An American Anarchist by Paul Avrich

Author:Paul Avrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

In the meantime, Emma Goldman and the Isaaks had been released from prison, and Free Society had retracted its accusations against Czolgosz, who died in the electric chair on October 29, 1901. The killing of McKinley, the journal maintained, was “the price of empire” and of capitalist injustice,310 a view which Voltairine de Cleyre shared. Before the assassination she had sharply criticized McKinley’s administration for its expansionist policies in the Pacific and the Caribbean. “Yes,” she had written to Addie in September 1900, “this Chinese affair [the Boxer Rebellion] is abominable; same as the Philippines and Porto Rico and Cuba and the rest of it. But when the American and European capitalists make up their minds to have markets, they’ll pull the North Pole out before they stop. I really don’t know what they’ll do by the time they have ‘civilized’ Asia and Africa, and got them on the same business basis as themselves, i.e., producing a great deal more than they consume and hunting a place to sell the surplus (while their own folks starve and half-starve).”311 And while she regretted Czolgosz’s action, it was mainly because of the repressions that would inevitably follow. “The boys outside are crying the Extras over McKinley’s assassination,” she wrote her mother on the day of the attack. “It’s rather a pity—not so much for him, at least no more than for the old lady cut to pieces on Brown Street yesterday—but for the scale of the reactionary sentiments it creates for a time. However, it’s all in the play, as Humbert said the first time his life was attempted: ‘It’s one of the risks of the king business.’”312

Her real sympathies lay, rather, with Czolgosz, “a child of the great darkness, a spectre out of the abyss,” for whom, whatever his mental or emotional confusion, McKinley had stood as the symbol of capitalist exploitation and of American plutocracy and imperialism. Not anarchism, she insisted, “but the state of society which creates men of power and greed and the victims of power and greed, is responsible for the death of both McKinley and Czolgosz.” Upon McKinley’s hand “was the ‘damned spot’ of official murder, the blood of the Filipinos, whom he, in pursuance of the capitalist policy of Imperialism, had sentenced to death. Upon his head falls the curse of all the workers against whom, time and again, he threw the strength of his official power.” The wonder, therefore, is not that there should be some who strike back, but that there are not more. “The hells of capitalism create the desperate; the desperate act—desperately!”313

Voltairine de Cleyre’s defense of Czolgosz represented a distinct shift in her attitude toward violence. As Emma Goldman observed: “Voltairine began her public career as a pacifist, and for many years she sternly set her face against revolutionary methods. But greater familiarity with European developments, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the rapid growth of capitalism in her own country, with all its resultant violence and injustice, and particularly the Mexican Revolution, subsequently changed her attitude.

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