An Accidental Anarchist by Walter Roth

Author:Walter Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1998-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

IX

THE AFFAIR GOES NATIONAL

CONGRESS QUARRELS AND EMMA FINDS A LOVER

March 2–23, 1908

If the fate of Lazarus Averbuch and the fortunes of Olga Averbuch were of diminishing interest to most of the public, the fear of anarchy that Averbuch’s killing helped bring to the fore remained not just a local, but a national concern. Civic and religious leaders and politicians at all levels cried out against the curved-backed, shadowy, foreign-born anarchist capable of murder most foul against society’s pillars for no reason anyone could understand. It did not matter that a growing body of evidence suggested Averbuch had not been an anarchist; the specter, once raised, proved an effective political totem. If the details surrounding the Averbuch Affair made it an increasingly cumbersome source for anti-anarchist fervor, no matter; the shadow it cast was consistent with the near panic the very word anarchist caused.

One key to the stereotype of the anarchist—as the type was sketched in editorial cartoons, public nightmares, and the earliest versions of the official story of what happened in Shippy’s home that fateful morning—was that he was a foreigner from eastern or central Europe. Never mind that, until the assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz seven years before, the best-known anarchists in America had all been of British, German, or other Western European descent: A. R. Parsons, Sam Fielden, August Spies, and the other leaders of the Haymarket Square demonstration; Bill Haywood and other founders of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World); and intellectuals such as Proudhon from France or aristocrats Bakunin and Kropotkin from Russia. Still, the image of the anarchist as Italian, Hungarian, or Russian-Jewish held. Such ethnic groups, with markedly different languages and cultures, terrified many Americans simply by dressing differently and by carrying on a noisier commerce; how could their growing numbers, then, not be disturbing? And how could their equation with the powers of anarchy not be natural? The campaign against anarchy often proved to be a veiled campaign against foreigners in general; driving out the foreigner would drive out the anarchist.51

The main front in the campaign against foreigners was the battle over reforming the longstanding U.S. policy on open immigration. As early as the turn of the century, federal lawmakers began proposing restrictions on immigrants who were felons, socialists, or anarchists. In early 1907, the debate had flared up again with the introduction in Congress of an immigration reform bill and with the gradual cresting of American nationalism that took place under President Roosevelt’s direction. What had been a more or less theoretical argument took on a human face in February 1908, however, with the assassination of Father Heinrichs in Denver and a month later with the Averbuch incident. With the priest and the police chief as victims of alleged anarchists, the congressional debate grew more intense, the federal executive branch got more involved, and local witch-hunts intensified.52

On February 20, 1907, Congress passed a law prohibiting, among other things, known anarchists from immigrating to the country. Using the word anarchist in Section 2, it spelled out the concern more fully in Section 38.

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