went to great lengths to keep papers alive, through which they responded directly to one another and to the changing political landscape they inhabited.

In particular, in this article I will demonstrate that detailed analysis of the anarchist newspaper Free Society's coverage of the assassination of William McKinley not only offers a more nuanced view of the ways anarchists responded to Czolgosz's act, but also of the history of the anarchist periodical press in a broader sense. I begin with a short overview of the McKinley assassination and the vilification and criminalization of anarchists that immediately followed. I also provide a brief account of the responses to the assassination published by anarchists in the United States, noting the uniqueness of Free...