The Proud Tower (20 page)

The assassin, “holding his smoking weapon exultantly aloft,” was immediately seized. He was identified as Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-year-old Anarchist and silk-weaver who had come from Paterson, New Jersey, to Italy with intent to assassinate the King. His act was the only instance of Anarchist propaganda of the deed for which there is some evidence, though unproven, of previous conspiracy.

Paterson was a center of Italians and of Anarchism. Certainly the Anarchists of Paterson held many meetings and heatedly discussed a Deed which would be the signal for overthrow of the oppressor. Certainly the King of Italy figured as their preferred target, but whether, as charged in reports after the event, lots were actually chosen to select the person to do the deed, or whether the discussions simply inspired Bresci to act of his own accord, is not certain. The picture of a cabal of Anarchists in a cellar drawing lots to select an assassin was a favorite journalistic imagery of the time.

One imaginative reporter pictured Bresci as having been “indoctrinated” by Malatesta, “the head and moving spirit of all the conspiracies which have recently startled the world by their awful success.” He claimed that Malatesta had been glimpsed quietly drinking at an Italian bar in Paterson, but the police found no evidence that Bresci had ever met Malatesta. He had, however, either obtained or been given a revolver in Paterson with which he practiced shooting in the woods while his wife and three-year-old daughter picked flowers nearby. Also, he was given by his comrades, or somehow obtained, money to buy a steerage ticket on the French Line with enough left over to make his way from Le Havre to Italy.

“He was not insane enough to expect that the change of Government would follow his act,” explained Pedro Esteve, editor of the Paterson Anarchist journal, to a reporter. “But how else could he let the people of Italy know that there was any such force in the world as Anarchy?” An amiable and scholarly person whose bookshelves held the works of Emerson next to those of Jean Grave, Esteve accepted as quite reasonable that one of his own readers should go out and express the protest of the masses in a magnificent gesture.

Bresci’s comrades sent him a congratulatory telegram in prison and wore his picture on buttons in their coat lapels. They also insisted at a mass meeting in Paterson, attended by over a thousand persons, that there had been no plot. “We don’t need to make plots or talk,” said Esteve, who was the principal speaker. “If you are an Anarchist you know what to do and you do it individually and of your own accord.”

Bresci himself suffered the same fate as other instruments of the Idea. As Italy had abolished the death penalty, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the first seven years to be spent in solitary confinement. After the first few months he killed himself in prison.

In the United States the newspaper account of King Humbert’s assassination was read over and over again by a Polish-American named Leon Czolgosz. The clipping became a precious possession which he took to bed with him every night. Twenty-eight at this time, he was small and slight, with a peculiar fixed gaze in his light-blue eyes. Born in the United States shortly after his parents came to America, he was one of six brothers and two sisters, and lived with his family on a small farm in Ohio. According to his father, he had “the appearance of thinking more than most children,” and because of his fondness for reading, was considered the intellectual of the family. In 1893, when he was twenty years old, he had been laid off during a strike in the wire factory where he worked, and afterward, according to his brother, “he got quiet and not so happy.” Prayer and the local priest having proved ineffective, he broke away from the Catholic Church, took to reading pamphlets issued by “Free Thinkers” and through these became interested in political radicalism. He joined a Polish workers’ circle where Socialism and Anarchism were among the topics discussed, and also, as he said later, “we discussed Presidents and that they were no good.”

In 1898 he suffered some undefined illness which left him moody and dull. He gave up work, stayed home, took his meals upstairs to his bedroom, kept to himself, read the Chicago Anarchist paper
Free Society
and Bellamy’s utopia,
Looking Backward
, and brooded. He made trips to Chicago and Cleveland, where he attended Anarchist meetings, heard speeches by Emma Goldman and had talks with an Anarchist named Emil Schilling to whom he expressed himself as troubled by the conduct of the American Army, which, after liberating the Philippines from Spain, was now engaged in war upon the Filipinos. “It does not harmonize with the teaching in our public schools about our flag,” said Czolgosz worriedly.

As flags were a matter of no respect to Anarchists, Schilling became suspicious of him and published a warning in
Free Society
that the oddly behaved Polish visitor might be an
agent provocateur.
This was on September 1, 1901, and was wide of the mark. Five days later Czolgosz turned up in Buffalo, where, in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition, he shot President McKinley. The President died eight days later and was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. Thus Czolgosz, on the lowest level of understanding among Anarchist assassins, performed of them all the act with the greatest consequences.

“I killed President McKinley,” Czolgosz wrote in his confession, “because I done my duty,” and later added, “because he was an enemy of the good working people.” He told reporters that he had heard Emma Goldman lecture and her doctrine “that all rulers should be exterminated … set me to thinking so that my head nearly split with pain.” He said, “McKinley was going around the country shouting prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man.” And further, “I don’t believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill them.… I know other men who believe what I do that it would be a good thing to kill the President and to have no rulers.… I don’t believe in voting; it is against my principles. I am an Anarchist. I don’t believe in marriage. I believe in free love.”

The Idea of Anarchism, its vision of a better society, had not come within Czolgosz’s ken. Like Caserio, the simple assassin of President Carnot, he was of the type of regicide who becomes obsessed by the delusion that it is his mission to kill the sovereign. This was brought out, shortly after Czolgosz’s hurried trial and electrocution on October 29, by Dr. Walter Channing, Professor of Mental Diseases at Tufts, and son of the poet William Ellery Channing. Dissatisfied with the official alienists’ report, Channing made his own study and concluded that Czolgosz had been “drifting in the direction of
dementia praecox
” and was a victim of a delusion already isolated and described by a French alienist, Dr. Emanuel Regis, in 1890. According to Dr. Regis, the regicide type is much given to cogitations and solitude and “whatever sane reason he may have possessed gives way to a sickly fixation that he is called on to deal a great blow, sacrifice his life to a just cause and kill a monarch or a dignitary in the name of God, Country, Liberty, Anarchy or some analogous principle.” He is characterized by premeditation and obsession. He does not act suddenly or blindly, but on the contrary, prepares carefully and alone. He is a
solitaire.
Proud of his mission and his role, he acts always in daylight and in public, and never uses a secret weapon like poison but one that demands personal violence. Afterwards, he does not seek to escape but exhibits pride in his deed and desire for glory and for death, either by suicide or “indirect suicide” as an executed martyr.

The description fits, but for the delusions to become active there is required a certain climate of protest—and an example. This the Anarchist creed and deeds provided. There may be at any time a hundred Czolgoszes living mute, inactive lives; it took the series of acts from Ravachol to Bresci to inspire one to kill the President of the United States.

The public was by now thoroughly aroused, and the public was composed not only of the rich but of the imitators of the rich. The ordinary man, the petty bourgeois, the salaried employee, associated himself—as Emile Henry knew when he threw his bomb in the Café Terminus—with his employers. His living, as he thought, depended on their property. When this was threatened, he felt threatened. He felt a peculiar horror at the Anarchist’s desire to destroy the foundations on which everyday life was based; the flag, the legal family, marriage, the church, the vote, the law. The Anarchist became everybody’s enemy. His sinister figure became synonymous with everything wicked and subversive, synonymous, said a professor of political science in
Harper’s Weekly
, with “the king of all Anarchists, the arch-rebel Satan.” His doctrine, said the
Century Magazine
after the death of McKinley, “bodes more evil to the world than any previous conception of human relations.”

The new President, an extraordinarily mixed man equally capable of subtle understanding, courageous action and extremes of banality, saw in the Anarchist simply a criminal, more “dangerous” and “depraved” than the ordinary kind. In his message to Congress on December 3, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Anarchism is a crime against the whole human race and all mankind should band against the Anarchist.” He was not the product of social or political injustice and his protest of concern for the workingman was “outrageous.” The institutions of the United States, the President insisted, offered open opportunity “to every honest and intelligent son of toil.” He urged that Anarchist speeches, writings and meetings should henceforth be treated as seditious, that Anarchists should no longer be allowed at large, those already in the country should be deported, Congress should “exclude absolutely all persons who are known to be believers in Anarchistic principles or members of Anarchistic societies,” and their advocacy of killing should by treaty be made an offense against international law, like piracy, so that the federal government would have the power to deal with them.

After much discussion and not without strong objections to the denial of the traditional right of ingress, Congress in 1903 amended the Immigration Act to exclude persons disbelieving in or “teaching disbelief in or opposition to all organized government.” The amendment provoked liberal outcries and sorrowful references to the Statue of Liberty.

Of the dual nature of Anarchism, half hatred of society, half love of humanity, the public was aware only of the first. It was the bombs and explosions, the gunshots and the daggers, that impressed them. They knew nothing of the other side of Anarchism which hoped to lead humanity through the slough of violence to the Delectable Mountains. The press showed them Malatesta, for instance, as the evil genius of Anarchism, “silent, cold, plotting.” It did not show him as the man whose philosophy of altruism caused him to deed two houses he inherited from his parents in Italy to the tenants inhabiting them. Since the public likewise knew nothing of the theory of propaganda by the deed, it could make no sense of the Anarchist acts. They seemed purposeless, mad, a pure indulgence in evil for its own sake. The press customarily referred to Anarchists as “wild beasts,” “crypto-lunatics,” degenerates, criminals, cowards, felons, “odious fanatics prompted by perverted intellect and morbid frenzy.” “The mad dog is the closest parallel in nature to the Anarchist,” pronounced
Blackwood’s
, the dignified British monthly. How was it possible, asked Carl Schurz after the murder of Canovas, to protect society against “a combination of crazy people and criminals”?

That was the unanswerable question. All sorts of proposals were put forward, including the establishment of an international penal colony for Anarchists, or disposal of them in hospitals for the insane, or universal deportation, although it was not explained what country would receive them if every country was engaged in sending them away.

Yet the cry of protest in the throat of every Anarchist act was heard by some, and understood. In the midst of the hysteria over McKinley, Lyman Abbott, editor of the
Outlook
and a spokesman of the New England tradition which had produced the Abolitionists, had the courage to ask if the Anarchist’s hatred of government and law did not derive from the fact that government and law operated unjustly. So long, he said, as legislators legislate for special classes, “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor,” so long will Anarchism “demand the abolition of all law because it sees in law only an instrument of injustice.” Speaking to the comfortable gentlemen of the Nineteenth Century Club, he suggested that “the place to attack Anarchism is where the offenses grow.” He was echoing a concern that was already expressing itself in movements of reform, in Jane Addams and the social welfare work she inspired from Hull House, in the Muckrakers who within a year or two were to begin exposing the areas of injustice, rottenness and corruption in American life.

With McKinley the era of Anarchist assassinations came to an end in the western democracies. Even Alexander Berkman in his prison cell recognized, as he wrote to Emma Goldman, the futility of individual acts of violence in the absence of a revolutionary-minded proletariat. This second disavowal sent his correspondent, who still believed, into “uncontrollable sobbing,” and left her “shaken to the roots,” so that she took to her bed, ill. Although she retained an ardent following, especially among the press, who referred to her as the “Queen of the Anarchists,” Anarchist passion on the whole passed, as it had in France, into the more realistic combat of the Syndicalist unions. In the United States it was absorbed into the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, although in every country there remained irreconcilables who stayed lonely and true to the original creed.

In the two countries on Europe’s rim, Spain and Russia, each industrially backward and despotically governed, bombs and assassinations mounted as the world moved into the Twentieth Century. When in Spain a bomb was thrown at King Alfonso and his young English bride on their wedding day in 1906, killing twenty bystanders, it spread a fearful recognition of the deep reservoir of hatred which could have impelled such a deed. The reciprocal hatred of the ruling class was confirmed in 1909, when as a result of an abortive revolt in Barcelona known as “Red Week,” the Government executed Francisco Ferrer, a radical and anticlerical educator, though not a true Anarchist. The case raised storms of protest in the rest of Europe, where, as usual, Spanish iniquities provided a vent for liberal consciences. In 1912 a Spanish Anarchist named Manuel Pardinas stalked the Premier, José Canalejas, through the streets of Madrid and shot him dead from behind as he was looking into the window of a bookstore in the Puerta del Sol. It was a poor choice, for Canalejas, carried into office in the wake of Ferrer’s death, was attempting some reforms of the unbridled power of Church and landlords, but it was evidence that in their continuing combat against society, Spanish Anarchists were moved, as Shaw wrote, by “consciences outraged beyond endurance.”