The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly [1 ed.] 1625344007, 9781625344007

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments: Co-conspirators
Introduction: “The Conspiracy of Capital”, The Dialectics of Conspiracy in the Age of Monopoly
Chapter 1. “This Worn-Out Piece of Tyranny”, Clarence Darrow, the Haymarket Generation, and the Secret History of Conspiracy Law
Chapter 2. “Sensational Writing and a Fight”, Dangerous Knowledge, Socialist Detectives, and the Rise and Fall of the Appeal to Reason
Chapter 3. “The Marks of Capital”, The Wobblies versus the Invisible Government
Chapter 4. “The Ku Klux Government”, Law and Terror in the Red Scare
Conclusion:
“Will Fascism Come to America?”, Civil Liberties, Antifascism, and the Legacy of the Haymarket Generation
Notes
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

MICHAEL MARK COHEN is associate teaching professor in American studies and African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cover art by T. H. Lockwood, Appeal to Reason, January 9, 1904. Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

COHEN_cover_FIN.indd 1

COHEN

THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL

B

etween the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalists and their allies in government responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to —Shelley Streeby, author destroy this anti-capitalist movement. of Radical Sensations: World The result was an escalating class Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy. In this detailed cultural history, Michael Mark Cohen argues that a legal, ideological, and representational politics of conspiracy contributed to the formation of a genuinely revolutionary mass culture in the United States, starting with the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, The Conspiracy of Capital offers a new history of American radicalism and the alliance between the modern business corporation and national security state through a comprehensive reassessment of the role of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in American culture.

“Cohen draws upon a strong archival base and an impressively wide range of texts to provide an illuminating analysis of how the politics of conspiracy was central to this era’s culture of popular radicalism.”

THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly

MICHAEL MARK COHEN 5/10/19 10:10 AM

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THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL

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THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly

MICHAEL MARK COHEN

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston

Copyright © 2019 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-­1-­62534-­401-­4 (paper); 400-­7 (hardcover) Designed by Desta Roosa Set in Minion Pro and Rockwell Printed and bound by Maple Press, Inc. Cover design by Frank Gutbrod Cover art by T. H. Lockwood, Appeal to Reason, January 9, 1904. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Cohen, Michael Mark, author. Title: The conspiracy of capital : law, violence, and American popular radicalism in the age of monopoly / Michael Mark Cohen. Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018051546 (print) | LCCN 2018054895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613766484 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613766491 (ebook) | ISBN 9781625344007 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625344014 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism—United States—History. | Conspiracies—United States—History. | Capitalism—Social aspects—United States—History. | Political violence—United States—History. Classification: LCC HN90.R3 (ebook) | LCC HN90.R3 C64 2019 (print) | DDC 303.48/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051546 British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

To My We-­S ystem: M3L & In Memory of John Michael Cohen

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CONTENTS

preface and acknowledgments Co-­conspirators 

xi

introduction “The Conspiracy of Capital” The Dialectics of Conspiracy in the Age of Monopoly  1

chapter 1 “This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny” Clarence Darrow, the Haymarket Generation, and the Secret History of Conspiracy Law  32

chapter 2 “Sensational Writing and a Fight” Dangerous Knowledge, Socialist Detectives, and the Rise and Fall of the Appeal to Reason  80

chapter 3 “The Marks of Capital” The Wobblies versus the Invisible Government  142

chapter 4 “The Ku Klux Government” Law and Terror in the Red Scare  189

conclusion “Will Fascism Come to America?” Civil Liberties, Antifascism, and the Legacy of the Haymarket Generation  249

Notes 273 Index 317 vii

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Conspire, v. /kәn'spaiә(r)/ French conspire-­r (15th cent. in Littré) (= Provençal cospirar, Spanish conspirar, Italian conspirare), Latin conspīrāre lit. “to breathe together,” whence, “to accord, harmonize, agree, combine or unite in a purpose, plot mischief together secretly.” intr. To combine privily for an evil or unlawful purpose; to agree together to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible (esp. to commit treason or murder, excite sedition, etc.); to plot. —Oxford English Dictionary While the European governments thus testify, before Paris, to the international character of class rule, they cry down the International Working Men’s Association—­the international counter-­organization of labour against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital—­as the head fountain of these disasters. —Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871) When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-­makers and in the name of an abstract conception of profit—­surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself that we are thinking, American capitalism in its most systematized and computerized, dehumanized “multinational” and corporate form. What kind of crime, said Brecht, is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? —Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979)

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Co-­conspirators “You’re a novice paranoid. . . . Of course a well-­developed They-­ system is necessary but it’s only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-­system as a They-­system.” —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

I’ll admit it, this book is very late. And over the years it has both silently witnessed and actively absorbed many lessons offered by the multiple cycles of social movements and conspiracy theories that shape far more of our political thought and practice than most would like to admit. When I began thinking about these questions, it was as a fan of Thomas Pynchon, Talking Heads, Gary Webb, The COINTELPRO Papers, Behold a Pale Horse (at least ironically), and Hillary Clinton’s defensive accusation that her philandering husband was the victim of a “vast right-­wing conspiracy.” The theoretical and historical question of conspiracy became a formal academic question for me after the turn of the millennium, the moment of citizens’ militias, Y2K, and Bush v. Gore. The initial writing of this book took place in what we now call the post-­9/11 era, characterized by a revived interest in the history of domestic and international terrorist conspiracies and the expanding repressive state apparatus that now included the Ashcroft raids, DHS, the TSA-­imposed but seemingly voluntaristic partial strip searches in xi

xii  Preface and Acknowledgments

airports, NSA warrantless wiretaps, NYPD stop-­and-­frisks, and an illegal war in Iraq started over lies about missing stockpiles of U.S.-­made WMD. The Global War on Terror sparked a new generation of radical studies of militarism, imperialism, and the national security state, while investigative journalists exposed the Bush administration conspiracies of waterboarding, deliberate “intelligence failures,” Blackwater mercenaries, the rise of private prisons, and the conspiracy of capitalism that was Halliburton, Enron, and Bear Stearns. After Bush’s (stolen) reelection (in which he defeated a fellow member of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale), this book sat somewhat ignored. My family moved to California, where we took up new teaching posts and set about raising our children in a multiracial landscape where folks distrusted Disney princesses and GMOs in equal measure, and where the urgency of protesting the police murder of Oscar Grant formed an essential part of loving the blooming, buzzing diversity of the Bay Area. Having been educated on the East Coast, I now read the Californians: Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Rebecca Solnit, Jeff Chang, Novella Carpenter, Mark Reisner, Carey McWilliams, and Mike Davis. I gained a further, practical education as my family learned how to keep bees and chickens, prune fruit trees, and grow vegetables in the northern California sunshine and fog. As migrants to the East Bay, we soon knew not to talk about the Hayward Fault, which snakes along the coastal mountain ridge right under our campus and threatens at any moment to remake all our lives. As fear and loathing in the Bush-­Cheney era gave way to the hope and loathing of Obama, the conspiracy pendulum swung again, this time giving full bloom to the racial anxieties of the white-­flight-­far-­right, whether embracing the delusional “Birthers,” Islamophobic anti-­Sharia “activists,” Tea Party Patriots, and the racist (but at least demographically informed) foreboding about the “end of the white establishment.” This transition was overdetermined, punctuated and compounded not only by the election of the nation’s first black/mixed-race president, but also by the worst financial panic since the Great Depression. This was a financial collapse so enormous, so obnoxious, and yet so totally obvious that it still seems like a Wall Street conspiracy to destroy democracy in a plot

Co-conspirators  xiii

to leverage an already planned follow-­up bubble. What else are we supposed to think when we find articles in the New York Times (December 11, 2010)—­not a paper known for its propensity for conspiracy theories, let alone a hostility toward Wall Street—­two full years after the crash, carrying a headline reading, “A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives”? Shouldn’t we be reading about how those guys, this secret elite who deliberately wrecked the economy, blew their personal fortunes on expensive lawyers but were still convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud and are now rotting in federal prison? Instead of economic justice, what we got was austerity. Major cuts, especially those targeting public higher education, propelled me and my comrades toward several cycles of activism starting in 2009 and reaching an apogee in the fall of 2011 with the outburst of popular radicalism that became Occupy Oakland and Occupy Cal. The emphasis on economic inequality, capitalist fraud and political corruption, the revival of century-­old terminology like “plutocracy,” the declaration of a “second Gilded Age,” and renewed challenges to the rights of corporate personhood, all bound up in mass resistance to the everyday terrorism of police violence, conspired to remind me of my own research and the long history of the present crisis. The streets of Oakland and New York City seemed to be filled with actual anarchists, with kind people optimistically discussing the future of socialism and the limits to capitalism, all of which I felt to be happening for the first time in my lifetime. If that was genuinely new, the DHS-­coordinated, FBI-­backed, simultaneous police raids on Occupy encampments across the country seemed like the triumph of revanchism in our supposedly progressive moment. Because at the same time the police attacked us, white men openly carried assault rifles and signs threatening President Obama at Tea Party rallies while the police stood by and watched. Obama, for his part, remained silent, seemingly more willing to wait for white supremacists to embrace him than for him to embrace the democratic left flank that actually elected him. Nevertheless, the remarkable intensity of Occupy’s short-­lived physical presence successfully reshaped the public discourse on economics and inequality.

xiv  Preface and Acknowledgments

If we take a long enough view of our strangely de-­politicized yet hyper-­partisan era, we can still see the vast horizontal struggle between popular social movements and a towering, increasingly distant global elite, or what the radicals discussed in this book sometimes called “the conspiracy of capital.” We live in an age in which the state’s power over capital (and hence most of our daily working conditions) is at a historical low, while the state’s power over the individual is at an all-­time high. One senses the science fiction of our present moment; an age of authoritarian capitalism seems upon us not unlike the late nineteenth century, but now in a neoliberal second Gilded Age, shimmering with a surface coating not of the gold standard but of the electric buzz of spectacle, social media, and financial speculation. The world appears so perfect and so broken at the same time that any kind of systemic change feels impossible. As the ice melts and our planet’s fever climbs toward the two degree threshold, expecting human annihilation feels more authentic than believing in anything that might lead to justice and equality. In the Anthropocene, disaster even begins to take on the cast of political liberation, or at least of the necessary prerequisite, wiping away the old order rather than reforming or revolutionizing it. So perhaps we should get on with it? No, I think not. Waiting for things to get worse only makes things, well, worse. And things are, and have been for a long time, bad enough already. But is it any wonder that we are so afraid, possibly even paranoid, especially when so many of us are afraid of the wrong things? Some fear the UN black helicopters, the government coming to take their guns, young black men in hoodies, or Muslims on airplanes. Others fear the NSA in our smartphones, fracking the earth’s crust, chemicals in our food, and zombies in the streets. In this landscape of ubiquitous fear and suspicion, Thomas Pynchon’s “Proverbs for Paranoids” from Gravity’s Rainbow rings true: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” And yet, in the face of so many potential phobias and disasters vying for our amygdala’s attention, we have to believe that it is still possible to know where the fight is and how much there is to be gained in taking it up. It is my hope that the history presented in this book can provide some hard-­won lessons and guidance as we struggle to reclaim our common future. •

Co-conspirators  xv

All that said, standing here in the midst of the cataclysm that is the Trump administration, where the paranoid style of American politics has seemingly seized the center of American political power, it is well past time to thank all those who have aided and abetted my own personal progress through this contemporary history. I like to think of this book’s authorship as growing out of a series of political plots, writerly cabals, and non-­criminal conspiracies strewn across the American map that have led me, the author, to whisper together here with you, the reader. Let me begin at the end by thanking my editor Matt Becker, along with Rachael DeShano and the rest of the production crew at the University of Massachusetts Press. Working with this press has been a real pleasure, and I thank you for the respect you have shown me and my work from start to finish. I come from a family of public school teachers. And I am one myself. So it is entirely appropriate for me to thank all my teachers, especially Fred Engel, David Gross, Philip Deloria, Cathy Comstock, Marc Schroeder, Mark Pittenger, and Ed Nolan. Each of these mentors has shown me more than the path to scholarly success; they served as models for why being a teacher and a scholar matters and how to play the role of an intellectual in society. This book began its life in the American studies program at Yale, where I was expertly advised by Michael Denning, Jean-­Christophe Agnew, and Glenda Gilmore; as well as Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Matt Jacobson, Alan Trachtenberg, Robert Johnston, and the late, great David Montgomery. I also thank all the good folks who work at Yale’s many libraries and archives, including the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Sterling Memorial Library and Archives, and especially the once wonderfully neglected (and now demolished) Steeley Mudd Library, where they kept all the old, crumbling pamphlets by forgotten radical authors. Thanks to Tom Hyry, who hired me for a summer to catalog the personal archive of the radical civil liberties lawyer Frank J. Donner, an experience that proved central to the intellectual development of this book. Thanks to the members of our tri-­ continental working group, Amy Chazkel, Jay Garcia, Tori Langland, Mark Overmyer-­Velazquez, and Fiona Vernal. I want to shout out the members of the Friday Marxist Group, including John MacKay, Laura

xvi  Preface and Acknowledgments

Wexler, Michael Denning, Vilashini Cooppan, Don Brown, Dale Martin, Katie Clark, Sumanth Gopinath, Nigel Alderman, Shafali Lal, and Rebecca Ruquist. Personal thanks are also due to Vicki Shepard, Kathy Newman, Logan Hill, Ken Moon, Helen Lennon, Eric Grant, Andrea Becksvoort, Kat Mellon Charron, Françoise Hamlin, Tucker Foehl, and all the members of GESO, past, present, and future. At Duke, I am grateful to Fred Jameson and Susan Willis for making us feel so welcome in Durham. Special thanks to Jane Gaines and Maurice Wallace, who arranged for teaching positions as Ad Hoc Professor of Literature, Film and Video, and African American studies for two great years. I am grateful to the Marxism and Society working group for welcoming me, especially Michael Hardt, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Maria-­Elisa Cevasco. Thank you also to Duke’s library and archives, which houses the papers of the Socialist Party of America and more pamphlets than one could read in a lifetime. Across the wider academic and activist worlds, I’ve benefited from the intellectual contributions of Alan Wald, Chip Berlet, Peter Knight, Jeff Clymer, Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, and Fred Pfeil. In the Bay Area I have another community to thank. Let me begin with thanking the Surplussers, Tori Langland, Grace Wang, Suzette Min, Robin Hayes, and Nadia Ellis. Much respect and thanks to my colleagues in American studies, African American studies, and elsewhere in Berkeley’s community of scholars and activists: Kathleen Moran, Richard Hutson and Bill Moran Hutson, John and Tina Gillis, Richard Candida-­Smith, Candace Falk and Barry Pateman, Scott Saul and Kathleen Donegan, Beth Piatote, Barry Thorne, Don McQuade, Lyn Hejinian, Keith Feldman, David Holly, Justin Gomer and Ianna Owen, Percy Hintzen, Charles Henry and Ula Y. Taylor, Christine Palmer, Josh Jelly Shapiro, Josh Begley, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Victoria Robinson, Natalia Brizuela and Blanca Missé, Jeffrey Skoller and Leslie Salzinger, Jake Kosek and Donald Moore, Peter Glazer and Greg Levine, Gray Brechen and Dick Walker, Tim Clark, Iain Boal, Larry Bogad, Hannah Chadeayne Appel, David Maldonado, and Michael J. Myers II. Thanks to Fred Wiseman for offering me an uncredited co-­starring role in his very long film At Berkeley (2013). And most important, a special word

Co-conspirators  xvii

of gratitude goes out to all my undergraduate students at UC Berkeley; it is an honor to teach, mentor, and serve you every week. In the civilian sector we have many great friends and skilled comrades who will rally to fortify the Armageddon Garden when called: Ayize Jama-­Everett, Andrea Hurd, Alison and Oliver Perry, Eron Ersh, Duncan Allard and Christina Zanfagna. Thanks are due to three collectors who have aided this project: John Durham at Bolerium Books in San Francisco (bolerium.com), Martin Goodman of the Riazanov Library digital archive project at the Holt Labor Library of San Francisco (marxists.org), and Michael Stephens, who holds one of the West Coast’s finest collection of Art Young drawings and socialist art. A special thanks to my oldest friends, Pierre, Aaron, Carlos, Robert, Ayesha, and Jett, who, quite frankly, saved me when I needed saving. To my uncle John Michael Cohen, who passed away too soon, my singular influence, and whose arguments with me on warm afternoons on the porch in Gloucester in no small part inspired this project. And to my parents, Joan and Steven Cohen, my first teachers, thank you for a boundless measure of love and support. Last and most important, I thank my family, beginning with my partner, co-­parent, co-­author, wife, and best friend in the world since way back east, since way last century, Leigh Raiford. Simply put, I would not be here without you, so here’s to the hope that we may breathe together for the rest of our days. As for the three most important people in my life, my family, our we-­system, Leigh, and my two children, Maya and Maceo, you bring me all the joy, devotion, and purpose that anyone can ask for in this life. Berkeley, California May 1, 2018

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THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL

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Introduction

“The Conspiracy of Capital” The Dialectics of Conspiracy in the Age of Monopoly This power of concentrated wealth which rules America is known by many names. It is “Wall Street,” it is “Big Business,” it is “the Trusts.” It is the “System” of Lincoln Steffens, the “Invisible Government” of Woodrow Wilson, the “Empire of Business” of Andrew Carnegie, the “Plutocracy” of the populists. It has been made the theme of so much stump-­oratory that in cultured circles it is considered good form to speak of it in quotation marks, with a playful and skeptical implication; but the simple fact is that this power has controlled American public life since the civil war, and is greater at this hour than ever before in our history. —Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check (1920)

As the United States industrialized after the Civil War, and wealth and economic power became concentrated in the hands of finance capitalists and corporate monopolies, a rising generation of socialist, anarchist, and labor radicals sought to name this singular, possibly all-­powerful capitalist enemy. Their visions of this ruling class power crystallized into popular attacks on “Plutocracy” and “Invisible Government,” ideas that helped forge what the historian Theodore Draper called the “common language of all radicalism.”1 In his nonfiction works, the socialist writer Upton Sinclair relied on the “trust-­busting” legal term “Interlocking Directorate” to criminalize corporate conspiracies. The future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and the Bolshevik revolutionary V. I. Lenin both blamed the world’s ills on a “Financial 1

2  Introduction

Oligarchy.” The fiery Minnesota Populist leader Ignatius Donnelly and the urbane New York reformer Frederic C. Howe attacked what they called the “Money Monopoly.”2 In the widely read nineteenth-­century tract Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People, the Populist intellectual Sarah E. V. Emery angrily reviled the “money-­kings of Wall Street” who manipulated currency and credit markets to “enslave the American worker.” Two decades later, the Wall Street analyst John Moody deployed the same magic number in a series for McClure’s Magazine on “The Seven Men” who stand as “Masters of Capital in America” (fig. 1). In his muckraking masterpiece The History of the Great America Fortunes, the journalist Gustavus Myers challenged American exceptionalism by revealing how the richest families, from the Astors to the Morgans, triumphed through “fraud and force” in a society that “worships property over people.” Whereas Henry Demarest Lloyd foresaw in his 1894 best-­seller the imminent battle between “Wealth versus Commonwealth,” by 1900 the inaugural issue of the Chicago-­based International Socialist Review declared that “Plutocracy or Democracy” promised to be “the political problem of the twentieth century.” And when the language of the 1890 Sherman Anti-­Trust Act defined a monopoly as “a conspiracy in restraint of free trade,” the labor and civil liberties lawyer Clarence Darrow toured the nation denouncing the criminal behavior of “Industrial Conspiracies.”3 In the movements’ most totalizing phrase, the immigrant anarchist Emma Goldman and the midwestern socialist weekly the Appeal to Reason named their enemy “the conspiracy of capital.” Based in the utopian socialist community of Girard, Kansas, the Appeal published a quickly forgotten pamphlet in 1901 on currency manipulation by a former Populist turned socialist bearing this ominous title. More dramatically, when, during the First World War, the Justice Department charged Goldman and her comrade Alexander Berkman with conspiracy to obstruct the American war effort—­not the first time “Red Emma” had been accused of criminal conspiracy—­she openly mocked the charges before the court. “To charge people with having conspired to do something which they have been engaged in doing most of their lives,” argued Goldman, “namely their campaign against war, militarism and conscription . . . is an insult to human intelligence.” When the patriotic jury convicted the

Figure 1. John Moody and George Kibbe Turner, “Masters of Capital in America: The Seven Men,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1911.

4  Introduction

two anarchists and voted to deport them to newly Communist Russia, Goldman responded by turning the conspiracy charge on its head. “With all the power and intensity of my being,” Goldman shouted at the court, “I protest against the conspiracy of imperialist capitalism against the life and the liberty of the American people.” In this act of defiance, Goldman evokes “the conspiracy of imperialist capitalism” as both a political metaphor and a criminal accusation. Antiwar activists are not the conspiring criminals here, insists Goldman. These conspiring American bankers, arms manufacturers, police, judges, and jailers are the real criminals. Of course, it is possible that these radicals got the phrase from Karl Marx himself in The Civil War in France, wherein the father of scientific socialism characterized the global class struggle as “the international counter-­ organization of labour against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital.”4 I take the title of this book equally from Marx’s dialectical totality and from Emma Goldman’s shouted courtroom accusation (and a little bit from that long-­forgotten pamphlet). The Conspiracy of Capital is a history of radical conspiracy theories and the popular revolutionary movements that articulated a unifying vision of a criminal capitalist enemy so as to challenge its legitimacy and topple its power. Beginning with the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and through a historical account of the rise and fall of what I call the “Haymarket generation,”5 I argue that the politics of conspiracy theories and the conspiracy doctrine in law were central to the frequently violent conflicts between capital and labor, social movements and the state during America’s Age of Monopoly, from 1877 to 1929. Through an examination of the cultural production and radical activism of the Haymarket generation, this book tells the story of how a culture of popular radicalism challenged the political and economic power of monopoly capitalism, generating a historical dialectics of conspiracy in which each side of the American class conflict accused the other of being a criminal conspiracy.6 In the end, after decades of struggle and growth, the revolutionary project of the Haymarket generation was crushed by a countersubversive wave of law and terror in the long Red Scare of 1916–­1927. This historical defeat is central to our story because it reveals how economic elites and their allies in the state (commonly known as “plutocracy”) modernized the American repressive state apparatus, transforming it from a regime

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  5

of private disciplinary violence to one in which the state could finally claim sovereignty through what Max Weber defined as a “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.”7 The largely privatized repressive and disciplinary apparatus of nineteenth-­century American capitalism, with its reliance on the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and other private detective firms, hired strikebreakers, and vigilante violence, is nearly unique in the history of industrial modernity.8 Many radical conspiracy theories grew out of this surplus of class violence—­such as the use of the military to break strikes or the vigilante lynchings of labor leaders—­in which the line between private and state violence was often blurred. By the first decades of the twentieth century, countersubversive conspiracy theories about union dynamiters and international communism led to the creation of the national security state, the modern discourse of civil liberties, and the institutionalization of the dialectics of conspiracy. The Haymarket generation’s opposition to the “conspiracy of capital” was no paranoid delusion. Radicals lived their entire activist lives under the legal shadow cast by the conspiracy doctrine, and nearly every leading figure of the Haymarket generation faced prosecution for conspiracy at some point. A partial list of conspiracy prosecutions includes Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, charged in 1894 and 1919; labor radicals Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, and Tom Mooney; Socialist congressman Victor Berger; bohemian radical Max Eastman, cartoonist Art Young, and the editorial staff of The Masses; Wobbly leader William “Big Bill” Haywood, who faced conspiracy charges in 1907 and 1918; black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and Mexican revolutionary anarchists Enrique and Ricardo Flores-­Magón; founding American Communists John Reed and William Z. Foster; and AFL president Samuel Gompers. Even the radical lawyer Clarence Darrow, who defended so many radicals against conspiracy charges, eventually faced his own conspiracy trial in 1912. Arrest on conspiracy charges, prolonged legal battles, and incarceration became the price of leadership for the Haymarket generation. Many of these figures spent several years—­even decades—­in prison on conspiracy convictions. Haywood and Mooney faced capital charges for crimes they did not commit, while Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Marcus Garvey were all deported as criminal aliens. The perceived injustice of prosecuting

6  Introduction

activists for acting within their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and assembly did not escape anyone in the labor and radical movement; it became their rallying cry. “Conspiracy is a dire thing,” proclaimed the editors of The Masses in September 1914, “and the conspiracy to ‘get’ labor agitators by a misuse of the conspiracy law is the direst of all.”9 Since it was first used by an American court to ban a journeyman’s union of shoemakers in Philadelphia in 1806, the conspiracy doctrine has consistently served as the state’s primary legal weapon to criminalize collective action, enforce guilt by association, and suppress social movements. From this point of origin, American courts in this era used the conspiracy doctrine to ban unions; outlaw strikes, pickets, and boycotts; and criminalize radical ideologies like anarchism and communism. “So long as we apply the notoriously loose common law doctrines of conspiracy and incitement offenses of a political character,” wrote the civil libertarian and Harvard law professor Zechariah Chafee Jr., “we are adrift on a sea of doubt and conjecture.”10 Still commonly known as “the darling of the prosecutor’s nursery” for its expansive application and flexible evidentiary rules, the conspiracy doctrine as used by the courts to silence dissent turned courtrooms into a major site of class conflict during the Age of Monopoly. Consequently, much of this book details a series of sensational political conspiracy trials starting with Haymarket in 1886–­1887 and ending with the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. These trials, with the conspiracy doctrine at their center, transformed courtrooms in big cities like Chicago and Boston, and in small towns like Boise, Idaho, and Centralia, Washington, into national flashpoints, where radicals and reactionaries had their day in court and revolution seemed to hang in the balance.11 In their courtroom defense, the radicals of the Haymarket generation contested the conspiracy doctrine itself, confronting their class enemy in court and standing up for the rights of a free citizenry to organized dissent and collective action in the face of persistent private, military, and judicial repression. The drama of these conspiracy trials, and the extensive investigation, litigation, and organization that went into their legal defense campaigns, as much as any ideology or shared vision, held the Haymarket generation together. This vision of a common enemy and the organized defense of working-­ class radicals in the face of repression united the Haymarket generation

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  7

around a shared struggle against the conspiracy of capital. This was important because the American Left of the Haymarket generation was remarkable in its diversity; which is another way of saying that it was deeply divided, structured by factional, tactical, and ideological splits. The historian Paul Buhle has argued that there never really was one singular American socialism in this era but rather a diverse array of isolated and often competing regional socialisms.12 Most factional divisions within this heterogeneous and international field of social movements were based on tactical priorities as each group built up distinct strategies ranging from the anarchists’ “propaganda of the deed” to the syndicalists’ “general strike,” and from workers’ education efforts to the Socialist Party’s electoral politics. But below the level of factional infighting, the real political energy of American radicalism built itself up around an influential core of what Antonio Gramsci has described as “organic intellectuals,”13 radical leaders who created a culture of radical mass education and vulgar Marxist propaganda.14 American popular radicalism was an evangelical culture of autodidacts and charismatic revolutionaries like “Big Bill” Haywood, Carlo Tresca, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, persuasive agitators, sloganeers, and songwriters who could explain a capitalist crisis to a rally of strikers but never managed to get past the first chapter of Marx’s Capital. Through an exploration of the movement literature, journalism, cartoons, and courtroom speeches of the Haymarket generation, I argue in this book that the dialectics of conspiracy helped to unify the radical movements of the Age of Monopoly. As the book explores in detail, every ideological shade and faction of the Left’s historical bloc contributed to this culture of popular radicalism: we find it among radical lawyers like Clarence Darrow who argued against the conspiracy doctrine in court (chapter 1); among sensationalist journalist-­detectives who covered strikes, bombings, and conspiracy trials for the popular leftist press (chapter 2); among the songs, cartoons, revolutionary slogans, and courtroom battles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as they sought to overthrow what they called “the invisible government” (chapter 3); in the massive wave of radical resistance to American entry into the First World War and the nativist backlash of the Red Scare (chapter 4); and on through the legacy of the Haymarket generation

8  Introduction

in the twentieth-­century struggles for civil liberties and anti-fascism (chapter 6). Taken together, this generation of popular radicalism shared Emma Goldman’s conception of the totality of the capitalist system in the Age of Monopoly as a vast but not uncontested “conspiracy of capital.” To tell the story of plutocracy and popular radicalism, this book offers a new history of American radicalism in the Age of Monopoly alongside a new framework through which to rethink the history of conspiracy and conspiracy theories in the United States. What this reveals is a previously hidden thread in the culture of American politics, the dialectics of conspiracy through which Americans have fought over fundamental questions of law, violence, the rights of social movements, and the limits of democracy in a capitalist state. This, in brief, is the book’s argument. But before I go on to provide a visual example of the dialectics of conspiracy and conclude this introduction with a methodological reconsideration of conspiracy theory, let me offer a word on the boundaries drawn around this book, in terms of both periodization and subject matter. The periodization of the Age of Monopoly is unorthodox, so a concise explanation is warranted. American historians traditionally break down the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into Reconstruction (1864–­1877), the Gilded Age (1877–­1900), and the Progressive Era (1901–­ 1920). Some have recently taken to calling this span the “first Gilded Age” in light of recent efforts to label the post-­Reagan neoliberal era the “second Gilded Age.” But history does not do sequels, or prequels for that matter. The biggest problem with this traditional periodization comes in describing the post-­1900 era as part of a “Progressive” era. African American historians have long known the early twentieth century as “the Nadir,” the lowest depths of Jim Crow terrorism and what W. E. B. Du Bois called an era of “second slavery.”15 Likewise, efforts to legislate the “labor problem” in the Progressive Era failed to stem class violence as strikes grew larger and more deadly in the twentieth century. Federal reforms—­such as the Pure Food and Drug Act, the founding of the National Park Service, and women’s suffrage—­represent important and durable changes in American life and politics. But in so far as the Progressive Era brought significant “progress,” it did so by making America

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  9

safe for the modern business corporation, white supremacy, and imperialism, all of which reached their maximum visibility at the moment of the supposed epochal break (i.e., the 1898 Philippine War and Mississippi Plan, the 1901 formation of U.S. Steel and the Sherman Anti-­Trust Act). Therefore, I periodize the era between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Depression, from the Great Uprising of 1877 to the Great Crash of 1929, as one unbroken period characterized by the economic and political hegemony of monopoly capitalism. Starting in the 1960s, venerable American historians led by Richard Hofstadter, Gordon Wood, and David Brion Davis began arguing that conspiracy theories have played a prominent, perhaps defining role in American politics.16 “There is in the American temper,” wrote the political scientist Daniel Bell in 1961, “a feeling that ‘somewhere’ ‘somebody’ is pulling all the complicated strings to which this jumbled world dances.”17 Though the Cold War is famous for its “paranoia,” and the 1990s were the “conspiracy theory decade,” it was during the Age of Monopoly that the politics of conspiracy became modern, taking on its most lasting legal, political, and cultural legacy.18 Many of the era’s pivotal events involved real conspiracies, including the first presidential assassinations by John Wilkes Booth in 1865 and Leon Czolgosz in 1901; the invention of dynamite in 1867 and the growth of revolutionary terrorism from Chicago to St. Petersburg; the expansion of conspiracy laws into the labor injunction, the wartime Espionage Act, and criminal syndicalism laws; the secret diplomacy behind World War I, the revolutionary vanguardism of the Bolsheviks, and the global spread of underground Communist parties; the coercive power of private detective agencies like the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the vigilante terrorism of the second Ku Klux Klan, and the wartime creation of a federal political police in the form of the FBI. For these innovations alone—­assassinations, terrorism, corporate law, war, anticommunism, vigilantism, and government surveillance—­the Age of Monopoly may present us with a more significant set of questions surrounding the politics of conspiracy than any other period.19 And yet, at least in the growing field of conspiracy studies, the Age of Monopoly has thus far gone under-­examined. This book is an attempt to fill that gap. Of course, the work of filling one academic gap necessarily leaves open or creates others. And in this effort to draw the many strands of the

10  Introduction

Haymarket generation into a single narrative, several areas of American radicalism have been left out. The work of building class consciousness and coalitions across a simultaneously nationalizing and diversifying American working class often broke down along lines of race. Though many American radicals in the nineteenth century took Marx’s famous statement to heart, that American “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,” radical groups remained deeply divided on what was broadly known as the “Negro question.”20 Most unions and socialist organizations in the nineteenth century remained exclusively white, only sometimes stretching their racial boundaries to include Jews, Irish, and Italians within a white racial alchemy. Radical groups that did organize across the color line—­like chapters of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s or the black socialists of the World War I era—­struggled to explain the role of anti-­black racism in building American capitalism and shaping a white working-­class identity. Consequently, the role of whiteness in forging the American industrial working class, as has been rigorously argued by historians including W. E. B. Du Bois, David Roediger, Cedric Robinson, and Alexander Saxton, was repeated across the early history of American socialism.21 For example, the visual icon of the American working class in this era is unfailingly a white man who could be made to stand up to parasitic bosses or kick out the heathen Chinese, depending on the ideology being illustrated. In the half century between the Civil War and the Great War, the geography of American radicalism reflected these racial and ethnic divisions. Contrary to the far more racially integrated history of American communism after 1919,22 the prewar American Left never fully bridged these gaps, remaining divided between the midwestern nativism of the Appeal to Reason, the Jewish radicalism and multiethnic bohemianism of New York City, the Darwinian white supremacy of Jack London, German American “bridge and sewer” municipal socialism in Milwaukee, the growing contingent of black socialists in Harlem, and the hobo jungle multiculturalism of the anti-­racist IWW. In this story, the place of black radicalism and anti-­imperialism arrives only in the later chapters, when the revolutionary crisis provoked by World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, and the Great Migration transformed the landscape of race and class radicalism. I have relied heavily

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  11

on the work of Rebecca Hill, Robin D. G. Kelley, Theodore Kornweibel, Shelley Streeby, and other scholars on the history of race and radicalism in the Age of Monopoly.23 In particular, I draw on the work of the literary historian Barbara Foley, who argues in her book Spectres of 1919: “In the crucible of 1919, a class-­based analysis of racism enjoyed widespread currency among liberals, progressives and leftists; the struggle against racial inequality was frequently linked with the necessity to transform or abolish capitalist social relations.”24 Many radicals embraced Debs’s vision that “the class struggle is colorless,” holding a belief that racism was a product of capitalist manipulation, fueled by the ruling class, to pit one people or nation against another. The problem of racial division had a single solution: only by overthrowing capitalism will the working class abolish all forms of human inequality. In this light, the internationalism of prewar socialism was supposed to provide an antiracist counter to the white nationalism of “100% Americanism” and what Foley theorizes as the “racist anti-­radicalism” of the Red Scare. The theoretical subsumption of race to class nonetheless represented a serious limitation to the Haymarket generation’s ideology and praxis—­a limitation that is attributable, in part, to a belief in the conspiracy of capital. The historian David Roediger has described the Left’s class-­ bound understanding of racism as a kind of conspiracy theory. Roediger’s innovations in the field of whiteness studies began with his call for “movements away from conspiratorial views of racism and towards a consideration of the agency of the working class in the social construction of race.”25 Not only did the majority of white workers embrace the “psychological wages of whiteness,” according to Roediger, but radicals of this era (as well as generations of historians) failed to understand the realities of racism and anti-­blackness in American working-­class history. The Haymarket generation found a criminal capitalist class at the center of their struggle, leaving it largely silent on the debilitating presence of white supremacy both within its own ranks and as a hegemonic racial formation in the Age of Monopoly. “The white Left’s inability to understand, let alone answer, the Negro Question, turned out to be its Achilles’ heel,” summed up the historian Robin D. G. Kelley. “The tragedy for America, perhaps, is that these committed revolutionaries set out to save the Negro when they needed black folk to save them.”26

12  Introduction

Figure 2. Maurice Becker, “Unlawful Assembly,” The Masses, May 1914. Restored digital image courtesy of Martin Goodman, Riazanov Library digital archive project, Holt Labor Library of San Francisco and Marxists.org.

UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY: ILLUSTRATING THE DIALECTICS OF CONSPIRACY Now that I have set out the basic arguments and periodization of this book, let us turn to an example that can help illustrate what the dialectics of conspiracy looked like to the activists of the Haymarket generation. To the artist Maurice Becker, the “conspiracy of capital” looked like this centerfold spread in the May 1914 issue of The Masses (fig. 2). Becker’s cartoon features a circle of serious men in a smoky room as they literally conspire, or breathe together. The glass-­encased stock ticker in the left foreground, echoing the bald heads of the two men on the right, anchors the image in a social landscape. The ticker and its accumulating pile of tape are important signifiers of a legitimate businessman’s world, connecting these men to Wall Street while foreclosing the possibility that they are simply criminals, gangsters, thieves, spies, or even politicians. Their work—­if one can call it work in the industrial age—­is calm and deliberative, free of debate and the din of competition that is supposed to govern the dynamism of free market capitalism. Instead, we see the

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  13

leisurely labor of wealthy men speaking together in a hushed consensus that is inaudible to the outside observer. From the reader’s point of view, there seems a common purpose at hand. The close whispering of the center pairing, the lowered heads of the deeply shaded men around the table all point toward a singular, if unseen, purpose. Like most radical cartoons of this era, Becker’s drawing interpolates the reader into the scene by having the turned backs of the businessmen close us—­the reading public and the radical working class—­out of the conversation. Our exclusion from the circle makes their work a secret, imparting a sinister atmosphere rendered as an inky blur that shrouds the air and tightens the circle. Becker depicts this gathering as explicitly anti-­democratic, reminding one of Adam Smith’s words from The Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.”27 Becker’s drawing of conspiring capitalists is underscored by the legalistic caption “Unlawful Assembly.” The title is an accusation. It frames the ruling class at work as a crime scene, invoking the conspiracy doctrine which criminalizes “an agreement . . . to do an illegal act, or to do a lawful act by unlawful means.”28 Maybe these capitalists are organizing a trust, plotting a stock swindle, or just cheating an old lady out of her life’s savings. In this way the caption deftly turns the tables on a legal doctrine that since the start of the nineteenth century has been used to criminalize every form of plebeian collective action. “If the rich meet to reduce wages, that’s a conference,” wrote the labor advocate and freethinker Robert Ingersoll; “if the poor meet to resist that reduction, that’s a conspiracy.”29 So too, as any practicing rebel knows, the declaration of an “unlawful assembly” is the last thing heard from a police bullhorn before the batons and tear gas come out. This phrase marks the boundary between a legal and an illegal protest, between legitimate forms of political assembly and a criminal conspiracy. Becker’s cartoon reverses the common sense of political legitimacy, insisting that the real conspiracies threatening America are found not in union halls or saloon basements but in corporate boardrooms and Wall Street banks. “It may be that the Capitalist system is a criminal conspiracy that deserves to be outlawed,” declared one socialist paper in

14  Introduction

1920, “that it sucks the life blood from the American people and fattens and enriches a small and insignificant class of bloated aristocrats. . . . And because Capitalism is a criminal conspiracy, the Socialists are going to outlaw it.”30 In the years before the Red Scare led to the government suppression of the Left and labor press, all but the most austere radical papers published cartoons. “The true art of the untrammeled cartoonist is now being developed,” wrote Eugene V. Debs in 1912, “and he will be one of the most inspiring factors in the propaganda of the revolution.”31 As popular visualizations of political and economic theory, radical cartoons were equally respected by immigrant steelworkers, native-­born lumberjacks, and New York art galleries. Some radical newspapers, like The Masses and Good Morning, specialized in cartooning and radical art. Maurice Becker drew his first cartoon for The Masses in 1912, and a year later one of his paintings made it into the celebrated 1913 Armory Show, putting him at the very center of American modernism. Together with editors Max and Crystal Eastman, journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, and artists like Art Young, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis, Becker helped establish The Masses as critical meeting point of revolutionary art and politics in New York City.32 Cartooning was so important to the Haymarket generation that many artists stood out as political leaders. John Sloan, art editor for The Masses, ran twice for the New York State Assembly. Art Young, The Masses’ cartoon editor, ran for local and state offices in New York on the Socialist Party ticket. Ralph Chaplin not only drew hundreds of cartoons for the IWW but also wrote the lyrics to the labor anthem “Solidarity Forever” and edited the union’s official newspaper, Solidarity. Given their prominence, many radical cartoonists became targets of government surveillance, censorship, and criminal prosecutions. Offended by four antiwar cartoons in 1917, the Justice Department indicted Young and the rest of The Masses’ editorial board twice for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act. A federal judge sentenced Chaplin to twenty years in Fort Leavenworth in the mass conspiracy trial of the IWW in 1918.33 To look at radical cartoons in this light is not to consider a marginal form from a fringe movement, but it is to recognize perhaps the most

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  15

provocative and expressive face of American radicalism at the moment of its greatest influence.34 Ten years after publishing this image in The Masses, Becker drew a similar cartoon for the IWW (fig. 3). The time in between had been hard on both Becker and the IWW. Because of his involvement with the revolutionary union, Becker was arrested in 1918 and sentenced to twenty-­five years in prison for his opposition to U.S. participation in World War I. Though he served only four months of this sentence, Becker spent the next several years in exile, living and painting in Mexico, where his works were shown with those of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Becker returned to the United States in 1923, by which time the IWW and most of the prewar radical press had been silenced. Taking his inspiration from the Bolshevik revolution, Becker drew this image to appear over a reprint of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World. Becker’s second image depicts a very different circle of men. Instead of a ticker tape machine, we see the spinning wheels and belt drives of productive industry; and instead of a whispering gloom, we see the bright light of worker self-­education. Though the men huddle together, intent if somewhat trepidatious, there is an open staging to the scene, inviting the viewer to join the circle. We watch as a seated worker reads the first line of the Preamble, the text that we now also hold: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” Beginning with this fundamental antagonism, the Preamble asserts that capitalist society is inevitably one of inequality and conflict, creating abundance for the few who own while imposing hunger and misery on the multitudes whose toil creates all wealth. With the concentration of capital into great trusts, argued the IWW, the old trade union system of organizing workers job by job and shop by shop, all while excluding women and people of color from membership, was no longer working for the labor movement. Nor would a socialist political party be able to bring radical change to a corrupted government through electoral politics. A new movement was needed, one that would organize all the workers into “One Big Union” in which “an injury to one is injury to all.” This democratic promise, articulated in the Preamble, transforms this group of workers into a union,

Figure 3. Maurice Becker, “Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World,” Industrial Pioneer, May 1924.

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  17

a cartoon prefiguration of the Wobblies’ syndicalist utopia, a vision of a future cooperative factory council, perhaps even an American Soviet. As the Preamble concludes, “By organizing industrially, we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”35 If such a vision of emancipated workers operating the factory was an inspiration for the IWW, it served as the official countersubversive nightmare for ruling elites in the Age of Monopoly. What looks to the radical artists like a capitalist conspiracy is for the bankers just another day at the office. To these capitalists, and increasingly to agents of the federal government, Becker’s reading workers are not citizens bringing democracy to the shop floor but criminals and subversives, dangerous Reds actively conspiring against the sacred rights of property and profits. One group of men views the other—­the closed circle of capitalists versus the open circle of workers—­as an “unlawful assembly” and a criminal conspiracy. Art Young illustrated this contradiction in the most concrete terms possible in his four-­panel cartoon “Secret Meeting” (fig. 4). He depicts the many well-­guarded doors behind which the ruling class orchestrates its corporate, diplomatic, and political affairs; but should the workers take a notion to organize on their own, those same lazy security guards spring to life with battering rams and fire hoses to smash the workers’ conspiracy. Taken together, these images reveal the interplay between radical social movements and the repressive state apparatus as a dialectics of conspiracy, in which the most vital questions of the moment become a polarizing demand: Whose side are you on?

RETHINKING CONSPIRACY THEORY Conspiracy theories are deliberately polarizing as they seek to accuse, to narrate, and to explain the nature of political power. But for the name of one utterly common criminal accusation, conspiracy is a notoriously difficult word to define. Colloquially we recognize that a conspiracy is at root a secret and nefarious agreement to achieve some broadly criminal or malevolent end. Derived from the Latin conspirare—­meaning “to breathe together”—­a conspiracy is a collective agreement, a mysterious and binding speech act shared with foul breath. A conspiracy is

18  Introduction

Figure 4. Art Young, “Secret Meeting,” in The Best of Art Young (New York: Vanguard Press, 1936).

an ill-­intended collective, a criminal group, gang, or cabal on a sinister mission. And the grander the better. But even this simplified definition hardly accounts for the myriad ways in which the idea of conspiracy circulates in American culture. For this, we need a wider view. My theory of conspiracy consists of three interrelated horizons wherein a conspiracy is a criminal act, a political plot, and a theory of history. Each horizon offers its own scale of action, level of abstraction, and narrative form, from a plan to rob a bank, to a plot to overthrow the government, to a conspiracy of bankers to take over the world. Conspiracies like Nat Turner’s rebellion, la Cosa Nostra, the Nazi Party, al-­Qaeda, Skull and Bones, or the Illuminati emerge from one horizon while bleeding out into the other two. And in telling the story of these conspiracies, this movement between the criminal to the political to

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  19

the historical horizons (while potentially, but not necessarily, moving off into a fantastical horizon) becomes the narrative work of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories, then, are little more than the stories we tell one another about conspiracies, often of an explicitly prosecutorial, accusatory, and speculative nature. Like any competing theory of ontology, representation, or history, a conspiracy theory has to accumulate evidence, present its case, and seek some sort of decision in either a court of law, an epistemological test of scientific falsifiability, or the judgment of history. The power to define what is and is not a conspiracy is a jealously guarded privilege, and there is a lot at stake in this question. In the era under consideration in this book, it means the power to make martyrs out of the Haymarket anarchists, to lock up the entire national leadership of the IWW, and to outlaw membership in the Communist Party. Every accusation of conspiracy contains both a legal claim and a political interpolation of illegitimacy; it is an instrumental definition of political agency and an overdetermined ideological construct that conflates both a specific crime and a broader social enemy. Therefore conspiracy as a concept is under contestation at every point, whether in a courtroom, in the boardroom, in the streets, or in the field of representation. What we find in the politics of conspiracy, set between the accuser and the enemy, the legal doctrine and the ideological representation, is a distinctive political and historical dynamic whereby conspiracy begets conspiracy in an escalating dialectics of conspiracy. Because the stakes of this conflict are so high—­the legality of dissent and the legitimacy of state violence—­ the field of political representation surrounding conspiracy theories is a hotly contested terrain. This methodological definition of conspiracy builds on the work of Fredric Jameson, not only for his foundational writings on conspiracy narratives in film but also in his theoretical modeling of “narrative as a socially symbolic act.”36 In The Political Unconscious, Jameson lays out a literary theory along three horizons that correspond to my own definition of conspiracy. The first is to take the text as “a symbolic act,” an “individualized literary work or utterance” subject to the interpretive methods of close readings. The second horizon reads the text as a discursive formation within “the social order,” taking up a position in

20  Introduction

the cultural politics of “hegemonic forms.” The third horizon is that of totality, or what Jameson calls, “the ultimate horizon of human history as a whole,” or “the ‘vision’ of a total system,” in which the text reveals the formal structures of the capitalist system.37 My definition of conspiracy similarly establishes three horizons where conspiracy is first an act, albeit a collective and criminal one, subject to legal interpretation; conspiracy is second a political plot in the contested social field; and third, conspiracy is a vision of totality, as the agent of history itself. Furthermore, I want to offer these three horizons as a methodological model with which to approach the problem of conspiracy: of a detective or criminal investigation working with a variety of forensic, materialist models and reconstructed procedural and criminal narratives; of a historian or journalist reconstructing the narratives of political forces contesting for power; and of a literary or social theorist seeking out the ultimate, if ultimately theoretical, horizon. “Conspiracy,” writes Jameson, “is the poor person’s cognitive mapping. . . . [I]t is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.”38 Cognitive mapping, in Jameson’s terms, is the necessary empirical, ideological, and aesthetic project of representing the social system as what Jameson calls the “social totality.”39 Equally necessary and unattainable, cognitive maps of the totality are required for any navigation or narration of physical, political, and social space. Yet these maps inevitably dwarf the individual, overwhelming any efforts to understand the forces that structure daily life, political power, and the collective future. Imperfect though they are, we all necessarily cling to these visions of totality as the “mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in various garbled forms.”40 But while Jameson curiously, and perhaps only figuratively, imagines conspiracy thinking as belonging to “poor persons,” I want to suggest that we can take this literally, especially in the Age of Monopoly. Armed with this critical insight, this book takes up the conspiratorial cognitive mapping offered by the Haymarket generation as the insurgent political science of the poor person’s social movements. For example, with personalities like Jay “I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half ” Gould and the world’s first billionaire, John D.

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  21

Rockefeller, dominating the turn-­of-­the-­century capitalist imaginary, it was difficult for American radicals to accept Karl Marx’s theoretical admonition that the capitalist should be deprived of his individual agency and seen merely as “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.”41 Contrary to Marx’s materialist logic—­but true to his frequently gothic imagery of Mr. Moneybags or bloodsucking vampires—­popular radicalism insisted on personifying and embodying capitalism as the bloated plutocrat. “The business boss, then, is the sovereign,” wrote Lincoln Steffens in his autobiography. “In all my time, J. P. Morgan sat on the American throne as the boss of bosses, as the ultimate American sovereign.”42 Art Young captures precisely this expression of Morgan’s power in a 1923 cartoon (fig. 5). Sitting alone in his Wall Street corner office, a pudgy Morgan reaches for his buzzer, causing all the city’s buildings to sprout ears and gather in, straining to listen to his every word or follow his smallest command. To the left, banks and the “World of Finance” genuflect, while to the right, the institutions of state and civil society including “Government,” “College,” and “Church” crowd in to beg for the Master’s attention. By placing Morgan at the center of the physical and institutional world, representing the center of capitalist power with a single figure, Young attempts to draw the capitalist totality in a single frame. Taken at its most totalizing, the conspiracy of capital represents a radical map of the social system—­a vernacular totality of class struggle and the challenge of democracy in the Age of Monopoly. In general, the radical ideology behind the conspiracy of capital perceives a singular subject rather than a system at the center of historical development. This subject operates strategically through control or manipulation rather than functioning systemically as a structure or process. This move from an impersonal historical process to the subject of history produces the frequent and deliberate personifications of economic forces, including that of capitalism itself, as in the cartoons discussed here, condensing the global economic system into a centralized, concentrated, or dominating agency. This dominating agency is imagined to be a tightly integrated cabal of economic and political elites, often explicitly imagined as a conspiratorial ruling class and criminal plutocracy, which, in whatever form, constitutes a standing threat to the ideal functioning of democracy, civil liberties, and social justice. The agency of these elites, the actual mechanisms and traces

Figure 5. Art Young, “Products of Civilization, or the Survival of the Fittest (No. 4) J. P. Morgan,” The Liberator, October 1923.

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  23

of anti-­democratic power, are understood to be unjust and illegal—­the work of corruption and class violence itself, which is necessarily secret, hidden, or otherwise kept off the public stage of democracy. And last, though the conspiracy of capital explicitly evokes an abstract social totality, this totality only becomes visible when it can be grounded in specific events and criminal acts such as strikes, riots, bombings, and political conspiracy trials, and thereby privileges content and narrative, or plot, over theory, form, and abstraction. In other words, the theory of the conspiracy of capital is, like ideology itself, always narrative in form. The conspiracy of capital posed a viable solution to the intellectual and critical problem at the heart of American radicalism: How does a social movement translate a sophisticated political economic model into something the proletariat, the masses, the oppressed, the subaltern, or the people can all understand and act upon? “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways,” wrote Karl Marx in 1845; “the point is to change it.”43 You can’t win a strike simply by offering the best explanation of a complex sociohistorical system. We cannot critique exploitation and inequality into submission. So how should a social movement turn radical theory into political change? The answer for the Haymarket generation was “the conspiracy of capital.” My arguments about the impact of conspiracy laws on American justice and the existence of political conspiracies—­whether anarchist dynamiters, Pinkerton provocateurs, or the FBI’s General Intelligence Division—­insist that the conspiracy theories in this era have real, material, even institutional sources. Yet since the 1960s, American historians have persistently associated conspiracy theories with a distinctive political pathology that they unscientifically label “paranoia.” The most enduring expression of this interpretation comes from an essay titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first delivered as a lecture at Oxford University by the American historian Richard Hofstadter on the day before the assassination of President Kennedy.44 This essay (not unlike the murder in Dallas) set off a substantial debate among many of America’s most prominent historians and political thinkers, the terms of which continue to preoccupy political discourse. For Hofstadter, the “paranoid style” evidenced a “style of mind” found

24  Introduction

in social movements throughout U.S. history, evoking the “qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.” According to Hofstadter, “the central preconception” of the paranoid style was “the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.” The paranoid style, in Hofstadter’s examples, does not simply fixate on devious crimes or political plots, but claims knowledge of an explicitly totalizing variety. The political paranoid believes in “a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy,” writes Hofstadter, “set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendental power.” And though he makes no claims to offer a “clinical” definition of paranoia, he does describe the paranoid style as evidence of a “political pathology” that appears to be “all but ineradicable,” with a “greater affinity for bad causes than good.”45 Hofstadter’s argument, explicitly pathologizing largely right-­wing mass social movements, helped give intellectual shape to mid-­twentieth-­ century American liberalism. Merging the traditions of an antifascist European critical theory with an anticommunist Cold War American pluralism, Hofstadter’s work stood alongside that of Daniel Bell, David Brion Davis, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Allport, and Seymour Martin Lipset, among others, in what came to be known as the “consensus” school of American historiography. Taken together, this approach to the cultural history of predominantly nativist, anti-­Semitic, and xenophobic mass movements employed an explicitly “pejorative” political psychology to mark off, and effectively cast out, the intellectual content of radical social movements as the work of what these theorists called “extremists.” The effect of this psycho-­political marginalization is to effectively redraw the traditional, linear left-­to-­right political spectrum into a circle. Under the postwar psychology of paranoia, fascists and communists, radical Left and Right, merged as “totalitarians,” and a rational, liberal democratic capitalism stood as what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the “vital center.”46 For the consensus school, tolerating paranoid social movements on the fringes of society was the necessary price to pay for an open, liberal society at the center.47 In this sense, Hofstadter and his story of paranoia

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  25

is a vision of American exceptionalism par excellence, deliberately marginalizing the realities of ruling-­class power and white supremacist violence for the sake of imagining a nation built on class mobility, melting pot whiteness, and national unity. “Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict,” claims Hofstadter, “it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.”48 This is an assessment, offered as the first line of the “Paranoid Style” essay—­that few in the ranks of capital or labor (let alone labor historians) could possibly agree with. Despite the enduring influence of Hofstadter’s essay, its most obvious flaw provides its deepest insight, namely, that conspiracy theories, especially right-­wing conspiracy theories, do not exclusively populate the extremist margins of American politics and history. Rather, the most dangerous conspiracy theories in American politics emerge from the very center of power, in which white supremacist, anticommunist, and anti-­terrorist ideologies, each defined by shifting fears of subversive conspiracies, are promoted and enacted by presidents, business leaders, military men, judges, prosecutors, police, and vigilantes. The greatest source of conspiracy theories in American history is not marginal groups like the Populists or 9/11 truthers but the centralized authority of the state itself. This question has been theorized by the political scientist Michael Paul Rogin as “the countersubversive tradition.”49 Rogin’s body of work, beginning with his seminal critique of Hofstadter and pluralism in The Intellectuals and McCarthy and completed in Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology, offers a history and theory of “political demonology” to call attention “to the creation of monsters as a continuing feature of American politics by the inflation, stigmatization and dehumanization of political foes.” The horrors of what Rogin calls “the dream-­life that so often dominates American politics” are easily listed as they shape our national identity and periodize our history: “the Indian cannibal, the black rapist, the papal whore of Babylon, the monster-­hydra United States Bank, the demon rum, the bomb-­throwing anarchist, the many-­tentacled Communist conspiracy, the agents of international terrorism.” Such fears are promulgated not by fringe

26  Introduction

extremists but by presidents, political candidates, newspaper editors, and business leaders who name the subversive enemy, attach personal anxieties to political projects, and direct the repressive apparatus. “The demonologist splits the world in two,” writes Rogin, “attributing magical, pervasive power to a conspiratorial center of evil. Fearing chaos and secret penetration the countersubversive interprets local initiatives as signs of alien power. . . . The countersubversive needs monsters to give shape to his anxieties and to permit him to indulge his forbidden desires. Demonization allows the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate his enemy.”50 This is why the Ku Klux Klan dresses in papal vestments, the John Birch Society organizes itself in communist-­ like secret cells, urban police behave like street gangs, democratically elected conservatives hate government, and Islamophobes adopt ISIS terror tactics. Or in the words of philosopher Theodor Adorno, “Those who persistently blame others for indulging in conspiracies have a strong tendency to engage in plots themselves.”51 As the subject of countersubversive representations, workers and radicals understood that the class struggle includes a struggle over meanings and images. In a cartoon appearing on the front page of The Irish World & American Industrial Liberator in 1879 (fig. 6), we see an allegorical tableau of representation with labor and capital sitting in an artist’s studio. The handsome aproned mechanic finds himself before the capitalist artist, brush in hand, moneybag for a head, and treasury bonds poking out of his pocket. In line with his completed paintings hanging on the back wall of “Miss Corporation” and “Might Makes Right,” the capitalist artist has literally demonized the mechanic, complete with horns, fangs, and pointed ears. “Since the public may judge of me from your picture, Mr. Capital,” the workingman pleads, “be careful to make it a true one.” To which the “Truthful Artist” simply lies: “I shall not misrepresent you, sir.” The lessons for the working class are clear: the corrupting influence of money is found not just in politics and the courts but in the press, in art, and across the whole field of culture and representation. This cartoon reminds its readers why unions and the Left needed representations of their own, why they needed a popular radical press and visual culture that could present their own self-­image, declare their innocence when accused, and expose the countersubversive logic of capitalist culture. In this way, the Haymarket

Figure 6. “The Wonders of Art,” The Irish World & American Industrial Liberator, February 1, 1879.

28  Introduction

generation recognized and contested the conspiracy of capital’s cultural authority alongside its legal, political, and economic power. Countersubversion is a critical, if irrational, element in the ideology of conservatism. “For that is what conservatism is,” writes the political theorist Corey Robin, “a meditation on—­and theoretical rendition of—­ the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”52 Countersubversion is about seeing (or, perhaps more appropriately, feeling) the personal threat to power and championing the reactionary violence necessary to retain it. The countersubversive locates the fundamental flaw of American political institutions in their democratic potential, working hard to contain democratic expressions and curtail civil liberties in the name of freedom, property, and elite white patriarchal rule. By bringing the countersubversive tradition into the foreground of our analysis and combining it with the political history of the conspiracy doctrine, we recognize that the greatest purveyors of violence in America, the greatest threat to our rights and freedoms, are not subversives and rebels but those who oppose them. Equipped with an understanding of the dialectics of conspiracy, animated by the opposing ideologies of the conspiracy of capital and the countersubversive tradition, we can gain new insights into some of the most contested aspects of American history. What this history reveals is that the essential freedoms Americans have fought for and won—­the freedom of speech, the right to form legal unions, to claim our civil liberties and civil rights—­all had to be demanded by popular social movements in the ongoing, sometimes overt, though often unrecognized struggle over the meaning of conspiracy. A culture of popular radicalism, such as that studied in this book, therefore emerges out of the gap between our ideals of American democracy and its actual practice, between our desire to believe that we live in an exceptional America and our dangerous, even uncanny knowledge that we do not. In this sense, contrary to Alexis de Tocqueville’s optimism—­“In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies”53—­it has been the actual practices of capitalism, white supremacy, political repression, and state secrecy within our democracy that have long been the source of conspiracy theories rather than their antidote. •

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  29

This book is therefore less about conspiracy theories than conspiracy laws, something that Hofstadter and his students never imagined. Thus this book does not just trace the history of the legal conspiracy doctrine in U.S. history; it also considers how the enforcement of conspiracy laws dangerously politicized the criminal justice system in the Age of Monopoly, setting the terms for generations of political conflict between labor and capital, civil liberties and “national security.” Spanning the 1870s to the 1920s, it offers a new history of radicalism in this era while generating a serious reconsideration of the politics of conspiracy and the limits of democracy in America’s first Age of Monopoly. Chapter 1 begins with the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and the early career of labor lawyer Clarence Darrow to introduce the history of conspiracy laws in the Age of Monopoly. Starting with Darrow’s personal involvement with the Haymarket case helps us understand how the bombing, trial, and execution of the Haymarket “martyrs” inspired a generation of revolutionaries, compelling radicals to challenge the conspiracy doctrine that led to the execution of their leaders while denouncing the capitalist system as a conspiracy against the toiling masses. In tracing Darrow’s critique of the conspiracy doctrine, this chapter covers the period between the Haymarket bombing and the 1894 Pullman strike and injunction, in which Eugene V. Debs—­perhaps the central figure of the Haymarket generation—­invented industrial unionism, shut down all railroad traffic in the nation, went to jail on a conspiracy conviction, and became a socialist, while Darrow left his corporate job to uncover the secret history of the conspiracy laws. Chapter 2 turns to the history of the socialist press, the Kansas-­based Appeal to Reason in particular, and its coverage of three major bombing cases in the West. Founded in 1895, the Appeal to Reason helped mark the transition from Populism to socialism before applying the techniques of the modern commercial press to sell the cause of socialism to middle America. This chapter focuses especially on a group of journalist-­detectives—­“the war correspondents for the class war”—­who wrote for the Appeal and other popular radical papers and helped build the massive legal defense campaign around these bombing cases. The first bombing occurred amidst the ongoing “mining wars” in the Colorado Rockies. The second bombing killed the former governor of Idaho

30  Introduction

and led to the first (of many) “trial(s) of the century” in which Darrow defended the head of the Western Federation of Miners and the founder of the IWW, Big Bill Haywood. Finally, we look at the bombing of the Los Angeles Times in 1910, a catastrophe for the Left that began with the deaths of twenty workers at the anti-­union paper. In each case, members of the radical press came to believe that not only could they save the lives of their accused brothers, but also that such trials, and the dangerous knowledge of capitalist conspiracies they exposed, had the potential to put the capitalist system itself on trial and spark a revolution. Chapter 3 considers the history of the Industrial Workers of the World, a militant, syndicalist labor union with an exuberant culture that made it the most conspired-­against of all the Haymarket generation’s social movements. This chapter introduces us to the culture of the IWW by focusing on its visions of the capitalist enemy. Starting with the history of how the “Wobblies” got their nickname, this chapter follows the organization through its biggest triumph in the Bread and Roses strike of 1912 (complete with a failed plot by one of America’s richest textile barons to plant bombs on the organization), and into the period of its violent repression, including the making of two Wobbly martyrs, Joe Hill and Frank Little, and ending with the mass trial of the IWW’s national leadership during World War I. Chapter 4 offers a history of the Red Scare and the dialectic of law and terror that enabled the violent destruction of the Haymarket generation. Beginning with the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco in 1916 and ending with the Wall Street bombing of 1920, this chapter maps the combination of legal repression and mob violence that socialists, Wobblies, and black radicals came to call “the Ku Klux Government.” The final chapter provides a conclusion that seeks to account for the long-­term influences and impact of this struggle on American history, from the debate over why there is no socialism in America, to the institutionalization of civil liberties and anticommunism, to the threat of an American fascism. This chapter ends with a brief intellectual history, from the work of anti-­radical Progressive intellectuals like Walter Lippmann to Richard Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style” essay, which chronicles the growing discursive disrepute of conspiracy theories among

“The Conspiracy of Capital”  31

America’s traditional intellectuals while marking how the politics of conspiracy shifted in the twentieth century from struggles over political crimes to a discourse on political fantasies. The cultural politics of conspiracy and the radicalism of the Haymarket generation both seem to me worthy objects of ongoing inquiry. Though the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party, Anarchist International, and black revolutionaries failed to bring down corporate personhood and plutocratic government, the popular radicalism of the Age of Monopoly is worth reconsidering if for no other reason than that it won over so many supporters and came to life through so many voices, images, and ideas. The Haymarket generation presented the greatest domestic threat to the undisputed rule of corporate capitalism and state violence in the United States since the end of the Civil War. In spite of its defeat in the long Red Scare of 1916–­1927, the spirit of the Haymarket generation and its battles for the right to strike, for free speech, and for socialist revolution resonates through to the present in the legacy of civil liberties, private detectives and vigilante violence, government surveillance, financial manipulation, and the corruption of democracy by corporate power. There is no telling when this lost history will rise again as part of a usable past, flashing upon history’s stage again in a moment of need. Such was the surprise shared by many when the world saw century-­old images of the conspiracy of capital animating the Occupy movement. Marching on May Day 2011 in the Oakland general strike, one might have come to recognize the many ways in which the Haymarket generation still has something to teach us about class, resistance, and the conspiracy of capital.

Chapter 1

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny” Clarence Darrow, the Haymarket Generation, and the Secret History of Conspiracy Law The reformers of this world have always led the lawyers of the world. —Clarence Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy” (1898)

“If there are still any citizens interested in protecting human liberty, let them study the conspiracy laws of the United States,” wrote Clarence Darrow in his 1932 autobiography. “They have grown apace in the last forty years until today no one’s liberty is safe.” Conspiracy, as a legally defined criminal act, finds its origins as a doctrine of the common law, meaning it belongs to a category of law developed by judges through decisions and precedent in court as opposed to statutory or civil laws created by legislatures. This is in part why the criminal conspiracy laws have been so controversial in the United States and why Darrow spent much of his life campaigning against them. On principle, Darrow hated laws that created more criminals, and he denounced the ways “the conspiracy laws magnify misdemeanors into serious felonies.” To dramatize this 32

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny”   33

feature of conspiracy laws to juries, Darrow liked to tell a hypothetical story in which a boy caught for stealing a dime might face a small fine, but if two boys make a plan to steal a dime—­even if they don’t actually carry out the theft—­“then both of them could be sent to the penitentiary as conspirators.”1 Well before he became best known as the lawyer played by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 film version of Inherit the Wind—­a play based on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial”—­Clarence Darrow was a hero to the American labor movement. Here was a man who had given up a lucrative career as a railroad corporation lawyer and political up-­and-­comer in the Democratic Party in Chicago to side with the working class and become the “defender of labor’s cause.” Darrow earned his reputation as “attorney for the damned” the hard way, by standing for the defense alongside many of the Age of Monopoly’s most abject and celebrated defendants, including the deranged assassin of the mayor of Chicago in 1894 and the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in 1924 (think Hitchcock’s Rope). But second only to his opposition to the death penalty, Darrow led a national campaign against the conspiracy laws and their widespread use to suppress dissent. It was in this anti-­conspiracy work, most prominently while standing in defense of labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs and Big Bill Haywood, that Darrow made his deepest mark on the history of the American Left. For Darrow, the centrality of the conspiracy doctrine and criminal conspiracy in American labor law and civil liberties cases revealed nothing less than the persistence of feudalism. “This crime began in the Star Chamber courts,” claimed Darrow, concluding, “It is a serious reflection on America that this worn-­out piece of tyranny should find a home in our country.” But hope was not lost, even for one of America’s great pessimists. Massive popular resistance to conspiracy laws and trials, coupled with legislative reform could yet democratize this medievalism shaping the boundary between legal political organizing and a criminal conspiracy. “These conspiracy laws,” pleaded Darrow, “made by the courts, have gone so far that they can never be changed except through a general protest by liberty-­loving men and women.”2 By the start of the twentieth century, Clarence Darrow had not only become the

34  Chapter 1

most famous radical lawyer in America but also convinced many that there was something dangerously unjust about the conspiracy doctrine. “When they want a working man for anything excepting work,” joked Darrow, “they want him for conspiracy.”3 Following Darrow’s early career, this chapter takes up the history of the common law doctrine of conspiracy and its formative entanglement with labor rights and radical social movements in the nineteenth century. I begin with the 1886 Haymarket bombing to consider how the riot and its subsequent trial gave shape to a generation of labor and radical social movements. For Darrow and the rest of the radicals in the Age of Monopoly—­even for those born well after 1886—­the Haymarket affair was the defining moment of their generation, the animating narrative of law and violence that set in motion the era’s dialectics of conspiracy. On the basis of his experience with the Haymarket case, Darrow focused his legal study on the conspiracy doctrine and its role in serving the interests of the powerful. Because of the way in which the conspiracy doctrine collectivized guilt and responsibility, often explicitly pitting organized labor against organized capital in a courtroom, Darrow came to understand these cases as not just criminal trials “but an episode in the great battle for human liberty.”4 Tracing the arc of Darrow’s critique, I unpack of the history of the conspiracy doctrine in American labor law starting with the formative 1806 Philadelphia Cordwainers case. In his courtroom defense of striking workers in an 1898 strike, Darrow dug deeper still into the secret history of the conspiracy doctrine—­a medieval English law designed to protect the innocent from malicious prosecution—­and use it to accuse the prosecution, the courts, and powerful monopolists of conspiring against the union. In this way, Darrow helped innovate the Haymarket generation’s legal defense theory, a strategy of using the conspiracy doctrine to turn the prosecution on its head and to turn the conspiracy trial into a major front of class struggle. The chapter ends with the Pullman strike of 1894 and the birth of the legal injunction filed to break the strike. The trial of the arrested union leaders radicalized both Darrow and his most famous client, the founder of the first industrial union and future leader of the Socialist

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny”   35

Party, Eugene Victor Debs. Extending his argument from the courtroom to the culture of popular radicalism, Darrow articulated the Haymarket generation’s challenge to the class biases of the legal system and the countersubversive tradition by naming a conspiracy of capital that manipulated the democratic state and judicial system for private interests. In so doing, Darrow helped shape the Left’s vision of freedom of speech and civil liberties by turning the law and courtroom struggles against the conspiracy doctrine into the front line of the class struggle. HAYMARKET AND THE MAKING OF A RADICAL GENERATION The Haymarket generation began on May Day. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers across the nation—­including nearly eighty thousand workers in Chicago alone—­went out on strike for the eight-­ hour day, the goal of organized labor since the end of the Civil War. On that first May Day the “Eight Hour Song” rang out from New York to San Francisco: “eight hours for work / eight hours for play / eight hours for what we will.” Chicago was the undisputed center of this “Great Uprising,” the nation’s fastest-­growing industrial city built upon Philip D. Armour’s meatpacking plants, Cyrus H. McCormick Jr. and George M. Pullman’s factories, Marshall Field’s department stores, and the innumerable granaries, sawmills, and railroad yards operated by hundreds of thousands of often shockingly immiserated workers. The city became a hotbed for all manner of working-­class organizing, including skilled trade unions that formed their own rifle companies, the expanding ranks of the High and Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, and the small but committed anarchists of the International Working People’s Association formed in 1884.5 These groups shared a vision of an American socialism, a “cooperative commonwealth” run by independent producers freed from the feudal organization and wage slavery of American capitalism. Each movement and faction had its own particular path to this future, ranging from electoral politics to currency or legal reform, strikes and boycotts, worker education and propaganda. What distinguished the anarchists of Chicago from the rest of these movements was their explicit

36  Chapter 1

rejection of any reformist or electoral strategies. They openly advocated violent direct action and conspiracy, especially in the use of dynamite in what anarchists called the attentat, or “propaganda of the deed.” Dynamite, many anarchists believed, could serve as a means to force class conflict, to strike a blow against the capitalist enemy and possibly spark a workers’ uprising to destroy capitalism.6 Despite this tactical schism between the insurrectionary anarchists and the more reform-­oriented party and union activists, all of these groups came together in 1886 to back the general strike. The strike held firm for three days, with the owners of several factories agreeing to worker demands, before tension broke out in a riot at the gates of the McCormick Reaper Works during which two workingmen were killed. That evening, the most militant anarchists in Chicago met in the basement of Greif ’s Hall, a local German saloon, to plan the next day’s events and issue printed circulars calling for “Revenge!” and urging “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!” The next night, as light rain fell on Desplaines Street, around the nearby corner to the wide section of Randolph Street known as Haymarket Square, the rally initially appeared disorganized. It started late, some speakers could not be found, and the drizzle dampened spirits. There were radical speeches, yes, but no sign of armed groups or hints of violence. The mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, who feared the escalation of tensions in the city, attended the rally, waved to the crowd and told the police captain that the rally was winding down on its own. But as the mayor left, several rows of police marched out of the Desplaines Street Station down the block, and their captain gave the order for the crowd to disperse. “But we are peaceable,” protested Samuel Fielden, the English-­born anarchist then speaking from the back of a freight wagon, before acceding to police orders and announcing, “All right, we will go.”7 But at that moment, just as many felt the tension had passed, all eyes in the square looked up to see a hissing, burning object arc out of a dark alleyway and into the night air. The bomb hit the street in the midst of the police ranks, bounced on the paving stones, and exploded, instantly killing Officer Mathias Degan. Between the shrapnel and the smoke and the efforts of the police to return fire upon an unseen enemy, seven

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny”   37

police officers and at least three civilians died that night, with scores more injured.8 To this day, no one knows for sure who threw the bomb in Haymarket Square or what their explicit intention was. Yet because no event, no matter how dramatic or singular, ever speaks for itself, because no bomb can tell us what its intentions are nor bind us to its particular perspective, the cultural battle to decide what the bomb meant and who was responsible began before the smoke cleared on Haymarket Square. Dynamite—­ invented by Alfred Nobel in 1876—­served as both an industrial tool and an ideological weapon of the class war, with hundreds of bombs exploding across the world, regularly shattering isolated mining camps and crowded city streets alike. The instantaneity of a bomb’s explosive expansion—­spraying burning gases and shrapnel in every direction—­ not only destroys life but also sets off a cultural struggle. While a bomb may make a lot of noise, it cannot speak. No bomb makes its own confession; no explosion tells its own story. Political actors—­from those who light the fuse to those whose lives are torn apart, those who investigate the scene and the ones who ultimately face criminal accusations—­are the people who must make the bomb talk. But it is always a ventriloquist act in that they can only make the bomb speak in their own voices. Extending out from the physical destruction, bombs in the Age of Monopoly set off cultural conflicts shaped by the dialectics of conspiracy, in which the standing political conflicts that predate the detonation—­the war of position between organized labor and organized capital—­are suddenly thrown into a fluid war of maneuver in which the power to narrate, to accuse, and to enforce one’s interpretation of the bombing is of the greatest consequence. Judgments of criminal conspiracy and political plots are often made in an instant, setting up legal conflicts that can last decades and historical controversies that are in some cases without end. And while a bomb often has the power to wipe out the prehistory of its moment—­or at least reduce that past into a police procedural or trial by media—­it remains for the contending social forces, temporarily disorganized and reorganized by the blast, to fight over what these events mean in the press, in the streets, and in the courtroom. Consider, for example, what is the single most famous image of the

38  Chapter 1

Haymarket bombing, Thure de Thulstrup’s engraving that appeared less than two weeks later in Harper’s Weekly (fig. 7). The image depicts a sequence of events—­a militant speaker addressing a crowd, the police charge, the bomb’s detonation, a gun battle in the streets—­as happening simultaneously. While this makes for a dramatic image, firmly set within the conventions of nineteenth-­century pictorial reporting,9 it powerfully supports the police and prosecution theory of the event by suggesting that it was the anarchists’ speech, their incendiary words, that set off the explosion of violence. The man standing on the platform to the left is the only viable candidate for the bomb thrower, his arm raised in a gesture that combines rhetorical excess and physical threat. The image suggests that the speaker ordered or called upon the bomb, fusing radical speech and radical violence in a way that marks anarchist intellectuals as terrorists. What we see is a surprisingly literal depiction of “shouting fire in a crowded theater” some thirty-­three years before Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established this phrase as the legal test for protecting and limiting free speech in Schenck v. United States in 1919. An image like this one did not simply depict what occurred in this moment; it narrated the event in such a way as to assign blame by tying radical ideas to violent acts. Expanding outward from the dead and wounded in the square, the bomb’s political impact spread across America. Everyone, from victims and radical sympathizers to policemen and newspaper editors, interpreted the night’s event through the lens of conspiracy, linking this singular criminal act to competing visions of political plots. According to the Chicago Police Department’s top “anarchist hunter,” Michael J. Schaack, Chicago’s ruling elites (especially the retail magnate Marshall Field) held “a strongly settled conviction that the thrower of the bomb was not simply a Guiteau-­like crank, but that there must have been a deliberate, organized conspiracy, of which [the bomb thrower] was a duly constituted agent” (fig. 8). (Charles Guiteau was the archetypal “lone nut” assassin of President James A. Garfield in 1881.) The city newspapers followed the conspiracy theory articulated by the state, attributing the bomb to an anarchist conspiracy rather than to an individual act. The Chicago Times evoked the accelerating xenophobia that framed the

Figure 7. Thure de Thulstrup, “The Haymarket Riot,” Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886.

Figure 8. Title page, Michel J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists (Chicago: F. J. Schulte & Co., 1889).

40  Chapter 1

interpretation of the anarchists on the day after the bombing: “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.”10 The Haymarket bomb sparked the largest “Red Scare” of the nineteenth century. Police raided countless pubs, meeting halls, and newspaper offices across the city, arresting all of the most prominent labor and anarchist leaders and using the bombing to break the eight-­hour strikes. “The city went insane,” wrote the labor activist Mother Jones, “and the newspapers did everything to keep it like a madhouse. The workers’ cry for justice was drowned in the shriek for revenge.”11 Haymarket broke the back of the anarchist movement and derailed the drive for the eight-­hour day for nearly fifty years. It reversed the once growing strength of the Knights of Labor and gave new life to police “Red squads” and “bomb squads” while spreading nativist anti-­radicalism.12 State legislatures passed laws expanding the conspiracy statutes, such as Illinois’s Merritt Conspiracy Act of 1887 (repealed in 1891), which turned the prosecution’s conspiracy theory into state law by declaring that speakers who “advise, encourage, aid, abet or incite a local revolution . . . shall be deemed as having conspired with the person or persons who actually commit the crime.”13 Fears of a revolutionary conspiracy spread from Haymarket Square to the rest of the world across the ever-­expanding network of railroads and telegraph lines. Scores of newspaper headlines and instant histories told in gruesome detail of subhuman, violence-­worshiping, bomb-­ throwing, Red revolutionary anarchists, transforming a local labor battle into an international event.14 Haymarket established the image of the anarchist in the American imagination as a swarthy, bearded foreigner ready to heave a spherical bomb at any icon of social stability.15 In the days and weeks that followed the bombing, the police arrested eight of the city’s leading anarchists. These men faced an indictment for conspiracy to murder Officer Degan, despite the fact that none of them could have thrown the bomb. The police claimed that they knew the identity of the bomb thrower, a man named Rudolph Schnaubelt, a well-­known anarchist who had been on the speakers’ podium during

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny”   41

the rally and who had in fact been arrested in the initial roundup. But Schnaubelt was inexplicably released by police after questioning, never to be seen again in Chicago, leading many anarchists to claim that he must have been a police spy or provocateur.16 Most of the eight men arrested and charged were not in the square at the time of the bombing, and only the weakest evidence could link several of them to the unknown and uncharged bomber. But what the murder charge finds a hindrance, the conspiracy doctrine finds a virtue. The police investigated a conspiracy, the press narrated a conspiracy, and the courts charged the eight men with being “accessories before the fact.” At the trial’s end, Judge Joseph E. Gary stretched the legal definitions of conspiracy when he gave final instructions to the jury that if it found that the defendants “by print or speech advised, or encouraged the commission of murder, without designating time, place or occasion at which it should be done, and in pursuance of, and induced by such advice and encouragement, murder was committed, then all of such conspirators are guilty of such murder, whether the person who perpetrated such murder can be identified or not.”17 Such a definition of murder, an expression of the state’s conspiracy theory of the case, nevertheless represented an expansion of the conspiracy doctrine, explicitly linking speech acts to criminal acts without an indicted (let alone convicted) criminal agent. “I am condemned to die for writing newspaper articles and making speeches,” proclaimed Michael Schwab to the court before hearing his sentence, summing up the defense’s interpretation of the judge’s conspiracy theory.18 As has been demonstrated by the historian Timothy Messer-­Kruse, these men were conspirators and armed insurrectionists, eager to radicalize the wider eight-­hour strikes into a revolutionary Chicago commune. Louis Lingg was known as a bomb maker (which was not illegal in 1886), and police found a veritable arsenal in his apartment when they arrested him. Forensic evidence submitted at trial suggested that the bomb that killed Officer Degan was metallurgically similar to those confiscated from Lingg’s apartment.19 Two of the eight (George Engel and Adolph Fischer) had organized the Monday night meeting of

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the armed groups that called for revenge; and August Spies once showed a member of the Chicago press a bomb and spoke of his willingness to use it against the police. Albert Parsons, by contrast, had very little to connect him to the bomb plot save his loyalty and solidarity. Parsons was born in Alabama and was a former Confederate cavalryman whose family ancestry extended to the Mayflower. Together with his equally revolutionary mixed-­race wife, Lucy Parsons, Albert led the American-­born anarchist groups. Though he had spoken at the Haymarket rally, leaving the square with his family well before the bomb, Parsons did not attend the Greif ’s Hall meeting the previous night (he had been addressing an eight-­hour rally in Cincinnati), and though he openly advocated for workers’ arming themselves in self-­defense, he had little enthusiasm for “bomb-­talk.” Had Parsons insisted on a separate trial instead of choosing to share the fate of his comrades by dramatically turning himself in on the first day of the trial, he would probably have been acquitted instead of becoming the Haymarket generation’s most celebrated martyr.20 During the trial of the eight men, only Lingg embraced responsibility for the bombing. The others either denied the existence of a conspiracy or, like Spies and Parsons, developed counter-­conspiracy charges of their own. In their final statements before the court, delivered before sentences were handed down, both August Spies and Michael Schwab challenged the conspiracy doctrine directly as the central issue in this case. As Spies told the jury in a speech revered by generations of his fellow insurrectionists: Upon that law every person in this country can be indicted for conspiracy, and, as the case may be, for murder. . . . But if you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement . . . then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand. You cannot understand it. You don’t believe in magical arts, as your grandfathers did, who burned witches at the stake, but you do believe in conspiracies; you believe that all these occurrences of late are the work of conspirators! You resemble the child that is looking for his picture behind the mirror. What you see, and what you try to grasp is nothing but the deceptive reflex of the stings of your bad conscience.21

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For Spies, not only were there no effective boundaries for the guilt imagined through the conspiracy doctrine, but more important, such accusations were the psychological projections of a criminal state. “Talk about a giant conspiracy!” exclaimed Michael Schwab before the court. “A movement is not a conspiracy. All we did was done in open daylight.”22 These arguments were efforts not so much to defend against the conspiracy charge as to challenge the anti-­labor logic of the conspiracy doctrine itself. The most detailed counter-­conspiracy charge came from Albert Parsons. In his long, at times rambling speech before being sentenced to death, Parsons condemned both the police riot and the trial as a “diabolical conspiracy against men’s inalienable rights.”23 Asserting his innocence, and convinced of the explicitly political nature of his persecution, Parsons proclaimed before the court, “I believe [the Haymarket bomb] was instigated by eastern monopolists to produce public sentiment against popular movements, especially the eight hour movement then pending, and that some of the Pinkertons were their tools to execute their plan.” After claiming that he and his fellow anarchists were scapegoats, Parsons presented his theory of the crime, which is worth quoting at length: The great commercial stock centers were convulsed with apprehensions of a swift decline in values if the eight hour strike succeeded. The wheels of industry remained paralyzed by the thousands of laborers who were out making the strike in favor of the eight hour movement. Something must be done to stop this movement, and it was felt that its strongest impulse was at the west, where forty thousand men were on strike for eight hours in the city of Chicago, and in order to make an example of them—­to quote the language of the Times—­as to scare them into submission, I repeat, that the men in New York, capable of making such a suggestion, are capable of carrying it out, of putting it into execution. Now, isn’t that a fair presumption? Was it not worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them annually to have it done? Pinkerton’s agency, in my opinion, contracted to carry it out; they have done such things on previous occasions. Often before have they done such things; it has been proven on them in numerous parallel cases of conspiracy to bring odium upon popular movements in all parts of the country. . . . The Pinkertons, in their circular addressed to these monopolists, said they had the men ready; they were prepared to furnish information, and they could build

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up and provide a conspiracy that would break down any contemplated effort on the part of the men to receive better pay or an improvement in their conditions. That is Pinkerton’s own circular.24

In court, Parsons’s argument got no traction and he presented no hard evidence for his claim. But outside the courtroom and the Cook County Jail, in the saloons and in the pages of the radical press, as the workers of Chicago began to return to organizing after the raids and arrests, Parsons’s argument made a lot more sense than Schaack’s. After a six-­week trial studded with legal and dramaturgical irregularities, and several major blunders by the largely inadequate defense team, the jury convicted all eight men of conspiracy to murder, and Judge Gary sentenced them to death.25 During the trial and in the years after, Gary made it quite explicit that it was both his legal reasoning and his moral judgment that the conspiracy doctrine empowered him to hang these men. “The mere fact that the defendants were members of the International,” he wrote, “of itself made them co-­conspirators with the more active members who worked publicly. The International was a combination (the technical legal term for which is conspiracy) to overturn all government by force. Whoever took part in that combination was a conspirator.”26 The courts upheld their conviction under this theory of guilt by ideological association throughout the long appeals process, including the Supreme Court. And on November 11, 1887, four men—­ George Engel, Adolph Fischer, August Spies, and Albert Parsons—­went to the gallows at the Cook County Jail. The most intransigent of the condemned, Louis Lingg, had days earlier cheated the state hangman by blowing his own head off in a gruesome suicide by biting a blasting cap that a comrade smuggled into his prison cell. Three more men—­ Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab—­had their death sentences commuted in 1887 but remained in jail until 1893, when Illinois governor John Altgeld pardoned the men, thanks in no small measure to the activism and influence of his friend Clarence Darrow. If Schaack connected the bombing to the anarchists and the union movement (again figured as a terrorist plot), and Parsons connected the bombing to the financial interests of Wall Street and the capitalist class as a whole (with Pinkerton detectives serving as the intermediary political

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plot), Governor Altgeld undid both conspiracy theories. In his statement pardoning the three surviving anarchists, issued on June 23, 1893, Altgeld offered a set of smaller conspiracies committed by the police, the prosecution, and the judge in the trial. He began by challenging both Schaack’s and Marshall Field’s assumptions of a conspiracy, concluding that whoever actually threw the bomb was most likely “simply seeking personal revenge for having been clubbed” by Police Captain John Bonfield during an otherwise lawful demonstration. If the bomber was not an anarchist, something that was assumed throughout the trial but never proved in court, then the whole conspiracy case breaks down. Altgeld focused on persistent police and prosecutorial misconduct, denouncing official wrongdoing that had already led to the execution of four men, the suicide of another, and the imprisoning of three more. “It is further shown here that much of the evidence given at the trial was a pure fabrication; that some of the prominent police officials, in their zeal, not only terrorized ignorant men,” claimed Altgeld, but also “deliberately planned to have fictitious conspiracies formed in order that they might get the glory of discovering them.”27 Though he believed it to be the right thing to do, pardoning the Haymarket anarchists ended Altgeld’s political career. To his right-­wing opponents, Altgeld was little better than an anarchist himself, siding with terrorists and attacking the good name of law and order in Chicago. “Governor Altgeld was in the way of the forces that control the world,” Darrow later explained, “and he must be destroyed.”28 There were those committed to the anarchist cause who praised the bombing and hoped that the act was the work of a fellow anarchist. “The bomb in Chicago was legally justified,” wrote Johann Most, probably the most feared anarchist in America, “and in a military sense, excellent. All honor to him who produced and made use of it.”29 Today, few historians claim to know who threw the bomb. According to Paul Avrich, the name of the bomber was known among a small circle of anarchists, including Voltairine de Cleyre, who announced in an 1899 speech: “The time has gone past when one should stand up and say, as has been said in the past, that ‘the Haymarket bomb was a police plot.’ The police never plotted anything half so just! The Haymarket bomb was the defense of

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a man who stood upon the constitutional declaration that the right of free speech, and the right of people to peaceably assemble, shall not be abridged.”30 If an anarchist conspiracy did plot the May 4 bombing, then it was imagined not as a constitutionally protected act of free speech but as an attempt at violent insurrection. The experience of the trial, labor defense, and execution was always the more important event for the emergent Haymarket generation, shaping its focus on the legal conspiracy doctrine and away from the history of revolutionary insurrection. Whatever the truth may be (I tend to agree with Emma Goldman’s and Paul Avrich’s conclusion that an anarchist threw the bomb), what is clear is that the cultural power of Haymarket’s conspiracy stories was far greater—­and politically more useful to both sides—­than any formal investigation to find the singular bomber. The struggle for justice waged around Haymarket, and in every major political conspiracy trial that followed, was a cultural and political battle over the power to define and narrate the dangerously malleable conspiracy doctrine. Power in this arena means the ability to shift interpretive horizons away from the evidence of a singular criminal act in order to connect it to a larger political plot. It is for this reason—­the narrative indeterminacy, the projection of the cultural over the empirical, and the mutability of the conspiracy doctrine itself—­that Haymarket persists in the memory of social movements, requiring constant revision, revisitation, and remuneration. These are the stories that shape movements, mark struggles, create heroes, villains, and martyrs, and, in this case, drive the modern dialectics of conspiracy for a generation. The impact of the Haymarket bomb on the lives of radicals like Darrow, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Art Young, and countless others can only be described as transformative, opening the eyes of many from all areas of American life to the harsh biases of the justice system, revealing the powerful influence of capitalist interests over the state, and converting many to the cause of revolutionary socialism. The trial, amnesty campaign, and long history of radical commemorations of the event gave shape to all future labor defense strategies. So too, did the date inaugurating the original strike—­May Day—­which became an international day to celebrate labor

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny”   47

solidarity and anti-capitalist organizing, remembering all those who gave their lives in the name of class struggle.31 The living memory of Haymarket provided the radical movement with a source of “revolutionary nostalgia,” which, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”32 No other event from the nineteenth century created such an impact on this post–­Civil War generation of radicals and dissenters. “They were the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,” proclaimed Debs in 1898, “and one of the supreme duties of our civilization . . . is to rescue their names from calumny and do justice to their memory.”33 For Debs, the task of rescuing the memory of the martyrs remained a fundamental goal of the labor and radical movements. “Twenty years have passed since these leaders of labor paid the penalty of their loyalty,” recalled Debs, “and marvelous have been the changes in public sentiment since that day. They would not now be executed under the same circumstances. The workers of today are too far advanced, too well organized and too conscious of their class interests and duties to submit to such a monstrous outrage.”34 Debs understood the memory of Haymarket as a unifying force, bringing together all the various strains of the popular radical movement under the banner of common memory. The cartoonist Art Young’s conversion to socialism happened gradually, crystallized around the events of the Haymarket bombing. Young was an editorial cartoonist in Chicago in 1886, and he clung to his paper’s belief that the anarchists were part of a conspiracy to destroy civilization. “My social awareness remained undeveloped,” he wrote. “I had no perspective on the human conflict, and had not found out how to connect up an effect with its underlying cause.” Yet Young got very close to the case, traveling to Joliet Prison, where he drew dignified portraits of the eight men just days before Ling’s suicide and the execution of Engel, Fischer, Spies, and Parsons (fig. 9). Years later, Young expressed deep regret for his political ignorance during the Haymarket trial and for his attacks (at his editor’s instructions) on Governor Altgeld’s pardon.

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Altgeld’s death in 1902 proved a catalyst for Young, leading him to reread the pardon statement, from which he concluded that as a newspaper cartoonist he had contributed not only to the state’s murder of the Haymarket martyrs but to the political destruction of the honorable Altgeld as well.35 Haymarket prompted Young, at the age of thirty-­six, to reevaluate the whole of his life and art. “Born bourgeois, my brain had been filled from infancy with the nonsense of super-­patriotism, with the lily-­white virtues of imperialism added in due time,” wrote Young. “I had been a drifter, innocent and sheep-­minded long enough.”36 Though he was a bit slow on the uptake, Haymarket provoked Young’s conversion to socialism in middle age, a cause to which he dedicated his life until his death in 1943. Haymarket transformed the global anarchist movement. For a young Emma Goldman, only recently arrived in the United States from her native Russia, the events in Chicago sparked her conversion to the radical cause. In an extraordinary passage in the opening pages of her autobiography, Living My Life, Goldman described this conversion: I was put to bed and soon I fell into a deep sleep. The next morning I woke as from a long illness. . . . I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic deaths.37

Haymarket became a kind of religion for the anarchist and radical movements, breeding revelations and conversions to the cause. “For every drop of blood you spilled on that November day,” proclaimed Voltairine de Cleyre in 1901, “you made an anarchist.”38 The Haymarket widows became the most prominent radical women in America, especially Lucy Parsons, who carried the memory of her martyred husband forward to bless new causes and struggles.39 A monument erected in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, completed in 1893, continues to be a pilgrimage site where the remains of dozens of prominent radicals have been interred next to the men whose sacrifice inspired them. For the anarchists of the twentieth century, the image of Haymarket continually reappears as a warning for the movement to be on guard against future provocations and other

“This Worn-­Out Piece of Tyranny”   49

Figure 9. Art Young, “The Condemned Anarchists as They Appear in Jail,” Chicago Daily News, November 11, 1887, reprinted in Art Young: His Life and Times, ed. John Nicholas Beffel (New York: Sheridan House, 1939).

conspiracies against the revolutionary working class. “If the Chicago tragedy had accomplished nothing more than to clarify the function of capital and the true role of government,” wrote Alexander Berkman in 1912, “the martyrdom of our comrades has not been in vain.”40 DARROW, CONSPIRACY, AND JUDICIAL REPRESSION Darrow was one of those touched directly by the Haymarket tragedy. Still a small-­town lawyer in Ohio when the bomb exploded, Darrow was inexorably drawn to these events and moved his wife and son to Chicago in the spring of 1887 while the bomb’s blast waves still reverberated

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throughout the city. But as with Emma Goldman, there was something in Darrow that wanted, or even needed, the transformation sparked by the Haymarket bomb. Clarence Seward Darrow was born in a small town in Trumbull County, Ohio, in 1857. His father, the primary iconoclastic influence in his life, failed as a minister after he and his wife became abolitionists and freethinkers; openly espousing atheism, he took up a career as a furniture maker and undertaker. In his time, Clarence came to espouse all manner of highly unpopular opinions, beginning with a deep affection for the insurrectionary abolitionism of John Brown, the rational atheism of Robert Ingersoll, positions against the death penalty (which he saw as first-­degree murder by the state), African American rights (including the highly charged right to intermarry with whites), women’s suffrage and emancipation, as well as Irish and Hawaiian independence. Writing of his youth, Darrow recalls: “I had little respect for the opinion of the crowd. My instinct was to doubt the majority view. My father . . . taught me to question rather than accept. He never thought that the fear of God was the beginning of wisdom. I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.”41 In school, Darrow excelled in debate and developed a love of politics, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire, all rather unusual inclinations in a small farming town. In 1872 Darrow spent one year at his father’s alma mater, Allegheny College, and later did one year of law school at the University of Michigan before completing his legal study under a local lawyer in Ohio. In 1922 he joined the Ohio bar at the age of twenty-­two and opened a practice in Youngstown.42 In these early years his intellectual curiosity only grew, drawing Darrow closer to the cause of social justice. Henry George’s 1879 reformist blockbuster Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with the Increase of Wealth left a large impression on Darrow, inculcating a sense not only of the political-­economic reality of class conflict but also of the fundamental contradictions of the Age of Monopoly, in that growing wealth and industrial progress seemed only to create wider and deeper poverty among the mass of the population. To this problem George offered up

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the idea of a “single tax” on land rent to encourage the redistribution of land and thereby solve the problem of poverty in America. George’s idea sparked a wave of “single tax” clubs and reformist campaigns which Darrow joined. The other major influence was a treatise on criminal justice, Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims (1884) by John Altgeld. “This book and the author,” recalled Darrow, “came to have a marked influence upon me and my future.”43 Altgeld argued that the criminal justice system in the United States had become more dangerous to society than crime itself, driving families into poverty, hardening petty crooks into dangerous criminals, and bankrupting the state in the name of mass incarceration. The twin causes of economic justice and criminal justice reform took root in Darrow’s mind, growing into an early ambition for a political career. Drawn to Chicago by these ambitions, as soon as he moved to the Windy City Darrow talked his way into a prison house visit with the eight condemned men. “As I had never seen an anarchist before coming to Chicago and had heard so much of these, I was naturally very anxious to see them,” wrote Darrow in a long letter to a newspaperman back in Ohio. “They are a good looking intelligent lot of men,” he noted with a hint of surprise, given what he had read about them in the papers. “At first they were not inclined to talk, but after assuring them that ‘I was something of a crank myself,’ although ‘I knew nothing about dynamite,’” reports Darrow, “they entered freely into conversation.” By the end of their encounter, Darrow was no closer to becoming an anarchist, but he did show sympathy for Parsons’s claim that “wealth is so strong that it controls legislatures and elections,” leaving the jail with the impression that “they are very intelligent, earnest men and I could not help feeling sorry for them.” Legally, the key issue for Darrow was freedom of speech. If radicals could be charged with conspiracy for speaking in favor of certain tactics that unconnected others then put into practice, Darrow argued, “the establishment of such a doctrine would be a vital blow at freedom of speech and of the press, and far more dangerous to human liberty and happiness than all the fool speeches ever made in America.”44 To the end of his days Darrow felt that “the trial was unfair and the judgement of

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the court unsound,” that it represented an abuse of the conspiracy statute to silence militant workers, all before a judge motivated by “malice and hatred.”45 On the basis of his experience with Haymarket, Darrow turned to the study of the conspiracy doctrine. Although it is at least four hundred years old in its current form, the doctrine still defies any easy effort at definition, let alone consistent application in courts of law. In his concurring opinion in the case of Krulewitch v. United States, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor at the postwar Nazi conspiracy trials at Nuremberg, described the criminal conspiracy charge as “that elastic, sprawling and pervasive offense,” further claiming that “the modern crime of conspiracy is so vague that it almost defies definition.”46 The conspiracy doctrine, understood as a framework or legal tests established by judges through precedent, has consistently remained the subject of much controversy and contention in the legal literature. At its most basic, the doctrine deals with the potential for surplus social harm done by collective as opposed to individual action. And it asserts that it is the agreement, the combination itself, and not the intended crime that constitutes “the gist of the offense, though nothing be done in pursuance of it.” This places the crime of conspiracy in the class of “inchoate” crimes, or crimes that can be interrupted and prosecuted for being in process, under contemplation, merely planned, or otherwise left incomplete, and all without evidence of an “overt act.” (Attempt and solicitation are other varieties of inchoate crimes.) Famously labeled by then Circuit Court judge Learned Hand as “the darling of the prosecutor’s nursery,” conspiracy doctrine stands as a kind of “state of exception” within the criminal law itself, a charge that allows for a whole range of criminal proceedings against groups that could never be charged against an individual.47 There are many such peculiarities to the conspiracy doctrine, even in the abstract. For example, all those indicted for conspiracy need not know one another to be guilty of conspiring together. There is no need for evidence of any formal agreement for one to be indicted, as a “tacit understanding” or “unity of design” is considered a sufficient standard to constitute a conspiracy. Nor does it matter if the conspiracy is secret or enacted in full public view for it to be an indictable offense. Another

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of the guiding principles of the conspiracy doctrine—­one essential to the Haymarket case—­is that each member of the conspiracy is guilty of all the offenses committed by any of the members of the conspiracy, and at any time (even before one joined the conspiracy or after one left it), in what amounts to a literal doctrine of guilt by association. Criminal conspiracy charges often enable, if not require, far looser evidentiary rules than usual, such as the admission of hearsay evidence in conspiracy cases. For example, statements like “he told me that she said . . .” is inadmissible evidence in most criminal cases as hearsay or third-­party conversation; whereas in a conspiracy case, a statement like “he told me that they said . . .” is perfectly admissible evidence of conspiracy. Lastly, as with Darrow and his dime-­stealing juveniles, conspiracy charges often carry far harsher penalties than would the contemplated offense, up to and including the death penalty suffered by the Haymarket anarchists. In this sense, conspiracy laws are capable of criminalizing a state of mind, membership in a political organization, or expressions of political belief. Controversy persists over how broadly or narrowly to interpret these already loose rules. Should conspiracies be indictable only when the action contemplated is itself a crime such as theft, murder, or assault? Should acts that are merely unlawful for individuals—­such as creating a nuisance, trespass, or fraud—­become far greater criminal acts under the conspiracy doctrine? While these challenges abound, the position that has held sway since the first labor conspiracy case in 1806, as it does to this day, is the most expansive one, asserting that it is the agreement itself rather than the act that provides the basis for prosecution.48 These significant controversies surrounding the legal theory only multiply when we look at the history of the conspiracy doctrine’s use in the American courts beginning in the early nineteenth century. The political scientist Victoria Hattam has argued that it was the courts, as opposed to the legislatures, that took the lead in opposing and containing worker organizing, and that “the primary mechanism through which American courts regulated working-­class organization during the nineteenth century was the common law doctrine of criminal conspiracy.”49 For example, while it is perfectly legal for workers to ask their boss for a pay raise, to quit their job, or to refuse to patronize a non-­union shop, under the court’s interpretation of the conspiracy doctrine it was a criminal act

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for workers to ask their boss for a raise as a group, to all quit at the same time, or to organize a boycott, a picket line, or a sympathy strike. “They got busy with injunctions, with conspiracy laws,” denounced Darrow, “and there was scarcely anything that a labor organization could do that was not an industrial conspiracy.”50 By contrast, combinations by shop masters and employers to suppress workers’ wages, impose lockouts, enforce blacklists, to combine in industrial associations, hire private detectives and strikebreakers, or merge into vast trusts and corporations were all looked upon kindly by the courts. In many cases, the courts granted combinations of ruling elites extra protections from the law. “The real industrial conspiracies are by the other fellow,” Darrow told a raucous crowd in Portland in 1913. “It is strange that the people who have no property have been guilty of all the industrial conspiracies, and the people who own all the earth have not been guilty of any industrial conspiracy.”51 Darrow had essentially discovered that the conspiracy laws and the laws of the modern business corporation were mirror images of each other, effectively reapportioning rights of collectivization and individuation between the working class and capitalists. This was especially true after 1886, which not only introduced a range of conspiracy and “criminal anarchy” statutes in the aftermath of the Haymarket trial but also saw, in that year’s Santa Clara Co. v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision, the U.S. Supreme Court grant the modern business corporation the rights of fictive persons under law.52 The effect was to transform the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment under the combined weight of the Republican Party’s abandonment of southern African Americans after Reconstruction and the party’s shift toward a conservative defense of monopoly capitalism. Constitutional scholars in the 1930s came to debate this startling revision as the “conspiracy theory of the Fourteenth Amendment,” a theory that hinged on the use of the word “persons” (instead of “man” or “citizen,” for example, in the amendment’s language) as evidence of the amendment’s drafters’ secret intention to endow corporations with constitutional rights.53 “I do not believe in this wild mania of incorporation,” Darrow told an arbitration judge during a national anthracite coal miners’ strike in 1903. “It has no sort of place with a trade union. You want to teach the people of the United States this new, strange doctrine, this doctrine of

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wealth, that, forsooth, a person which man made, which is a corporation, is greater than a person which God made, which is an individual? It is a false doctrine. It has produced infinite evil in America, and its evil has just begun.”54 This evil stemmed from a contradiction as Darrow saw it. On the one hand, workers’ combinations were defined as conspiracies to render them more vulnerable before the law, while on the other hand, capitalist combinations were provided with a surplus of additional rights and protections by being imagining as legal individuals. Francis Sayre, a Progressive intellectual, Harvard law professor, and President Wilson’s son-­in-­law, argued just this point in 1922. Speaking of the doctrine’s general assumption that the danger of collectives is greater than the threat posed by individuals, Sayre writes: But in these days of huge and powerful corporations, which form in the eyes of the law single persons, such a generalization would seem far too sweeping to accord with the actual facts of every-­day life. Why should the law be such that if two steel workers plan a certain act which the law regards as tortious, they should be subject to fine and imprisonment; but if, let us say, the United States Steel Corporation plans and executes the self-­same act, the criminal law should be unable to touch it?55

The hostility of the American courts to the labor movement, especially in the “laissez-­faire constitutionalism” of the Gilded Age, has been well documented by scholars like Hattam, William Forbath, Karen Orren, Josiah Bartlett Lambert, Herbert Hovenkamp, and Anthony Woodiwiss.56 Between the 1880s and 1920, not only were most strike tactics declared criminal, but also state and federal courts struck down more than three hundred laws and regulations sought by labor unions. These included laws that required workers be paid in legal tender rather than company scrip; laws that required workers to be paid weekly and upon termination; laws requiring the labeling of “convict-­made” goods; laws preventing the firing of workers for being union members; laws prohibiting employers from threatening or firing workers for voting the wrong ticket; laws establishing the eight-­hour day for women and children; and laws that narrowed the scope of conspiracy statutes to legalize unions and strikes.57 “I don’t care who makes a law, if you will let me interpret it,” said Darrow to riotous laughter. “I would be willing to let the Steel Trust make a law if they would let me tell what it meant after they got

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it made. That has been the job of the judges and that is the reason the powerful interests in the world want the courts.”58 By itself, the courts’ issuing injunctions and signing bench warrants for the arrest of labor leaders could not suppress labor activity, not without an enforcement arm. And so in the Age of Monopoly, labor riot duty and strikebreaking became some of the U.S. military’s primary activities. Between 1877 and 1920, U.S. presidents dispatched the regular army to suppress more than eleven strikes. According to the labor historian David Montgomery, between 1886 and 1895, state governors called out National Guard units 328 times, and one third of the incidents were officially listed as “labor troubles.”59 These conflicts between heavily armed troops and unarmed protesters (with the notable exception of Haymarket) contributed to the hundreds if not thousands of deaths, and tens of thousands of serious injuries, suffered by union activists and protesters in labor conflicts. The state was not the only armed enemy that even nonviolent strikers faced in labor disputes. In the United States, alone among industrial nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, corporations hired their own coercive violence in the form of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, the Burns Detective Agency, Bergoff Brothers’ strikebreaking services, and dozens of other companies. These industries organized tens of thousands of men from prisons, saloons, relief lines, and among the unemployed in “fink markets” to serve in a mercenary force larger that the U.S. Army. The most famous of these private detective agencies, the Pinkertons were founded in 1850 by a former radical Scottish Chartist named Allan Pinkerton, who fled to the United States as a refugee before going on to found the U.S. Secret Service. Between 1866 and 1892, Allan Pinkerton sold “industrial and strike services” to railroads and other large corporations, which included labor espionage, provocation, and armed strikebreaking in more than seventy strikes.60 The continued criminalization of unions and strikes under the conspiracy doctrine drove many radical labor organizations back underground. The 1870s and 1880s witnessed a resurgence of secret labor societies rooted in ritual masculine solidarity such as the High and Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, secret workers’ benevolence societies

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like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and outright terrorists groups like the Molly Maguires and the anarchist followers of Johann Most.61 Violence by any radical element (vanguardist, conspiratorial, secret, or otherwise) came to be immediately and opportunistically blamed on a larger, more public force, generating events—­and subsequent legal trials—­of extraordinary controversy where life and death often hung on a conspiracy charge. The first major case of this kind came in the trial and execution of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s.62 One version of the story begins in the old world, where the Mollies were famous and feared across Ireland for their use of “retributive violence” against the ruling classes. Mass migration to the United States, and the vast coal fields of Pennsylvania in particular, expanded Molly Maguireism into a transatlantic pattern of violent resistance. The violence attributable to the Molly Maguires in Schuykill County, Pennsylvania, began as early as 1862 with a string of murders exacting vengeance on mine owners, managers, superintendents, and foremen following underground disasters and union disputes. The second version of the Mollies’ story opens with a meeting between Franklin Gowan, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and the great detective Allan Pinkerton. A pioneer in corporate vertical integration, Gowan owned both the rails and the coal fields that fueled the locomotives. The only obstacle to Gowan’s semi-­feudal reign was the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), a union of Irish coal miners. In order to remove this obstacle, Pinkerton offered Gowan a new “industrial service,” the use of a top operative to be sent undercover into the mining regions to infiltrate, report on, and eventually break the unions. That particular operative, an Irish Catholic from Ulster named James McParland, became, by the turn of the century, the most famous, and most hated, labor spy in the world. McParland spent two years undercover and underground as a militant Irish miner and was eventually invited by his fellow workers to join the secret society of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). McParland got himself elected secretary of his local AOH lodge, successfully turned one miner into a willing informant, and gathered evidence on men who thought him a brother. The Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police, at the time little more than a private army paid for by the railroad, subsequently rounded up

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hundreds of suspected Molly Maguires. Gowan himself then acted as special state prosecutor. Under a military guard, Detective McParland gave his testimony and the court sentenced to death some twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires. At the encouragement of a private detective selling a new service, a railroad executive initiated an investigation, hired a team of spies, detectives, and arresting policemen, and then provided the prosecution’s legal team in a campaign to break the union and murder its leadership. Thanks to the surrender of state sovereignty, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad successfully broke up both the AOH and the WBA, executed the union’s militant leadership, and crushed the “long strike.” After all that, in the words of Franklin Gowan, “it was sufficient to hang a man to declare him a Molly Maguire.”63 To Gowan, Pinkerton, McParland, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the members of the capitalist press, the Molly Maguires were union terrorists whom they were duty bound to track down and punish. Allan Pinkerton’s ghostwritten book The Molly Maguires and the Detectives celebrated the detectives’ victory over violent unions while founding a literary genre of sensational countersubversive detective stories and dime novels.64 In contrast, some labor historians, notably Philip Foner, have argued that the Molly Maguires did not exist at all, but were created by Gowan and the Pinkertons to justify a violent crackdown on the striking miners.65 Yet in his authoritative study of the Mollies, the historian Kevin Kenny emphatically insists that the Molly Maguires did exist and did commit a range of criminal acts worthy of being called terrorism. But in the coal fields, strike meetings, and the courtroom, the real legal issue was the question of conspiracy. Kenny argues: The identification of the Maguires with the fraternal society [AOH] and the labor union [WBA] provided the alleged terrorist conspiracy with an institutional structure it otherwise lacked, transforming it in the first case into part of a national network, and in the second into the well-­organized, militant arm of the labor movement. This strategy was central to the construction of knowledge about the Molly Maguires, and it provided an important rationale for their eventual destruction.66

At stake here is the legal and political precedent set by linking a criminal act to a social movement branded by the state as a political plot. This

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shifting upward of the interpretive horizons carries real consequences, and in this case, the expansive definition of conspiracy contributed to or enabled the corporate-­ordered state execution of more than twenty miners. THE SECRET HISTORY OF CONSPIRACY LAWS With such a formidable array of forces standing in opposition to union activists in the late nineteenth century—­courts, cops, militias, and mercenaries—­some today might wonder why anyone would choose to fight back at all. Standing in a courtroom in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to defend three union men charged with conspiracy, Darrow clearly knew the answer to this question: So long as injustice and inhumanity exist, so long as employers grow fat and rich and powerful through their robbery and greed, so long as they build their palaces from the unpaid labor of their serfs, so long as they rob childhood of its life and sunshine and joy, you will find other conspirators, thank God, that will take the place of these as fast as the doors of the jail should close upon them. If other conspirators should be wanting to fill up the gaps made vacant by the prosecutions of the courts and the verdicts of juries, then I should be ashamed of the country in which I live. This is not a criminal case, and every actor concerned in the drama understands it well.

In the drama that Darrow elaborated before the jury, meticulously twisting the conspiracy doctrine inside out, the men charged with criminal conspiracy were no longer dangerous subversives but heroes akin to Jesus Christ, whom Darrow declared to be “the greatest conspirator that the world has ever seen.” The men at the prosecutors’ table were not sovereign agents of law and order but vile conspirators plotting the criminal destruction of heroic men. “There is a conspiracy, dark and damnable, and I want to say boldly,” bellowed Darrow before the packed courtroom, that somebody is guilty of one of the foulest conspiracies that ever disgraced a free nation. If my clients here are innocent, and you know they are, and these persecutors know they are—­if my clients are innocent, then [factory owner] George M. Paine and George M. Paine’s son . . . are guilty of entering the temple of justice and using the law, which was made to guard and protect and shelter you and me and these defendants, for the purpose of hounding innocent men to their deaths or to a prison pen.67

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Darrow was nothing if not melodramatic in the courtroom, constantly seeking the widest possible historical, social, and ethical view, and he used everything he had learned about the secret history of conspiracy law since Haymarket to win this trial in Oshkosh. Darrow had come to Oshkosh to help a personal friend in the wake of a failed strike. Oshkosh, the “City of Sawdust,” was the center of the nation’s woodworking industry, transforming the forests of the northern plains into sashes, doors, and wooden blinds in seven huge factories fed by the city’s two dozen sawmills. The largest of these factories was owned and run by George M. Paine, famous for his ruthless business acumen, his hostility to unions, and his starvation-­level wages. Paine imposed a poverty on his workers so deep that many once independent breadwinning mill men found themselves working next to their wives and young children in a desperate and often failing effort to make enough money to survive. In May 1898 the workers in Oshkosh decided to form a local of the Amalgamated Wood Workers’ International Union, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. They sought the guidance and leadership of the union’s general secretary, Thomas I. Kidd, and together they sent a letter to Paine demanding that he raise their wages a quarter a day, that he no longer employ women and children in his mills, that he pay the workers weekly, and that he recognize their union. Paine proudly and publicly threw their letter in the garbage, later telling the jury under Darrow’s questioning: “The reason I did not answer it [the letter] is because I don’t have to. My wastebasket is filled with letters like that.” And so the workers struck all seven factories. The mill owners, determined to break the union, responded by organizing an anti-­strike “union club,” importing strikebreakers and hiring Pinkertons to infiltrate the unions and provoke violence along the picket lines. Tensions grew in the city as the strike dragged on, and the workers grew hungry and desperate, until a riot broke out when striking workers attacked scabs outside one of the mills. During this fight, a plant engineer hit a sixteen-­year-­old striker with a heavy wrench and killed him. No matter that the dead kid was a striker and that his assailant worked for the company; the governor sent in the National Guard to break the fourteen-­week-­long strike. Though they walked out together, the workers returned to their jobs one by one;

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meanwhile, the courts took up the task of destroying what was left of the union and sending its leaders to prison for conspiring against the Paine company. Thomas Kidd, along with two co-­conspirators, George Zentner and Michael Troiber, faced four counts of criminal conspiracy, and that is when Darrow arrived in Oshkosh.68 During the trial, Darrow’s questioning produced its full share of sensational moments. His skillful research and cross-­examination forced the admission that the Paines had organized vigilantes to attack pickets, hired Pinkerton detectives to gather intelligence and provoke violence, and paid anti-­union workers to lie in court. So too did Kidd testify to the wretched conditions inside the mills, including the exploitation of child labor, horrifying industrial accidents, and starvation wages. But it was Darrow’s closing arguments that made the biggest impact, not just on the jury but on the labor movement and the broader reading public, especially when his words were widely reprinted after the trial. Darrow’s first move in his closing arguments was to shift the interpretive horizon of the conspiracy charge from the union’s criminal act to the company’s political plot by challenging the state’s sovereignty. Darrow reminded the jury that in Wisconsin no grand jury indictment was necessary to bring a case, only the filing of a complaint by the district attorney, Walter W. Quartermass. “Paine has used almost everything else in Oshkosh, men, women, little children,” mocked Darrow, “and now Brother Quartermass has made an assignment of the state to him.” Darrow further humiliated the compliant DA by telling the jury, “I thought he would have been glad to have licked the dust from Paine’s boots had he been given the opportunity to perform the service.”69 Darrow insisted that the charges against Kidd were a personal vendetta, a conspiracy of capital led by Paine to abuse the court system and break the union. Drawing upon his study of the medieval English origins of the conspiracy doctrine, and translating it into modern terms, Darrow argued that the manipulation of the courts and the conspiracy doctrine represented the real criminal conspiracy in this case. Darrow explained in his closing arguments before the jury: It was an ancient law that a man who conspired to use the courts to destroy his fellow-­men was guilty of treason to the State. He had laid his hand upon the State itself; he had touched the bulwark of human

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liberty. . . . These are the criminals in this case, gentlemen, criminals who in the eye of heaven and in the light of justice have not been guilty of the paltry crime of conspiring to save their fellow-­men, but criminals who have conspired against the framework of those institutions that have made these same criminals great and strong; and you know their names; and I know their names; and . . . George M. Paine’s name and [his son] Nathan Paine’s name are written down as men who conspired against the liberty of their fellows and against the country in which they live.70

The great defense attorney offered a lesson on the history of the common law doctrine of conspiracy, a history that Darrow likely knew as well as any legal scholar of his time. The earliest known legal examples of criminal conspiracy as a statutory crime developed in the late thirteenth century in England, and were designed to punish the private abuse of the jury trial system. Codified in 1305 as the first statutory definition of a crime in English law, the “Ordinance concerning Conspirators” sought to remedy the abuse of the legal apparatus by criminalizing combinations intended to procure false indictments, to bring false appeals, to give false testimony, or to maintain malicious suits.71 In short, the origins of the conspiracy law lay not in an effort to restrict combinations of the weak against the powerful, but in an attempt to criminalize the abuse of the legal system in what is a distant forerunner to the modern crime of malicious prosecution, organized perjury, obstruction of justice, and nuisance lawsuits. In other words, the secret history of conspiracy laws is embedded in the labor movement’s language of “rats,” “finks,” and “frame-­ups.”72 This historical reversal became Darrow’s primary labor defense strategy, turning the prosecution’s conspiracy theory on its head and putting the conspiracy of capital itself on trial. “This hideous conspiracy in Oshkosh,” Darrow concluded before the jury, “where sixteen hundred of your fellow citizens were plotting in the dark, was a labor union; that is all.” The real conspiracy was Paine’s. But it was this anachronistic and autocratic stain of the conspiracy doctrine, this “worn-­out piece of tyranny” within the American common law, that so outraged Darrow. In his closing arguments Darrow excoriated the conspiracy law, claiming that the prosecutors had “ransacked the ancient cobwebs of the past

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and brought out these law books containing the opinions of imbecile judges in the employ of powerful knaves and quoted their utterances to be adopted in this year 1898, and in the United States.” This image of the robber baron wielding feudal laws to attack a democratic and popular union evokes a counter-­conspiracy theory of an autocratic elite subverting American democracy by undertaking a “conspiracy to take away the liberty of his fellow-­men under the sanction of law; and if there is any darker or deeper one, it is hard for me to imagine it.”73 In the end, Darrow’s strategy worked. Following a three-­week trial, his closing argument, with its extensive excursion into the history of labor law and the dialectics of conspiracy, took two full days to deliver. When it appeared in newspapers and as a pamphlet, the nation’s most famous novelist, William Dean Howells, declared the oral argument “as interesting as a novel.”74 But most important for Darrow, it took the jury only two ballots and fifteen minutes of deliberation to return a not guilty verdict. The Kidd trial represents one of the minor triumphs for this legal giant, but it is revealing of Darrow’s interests in conspiracy law, demonstrating everything he had learned since he’d arrived in Chicago. Of course the original version of conspiracy law evoked by Darrow was not the common law precedent that guided the Kidd case. In the seventeenth century, the use of conspiracy doctrine established a broader applicability, beginning what Francis Sayer called “the first step in the long process by which the early rigidly defined crime of conspiracy was . . . gradually expanded in to the vague and uncertain doctrine which we know today.”75 Legal historians point to the Poulterer’s Case of 1611, in which the English court of the Star Chamber—­a royal court held in secret, without written indictments, witnesses, or oral argument—­established that conspiracy could be prosecuted as a common law crime. In 1716 the conspiracy doctrine achieved its common law definition via the English jurist Serjeant Hawkins: “There can be no doubt, but that all confederacies whatsoever, wrongfully to prejudice a third person are highly criminal at common law.”76 Hawkins transformed the definition of conspiracy by asserting that the act of combination or confederacy was “the gist of the crime,” and the pursuance of such an agreement thus

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became an aggravating circumstance to the real crime of conspiracy. The looseness of the conspiracy charge, placed entirely in the hands of judges, meant that the judiciary could employ conspiracy laws as a kind of social policy, criminalizing as wide a range of collective or community activities as they chose.77 The transformation of English conspiracy doctrine from punishing malicious prosecution to prohibiting socially undesirable combination became a serious social force in the midst of the Age of Revolution. Shortly after Hawkins offered his new common law definition, English judges used the conspiracy doctrine in the 1721 case of Rex v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge, ruling that any combination of workers for purposes of raising wages was an unlawful conspiracy.78 This began the long entanglement of conspiracy doctrine and labor law. By 1800, an anti-­ Jacobin Parliament passed the Combination Acts, expanding conspiracy laws to ban all forms of plebeian political organization, including trade unionism and democratic reformism, alongside more radical forms of Luddism and outright terrorism. “The aristocracy were interested in repressing the Jacobin ‘conspiracies’ of the people,” writes the British historian E. P. Thompson, and “the manufacturers were interested in defeating their ‘conspiracies’ to increase wages: the Combination Acts served both purposes.”79 But as Thompson narrates in The Making of the English Working Class, such legal censure did not put a stop to the working-­class “army of redressers.” Instead it gave birth to an “opaque society” that Thompson calls “the illegal tradition.” Shaped by secret societies, oaths of confederacy, and clandestine meetings, early labor organization developed a growing sense of “solidarity against” employers, magistrates, parsons, and spies.80 Evoking this history of “the labor agitators and the conspirators and the humanitarians of that old world,” Darrow offered the Wisconsin courtroom a history lesson, describing the clandestine formation of the early labor movement and its struggle against the conspiracy doctrine: “The early history of trade unionism [in England] shows that the first associations came together in the forests, in the rocks, in the waste places, where no human eye could see. . . . To belong to these labor organizations

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was a crime—­a crime to simply join them.”81 Conspiracy laws under an autocratic system don’t so much criminalize conspiracies as create them, for either the members of early labor or radical organizations must knuckle under and accept the dispossessions wrought by capitalism or, if they are to resist at all, they must form as clandestine conspiracies. The first instance of a labor conspiracy trial in the United States came in the Philadelphia Cordwainers case of 1805–­1806. When a group of eight journeymen shoemakers attempted to combine to demand higher pay and prevent the hiring of replacement workers, the courts charged the men with forming “a combination and conspiracy to raise wages.”82 At trial, opposing counsel argued over the applicability of the English common law doctrine of conspiracy to the new American context. The prosecution argued the need for legal consistency and the adoption of the common law doctrine of conspiracy, while the defense insisted that the English common law had been thrown out with independence. The laborers’ lawyers, attacking the common law itself, argued that American employers were trying to import a medieval master-­servant law devised to force survivors of the black plague to work at a fixed wage. In addition, the prosecution questioned one witness, a self-­confessed scab and labor spy, who testified that the strikers were foreigners seeking to overthrow the laws of the United States. In the end, the court convicted the journeymen of unjustly conspiring to raise their wages, coercing others to join their combination, and conspiring to prevent other cordwainers from working for any master who paid less than they demanded. The court further declared these actions criminally harmful to the masters, to other cordwainers, and to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Though the eight journeymen were lightly punished with a minimal fine, the precedent set in this case proved substantial as other courts interpreted the ruling as a ban on labor unions. “In sum,” writes the labor law historian Anthony Woodiwiss, “the court’s decision prohibited combinations from maintaining their position in the discourses of production and repositioned them in the discourses of criminality, where they would be subject to the disciplinary powers of the state in addition to those of the masters.”83

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As early as the 1830s, the labor movement established a basic model for mass political action around conspiracy trials. Between 1806 and 1842 there were an estimated twenty-­one labor conspiracy trials targeting cordwainers, tailors, hatters, spinners, and carpet weavers, primarily in Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Connecticut. Six of these cases were won by strikers; a majority of the rest were lost and again lightly punished. But in each case the union was banned.84 In the 1820s and 1830s the judiciary in the North generally saw unions as antithetical to a harmonious society, a contention that an increasingly mobilized urban working class grew to contest. Writing in 1831, Stephen Simpson, a labor leader in Philadelphia, announced new grounds for a legal class struggle: If mechanics combine to raise their wages, the laws punish them as conspirators against the good of society, and the dungeon awaits them as it does the robber. But the laws have made it a just and meritorious act, that capitalists shall combine to strip the man of labour of his earnings, and reduce him to a dry crust, and a gourd of water. Thus does power invert justice, and derange the order of nature.85

The New York cases of People v. Fisher (1835, also known as the Geneva decision) and People v. Faulkner (1836) further declared unions illegal conspiracies on the grounds that they were inherently “injurious to trade or commerce.” To the working class of New York City, the Fisher and Faulkner decisions proved the judiciary’s loyalty to the rich and represented “an unhallowed attempt to convert the working men of this country to slaves.”86 The conviction and heavy fines imposed on twenty journeymen tailors for the crime of “conspiracy to injure trade, riot, assault, battery” in the Faulkner decision sparked citywide protests in the summer of 1836. In what the historian Sean Wilentz has described as “one of the most remarkable public events of the Jacksonian period,” some 27,000 people (or about one fifth of the entire adult population of New York City) gathered around City Hall Park to make speeches, raise money to pay the journeymen’s fines, talk openly about forming a working-­class political party, and denounce Judges Edward Savage and Ogden Edwards as “tools of the aristocracy” while burning them in effigy. Writing on the Fourth of July, 1836, “A Mechanic” reflected:

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“A day is fast approaching, which must call forcibly to mind the state of liberty in republican America. To tailors, the conspiracy class, it must be a sad day; disguise the matter as we may, they were treated no better than tyrants treat their subjects.”87 In 1842 the arc seemed to bend in labor’s favor with the decision of Commonwealth v. Hunt, offering the first sanction for the existence of trade unions in an era of relative inaction by organized labor. But that did not last. “The notion that Commonwealth v. Hunt put an end to conspiracy convictions of trade unions in 1842 is thoroughly misleading,” writes the labor historian David Montgomery. “One must conclude that it was not Justice Shaw’s decision of 1842 that made conspiracy indictments of unions subside during the next two decades, but the absence of union activity.”88 Immediately after the Civil War, a new round of labor conspiracy prosecutions began with the dramatic expansion of organized labor and monopoly capitalism. Though there were fewer than ten conspiracy prosecutions of unions between the end of the war and 1870 (and these cases did not reverse the legal ruling on the legality of unions per se), they did nevertheless ban the most effective strike tactics, particularly boycotts and organized picketing, all while beginning to levy far heavier fines and prison sentences against strikers found guilty of illegal tactics. In the aftermath of the Great Uprising of 1877, six states passed laws banning any form of railroad strike, and by 1886 judges in twenty-­five states, across several hundred labor trials, had invoked the English common law doctrine of conspiracy to ban unions and strike activity.89 Stripped by the courts of their rights to organize and strike, unions and other radical organizations took up the political challenge by demanding laws to curtail (or at least place clear statutory limits on) the conspiracy doctrine. The Socialist Labor Party, founded in 1877 as the first American socialist party, explicitly took up the phrase “conspiracy of capital against labor” as a slogan throughout the 1880s. And in its party platform, first published in 1880, the fifth demand of the organization read, “All conspiracy laws operating against the rights of workingmen must be repealed.”90 This demand ranked just below the right of suffrage and political equality before the law “without regard to creed, race or sex” and above the demand for the eight-­hour day.

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Between 1865 and 1891, the New York Workingmen’s Assembly and Pennsylvania’s Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions made the repeal of conspiracy laws—­or at least the legal immunity of organized labor from such laws—­one of their top priorities. These trade union groups sought to pressure state legislatures into passing anti-­conspiracy statutes through electoral organizing, lobbying, testifying before legislative committees, and other legal work. On paper, the unions’ campaigns were quite successful, as both states passed anti-­ conspiracy laws, guaranteeing labor unions the legal right to exist and organize in their collective interests. Enforcing statutory protections proved impossible because each of the anti-­conspiracy laws contained provisions that banned the use of “force, threats or menace of harm to persons or property.” Using this broadly interpretable provision in the law, district attorneys continued to convict strikers on conspiracy charges after claiming that they had used “intimidation tactics” such as organizing picket lines, taunting scabs, and threatening boycotts. The court found no difficulty in undermining labor’s legislative gains, a turn of events that taught some nineteenth-­century labor leaders the futility of electoral politics, sending them either toward a revolutionary position like that of the IWW, or toward a compromised “business unionism” like that pushed by the American Federation of Labor.91 As labor unrest continued, a new dissatisfaction with the efficacy of the conspiracy doctrine spread among leading businessmen and conservative politicians. One problem for the increasingly national business corporations was the unreliability of the local jury system; sympathetic juries of farmers or small businessmen hostile to monopoly power could always acquit (or fail to adequately punish) the troublesome unions. And second, the law as it was currently understood enabled the prosecution of unions only for damage already done. But conspiracy is an inchoate crime, a criminal act that can be interrupted and prosecuted before any of the greater damage occurs. So corporate lawyers began to argue for the use of the conspiracy doctrine to stop or ban strikes before they could cause future damage to earnings and property. The corporate-­judicial solution to this problem became the injunction, a legal weapon that could be issued from the bench to ban most

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strike tactics while enabling the arrest and prosecution of strike leaders for contempt of court should they violate the injunction.92 With this innovation, corporations only needed a court order to have a strike declared illegal. No jury or trial was necessary not to preemptively criminalize organized labor’s primary weapon. Between 1880 and 1930, courts issued 1,845 injunctions to stop strikes, pickets, and boycotts (924 issued between 1880 and 1920, 921 in the 1920s alone), leading labor radicals to denounce this abuse as “government by injunction.”93 It took the revolution in labor law led by the New Deal, and the passage of the Norris–­La Guardia Act of 1932, to bring an end to the injunction. It is one of the supreme ironies of nineteenth-­century “reform” that the passage of the Sherman Anti-­Trust Act of 1890 cleared the way not for corporate regulation but for the perfected federal labor injunction. The full intention of the Sherman Act is still debated by historians, although the popular consensus in 1890 was that the law was needed to address some of the crudest monopolistic practices by giving the government the power to “bust” the nation’s largest trusts like Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company.94 Section one of the act declared illegal “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states or with foreign nations.” Section four gave the U.S. circuit courts jurisdiction to “prevent and restrain violations of this act.” It then became the duty of the attorney general to “institute proceedings in equity to prevent and restrain such violations” so that such conspiracies might be “enjoined or otherwise prohibited.”95 “Everybody supposed this law was plain and simple and easily understood,” Darrow recalled, “but when they indicted a combination of capital for conspiracy in restraint of trade, the Supreme Court said this law did not apply to them at all . . . and everyone began to wonder what the law did mean anyhow.”96 Judicial decisions between 1890 and 1897 rendered the Sherman Act largely ineffectual in limiting the competitive power of monopoly capital. But the law’s usefulness in attacking labor was only just being discovered. The first successful use of the Sherman Act’s “conspiracy in restraint of trade” argument against labor came in 1893, when the Circuit Court of Louisiana issued an injunction to stop

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a general strike in New Orleans. Soon thereafter, judges declared that any form of railway strike could be declared a “conspiracy in restraint of trade” for blocking interstate traffic, with further decisions declaring nearly any form of pickets and boycotts criminal conspiracies to be enjoined by the courts and repressed by police, militia, and army.

“A GATLING GUN ON PAPER”: THE PULLMAN STRIKE OF 1894 “And after awhile came along the strike of a body of laboring men, the American Railway Union,” recalled Darrow nearly two decades later: They didn’t have a dollar in the world altogether, because they were laboring men and they were not engaged in trade, they were working, but they hadn’t found anything else that the Sherman anti-­trust applied to, so they indicted Debs and his followers for a conspiracy in restraint of free trade; and they carried this case to the Supreme Court. I was one of the attorneys who carried it to the Supreme Court. Most lawyers only tell you about the cases they win. I can tell you about some I lose.97

Darrow could joke about this in 1913. But it is true, the world’s most famous defense attorney lost the most high-­profile case of his early career, a case that irreversibly changed him and the labor movement. The Pullman strike is one of the key moments in American labor and legal history, an almost archetypal confrontation of labor versus capital. The strike, which successfully tied up most of the nation’s rail traffic for the better part of a month in the summer of 1894, remains most notable for its unprecedented use of the labor injunction, the deployment of federal troops under presidential order to break a railroad strike, and the emergence of Eugene Victor Debs, founder of the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU), and future four-­time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. Established a little over a year before the Pullman strike, the ARU was the first industrial union of its kind, refusing to organize by trade (that is, with engineers, firemen, switchmen, brakemen, yardmen, and so on in separate trade unions) but rather organizing in one large union, open to all white men employed by railroads, except for those in management.

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Its leader, Debs, was a child of Terre Haute, Indiana, seemingly born and raised on the railroads and in the spirit of its workers. “I rode on the engines over mountain and plain,” wrote Debs of his youth, “slept in the cabooses and bunks, and was fed from their pails by the swarthy stokers who still nestle close to my heart.” The success of this new union model—­“the stockholders of the corporation acted as one,” argued Debs; “why not the men?”—­came very quickly when the union won a major strike against J. J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad in September 1893.98 Within a year, the ARU grew to include some 465 locals and more than 150,000 members, with Debs, based in Chicago, as its national leader. The strike at Pullman’s model town and factory began on May 11, 1894, as a protest against steep wage cuts and layoffs without a corresponding decrease in rent or prices for company housing and stores in the “model community.” Some 35 percent of Pullman’s workforce were ARU members. After more than a month of a peaceful strike at Pullman’s works, the ARU convention meeting in Chicago authorized a solidarity boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars, and within three days, more than 100,000 workers covering twenty railroads in twenty-­six states were out on strike. Intent on breaking both the strike and the union, the Chicago General Managers’ Association (GMA)—­a powerful combination of railroad business interests—­refused to allow any trains to travel without Pullman coaches and U.S. Mail cars. With this tactic, the bosses transformed the boycott into a lockout, which rapidly escalated into the largest railroad strike since 1877. As the strike grew, Chicago mayor John Hopkins and Illinois governor John Altgeld insisted that the strike was both legal and peaceful, and that the struggle between labor and capital should be allowed to work itself out without state intervention. With local authorities proving uncooperative, the GMA turned to the federal courts and the president of the United States to break what they called the “Debs Rebellion.”99 “We have been brought to the ragged edge of anarchy,” declared Attorney General Richard Olney, “and it is time to see whether the law is sufficiently strong to prevent this condition of affairs.”100 Olney led the push for federal intervention in the strike despite the fact that he was not a neutral party in this conflict; in fact, he was one of the most powerful railroad corporation lawyers in the country, serving as counsel

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for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and several New England lines, a job (and a paycheck) that he kept throughout his tenure as President Cleveland’s attorney general. To add to the conflict of interest, Olney appointed Edwin A. Walker as special U.S. attorney to prosecute the ARU while he, Walker, was also general counsel for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, one of the GMA’s most powerful members and one of the largest Chicago-­ based rail lines shut down by the strike. At Olney’s instruction, Walker went to two federal judges, Peter Grosscup and William Woods, with a sweeping writ of injunction that criminalized “doing any act whatever in the furtherance of any conspiracy or combination to restrain said railroads.”101 The New York Times, on the day after its issuance, described this new injunction as a “Gatling Gun on paper,” an omnibus injunction that seemingly prohibited any action that the union might undertake to organize the strike—­violent or nonviolent—­including sending telegrams, holding meetings, or even speaking to non-­striking workers. With the injunction published in all the city’s papers and posted at rail yards, Debs took the advice of the union’s attorneys and ignored the order. To respect its authority could only mean total surrender for the union. On July 4, 1894, Debs, Darrow, and the rest of the city of Chicago awoke to the spectacle of thousands of federal troops (and their very real Gatling guns) marching through the city’s streets. President Cleveland had superseded the authority of both the mayor of Chicago and the Illinois governor, transforming Chicago into an armed camp that soon became a war zone. Debs, who the previous day had told the press, “I do not believe in Socialism, but I am forced to the conclusion that government ownership of the railroads is better than railroad ownership of government,” sent word by telegraph to all the union locals that “troops cannot move trains.” Ever mindful to counsel against the use of violence, Debs stood firm and the strike went on. In their dual service to the federal government and the financial interests of the railroads, Olney and Walker began two court proceedings against Debs and the ARU, a civil case to hold Debs in contempt of court for violating the injunction and a criminal proceeding charging Debs with conspiracy. Olney and Walker proceeded first with contempt

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charges against Debs and the ARU, quickly gaining a court order for their arrest, after which the strike began to lose ground. At first Debs refused bail, claiming to be no better than the ordinary striker under arrest. At this point his political vision for labor and socialism began to change. “When in company with my loyal comrades I found myself in Cook county jail at Chicago,” recalled Debs, “with the press screaming conspiracy, treason and murder, and by some fateful coincidence I was given the cell . . . overlooking the spot, a few feet distant, where the anarchists were hanged a few years before, I had another exceedingly practical and impressive lesson in Socialism.”102 In Cook County Jail, Debs joined the Haymarket generation. In September the formal hearing on the civil contempt charge resumed, and with a reinforced legal team that included Clarence Darrow at their side, the ARU members faced Judge Woods, who now sat in judgment over men accused of violating an injunction issued from his own bench. The prosecution cited the more than nine thousand telegrams sent from ARU headquarters as evidence that Debs had violated the injunction. Darrow, by contrast, offered no defense at all, preferring to challenge the legality of the proceedings itself and press an appeal to the Supreme Court to test, in Debs’s words, “whether men can be sent to jail without trial for organizing against capital.”103 As expected, on December 14, Judge Woods found Debs and the ARU men guilty of contempt for conspiring to strike and sentenced them to six months in the federal prison at Woodstock, Illinois. Upon Debs’s conviction, Governor Altgeld—­still fuming about the usurpation of his local sovereignty—­denounced the power of corporate attorneys and judges to sit as “legislator, court and executioner” of the labor movement.104 Olney and Walker also began criminal proceedings against Debs and the ARU, convening a grand jury on July 10 to indict the men for a conspiracy that stretched from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. This trial began in Judge Grosscup’s court on January 24, 1895, just sixteen days after the start of their prison sentences for contempt. On one level, Darrow knew that there was no ostensible defense for his clients: the ARU had held all of its meetings in public, where the members had openly committed themselves to defying the injunction. In their

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pre-­trial motions the prosecution seemed to press an antebellum legal line which held that the very act of combining into an industrial union and striking was itself an illegal conspiracy to restrict free trade. But if Debs had been successfully demonized in the national press as a fire-­ eater, a tyrant determined to starve a nation, to the majority of working people across the country Debs became a new symbol of defiance of corporate tyranny and government corruption. Rather than defend his client against a narrow set of charges, Darrow decided to do what he did best and attack the prosecution to transform the court proceedings into a melodrama of class struggle. Pitting the ruthless capitalists against the heroic union leader, Darrow aggressively turned the tables by accusing the prosecution, the General Managers’ Association, and the Pullman company of conspiring to use state power to destroy the railroad’s enemy. This was the moment when Darrow dug deep into history and presented his case as an indictment of the conspiracy doctrine itself, insisting that justice required that his client be freed and the law used to persecute him be abolished. The defense’s first move in the trial was to object to the presence of the special prosecutor, Edwin Walker, claiming he had no right to prosecute Debs because he was in fact employed by one of the aggrieved parties. Though Judge Grosscup accepted Walker’s feeble denial and ignored the motion, the jury heard Darrow’s message: Was the prosecutor working for the government, or was he working for the railroads? Was this a legal prosecution or a conspiracy to persecute labor? Prosecutor Walker, for his part, leveled a blistering attack at the calm and contained Debs, claiming that he was guilty of murdering the seven strikers shot by troops; that he was responsible for inciting riots and destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of railroad property; and that he was guilty of leading an international conspiracy to starve the country, paralyze industry, and overthrow its economic system. In other words, both opening statements sought to move the interpretive horizon of conspiracy from a criminal act to a political plot and even to a theory of history. Whereas Darrow sought to reorient the trial around that political plot—­namely, the corruption and collusion between the federal courts and railroad lawyers—­Walker’s statement of the conspiracy doctrine suggested the broadest possible definition of

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Debs’s causal agency. Leaping up the interpretive horizons from criminal act to a demonic theory of history in a few short steps, Walker presented a clear vision of a countersubversive conspiracy theory, arguing that any act of violence—­whether committed by strikers, soldiers, or unknown parties, and any stoppage of trains caused by either the ARU’s strike or the GMA’s lockout—­was evidence of the criminal responsibility of Eugene Debs and the ARU’s conspiracy. When Darrow took the floor to begin his defense, he launched a combined legal attack and public campaign—­something of a Darrow trademark—­by accusing the prosecution of conspiracy: This is a historic case, which will count much for liberty or against liberty. Conspiracy, from the days of tyranny in England down to the day the General Managers’ Association used it as a club, has been the favorite weapon of every tyrant. It is an effort to punish the crime of thought. If the government does not, we shall try to get the General Managers here to tell you what they know about conspiracy. These defendants published to all the world what they were doing and in the midst of a widespread strike were never so busy but that they found time to counsel against violence. For this they are brought into a court by an organization which uses the government as a cloak to conceal its infamous purposes.105

The railroads and their servants Olney and Walker were the real conspirators here, Darrow insisted, for they had—­in the name of the ruling elite of Chicago’s railroad industry—­illegally seized hold of the courts of the people to destroy a private enemy in an act that was not simply a conspiracy but akin to treason. To this point, Darrow presented evidence that it was the GMA that was guilty of stopping the trains by refusing to allow Pullman cars to be disconnected from mail cars, thereby acting in deliberate restraint of free trade. Much to the dismay of the prosecution, Darrow had obtained the minutes of GMA meetings in which the members discussed plans to reduce wages, break the ARU, and establish a common labor policy. Or in the cold words of the pretrial legal briefs: The defendants allege . . . that the railroad companies named in the bill . . . organized and were members of a certain unlawful conspiracy and combination among and between themselves to reduce the wages and compensation of their employees . . . and that pursuant to

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that conspiracy and combination the railroad companies proposed . . . uniting their powers, property and influence to prevent the employees, including the members of the American Railway Union, . . . from obtaining redress against the action of the railroad companies in pursuance of such unlawful conspiracy, and proposed and intended, by their combined and united action to overcome successively and in detail any lawful and peaceable resistance that the employees or any of them might make to the reduction of their compensation.106

Darrow further exposed the fact that 3,600 railroad employees had served as deputized marshals during the strike, meaning that the railroads provided not only the judges, prosecutors, and injunctions in this case but the police as well, many of whom the union men accused of vandalism and inciting riots. The case reached a climax when Darrow attempted to subpoena George Pullman himself. Darrow wanted a public explanation for how Pullman could hold $25 million in undeclared dividends while the workers living in his company town suffered from starvation and malnutrition. But as he had during the strike itself, Pullman simply fled Chicago rather than face questioning and public judgment, leading Darrow to insist that Pullman be cited for contempt of court, adding that he could share a cell with Debs at Woodstock Prison. With Pullman’s flight, the public sympathy for Debs and the strikers soared. Darrow pressed his advantage to the breaking point, threatening to put every member of the GMA on the stand and demanded their conviction for conspiracy, and not merely a conspiracy to depress wages but a conspiracy to take over and use the federal government for private gain. In this, his first big trial, Darrow’s strategy worked all too well. The case blew up in his face: the next morning only eleven jurors showed up, and Judge Grosscup, seeing this as an easy exit from a losing fight, adjourned the trial over Darrow’s vigorous objections. Upon leaving the jury box, several jurymen ignored the outstretched hands of the prosecutors and warmly greeted Debs, informing him that at the time of suspension, the jury stood eleven to one for acquittal. Despite the collapse of the conspiracy trial, Debs faced the remainder of his prison term for contempt, leading to a writ of habeas corpus that worked its way up to the Supreme Court. Labor and capital stood before

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the highest court to present oral arguments in the case of In re Debs in March 1895. Darrow and his co-­counsel, Stephen Gregory, were joined by Lyman Trumbull, Illinois’s Civil War era senator and co-­author of the Thirteenth Amendment, in challenging the incarceration of a strike leader without a criminal conviction in a jury trial, the usurpation of state law by the federal courts, and the misuse of the Sherman Act against labor organizations. Again, Olney and Walker made a narrow jurisdictional argument about the right of the federal courts of equity to issue writs of injunction. The Supreme Court’s allegiance—­like that of the entire federal judiciary in this case—­was never in doubt, and two months later the Court handed down a unanimous decision upholding the legality of the labor injunction and returning Debs to prison to serve out his sentence. As for many revolutionaries of his generation, Debs’s time in Woodstock Prison turned out to be transformative. Already nearing forty years old, in an unhappy marriage, with a fully receded hairline and an inexhaustible reserve of optimism, Debs embraced a new faith in socialism in what became popular radicalism’s favorite conversion story. Debs’s celebrity served to draw together the various strains of the Haymarket generation’s growing mass movements: the nineteenth century’s surviving vision of labor republicanism, midwestern Populism, the radical labor strategy of industrial unionism or syndicalism, and the new twentieth-­century vision of a militant Socialist Party. Not only had the defeat in the Pullman case offered its own harsh lessons, but also Debs, always an autodidact and organic intellectual, finally had time to read in prison. And here he had his first serious engagement with the work of Karl Marx after his friend Victor Berger, the German American socialist leader (and future congressman) from Milwaukee, gave Debs his first copy of Capital. Upon his release, Debs announced to the ARU: “The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. . . . Money constitutes no proper basis of a civilization. The time has come to regenerate society—­we are on the eve of a universal change.”107 He then went out on the first of what would be nearly three decades of continuous speaking tours, this time recounting his version of the great strike story under the title, “Who Are the Real Conspirators?” All of this was the jumping-­off point for Debs’s celebrated career as the

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leader of the Socialist Party, which he helped found in 1901 and for which he would stand as four-­time presidential candidate—­the last time in 1920 while once again a federal prisoner—­and all-­around leading light of the Haymarket generation.108 Both Debs and Darrow, as well as the rest of the American industrial union and socialist movements, were profoundly shaped by the experience of the Pullman strike and trials. From a legal point of view, the Pullman case ushered in an era in which the right to strike and form legal unions was severely restricted by injunctions. Beginning with the election of 1896, the labor injunction became a key party issue, and by 1914, the political call to amend or repeal the Sherman Anti-­Trust Act so as to exempt unions became a major demand of Samuel Gompers and the AFL’s “pure and simple unionism.” But for radicals like Debs and Darrow, there could be no doubt that a feudal-­like monopoly capital and a corrupt state now stood together in a powerful alliance against an increasingly militant working class. Darrow’s story is more than a series of trials and verdicts; it is at the heart of a legal battle to define the boundaries of civil liberties and free speech rights in America. If the conspiracy doctrine is the legal form of the countersubversive tradition, then the emergent field of civil liberties is the unifying legal vision of popular radicalism. If conspiracy marks an arena of American law grounded in fear of subversive collectives, guilt by association, and the defense of property, inequality, and authority, then civil liberties, especially the freedom of speech, represent the legal practices on which all forms of left activism found common ground. As we have seen, the history of the conspiracy doctrine is a tale of government and judicial collusion with economic elites to criminalize plebeian organized resistance. Haymarket did not create this link—­that connection was forged in the Star Chamber and the labor courts of early America—­but it did re-­articulate the relationship for an age of industrial monopolies and radical mass movements, of dynamite and Gatling guns, injunctions and socialism. No radical leaders ever wanted to fight out the class struggle through the conspiracy charge in a hostile courtroom, especially if their life and freedom were at stake. But when activists found themselves before the bar of American justice, radical lawyers like Darrow worked to

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transform the meaning of their day in court, establishing a tradition of labor defense campaigns waged against the conspiracy doctrine and in the defense of civil liberties. “A lawyer with a heart,” went one IWW slogan, “is as dangerous as a workingman with brains.” 109 Such trials, many of which garnered tremendous public—­even global—­attention, provided a public forum to deploy the dialectics of conspiracy and turn the proceedings over, to put the capitalist system and its tools of justice on trial for the violation of American’s constitutional rights.

Chapter 2

“Sensational Writing and a Fight” Dangerous Knowledge, Socialist Detectives, and the Rise and Fall of the Appeal to Reason In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in a situation where he has to play detective. —Walter Benjamin, The Flâneur (1938)

On the quiet winter morning of December 30, 1905, in the small town of Caldwell, Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, the state’s former governor, was blown apart by a crude bomb wired to his front gate. In the following days, local police arrested a ragged drifter calling himself Harry Orchard, but his real name was Albert Horsely. A quick search of his unkempt hotel room uncovered bomb parts and other proof of his guilt. But rather than charge this stranger with murder, officials in Idaho believed this crime to be part of a vast conspiracy of radicals taking revenge on an old enemy. To pursue their conspiracy theory, the state of Idaho hired the world-­famous Pinkerton operative, the scourge of the Molly Maguires, detective James McParland, who arrived in Caldwell already convinced 80

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that Orchard was a “tool” of “the inner circle of the Western Federation of Miners.”1 The governors of Idaho and Colorado, and the mining interests they represented, all agreed with this conspiracy theory. To them it was obvious: this bombing was the latest atrocity in an ongoing war between the states’ powerful Mine Owners’ Association (MOA) and the explicitly socialist Western Federation of Miners (WFM). McParland gained exclusive access to the killer’s cell, and after they spent several weeks together, Orchard signed his name to a detailed narrative in which he confessed to being one of the most prolific terrorists in American history, claiming responsibility for a string of bombings and the violent deaths of more than twenty men—­all of which, Orchard confessed, he did at the instructions of, and with payment from, the national leadership of the WFM. Two months after the bombing, acting upon this confession, a detachment of Pinkerton operatives under McParland’s orders abducted three men off the streets of Denver: Charles H. Moyer, the union’s president; George A. Pettibone, a union miner; and William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, the WFM’s general secretary, an official in the Socialist Party and leader of the newly formed Industrial Workers of the World. After secretly detaining them overnight, detectives dumped the three men on an early morning express train bound for Boise, carefully timed to outrun any writs of habeas corpus in Denver. Once in Idaho, the three men found themselves facing capital murder charges as part of a conspiracy to spread anarchy across the industrial West. Much as they had in 1886, the capitalist papers howled not for the head of the dynamiter himself, for whom something of a compassionate fascination gradually emerged, but for the blood of his demonized co-­conspirators. Inspired by a very different set of memories of Haymarket, a growing socialist and Socialist Party press challenged the countersubversives’ story by pitching a sensational conspiracy theory of its own. With Clarence Darrow leading the courtroom defense, and the socialist press organizing mass protests in the streets of American cities, Haywood and Darrow accused the Pinkertons of conspiring against the Constitution and the American labor movement in the most colossal “frame-­up” of the new century. Once again a mysterious bombing set off a legal and political clash of conspiracy stories that drew bright lines across the

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American class divide. The first political conspiracy trial of the twentieth century held the nation in thrall, pitting an alliance between the radical labor movement and a rising Socialist Party against outraged capital in what Eugene Debs called “the greatest legal battle in American history.”2 “The Moyer-­Haywood-­Pettibone case is a thrilling chapter of conspiracy, wrong-­doing, knavery and persecution,” wrote one of Darrow’s expert witnesses at the trial, a former stenographer for the Pinkertons turned whistle-­blower named Morris Friedman, “a chapter so full of impossible situations, mischievous possibilities, glaring contradictions and sensational complications, that it reads more like a detective tale of the blood and thunder variety than a narrative of occurrences happening in real life.”3 Both sides of this conflict seemed all too aware of the ways in which this case resembled the plot of a “penny dreadful,” a dime novel, or other “cheap fiction” famous for sensational plotlines, heroic workingmen and women, and page-­turning action. Detective turned author Allan Pinkerton sold thousands of such books, including Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (1878) and The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), in which popular fiction “often served as a kind of journalism, casting contemporary events into popular formulas.”4 But Steunenberg’s assassination reveals something of the reverse dynamic, the ways in which the characters, class allegories, and desires of popular fiction could be projected onto a very real class and courtroom struggle, transforming labor conflicts into a sensational melodrama, replete with heroes and villains, secret meetings, and spies, climaxing in the courtroom clash of labor and capital. The culture war waged around a string of western bombings in the new century came to be fought in the courtroom, on the streets, and in the popular press, animated by an intensifying dialectics of conspiracy. These competing narratives each played on the theme of dangerous knowledge, the explosive revelation of fact and evidence that radicals believed could challenge the social order itself and countersubversives believed should legitimate any exercise of violence to preserve that order. Dangerous knowledge could detonate in a courtroom or across a headline, and as the legal and cultural battles over class violence heated up, this belief in

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dangerous knowledge contributed as evidence, as entertainment, and as outrage to fuel a mass mobilization in the Haymarket generation’s first major contest of the twentieth century’s dialectics of conspiracy. No one did more to transform the story of the Haywood trial into a mass social movement than a weekly socialist newspaper called the Appeal to Reason. Founded by J. A. Wayland, a journalist and entrepreneur turned socialist, the Appeal to Reason was based in the small town of Girard, Kansas. There Wayland built a utopian socialist community and sweatshop propaganda factory into a publishing empire for a rising movement. The Appeal, along with a growing list of popular radical periodicals such as the International Socialist Review, the National Rip-­ Saw, Wilshire’s Magazine, and the New York Call, established a national voice for a uniquely American form of anti-­capitalist agitation. “Its twofold campaign,” wrote George Allan England, the Appeal’s official historian, “on the one hand violently exposing and attacking capitalism, on the other hand constructively up-­building the ideals and practical framework of the coming state, ere long forced recognition on a national scale.”5 Costing only twenty-­five cents for a yearly subscription, and with an estimated four readers to each copy mailed, by the turn of the century the Appeal had a weekly circulation of approximately 61,000 subscribers, and by 1904 it had become the fastest-­growing socialist newspaper in the country.6 In 1906, the Appeal commissioned and serialized The Jungle, the young Upton Sinclair’s investigation into the Chicago meatpacking industry, and then vigorously defended the exposé against Teddy Roosevelt’s attacks on “muckrakers.”7 By 1913 the Appeal claimed a peak circulation of 760,000 subscriptions a week, making it possibly the most popular left-­wing paper in U.S. history.8 Even Lenin had heard enough about the Appeal while in exile to declare it “not at all bad.”9 In its heyday, the influence of the “Little Ole Appeal” was so great that George England could declare, “The history of this wondrous paper is the history of American Socialism.” And he was, for better and for worse, entirely right.10 “Though they used Tom Paine’s title, the Appeal to Reason,” recalled the Appeal’s ace reporter George Shoaf, “[the editors] decided to give Americans what they wanted, sensational writing and a fight, and this

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without letting up on socialist propaganda. Stories of concrete situations involving political corruption and high-­class crime. . . . Every article and editorial was simply, plainly, but sensationally written. Abstractions of any kind were taboo; only the concrete and immediate were given emphasis.”11 The Appeal, along with the rest of this popular radical press, combined the totalizing theories of a conspiracy of capital then associated with Populism and attached them to the detailed counter-­ conspiracy claims expressed by Albert Parsons and Clarence Darrow. In so doing, the Appeal put forward a new type of socialist detective, the radical journalist who bravely investigated capitalist crimes to produce the dangerous knowledge radicals believed could spark the social revolution.12 “When the working class of America realizes to what lengths these aspiring plutocrats are going in their nefarious work,” wrote Wayland in a stark expression of this new radical faith, “the social revolution will not be far off.”13 Nevertheless, the reliance on sensational reporting and conspiracy trials to build a revolutionary movement proved a double-­edged sword for the Appeal to Reason and the Haymarket generation. The unprecedented legal defense campaign to save Haywood served to construct a coalition of socialist, labor, and liberal forces to defend the union’s legal rights and to push Darrow’s counter-­conspiracy theory of the bomb plot. But just three years later, in a remarkably similar set of events surrounding the bombing of the virulently anti-­union Los Angeles Times, the Appeal’s socialist detectives and faith in dangerous knowledge led to disaster. This chapter looks at how the Appeal to Reason put its distinctive vision of the conspiracy of capital into action through its reporting on three bombings in the West—­the Independence Depot bombing in Colorado in 1904, the assassination of Frank Steunenberg in Idaho in 1905, and the Los Angeles Times bombing in 1910—­with each subsequent bomb marking the rise, triumph, and fall of the Appeal’s popular radicalism. I am interested in how investigative journalism contributed to the building of the American socialist movement, and how the Appeal and others in the popular press used these events to build a mass culture of revolutionary socialism. I ask: How did the politics of conspiracy contribute to both a temporary and persistent unity across the divisions

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of trade and industrial unions, revolutionists and reformists, native born and immigrant, proletarians and millionaire socialists? What is at stake for a radical movement to organize around spectacular political conspiracy trials, legal defense campaigns, and capitalist plots? It seems to be common sense today that conspiracy theories are politically disempowering, that believers are less inclined to participate in political activism than other, more rational citizens.14 As I argue in this chapter, this has not always been the case; in fact, quite the opposite, especially in an era in which political knowledge was accumulated for its organizing purposes, and not merely as entertainment or so as to maintain the quintessential liberal status of being “well informed.” For the Haymarket generation, outrage at the conspiracy of capital led to outbursts of radical activism. The socialist press, guided by the Appeal to Reason, did not so much report these cases as become an active participant in them, playing an authorial role in the great melodrama of American class conflict, shaping the dialectics of conspiracy into a distinctive literary genre as well as a high-­risk, high-­reward project of using dangerous knowledge to build the American socialist movement. For, as we will see, this strategy worked spectacularly well, until it didn’t, demonstrating that it is never a safe thing to wager the survival of a social movement on a jury’s decision in a conspiracy trial. THE APPEAL TO REASON AND AMERICAN SOCIALISM The Appeal to Reason was the most successful venture of a uniquely American propagandist and entrepreneur, Julius Augustus Wayland.15 Born into poverty in Versailles, Indiana, in 1854, J. A. Wayland apprenticed with a local paper at the age of sixteen and rambled around the Midwest as a tramp printer until he was nineteen, by which time he had saved up enough money to buy out the paper that had given him his first job. After founding both Democratic and Republican papers in Missouri, Wayland moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where he made a considerable fortune in land deals as the frontier town expanded into the “Pittsburgh of the West.” The industrialization of the West not only made Wayland’s fortune but also called to his conscience. The construction

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of large mines, ore mills, and steel factories subsumed the independent mining towns of the Rocky Mountains into a chain of industrial colonies, enriching the Guggenheims, Rockefellers, and Pinkertons at the cost of driving the state’s working class into the same poverty and militancy that characterized eastern industry.16 Wayland found an answer to these problems in his reading of Edward Bellamy’s programmatic utopian novel Looking Backward, Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth, and Laurence Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth. Despite his growing wealth and middlebrow culture, his first engagement with socialism gave Wayland a taste for dangerous knowledge. “Until that moment,” he wrote, describing his conversion, “the word [socialism] had been associated in my mind with conspiracies and assassination. I thought it was something about like a ‘Black Hand’ society. When I saw the word, I was tempted to throw the book away. Then I thought I might as well find out what it was about anyhow and decided to sneak the book into the house and read it ‘secretly.’”17 Socialism presented Wayland with a thrilling look into the mysterious inner workings of a corrupt society, a secret vision of radical truth that he wanted to share. Beginning in the 1890s, Wayland threw his growing resources into the Colorado Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Party, helping to elect a pro-­union Populist governor in 1892. But publishing and propaganda were his true calling, and in 1893 Wayland returned to Indiana, where he pronounced himself a socialist and founded The Coming Nation, a weekly magazine named for Bellamy’s Nationalist movement. Impatient for social change, Wayland helped found a utopian community in Tennessee based on the principles of the British artist and reformer John Ruskin. The Ruskin Cooperative Commonwealth never rested on a stable financial or ideological foundation, and Wayland, whose desire for total editorial control never suited him to communal life, withdrew after a short time. He then founded the Appeal to Reason, a weekly four-­sheet newspaper which published its first issue on August 31, 1895, with the immodest goal of bringing socialism to the American masses. Alongside his capitalist competitors William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, S. S. McClure, and others, Wayland helped lead a national revolution in popular newspapers and magazines at the turn of the twentieth

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century.18 Whereas the commercial publishers built empires by ramping up circulation and offsetting their costs through delivering audiences to paid advertisers, Wayland labored to build a massive circulation while keeping advertising, if not out entirely, at least to a minimum as a sign of his political independence. In this somewhat paradoxical way, Wayland sought to fuse the practices of utopian socialism, entrepreneurial leadership, and the productive capacity of industrial capitalism to create a national propaganda machine of evangelical socialism. “The day has gone by for small mediums to tackle great undertakings,” wrote Wayland. “We must prepare to propagate Socialism in just the proportions that Capitalism operates.”19 After moving the Appeal from Kansas City to Girard, Wayland refashioned the small town into his “Temple of the Revolution.” Given its paradoxical character as a socialist company town under the pressures of getting out a national weekly newspaper, life was far from utopian in Girard. In October 1903 about fifty employees formed a union and staged a walkout to protest long hours and low wages. Wayland quickly settled the strike and set everyone back to work without missing a single issue. But the contradictions of operating a for-­profit socialist propaganda machine would continually shape the Appeal’s identity and history.20 In addition to the Appeal to Reason, the editors, writers, and presses in Girard turned out the illustrated magazine The Coming Nation, edited by A. M. Simons and Charles Edward Russell, as well as the milestone socialist feminist papers The Socialist Woman and The Progressive Woman, edited by Josephine Conger-Kaneko.21 In 1903 Wayland hired Conger to edit the Appeal’s women’s column, titled “Hints to the Appeal’s Wise Women.” Conger provided vivid discussions of the news as it related to women’s issues, socialist contributions to the suffrage campaign, and the ethics of Christian socialism. In later years, Conger turned part of her column into a readers’ forum in which she reprinted letters and organized a women’s brigade in the Appeal Army. After marrying the Japanese socialist Kiichi Kaneko, Conger-Kaneko went on to edit The Socialist Woman, which evolved into The Progressive Woman, both based in Girard and published by the Appeal until 1913.

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By the turn of the century, Wayland’s Appeal Press published a catalog of radical books and pamphlets with thousands of titles. The Appeal Press aimed to provide American socialists with a complete history and library, reprinting Populist favorites like Seven Financial Conspiracies and Caesar’s Column alongside Marx’s Capital, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and collections of the speeches, writings, and even gilt-­ framed portraits of their hero, ’Gene Debs. As for the Populists before them, the belief in popular education stood at the core of the Appeal’s sense of activism.22 “To remain ignorant is to remain a slave,” read the motto of the Appeal ’s book publishing arm. The editors and writers of the Appeal were convinced that facts and information, properly framed and distributed, could build a socialist movement and win the revolution. To this end, the Appeal annually published almanacs of political data, called The Appeal Arsenal of Facts, for socialist agitators to use in propaganda, or as the Appeal put it, to “bombard the citadels of capitalism until the white flag is hoisted by the enemy.”23 At the helm of the Appeal to Reason, Wayland spread his distinctive “one-­hoss philosophy” in the effort to, in his words, “explain in my humble way the tendency of the times.”24 Yet this simplified American voice had set out upon a grand agenda: to fuse the fading agrarian revolt to the rising tide of socialism. The Appeal spoke most powerfully to a core readership of the native-­born white working class, the last generation of independent farmers, artisans, and craftsmen who feared that they and their children were being swallowed by the growing trusts. Though its circulation was national, its greatest influence remained within the old Populist regions, across the rapidly industrializing central Midwest, Rocky Mountain region, Pacific Coast, and Southwest, where its circulation was deepest in the socialist hotbed of Oklahoma.25 The agrarian radicalism of the 1890s—­also known as the People’s Party or Populism—­was rife with conspiracy theories of currency swindles, credit cheats, and money monopolies. And not without reason: the consolidation of banking and credit in the hands of urban bankers provided all the inspiration needed for most American farmers, hard hit by recession, to recognize a malevolent conspiracy of railroads and bankers as their enemy. To the Kansas farmers who purchased best-­selling Populist pamphlets by “Coin” Harvey or witnessed Mary Elizabeth Lease’s

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electrifying stump speeches (“Raise less corn and more Hell!”), it could be difficult to distinguish between abstract economic developments within which they were individually intertwined and a deliberate financial conspiracy to attack them personally. If social movements arise within a democracy in part because of the inaccessibility of ruling elites, then both the Populists and twentieth-­century popular radicals had good reason to understand themselves as engaged in a democratic struggle against a distant, concentrated power.26 Through much of the late nineteenth century in the South, Midwest, and West there was a critical overlap between Populist and socialist movements. Many socialists first discovered anti-­capitalist radicalism in reading the works of Populist intellectuals like Ignatius Donnelly and Henry Demarest Lloyd. As a young man in 1894, Jack London—­the famous “boy socialist of Oakland”—­marched across several states with a mass protest of unemployed workers known as Kelly’s Army. Morris Hillquit, Daniel De Leon, Victor Berger, and dozens of other Socialist Party leaders were at one point deeply influenced and inspired by agrarian radicalism. In 1896 Lloyd nominated Eugene Debs to be the presidential candidate for the People’s Party, and when the party fused with William Jennings Bryan’s Democrats behind free silver, Debs and Lloyd vigorously supported the “great commoner” in his bid for the White House.27 In a tacit recognition of the Populist heritage then being absorbed and translated into socialism, the Appeal to Reason claimed in 1901 that “the populist party has performed its mission and there is now no place for the populist except in the ranks of the Socialists.”28 Unlike the Populists, the journalists of the Appeal to Reason did not want to mint silver coins; they wanted to fight the class struggle and win political power. We get a sense of their fighting spirit in a cartoon by T. H. Lockwood published in 1904 (fig. 10). The Populists regularly employed allegorical images of the octopus, or “devil fish,” to represent the villainous capacity of a centralized capitalism to expand and strangle its competition across space.29 But in this intense scene of class struggle, we see labor, typically figured as a white male, grappling with an octopus with only a dollar sign on his head for a name and a seriously ugly look on its face. To deepen the image’s allegorical meaning, Lockwood’s octopus has the names of the various weapons of class war familiar to socialists and labor

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Figure 10. T. H. Lockwood, Appeal to Reason, January 9, 1904.

radicals printed on its tentacles: Injunctions, Employers Assn., Police, Militia, Frame Up, and Black List. The cartoon’s caption asks the worker, mired in battle, to pick up the sword of the Socialist ballot to use against this beast. Of course, it is up to our own interpretation, our own level of political commitment, if we want to imagine that the struggling worker will use the knife to cut off the tentacles of injustice and free himself, or if he intends to plunge the knife into the octopus’s head and kill the beast. Ultimately, the octopus image insists on a totalizing and necessarily revolutionary response; after all, each tentacle is not so much under the

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Figure 11. Page from Appeal Army Picture Gallery (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1905).

beast’s control as a physical part of it, operating somewhat independently but irremovable from the monster capital except by the most violent force. One of Wayland’s most significant innovations was to establish an organization of “Salesmen-­Soldiers” that he called the Appeal Army.30 Begun around 1900, this cadre of committed socialist agitators traveled the country supporting themselves off the pennies earned with each subscription and book sold. Most of the members of the Appeal Army were either working-­class inhabitants of small towns and cities, or members of middle-­class professions living in rural areas, two groups that found common purpose in opposing monopoly and joined the grassroots leadership of the socialist movement (fig. 11). At its peak in 1913, the Appeal Army had over eighty thousand members, making it kind of “party within a party,” an activist core who not only sold literature but also could be counted on to turn out for speakers, strikes, trials, and other events at which the socialist movement sought to show its growing strength.31 Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party of America had no official newspaper; but when Eugene Debs joined the staff of the Appeal in 1903, the paper became the unofficial organ of the socialist movement.32 The Appeal did more than enable Debs to reach a growing number of readers; Debs made his home in Girard and it became his base of operations for

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endless speaking tours and three presidential campaigns. Two members of the Appeal staff, George and Grace Brewer, served as his close aides, arranging speaking engagements for Debs from coast to coast in which small towns and local party chapters paid Debs’s speaker’s fee not in cash but with six hundred to a thousand subscriptions to the Appeal. Due in no small measure to this propaganda strategy, Debs’s popularity and the published subscription rates for the Appeal to Reason seemed to rise in lockstep.33 “I honestly believe,” wrote Wayland in the fall of 1907, “if we could put a Socialist paper every week into the hands of every voter in the United States between now and the election of 1908 that we could capture the government.”34 In its style and success, the Appeal drew its share of critics. In 1904 the right-­wing Socialist Party leader (and future congressman) from Milwaukee Victor Berger denounced the Appeal as “a menace to the movement,” attacking Wayland’s “visions of empires.”35 For the left-­wing socialist Frank Bohn, the typical reader of the Appeal was the small-­town worker who is “bred to be both religious and patriotic,” and when he sees his living conditions decline, a new political awareness develops. “[The Appeal’s] editors comprehend perfectly the psychology of the American-­born worker and specifically the worker in the small town,” wrote Bohn. “The Appeal to Reason comes into the home of this man and he begins to sweat from anger.” Bohn argues, however, that anger is not enough to make a socialist, suggesting hopefully that Wayland’s propaganda was simply “the first act in the making of a revolutionist.”36 What these critics could not deny was that Wayland and Debs were introducing millions of Americans to socialism for the first time, and that the socialist movement was growing. “IS COLORADO IN AMERICA?” THE COLORADO MINING WARS The most significant series of events covered by the Appeal in its early years was the Colorado mining war of 1903–­1904, a protracted outbreak of violence pitting armed members of the Western Federation of Miners against the western Mine Owners’ Association and the anti-­union Citizens’ Alliance in the isolated towns of the Rocky Mountains. “If

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Socialist agitators would now forget for a season that they are men of the book,” declared John Spargo, “and brace themselves to a propaganda for the coming campaign with this Colorado struggle for a living text we would have the most fruitful campaign in our history. Here is a thread of current events upon which every doctrine of critical Socialism appears verified and crystallized.”37 With this story the radical press hoped to unite intellectuals and rabble rousers, radicals and union men, and to win the West for socialism. The history of the Western Federation of Miners chronicles the most abrasive phase of the “incorporation” of the trans-­Mississippi West. Copper miners in Butte, Montana, founded the first western miners’ union in 1878, destined to become Local 1 of the WFM. In 1892 a strike in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, turned violent, and large numbers of miners were summarily detained in wooden barns, empty boxcars, and other improvised prisons that came to be known as “bullpens.” According to legend, while locked up in the bullpen, strike leaders discussed the need for a national organization that could build an industrial union of all hard rock miners across the West.38 After a strike in 1894, the WFM won a string of victories in Colorado, successfully unionizing the Cripple Creek district, instituting a uniform minimum wage and the eight-­hour day for all underground workers. On a state level, unions won passage of an eight-­hour law in 1899, which the state Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. In 1902 a ballot referendum to change the state constitution to mandate an eight-­hour day passed again, this time with 72 percent of voters approving the measure. But the state legislature came under pressure from the MOA to block the eight-­hour bill, especially after the Democrats and Populists split the labor vote and Colorado elected conservative Republican James H. Peabody as governor. Peabody, a banker from Canyon City and founder of the local Citizens’ Alliance, believed that the interests of corporate capitalism and the state were one and the same, stating that government was like “any other great corporation and its executive officers should be asked to conduct its affairs along similar lines.”39 When a WFM campaign to organize mill workers led to a strike, Peabody went to the MOA to secure private funding before marching the Colorado National Guard up to Cripple Creek under the command

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of former Rough Rider General Sherman Bell. The Guard raided union halls, deported hundreds of strikers, and occupied courtrooms with bayonets to deny habeas corpus hearings. “Habeas corpus be damned,” Bell bellowed before a press conference; “we’ll give ’em post mortems!” Bell’s men raided the labor press and arrested all the employees of the Victor Record, leaving the union without any way to get its story to the rest of the nation. “To Hell with the Constitution!” announced one of Bell’s subordinates to a protesting newspaperman. “We are going by the governors’ orders.”40 Emma Langdon, an apprentice linotype operator and, in her words, “the only printer in Victor overlooked by the militia,” snuck back into town, barricaded herself inside the Record’s office, and not only single-­handedly produced the next issue of the paper but also began compiling what is the most complete eyewitness account of these events. Big Bill Haywood designed a poster for the WFM asking “Is Colorado in America?” Haywood printed an indictment of military rule on the stripes of the American flag “in order that the millions of toiling humanity throughout America may know of the conspiracy between the Governor of the state and the corporations, to annihilate the Western Federation of Miners” (fig. 12).41 When General Bell saw these posters, he ordered the arrest of WFM president Charles Moyer for flag desecration. Despite the military occupation of their small town, the WFM maintained the strike. That was until the breaking point came at 2:15 a.m. on June 6, 1904, when a bomb exploded on a crowded train platform at the Independence Depot in Cripple Creek, killing thirteen non-­union miners and seriously injuring dozens more. The first investigators on the scene found some seventy-­five yards of wire fixed to the trigger of a revolver rigged to discharge into a large quantity of dynamite. Someone had coolly waited for the train to pull to a stop at the station platform crowded with scab workers before tugging the wire and triggering the bomb. The WFM had attacked scabs before, chasing them out of the district with brickbats and axe handles. They had dynamited non-­union mine shafts and mills, and they were responsible for the retributive murder of several foremen and mine operators they held responsible for mine accidents between Colorado and Idaho. But this scale of indiscriminate mass killing with dynamite was a major escalation of violence in

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Figure 12. William D. Haywood, “Is Colorado in America?” Western Federation of Miners poster, published in “An Advertisement for Colorado,” Miners’ Magazine, October 15, 1903.

Colorado. Since the start of the strike, the MOA had labored to frame the WFM as the singular source of violence in the districts, accusing them of “Molly Maguireism” and compiling a lengthy list of “outrages” in a pamphlet titled “Criminal Record of the Western Federation of Miners.”

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This public bill of indictment concluded by citing the WFM’s demand for the repeal of conspiracy laws, questioning “what objection can a law-­abiding organization have to conspiracy laws, unless it wishes to engage in a conspiracy unhampered?” In the weeks before the bombing, the WFM responded with its own pamphlet, protesting both labor violence and the lack of mine safety, accusing the MOA of no fewer than “851 men murdered in less than four years.”42 With the bomb at Independence, however, the competing pamphlets’ war of position was violently superseded by the MOA’s vigilantes and National Guard troops backed by the conspiracy doctrine. As the sun rose over the mining districts, the MOA closed its mines and ordered its members to arm themselves and assemble in the town of Victor. There, leaders of the Citizens’ Alliance threatened to lynch Sheriff Henry Robinson if he did not resign. The mob removed the county coroner, all members of the Victor police force sympathetic to the miners, and thirty other local elected officials, replacing them with deputized members of the alliance. MOA vigilantes, including many of the most prominent and propertied men in town, led a riot in which they destroyed WFM halls and looted union co-­ops that supplied strikers and their families with food and provisions, all while shooting dozens of men, leaving two dead and arresting more than 175. Impelled by the bombing, and animated by the presumption of union guilt, the MOA led a local coup d’état, violently deposing the pro-­union elected government and seizing power for organized capital. Given the isolation and the imbalance of power between the WFM in Cripple Creek and Bell’s boots on the ground, the struggle to define what happened and claim the “dangerous knowledge” of the Independence Depot bomb was won before the dust settled. For the MOA, there was no question that this was a union conspiracy, and by deposing the local sheriff and shuttering the local paper, the mine operators ensured that there would be no formal investigation into the bombing. The WFM could only fruitlessly protest, accusing the MOA of murder and provocation.43 According to the historian Elizabeth Jameson, what evidence there

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is as to who blew up the Independence Depot strongly points to the MOA. Testimony taken years later by union lawyers in preparation for the Haywood trial revealed that several of the witnesses who first arrived at the scene saw Sheriff Robinson’s bloodhounds sniff out known MOA private detectives before the new sheriff could call off the dogs. Several witnesses testified that they had seen MOA members planting casks of powder at the Independence Depot, militia members talked openly of plans to foment riots, and several Citizens’ Alliance members spoke of the extensive preparations and military drills made in the days before the bombing. In addition, the MOA had its own well-­established record of bombings in its efforts to exert a monopoly over ore refining in the district, including the destruction in 1902 of eight independent assay offices that the MOA had threatened to close for “high grading” or fencing stolen ore. “Whether or not individual members of the Western Federation of Miners committed violent acts during the strike,” concludes Jameson, “violence was not union policy. It was, however, the policy of the Mine Owners’ Association, the Citizens’ Alliance and the militia.”44 The Appeal to Reason jumped to the aid of its socialist allies in the WFM. “It was the first paper in the land with a national circulation to expose the capitalistic plot,” editorialized the Appeal.45 Its new “fightin’ editor,” Fred Warren, sent no fewer than three reporters into Colorado, where he arranged to have their dispatches smuggled “through the military lines” by sympathetic railroad men.46 Dubbed “war correspondents for the class war,” Appeal journalists covered the violent end of the strike, published a fair amount of rumor and invective directed at Peabody and Bell, and reprinted several “stolen documents” and “overheard” telegrams, linking them to the MOA “conspirators and executioners” whom they accused of pulling the wire that destroyed the Independence Depot.47 With no police investigation, no arrests for the bombing, and no trial—­just the vigilantes’ presumption of union guilt—­the work of investigating, interpreting, and disseminating the story of the bombing was more than just an act of reporting. This was propaganda as direct action, and it was the socialist movement’s most important act of participation in the Colorado mining wars, drawing labor and the socialist

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movement into an alliance. Was breaking the strike a legitimate response to a terrorist union bombing, or was the bombing plotted to enable a larger crime, that of breaking the union’s political power and asserting a reign of corporate control backed by vigilante violence? This story was all too familiar to members of the Haymarket generation, and to the Appeal, the hand of the conspiracy of capital was all too obvious. Debs’s editorials denounced the “capitalist conspirators” who blew up a crowd of “poor, dumb workmen” in a plot to “cover up the crimes of capital and bring down the wrath of the nation upon the union miners.”48 To make its point as explicitly as possible, the Appeal published a cartoon by T. H. Lockwood in which a Citizens’ Alliance plutocrat in full dinner dress and spats plays “The Man Who Pulled the String” that set off the Independence Depot bomb, graphically dismembering a frenzied crowd with an “infernal machine” (fig. 13). This image gives us two versions of plutocratic action at a distance depicted through the pulling of strings. There is the literal string to be pulled, the committing of a criminal act by discharging a pistol into a cache of dynamite. There is also the agency of “wire pullers,” the technological communication of telegrams and telephones enabling cosmopolitan elites to rule over remote mountain towns by hiring private detectives, paying soldiers, and ordering murders by telegraph wire.49 Either way, a political plot, figured as an oversized (and overdressed) individual, executes a criminal act as an agent of the conspiracy of capital. Of the “war correspondents” the Appeal sent to Colorado, George Shoaf rose to the greatest prominence, becoming what the Appeal called “one of the few REAL soldiers of the Social Revolution.”50 Born in Lockhart, Texas, in 1875, George Shoaf was the son of the town’s gun-­slinging marshal; his uncle John “Dirty Shirt” Davis was a legendary Texas Populist and state senator who introduced the boy to radical politics. A visit from Eugene Debs to San Antonio in 1898 sealed Shoaf ’s conversion to socialism. As a young man, Shoaf ran for local office, ministered to a west Texas pastorate, raised a family, discovered journalism, then turned to railroading before making a decision to become a “socialist agitator.”51 Shoaf left his wife and children and proceeded to Trenton, Missouri, where he enrolled in Ruskin College, a short-­lived American cousin to

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Figure 13. T. H. Lockwood, Appeal to Reason, June 18, 1904.

Oxford’s Ruskin Hall, which aimed to become a vocational school for training socialist intellectuals. Shoaf quickly distinguished himself as a firebrand and won the attention of the school’s founder, Walter Vrooman, the son of a Populist judge and former follower of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons. Vrooman, who came into millions when he married the only daughter of a Baltimore coal mine owner, seemed enthralled by a series of wildly improbable revolutionary schemes, and together with Shoaf he moved to Chicago, where the two entertained a long-­ held desire to “avenge the death of Albert Parsons.” When their plotting collapsed in the post-­McKinley assassination Red Scare, Shoaf went back to wandering. Returning to Chicago, he landed a job at William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American, where he learned the paper-­selling trade of yellow journalism.52

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Shoaf ’s affiliation with the Appeal to Reason began in the spring of 1904, when Fred Warren showed up in Chicago and asked him to go to Colorado. Shoaf jumped at the chance to cover the story, and he arrived in Colorado the day after the bombing carrying credentials from the Hearst paper. Shoaf used these credentials to become a kind of double agent in the class war, getting military tours of the strike areas, witnessing firefights between the militia and armed miners, and managing to score an exclusive interview with General Bell, whom Shoaf described as “militarily crazed,” adding that “his conduct is governed absolutely by the policy of the Mine Owners’ Association.”53 Shoaf wrote such invective only for the Appeal; each night he wired one story to the Chicago American, while his “real story was reserved for the Appeal to Reason.” These dispatches from “Siberia, Colorado, U.S.A.” had to be smuggled out of the district by a union fireman on the Cripple Creek to Colorado Springs line.54 Shoaf was more than a journalist. He was playing the part of a socialist detective tracking down the perpetrators of the Independence bombing and exposing the conspiracy of capitalism. “THE INNER CIRCLE” As dramatic as the Colorado mining wars were, they proved a mere prologue to the bomb that killed the former governor of Idaho, turning the nation’s attention to bomb plots in the West. The victim, Frank Steunenberg, won election in 1896 on a Populist ticket backed by the state’s hard rock miners. Expecting a sympathetic voice in the state executive, labor leaders accused Steunenberg of betrayal when he dispatched the state militia to break the strikes of 1899. After Steunenberg’s murder the WFM remained defiant, calling him “a traitor to those whom he had appealed to for election and sold out to the money power,” adding that although the union bore no responsibility for his death, the bomb gave the story “a true Russian ending.”55 Within a few days of the bombing, local police in Caldwell solved the crime. Witnesses led investigators to a suspicious drifter who had been staying at the Saratoga Hotel for weeks on the pretext of buying sheep. But this man bought no sheep, had no visible means of support,

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and had no friends in town. On New Year’s Day 1906, two days after the bombing, the police arrested Harry Orchard with enough bomb-­making material in his hotel room to hang him for murder. For the state of Idaho, this was not a simple murder. A member of the political class had been killed, and though no clear motive presented itself, dynamite was both a political weapon for working-­class militants and a tool of the hard rock miner’s trade. Rumors of union plots were rife in the local press, and Idaho governor Frank Gooding put up a large reward for the arrest of the unnamed conspirators. This reward is what attracted James McParland, the celebrity detective who was now head of the Pinkerton International Detective Agency’s Rocky Mountain branch. When McParland first met Orchard in his isolation cell, the detective talked broadly of his most famous case, explaining how he had interceded on behalf of the repentant Molly Maguires who testified against their brothers. “Not because they were innocent,” explained McParland, “but because they had allowed themselves to become the tools of the men of the inner circle of the Mollie Maguires, who were more guilty than they who actually committed the crimes, . . . just as he had done the bidding of the inner circle of the WF of M.”56 For McParland, the countersubversive narrative of “inner circles,” linking individual terrorists to larger labor movements, was an unchanging feature of union criminality, offering the detective a chance to repeat the storyline that had made him a dime novel hero (or villain) thirty years earlier. Twenty-­one days after Orchard’s arrest, he and McParland emerged with an eighteen-­thousand-­word confession in which Orchard claimed he had been hired by three officials of the WFM—­Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone—­to dynamite Steunenberg. Not only that, but Orchard confessed as well to a lifetime’s worth of violent crime and moral turpitude, including drinking and gambling, larceny and fraud, burglary and arson, child abandonment and bigamy, all before undertaking a series of shootings and bombings that tallied up more than twenty murders, including pulling the wire that triggered the Independence Depot bomb. His confession detailed failed assassination attempts on Governor Peabody, General Bell, and other enemies of the WFM across several states.

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Taken at his word, Orchard’s confessions made him one of the most murderous terrorist in American history and the secret link in a chain of industrial violence in the West over more than a decade. In the hands of McParland, the state of Idaho, and the capitalist press, Orchard’s confession became an absolution, not just through the narrating of sin and coming home to Jesus, but through the telling of a thrilling conspiracy narrative, equally suitable for dime novels, middle-­class magazines, or courtroom testimony. This was a new and dangerous genre, the dynamite confessional, in which the arrested dynamiter spills his story and names names to both public and prosecutors, thereby gaining an equal measure of celebrity and leniency. On the strength of this tale alone—­and the shifting of agency enabled by a private detective and the conspiracy doctrine—­Harry Orchard’s story brought three men to stand trial on capital murder charges. Like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray to come, Orchard himself may be the greatest mystery in this case. But unlike the conspiracy theories surrounding those more famous 1960s assassins, Orchard’s found great currency and sympathy with the national media and political elites. When McClure’s Magazine published Orchard’s “Confession and Autobiography” in the midst of the trial, the editor George Kibbe Turner wrote that Orchard was “sane to the point of bleakness,” that he was “absolutely devoid of imagination,” and that unless he possessed the literary talents of Defoe, his story must be true.57 Likewise, Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote in his review that Orchard’s confessions filled him with “an overwhelming impression of essential truthfulness.”58 For a mass murderer, Orchard drew a remarkable list of character witnesses, including the Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, who examined Orchard in his cell and pronounced him honest and sane.59 Orchard’s tale was a literary experiment in what one might call the sensational depositional style, a blend of genres and tones, equal parts temperance narrative and labor spy procedural authored by a peripatetic killer for hire. When he is not lamenting his moral degradation (“for I had no conscience, or, if any, it was seared so with sin it would not act”), his prose becomes as stiff as a police report (“I forget what I told him they said to me. . . . I cannot remember a falsehood like I can the truth”).

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Orchard’s early years of drinking, adultery, and wandering in the desert are all too anagogical, especially after his tale of internal guilt becomes politically externalized when he joins the WFM and meets “murderers and anarchists” like Haywood and Moyer. Orchard is too busy trying to smuggle high-­grade ore out of the mines to concern himself with union politics or class struggle, so he takes on the WFM’s hit jobs with an unenthusiastic sense of duty, preferring to be paid in cash and live like a hunted tramp without the ideological embrace of the radical Left. Perhaps this is why so much of Orchard’s dynamite confessional adopts such an evidentiary and depositional tone. Along the way, Orchard details his involvement not just with the WFM but with a pair of railroad secret service agents to whom he initially tried to make a confession but instead found himself hired by the MOA to work for both sides. The encounter ordering the Steunenberg murder is rendered as dryly as possible: Haywood pays Orchard $300 and tells him to put Steunenberg “out of the way” because “they wanted to show those fellows that they never forgot them.”60 After the murder, the last in a long list, Orchard cracked. “I seemed to lose my reasoning power for a time,” he wrote, “and left everything there just as they were.” Orchard made no attempt to escape or dispose of incriminating evidence. But without these signs of obvious guilt, redemption for Orchard is unavailable. When James McParland arrives in his cell as the detective confessor, he offers Orchard a chance at both legal and moral absolution. Orchard recalls McParland explaining that “men might be thousands of miles from where a murder took place and be guilty of the murder, and be charged with conspiracy, and that the man that committed the murder was not as guilty as the conspirators, and, to say in a word, he led me to believe that there was a chance for me, even if I was guilty of the assassination.” That is, McParland told a story about the conspiracy doctrine, one that offered Orchard legal and religious redemption for a lifetime of guilt. Conspiracy allowed Orchard to cast his sins onto the crimes of the union, and in that sacred plea bargain he could seek “the forgiveness of God.”61 Armed with Orchard’s confession, on the evening of February 17, 1906, the Pinkertons kidnapped Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone off the streets

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of Denver, detaining them overnight in the Oxford Hotel near Union Station. When the next morning, a Sunday, broke over the city, with its courts closed and lawyers still asleep, McParland escorted the three men to an express train to Idaho “in order to secure perfect safety from legal attacks.”62 The plot worked. Calls from WFM lawyers to the county jail were ignored, or they were fed scripted misinformation, and when the three union men arrived in Idaho, Governor Gooding announced that they would never leave the state alive. Once the WFM lawyers filed writs of habeas corpus on their clients’ behalf, protesting the illegal arrests and extradition from Colorado, this began a yearlong legal challenge, giving the defense the time it needed to organize (something the Haymarket anarchists did not have). The Idaho Supreme Court accepted the men’s arrest and their presence in its jurisdiction as a fait accompli, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, ruling that while the arrest and extradition had in fact been illegal, given that the men were currently in Idaho’s jurisdiction, there was no legal recourse or remedy. Justice Joseph McKenna alone dissented, agreeing with WFM lawyers who claimed their clients were the victims of a kidnapping conspiracy. “Kidnapping is a crime, pure and simple,” wrote Justice McKenna, declaring that the governors of Colorado and Idaho had conspired to “avoid the Constitution of the United Sates.”63 Despite the lone dissent, Idaho now set the date for the first of three proposed trials. “AROUSE, YE SLAVES!” William D. Haywood, not yet known to the world as “Big Bill,” faced trial first. Haywood was a six-­foot-­tall, two-­hundred-­pound, hard-­ drinking, one-­eyed former miner turned organizer who would become the embodiment of proletarian masculinity and the Left’s most famous tough guy. Born to a poor family in Salt Lake City, Haywood started working underground in Winnemucca, Nevada, at the age of nine. Somewhere along the way Haywood learned of industrial unionism from a member of the Knights of Labor, and when he got a job in Silver City, Idaho, Haywood joined the WFM. There he showed his talent for

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organizing, and in 1902 Haywood put down his pneumatic drill for the last time and left the four-­thousand-­foot-­deep mine shaft in which he had spent much of his adult life working. Haywood moved to Denver, where he took up a position as secretary-­treasurer of the WFM, the number-­two man behind union president Charles Moyer, and editor of the union’s paper, the Miners’ Magazine. Haywood believed in what he called “industrial socialism” and wanted to grow the WFM into a national and international union for all workers, rejecting the narrow craft labor and “lily-­white” conservatism of the AFL. Under this banner, Haywood led his union as the largest delegation at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago. On June 27, 1905, before a delegation that included Eugene Debs, Daniel De Leon, Mother Jones, and Lucy Parsons, Haywood called his “fellow workers” to order and declared this to be “the constitutional congress of the working class,” dedicated to building the “One Big Union” of all working people.64 Eight months later, the Pinkertons kidnapped Haywood and the others in Denver, propelling the three men and the multiple organizations they represented into the national spotlight. With the coming trial, Haywood was going to become either the most famous radical in America or a martyr to a much larger movement.65 When the news of the kidnapping broke, Wayland did not just denounce “the conspiracy to hang Haywood”; he also promised that the Appeal and its readers would put a stop to it. “Already the Appeal’s staff correspondents are speeding on their way to the scene,” claimed Wayland.66 The kidnapping of Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone led Eugene Debs to pen the most radical statement of his career. In an editorial titled “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” printed across the front page of Appeal on March 10, 1906, Debs evoked the spirit of Haymarket, accused the mine owners of conspiracy, and openly called for armed revolt should Haywood be convicted: There have been twenty years of revolutionary education, agitation and organization since the Haymarket tragedy, and if an attempt is made to repeat it, there will be a revolution and I will do all in my power to precipitate it.

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The crisis has come and we have got to meet it. Upon the issue involved the whole body of organized labor can unite and every enemy of plutocracy will join us. . . . If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns. . . . Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this union will resound with the tramp of revolution. . . . We will watch every move they make and in the meantime prepare for action. A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat at Chicago, or some other central point, would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising. If the plutocrats begin the program, we will end it.67

For Debs, not only did the Haywood trial offer redemption for Haymarket, but also it was a chance to expand the reach of popular radicalism. Debs pulls out a series of totalizing conspiracy theories in the editorial: wire-­pullers on Wall Street, the lies of the capitalist press, and a mount-­ the-­barricades rallying cry. This editorial marks Debs’s first explicitly insurrectionary statement, revealing not just the perceived stakes for the socialist movement in this trial but the imagined potential for revolutionary action. So deep was the historical imprint left by the events of Haymarket upon this generation of radicals that only a perceived reiteration of the frame-­up and trial could compel America’s most popular socialist to visions of mass revolt. Debs was not alone in his enthusiasm for the Haywood trial. Gaylord Wilshire, the southern California “millionaire socialist” and publisher of the weekly Wilshire’s Magazine (probably the Appeal’s closest competitor in the field of popular socialism), shared Debs’s urgency.68 “If the trial proceeds and if such a terrible event as conviction by the servile minions of plutocracy should follow,” wrote Wilshire, “it should be the signal for the working class of America to rise—­let that mark the date for the beginning of a Great National General Strike.”69 In the International Socialist Review, a lead editorial by A. M. Simons furiously proclaimed, “This plot will succeed unless there is such an uprising of the working class of Americans as to frighten the conspirators away from their murderous intentions.”70 Such statements are certainly filled with bluster

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and melodrama, but they also give evidence of what the historian Perry Anderson once called “the imaginative proximity of social revolution.”71 But there is a big flaw in the editorialists’ revolutionary plan: the revolution comes only if the court in Idaho finds their comrades guilty. What of the great uprising, what of the coming of socialism and the crimes of capitalism if the WFM men are found not guilty? Perhaps Debs’s usually disguised cynicism never considered the possibility of a legal victory. The Appeal and the popular radical press stoked this legal outrage to feed circulation and socialist revolution to a growing national audience. But if Big Bill got off was the revolution off too? And if they convict, were they ready to rise? Debs’s enemies certainly took this incitement to revolution seriously. After “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” Canadian postal officials banned the Appeal for some fourteen thousand subscribers. The editorial came to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered his attorney general to investigate the possibility of arresting Debs and keeping the Appeal out of the U.S. Mail.72 Much to Roosevelt’s chagrin, there was no legal basis for the Justice Department to prosecute. Debs’s statement, however, plus a clever stunt in which the Appeal offered a bounty for the kidnapping of the former governor of Kentucky who had fled the state on a murder charge, set up the Appeal and editor Fred Warren for more than a decade of legal harassment by the state and federal governments.73 If Roosevelt could not prosecute the Appeal, he could use his “bully pulpit” to attack socialism, publicly denouncing Haywood and Debs as “undesirable citizens.” When Haywood wrote the president from prison pointing out that in America the defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty, Roosevelt repeated his claim: “Messrs. Moyer, Haywood and Debs . . . stand as representatives of those men who . . . habitually stand as guilty of indictment to or apology for bloodshed and violence. If that does not constitute undesirable citizenship, there can never be any undesirable citizen.”74 The Appeal shot back, calling the president a “creature of political accident” and an “incarnation of imperialism” who had become “the protege of plutocracy” and was now the “arch-­conspirator” behind “the desperate outlaws of capitalism.”75 This case and its competing narratives divided the nation.

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At the Appeal, tens of thousands of new subscriptions poured into the Girard offices. In the spring of 1906, Warren began shipping free copies to Idaho in the hope of influencing the potential jury pool. Special editions of the Appeal reached self-­proclaimed “world record” levels, with 2,240,000 copies printed of the March 31, 1906, “rescue edition.” “The Appeal has been accused of taking advantage of this conspiracy of the mine owners to railroad innocent men to the gallows to promote the circulation of this paper,” wrote Wayland. “The Appeal pleads guilty to the charge.” As proof of the paper’s growing influence, Wayland informed his readers that the Appeal offices were now under constant surveillance by the Pinkertons. “Bring on your Pinkerton thugs—­we will give them information which will cause their masters to stand aghast! We are making history,” he wrote.76 It was a muckraker’s dream: knowledge was power, and socialist truth tellers could beat back both the lies and the moral legitimacy of the capitalist enemy. Seeing the chance to sell papers, the San Francisco Examiner offered to pay Jack London a considerable sum to report on the trial from Boise. At this moment, London was the most famous socialist in America, and probably the only American socialist recognized internationally. It seemed a plum assignment, but London turned the offer down. Instead, he chose to finish his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, in which a very Big Bill–­like proletarian hero leads a socialist revolution in America.77 But London did speak out on the case, giving a speech two days before the trial opened which was widely reprinted as “Something Rotten in Idaho.” “Here is conspiracy self-­confessed and openly flaunted,” London argued, “and it is conspiracy and violation of law on the part of the very men who claim that they are trying to bring punishment for conspiracy and violation of law.” This article is important because London represented the strongest voice of the left-­wing socialists—­the class-­conscious, fighting men and women—­before the reading public. London threatened the position of the more conservative Socialist Party electoral figures, and now the famous author told the world that the Haywood trial was part of an escalating class war. “In brief, the situation at present in Idaho is as follows,” London concluded. “Following a long struggle between capital and labor, the capitalist organization has jailed the leaders of

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the labor organization. The capitalist organization is trying to hang the labor leaders. It has tried to do this before.”78 London cut the storyline to a razor’s edge: what was at issue was not guilt or innocence but class power. It was the same message offered in The Iron Heel, London’s most radical work of fiction. “The Moyer-­Haywood case,” predicted the Miners’ Magazine, “will tend to cement labor the country over.”79 Because the state’s countersubversive theory was to link terrorist acts to labor and socialist organizations, the Haywood defense campaign drew these groups together. Haywood held a position of national leadership in the WFM, the newly formed IWW, and the Socialist Party. His conviction threatened to brand all three groups as terrorist conspiracies, and so they joined forces to defend their new leading man. In fact, Haywood made an improbable run for governor of Colorado on the Socialist Party ticket, winning sixteen thousand votes while in a prison cell in Idaho. Moyer-­Haywood conferences formed across the country to propagandize, organize rallies and marches, and raise huge sums of money for the defense. As the trial approached, major cities and small towns witnessed large rallies of working people and radical organizations. In Boston, anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people marched, bellowing the favored chant of the movement: “If Moyer and Haywood die / Twenty million workingmen will know the reason why.” On May 4, 1907, the anniversary of the Haymarket bomb, an enormous crowd of 50,000 to 70,000 marched through New York City, in which many of the marchers and members of forty-­two bands waved red flags and carried signs denouncing Roosevelt and McParland.80 The size of the New York rally was due in no small measure to the organizing work of Abraham Cahan, whose radical Yiddish-­language paper the Jewish Daily Forward helped publicize the case to an audience of urban radicals and Jewish socialists drawn as much by the parallels to Haymarket as by any affinity with the struggles of hard rock miners in the West. In Chicago, Mary Dreier and Margaret Robbins of the National Women’s Trade Union League organized labor marches, deftly balancing the many factional and political disputes within the Chicago labor movement. The resulting event included 30,000 to 40,000 citizens marching along with Lucy Parsons before ending at

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a rally conducted in six different languages. The weekend before the trial opened, smaller marches took place in Brooklyn, Rochester, Lynn, San Francisco, and the single-­tax colony of Fair Hope, Alabama, which raised several hundred dollars for the defense fund. Throughout these protests, thousands of marchers wore red buttons declaring “I AM AN UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN!”81 The defense campaign for Haywood also took on a significant internationalism. When the Russian poet Maxim Gorky came to the United States, hosted by Gaylord Wilshire, he exchanged several telegrams with Haywood—­“The class struggle, which is worldwide, makes us brothers indeed,” responded Big Bill—­after which Gorky was angrily hounded out of the country by New York’s scandalized high society. As the Second Socialist International grew, the Appeal published words of support from the leaders of the German Social Democrats, August Bebel and Karl Kautsky, who wrote, “May this struggle be successful, may it be the starting point of an overwhelming rise of the American proletariat against its oppressors!”82 As the competing stories of inner circles began to draw attention in the summer of 1906, the legal maneuvers were already well under way. The trial of Steve Adams, the prosecution’s only corroborative witness to Orchard’s story, proved to be a rehearsal for the Haywood trial and a boost in confidence for the defense. The Pinkertons arrested Adams, a former WFM activist, in Oregon, where he was interrogated until he delivered a full confession corroborating Orchard’s story. Under Darrow’s influence, however, Adams recanted his confession and testified in court that Orchard was working for the Mine Owners’ Association. He testified that members of the Pinkertons had threatened to kill him unless he signed a false confession. By the end, Adams sat through three murder trials with Darrow leading the defense, resulting in either a hung jury or an acquittal, thereby removing Orchard’s only corroborating witness. Meanwhile, Haywood recalled his time in the Ada County Jail as “the most quiet, peaceful period of my life,” enabling him to read Marx and Engels and other classics for the first time.83 All of this fed the optimism of the socialists. Wayland gathered millions of subscriptions for a special “First Anniversary Kidnapping Edition” (fig. 14). The Appeal now came under pressure from both the capitalist press

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Figure 14. Appeal to Reason, First Anniversary Kidnapping Edition, ed. Eugene V. Debs, February 16, 1907.

and other socialists. Republican papers ridiculed “The Squeal of Treason,” “The Appeal of Unreason,” and other such jabs.84 The Denver Republican, one of the Mine Owners’ Association’s most ardent defenders, carried a story detailing how a “dynamite bomb wrapped in a copy of the Appeal to Reason was found” in Grand Junction, as if the wrapping was more important than the undetonated (and unconfirmed) bomb.85 Several journalists complained about the Appeal directly, and especially about George Shoaf, whom many members of the press accused of being a drunken liar, quick to pursue local women and make up stories about secret meetings. As the trial approached, the many enemies of Haywood raised the volume. Newspapermen from around the world overran the small mountain town of Boise, the majority of whom presupposed the WFM men’s guilt, rationalized the illegal extradition to Idaho, and reported that union members were plotting to bomb the Boise prison to free the three men, while playing down the role of McParland and the Pinkertons.86 The newspaper reports seemed to grow in both sensationalism and substance by the day.

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THE TRIAL OF BIG BILL HAYWOOD After more than a year of acrimony, accusations, and growing public fascination, the trial of Bill Haywood finally began on May 7, 1907. Both sides brought out their best legal teams. For the prosecution were James Hawley, special counsel for the state of Idaho, and William E. Borah, the newly elected senator from Idaho. Clarence Darrow led Haywood’s defense team, aided by Edmund Richardson, an urbane and polished Denver attorney who was on regular retainer for the WFM. For the prosecution, the case was simple: all the killings, bombing, and mayhem confessed to by Harry Orchard, including the murder of Frank Steunenberg, were committed at the insistence of the “Inner Circle” of the Western Federation of Miners. The courtroom testimony and cross-­examination of Orchard formed the central drama of the trial. For six days the competing lawyers questioned the only material witness in the case, drawing out the details of a confession he had rehearsed with McParland over nearly sixteen months of sequestered isolation. On the stand, the well-­groomed and outwardly taciturn Orchard repeated the details of his published confession. “Not in the whole range of ‘Bloody Gulch’ literature,” wrote New York Times reporter Oscar King Davis, “will there be found anything that approaches a parallel to the horrible story so calmly and smoothly told by this self-­possessed, imperturbable murderer witness.” According to Davis, who befriended the presiding judge and grew deeply involved in the trial, Orchard’s narrative was the “unmixed truth.”87 Davis was so stirred by Orchard’s personality and narrative that he readily accepted its Manichean logic and displacement of agency from criminal act to political plot. If the confessed killer Orchard appeared calm and spoke gently, the men on trial who ordered those murders at a distance must be the bloodthirsty savages. “In all the talks with the overseers and architects of his work,” wrote Davis, “Haywood stands out as the iron man, insatiable of blood, vindictive, savage, revengeful. . . . It was kill, kill, kill with him, kill and never cease.”88 Most court watchers in the capitalist press found Orchard’s testimony convincing. However, the opinion of the press counted for very little in the courtroom because from a legal point of view, the prosecution could not produce a single witness to support a word of it.

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When Darrow and the defense took the stage, they argued not one conspiracy theory but three counter-­conspiracy narratives for Steunenberg’s assassination.89 The first story, reported early on by the Appeal, suggested that Steunenberg’s murder was motivated by the local range wars between sheep and cattle men. As a businessman, Steunenberg had connections with largely Mormon and Democratic sheepherders that made him a target for an alliance of cattle barons and mine owners in the Republican Party. According to this theory of the crime, these wealthy conspirators decided to rid themselves of Steunenberg by hiring McParland and Orchard to do the deed, which not only cleared the way for cattle but could be pinned on the WFM to boot, allowing conservative businessmen to solve two problems with one bomb.90 The second theory suggested that Orchard murdered Steunenberg in a personal act of revenge and that the only conspiracy in this case was the prosecution’s attack on the WFM. Under cross-­examination Orchard related how he had been forced to sell a one-­sixteenth interest in a Coeur d’Alene mine after Steunenberg’s declaration of martial law in the 1899 strike, a claim that could have earned the constantly broke Orchard a small fortune. Of all the theories of the crime presented by either side, this is the only one that gave Orchard, the primary actor in this story, any semblance of personal agency or purpose. It is also the dullest version of the story. While both the range war and revenge theories carried some explanatory power, the third counter-­narrative presented by the defense was ripped right from the headlines of the Appeal to Reason. The argument was simple: Orchard was a spy working for the Pinkertons, the MOA, and the Citizens’ Alliance, or all three, in a plot to destroy the WFM. This counter-­conspiracy argument grew out of what was the most significant moment for the defense in Orchard’s cross-­examination. Under withering questioning by attorney Richardson, Orchard admitted that when he first met Haywood and Moyer, he was in the employ of the MOA, and that during his stay in Cripple Creek, Orchard made frequent reports to a railroad company detective named D. C. Scott, from whom he received money and railroad passes (something to which his published confessions allude). What the Appeal had been printing for the past year, based on investigations by the defense during the Adams

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trials and the journalistic footwork of George Shoaf, was now a matter of court record: Orchard was a spy during his years as a member of the WFM. “This has been a Pinkerton case from start to finish, Your Honor,” declared Darrow. “All that the mine owners did—­the deportations of men, the defiance of law, the forbidding of merchants to sell food and supplies to the families of the men driven out of the district—­they did in furtherance of their criminal conspiracy to destroy the WFM.”91 Though the prosecution objected to this line of questioning rehashing the history of the Colorado mining wars, Judge Fremont Wood decided to allow it, promising to rule whether or not it was admissible—­as is the exception made by the conspiracy doctrine—­only after its presentation to the jury. During the trial, McParland did his best to remain outside the public view. Governor Peabody testified against Haywood, and so did General Bell. But as the mastermind behind the entire case, McParland remained in Boise under the close protection of his own celebrity bodyguard, the “cowboy detective” Charles Siringo, who told anyone who would listen that their lives were constantly in danger. Siringo’s ambition for fame was as strong as McParland’s desire for secrecy. Born in southwest Texas, Siringo joined the Pinkertons in Chicago in 1886, where he spied on the Haymarket defense team, broke the strikes in Coeur d’Alene in 1892, chased Butch Cassidy across the West, and served as Governor Peabody’s and McParland’s bodyguard in 1907. When Siringo sought to cash in on his fame, the Pinkertons sued him over his first memoir, A Cowboy Detective, after which Siringo turned on the agency, and in 1915 he published his own tell-­all book, blaming “two evil isms,” Pinkertonism and anarchism, for industrial violence and social disorder (fig. 15).92 Siringo’s dangerous knowledge came later, however, because in Idaho, the first ever whistle-­blower inside the Pinkertons was about to testify in open court. The prosecuting attorneys managed to keep the Pinkertons out of the case, right up to the point when Darrow called an ex-­Pinkerton employee named Morris Friedman to testify as an expert witness. Friedman was not a detective or a spy, but worked as a clerk and stenographer in the Pinkertons’ Denver office before becoming disillusioned with the organization. As the Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden of the

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Figure 15 (left). Charles A. Siringo, Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism (Chicago: Charles A. Siringo Publishers, 1915). Figure 16 (right). Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy (New York: Wilshire Book Co., 1907).

Haymarket generation, Friedman collected stacks of internal documents and daily reports from “secret operatives” before quitting the company and publishing his exposé in a book titled The Pinkerton Labor Spy (fig. 16). Denouncing the Pinkertons as “a public menace masquerading as a public necessity,” Friedman became the era’s first capitalist whistle-­blower, combining reprints of stolen reports from labor spies with an angry analysis of what he called “the romantic vileness of the detective trade.”93 The ramifications of Friedman’s exposure were enormous, for not only was he the first Pinkerton to publicly document the inner workings of the organization, but also his position in the Denver office gave him privileged access to McParland himself and the agency’s full range of activities in the Colorado mine wars. For example, Friedman reveals how the Pinkertons thoroughly infiltrated and surveilled the WFM’s leadership, and yet the agency could produce no evidence of the union’s involvement in the Independence Depot bombing. “If

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there was a conspiracy,” concludes Friedman, “the conspirators were none other than the leaders of the Cripple Creek District Mine Owners’ Association.”94 According to Friedman, what made the Pinkertons so dangerous was not that they used countersubversive fantasies to drum up business but that they genuinely believed in their own fears, especially if there was money in it. In the book’s startling final passages, after pages of reprinted internal Pinkerton reports and documents, Friedman offers a pre-­psychoanalytic theory of paranoid projection to describe the Pinkertons’ countersubversive demonization of workers. By reflex action, a picture of how [McParland] and six associates secretly ran the infamous business of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, which picture had lain for years in his brain like an undeveloped film, suddenly took shape, and was thrown considerably magnified on the canvas of his fertile imagination so that he beheld seven men secretly plotting mischief and directing infamies of the worst character. And his thoughts were so forcibly concentrated on the leaders of the Miners’ union that instead of recognizing in this picture william a. pinkerton, robert a. pinkerton, george d. bangs, young allan pinkerton, john cornish, edward s. gaylor and himself, he fancied he beheld Charles H. Moyer, William D. Haywood and the different members of the Executive Board of the Western Federation of Miners. Without stopping to examine into things, Manager McParland promptly condemned the men he fancied he saw on the picture as a gang of conspirators, and named them the inner circle. How little he realized that in doing so he was condemning himself and his six associates, and how little did he dream that the name which he intended should be a reproach to the officers of the Western Federation of Miners would be correctly and properly applied to the management of pinkerton’s national detective agency!95

In Friedman’s all-­caps psychological theory of the case, McParland mis-­ recognizes a vision of himself and the heads of the Pinkerton agency as the violent “Inner Circle” of the WFM, displacing his own criminal desires onto a screen memory that frames the innocent union. Externalization, paranoid projection, sublimated desires for violence, and ideological demonization: all of these elements constitute what Michael

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Rogin has called “the countersubversive personality.”96 Friedman was a clerk and a whistle-­blower, certainly not a psychoanalyst, yet his diagnosis “in regard to the inner working of [McParland’s] brain” remains a remarkable example of popular radicalism’s vernacular theory of paranoia.97 Gaylord Wilshire, publisher of The Pinkerton Labor Spy, hoped to capitalize on Friedman’s sudden fame and paid to bring him to Boise to serve as an expert witness in the trial. More than offering background on Pinkerton tactics and organization, Friedman named names, pointing out several agents provocateurs seated in the courtroom and listing dozens of spies who infiltrated the WFM over the years. Much to the defense’s surprise, Judge Wood permitted this testimony, filling the court record and subsequent newspaper editions with stories of how the Pinkertons incited violence with the design of destroying the WFM, all while offering internal documents bearing director McParland’s signature as proof. From the court watcher’s point of view, the counter-­conspiracy argument seemed to be working. The correspondent for Wilshire’s claimed that Friedman’s testimony “proved to be an eye-­opener for the whole country,” and that it was “the strongest thing offered by the defense to prove their contention of a conspiracy by the mine owners to destroy the Western Federation of Miners.”98 This evidence was so compelling that when Judge Wood refused to admit the testimony into evidence and instructed the jury to disregard more than a week of evidence offered as part of the defense’s counter-­conspiracy arguments, the impact was undimmed. How could the jury, let alone the reading public, un-­hear such testimony? Once the defense rested its case, the trial moved on to closing arguments. The packed courtroom listened with rapt attention to several days’ worth of summation from the four lead lawyers. Hawley, Idaho’s special prosecutor, emphasized the horrific nature of the crime and argued that Haywood should be convicted even without the absolutely truthful, if legally uncorroborated, confession of Orchard. When Senator Borah took up the trial’s final remarks, before a courtroom crowded with well-­dressed members of Boise’s elite, including Governor Gooding and the victim’s widow, he delivered a speech filled with religious

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exhortations and countersubversive exaggerations. “It was murder—­no, not murder, a thousand times worse than murder,” shouted Borah in an effort to shake the rafters. “I saw anarchy wave its first bloody triumph in Idaho.”99 The two attorneys for the defense put on the best show. Richardson spent nearly nine hours attacking Orchard, McParland, and, in his words, “the slimy Pinkertons who sneaked into our union to make trouble.”100 But as we have seen, Darrow was a closing arguments specialist, and he filled his eleven-­hour final summation with humor, invective, and emotion.101 He began with a series of blistering attacks on the prosecution (“[Hawley] says he is honest! Maybe he is, but if he is honest he is crazy, and he can have his choice!”) and on Orchard (“Orchard saves his soul by throwing the burden on Jesus, and saves his life by dumping it onto Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone”). Darrow ultimately presented Orchard as a hollow and violent character, granting him a debased sense of agency coupled with an incapacity to represent anything or bear any responsibility greater than himself. “He was a soldier of fortune,” declared Darrow, “ready to pick up a penny or a dollar or any other sum in any way that was easy . . . to serve the mine owners, to serve the Western Federation, to serve the devil if he got his price, and his price was cheap.” While this does not sound like much more than invective, it was the key legal move in Darrow’s closing argument. By granting Orchard this pathetic measure of independence, he turned the crime back onto the still untried but publicly confessed killer while denying the agreement that could hang Haywood on a conspiracy charge. In Darrow’s soaring final words, he drew upon the far larger, more totalizing visions of the conspiracy of capital to build a class bond between the big-­city lawyer, the persecuted union man, and the independent western farmers who constituted the twelve men of the jury: The eyes of the world are upon you, upon you twelve men of Idaho tonight. . . . If you should decree Bill Haywood’s death, in the great railroad offices of our great cities men will applaud your names. If you decree his death, amongst the spiders of Wall Street will go up paeans of praise for those twelve good men and true who killed Bill Haywood. In every bank in the world, where men hate Haywood because he fights for the poor and against the accursed system upon which the favored

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live and grow rich and fat—­from all those you will receive blessings and unstinted praise. But if your verdict should be “Not Guilty,” there are still those who will reverently bow their heads and thank these twelve men for the life and the character they have saved. Out on the broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide ocean where men are tossed and buffeted on the waves, through our mills and factories, and down deep under the earth, thousands of men and of women and children, men who labor, men to suffer, women and children weary with care and toil, these men and these women and these children will kneel tonight and ask their God to guide your judgment. These men and these women and these little children, the poor, the weak, and the suffering of the world will stretch out their hands to this jury, and implore you to save Haywood’s life.

Darrow melodramatically plays on Populist and agrarian imagery of bloodthirsty “spiders of Wall Street” and the ruling men of “every bank in the world” versus the honest “men who toil with their hands” who will celebrate a “not guilty” verdict. Did these men of the jury seek the “praise”—­a paternalistic and patronizing gesture—­of the distant elite who clamored for the blood of innocents, or a humble thank you and the prayers of their neighbors and fellow toilers? Darrow’s class-­based and at times explicitly conspiratorial concluding lines successfully joined the men of the Idaho jury not with the radical leader sitting in the dock but with the vast social struggle between the arrogant haves and familiar and humble have-­nots. This was the last great gesture of class solidarity forged by this trial. With the end of closing remarks, Judge Wood gave a long list of instructions to the jury about the presumption of innocence, the conspiracy doctrine, and corroborative evidence. For example, the judge warned the jury that “greater care should be exercised in receiving the testimony of detectives and other persons especially employed to hunt up evidence against the defendant.” This cast suspicion on the whole of the prosecution’s evidence, especially Orchard’s confession. “The law views with distrust,” continued the judge, “the testimony of an accomplice on account of the motive he may have for laying the responsibility of his crime upon another when by so doing he may secure immunity for his own participation in the crime charged.”102 This too directly

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diminished the legal standing of Orchard’s testimony. Though bench-­ issued jury instructions were a common practice, the prosecution felt very hard done by as a result of the judge’s remarks, and many in the press felt that Wood had tipped his hand. Nevertheless, at mid-­day on July 26, 1907, the jury began its deliberations, and by early the next morning the jury informed the bailiff that they had reached a decision. News of the verdict set the overcrowded town abuzz with nervous commotion as Haywood returned to the courtroom to face the decision. When the foreman stood to offer the verdict, Darrow hugged Haywood, telling him to “prepare for the worst, I’m afraid it is against us, so keep up your nerve.” The court clerk took the verdict from the judge and read aloud: “Not guilty.” Pandemonium erupted in the courtroom, and the judge gaveled Haywood a free man on the spot. The verdict left most reporters for the capitalist press stunned, especially those like Davis to whom Judge Wood had confided his personal belief in Haywood’s guilt. Vindication rang through the assembled radicals, and spontaneous celebrations carried on throughout the day and night in the streets of Boise and around the country. According to Haywood’s memoirs, “perhaps tons of dynamite were exploded in the celebration. . . . There is no way of estimating how much whisky was drunk for the occasion.”103 In the weeks and months that followed, both sides felt the verdicts’ reverberations. Accusations of bribing and intimidating jurors flew from one side to the other. Conservative papers refused to admit defeat. “The verdict sets Haywood free,” wrote a Chicago Tribune editorialist, “but public opinion has not cleared him.”104 Equally unwilling to accept defeat, the state of Idaho continued with the trial of George Pettibone, who was also acquitted in January 1908. The state finally dropped all charges against Moyer, and the entire legal campaign against the WFM ended with a whimper. Making a liar out of the badly discredited McParland, the state of Idaho easily convicted Orchard of murder, sentencing him to death before commuting the sentence to life in prison. Harry Orchard (or Albert Horsely), a confessed terrorist and hit man claiming a body count surpassed only by Albert Anastasia and Timothy McVeigh, died in prison an old and forgotten man in 1954.105 With the verdict, the Appeal to Reason declared itself “the mightiest

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political power in the nation today. . . . No paper approaches it in influence.”106 The paper’s circulation reached national scope during the trial, with a nearly 50 percent increase in subscriptions accelerating past 300,000. The praise in the Appeal for George Shoaf also grew hyperbolic, turning the journalist into a leader of a social movement. “The conspiracy was nipped in the bud and exposed by Geo. H. Shoaf,” boasted the Appeal. “Practically alone, he has fought valiantly that all the facts in this monstrous plot be laid before the working millions of this country. The largely attended protest meetings being held in every city in this land testify to the potency and effectiveness of his work.”107 Just as Allan Pinkerton had done to McParland in 1877, the Appeal made Shoaf into a dime novel hero, featuring him in two books about the Colorado mining wars and the Haywood trial. The first, Love Crucified: A Romance of the Colorado War, was authored by Shoaf himself and published by the Appeal in 1905.108 The second novel, The Scarlet Shadow: A Story of the Great Colorado Conspiracy by Walter Hurt, also published by the Appeal, appeared shortly after the Haywood verdict.109 The latter imagines itself as a “new experiment in realistic story writing” which combines real characters with fictionalized elements to dramatically recount the recent, thrilling past. Though the novel features Debs, Fred Warren, and Haywood in their documented roles, an adventuring journalist named Gordon Shoforth stands as the novel’s hero in his battle with the “Thuggerton Detective Agency.” Written by an Appeal reporter, featuring the Appeal’s ace investigator, published by the Appeal Press, this novel also offers one of the clearest defenses of the paper’s strategy and popularity. “Such a paper as the Appeal is not primarily devoted to a scientific exposition of Socialism,” explains Shoforth to an adversary in the capitalist press. “Its function is purely propagandic; it addresses itself to the popular mind in language most readily understood, and often with a vivid vernacular that appeals very effectively to the reader. This is largely the secret of its tremendous success.”110 Whatever its success as an experimental dime novel, what is fascinating about The Scarlet Shadow is just how quickly the Appeal translated the story of the Haywood trial, and its journalistic role in those events, into heroic socialist fan fiction with a dramatic climax equaled only by the actual verdict.

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Despite the celebrations, the successful defense of Big Bill presented the Haymarket generation with a complex set of lessons. It proved that organized labor and socialism could unite in a common defense, and it taught that Haymarket could be avenged by a mass revolutionary movement. It taught the radical Left that a very public victory against the conspiracy laws after decades of defeat and persecution was at least possible. To achieve this, the Haywood defense campaign required the greatest mobilization of the American working class since the first May Day in 1886. But more still seemed possible. Socialism was growing, and this moment gave the Haymarket generation hope that the next galvanizing event could spark a revolution. “It may well be,” concluded the International Socialist Review after the verdict, “that from this trial will date the growth and development of a proletarian activity and militancy that will bring about the speedy overthrow of the whole capitalist system.”111 For Debs, Darrow, and the Appeal, the Haywood trial cemented in them a set of assumptions about political organizing, the villainy of the capitalist enemy, and the dynamics of conspiracy cases as “frame-­ups,” as well as a taste of what winning something, anything, could feel like. In this great rush leftward, more cautionary lessons went unnoticed. To begin with, there is a tremendous tactical disadvantage to fighting “labor defense campaigns.” Though the Left dreamed of turning labor defense into revolutionary offense, these struggles were exclusively reactive, meaning that the government alone has the power to set the time, place, and issues of conflict. Such defense campaigns are expensive for social movements in both financial and human resources. Running a union and supporting strikers has historically proven nearly impossible when the leaders are imprisoned and all of the organization’s energy and income are focused on courtroom battles over constitutional rights. Aggressive strikes and legal defense campaigns are usually antinomies, or at least sequential phases, in the dynamics of social movements, despite what the radical spark of the Haywood verdict suggests. In this case, the trial slowly drained the WFM of its financial resources to pay legal fees, and with its most radical officer and editor in jail for more than a year, a more conservative, contract-­oriented leadership took over the union, which shed its once celebrated militancy. Eventually the WFM left the IWW and joined the AFL.

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Writing from his position in the Popular Front generation of the 1930s, Louis Adamic called the Haywood trial “unquestionably the most significant incident in the war between the have-­nots and the haves in the first decade of the twentieth century.”112 And in retrospect even from 1910, the Haywood trial began to look something like a high-­water mark. For the next time this same cast of characters united to defend their fellow workers in a strikingly similar case, the result was an unmitigated disaster for the Haymarket generation. “THE LAST BIG FIGHT!” Second only to James McParland and the Pinkertons, organized labor knew few more belligerent, and despised, enemies than Harrison Gray Otis. Otis was the son of an anti-­union senator from Massachusetts, early devotee of Nietzsche’s will to power, and Los Angeles’ “generalissimo of the open-­shop.”113 General Otis moved to Los Angeles when it was still a small town and purchased the Los Angeles Times, which he used to promote the city as the sunshine-­fueled, union-­free future of America. A domineering local power broker, Otis organized the Los Angeles–­area Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association and successfully battled back several efforts to unionize the workers at the Times. Even Theodore Roosevelt, something of an authority on blustering reactionaries, once called Otis “a consistent enemy of every movement for social and economic betterment.”114 Business interests held such a tight grip on Los Angeles by the early twentieth century that the city council outlawed picket lines, judges handed out blank-­check injunctions to company lawyers, and the police routinely broke up union parades with guns and batons. During one strike, Otis had a brass-­plated machine gun mounted on the hood of his armored touring car.115 The labor movement knew Los Angeles as “Otistown of the Open Shop,” and recognized Otis’s paper as the “most unfair, unscrupulous and malignant enemy of organized labor in America.”116 On the strength of its building trades after the 1906 earthquake, the unions in San Francisco had long set their sights on organizing the workers in its younger sister city to the south.117 During the summer and fall of 1910, an organized campaign of strikes shut down large sectors of Los Angeles’ industry. As the strikes grew, the threat of

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violence hung heavy in the desert air, as if each side expected nothing less than the worst from the other. On his way home to Los Angeles after meeting with Mexican president Porfirio Díaz about a land deal, General Otis learned of an explosion at his printing plant.118 The explosion and fire destroyed the main printing facility and killed twenty-­one workers, with scores more injured. Yet with a delay of only hours, Otis started up a secondary printing plant two blocks away, and on Sunday morning, October 2, 1910, the headline of the Los Angeles Times read, “Bomb Exploded by the Enemies of Industrial Freedom and of This Paper.”119 So it was as if made to order for Otis when, in April 1911, operatives of the Burns Detective Agency captured three prominent leaders of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (IABSIW, an AFL affiliate). William J. Burns, a former member of the Secret Service and commonly known as “the American Sherlock Holmes,” ran the most competent detective agency in the country, now outshining the scandal-­plagued Pinkertons. In 1910 not only was Burns personally in charge of security for Otis, but also he had been retained by the National Erectors’ Association since 1905 to investigate dozens of bombings at non-­union construction sites. When detectives arrested James B. McNamara and Ortie McManigal in Detroit, and James’s brother John J. McNamara, the secretary-­treasurer of the IABSIW, in his Indianapolis office, it came at the end of a five-­year investigation that combined Burns’s two biggest cases. Armed with strong physical evidence, which included a briefcase full of dynamite, blasting caps, and alarm clocks, Burns successfully flipped Ortie McManigal. McManigal gave a full confession, led the detectives to substantial corroborating evidence, and committed to testify against his former union brothers. “Were I to do it over again, in the light of my present knowledge,” warns McManigal in his dynamite confessional, “I would die rather than join a labor union.” 120 In Burns’s narrative of the case, published in 1913, he details the “Masked War” between dynamiters and detectives, arguing that “the war with dynamite was a war of Anarchy against the established form of government of this country. It was masked under the cause of Labor. . . . My reports of investigations among the Anarchists in this country, written in

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the terse and simple language of my investigators, will prove it.”121 After some questionable legal handling (indeed another illegal extradition), Burns shipped the brothers off by car to California, where they arrived at the Los Angeles County Jail on April 26, 1911. “These villains are the Camorrists of the United States,” editorialized Otis, transforming the native-­born trade unionists into immigrant gangsters, “and in running them down Detective Burns has unearthed the most tremendous criminal conspiracy in the history of America.”122 This was a countersubversive fantasy come true for Otis and his detectives, for now he had the union men who he believed had attacked him personally. Writing in the Appeal on October 15, 1910, Eugene Debs set the oppositional tone for what grew into a broad coalition of organized labor and radicals to fight General Otis. Where Otis saw a cabal of “anarchist scum” and “criminal unions,” Debs found a familiar frame-­up. “As one who knows the Los Angeles Times by personal experience with that vicious, lying and criminal sheet,” wrote Debs, “I want to express it as my deliberate opinion that the times and its crowd of union-haters are themselves the instigators, if not the actual perpetrators, of that crime and the murderers of the twenty human beings who perished as its victims.” To Debs, had the explosion not been so deadly, the entire episode would have suggested a laughable melodrama, “particularly fitted for the sleuth series of dime novels.” Debs shared the conclusion offered up by many socialists and Progressives in Los Angeles that this was not a bombing at all but an accident caused by faulty gas pipes, an industrial accident (similar to those that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of workers a year in the Age of Monopoly) for which Otis was responsible. Nevertheless, Debs predicted it would be only a matter of time before some “conscienceless detective” was able to “railroad some worker to the gallows.” Based on only circumstantial evidence and his own personal experience, Debs’s statement represents a polemic on social justice grounded in the conspiracy of capital. What Debs did not have was a clear sense of the evidence of the criminal act to be presented in court.123 The McNamara and Haywood cases were similar enough that Debs’s conspiracy theory washed over the full range of socialist and labor

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movements. “To review the kidnapping of J. J. McNamara and his associates,” wrote Big Bill Haywood for the freshly redesigned International Socialist Review, “is like reading a brief chapter of my own life.”124 In a pamphlet titled Capitalism’s Conspiracy in California: Parallel of the Kidnapping of Labor Leaders in Colorado and California, the socialist author Frank E. Wolfe enumerated no fewer than sixteen “exact parallels” between the two frame-­up cases. And just as in Idaho, writes Wolfe, “the outcome in California depends on the actions of the workers.”125 As if waiting for just such an event, Fred Warren announced that the McNamara case would be “The last big fight!” “I am sure,” he wrote, “every member of the Appeal Army will endorse our decision to throw this paper and all its resources into the fight.”126 As he had done twice before, Warren dispatched Shoaf to cover the trial; Debs began a national speaking tour to publicize the case; and by early May, the Appeal began taking orders for another multimillion-­copy special “Rescue Edition No. 2.” As part of a larger campaign to “Carry California for Socialism,” Wayland committed to send forty thousand copies of the Appeal to California voters every week. The right of the Appeal to lead the national defense campaign was taken for granted by the editors in Girard (if resented by socialists elsewhere else). “The Appeal has sources of information that reach to the innermost circles of capitalism,” proclaimed Wayland after the arrests of the McNamara brothers. “Be it remembered that capitalists can make no move of any consequence that the services of some working man or woman is not needed. . . . These sources of information are considered sacred and will not be revealed under any circumstances. . . . Don’t ask us for details and explanations. Watch the Appeal and follow its lead!”127 Armed with socialist detectives and an army of potential working-­class whistle-­blowers, the Appeal fed on a thirst for sensational conspiracy stories and dangerous knowledge. The second group to claim leadership of the McNamara defense campaign was Samuel Gompers and the AFL. By early May, the AFL had started a nationwide drive to raise money and build a defense campaign.128 Gompers had equivocated throughout the Haywood trial, but this time he recognized the threat posed to his “pure and simple unionism.” Now “the trade unionists of America are going to see that

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they shall have a fair trial,” declared Gompers, “that those guilty in the conspiracy and in the carrying out of the conspiracy to kidnap . . . the accused men shall be punished, and to prevent for all time to come the repetition of so great a travesty upon justice.”129 Over time, Gompers became personally convinced of the McNamaras’ innocence, and as the trial approached, the conservative labor leader grew more militant. During the AFL’s 1911 convention, Gompers threatened to abandon the two mainstream political parties if the McNamara brothers were found guilty. “‘Sam,’” J. J. McNamara told Gompers during their final meeting, “‘I want to send a message by you to organized labor and all you may meet. Tell them we’re innocent—­that we are the victims of an outrageous plot.’ I believed him,” wrote Gompers, “I had no reason not to at that time—­and I delivered his message.”130 To this end, Gompers traveled up and down the West Coast, stopping twice in Los Angeles to meet with the brothers and pose for photos in their cell. For Gompers and the AFL, the Los Angeles Times case was an existential threat to trade unionism, and he put his organization and his personal reputation on the line for the brothers’ defense. Perhaps most innovative of all, the AFL sponsored the making of what is considered the first labor film. Films such as The Dynamiters and Gus and the Anarchists were common in the first decade and a half of popular cinema. For the AFL to take up moviemaking in a political campaign marks the beginning of a class struggle on the silver screen. Shot at the Steeley Studios in Dayton, Ohio, for $2,577, A Martyr to His Cause: Incidents in the Life and Abduction of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers debuted in Cincinnati on September 23, 1911. An estimated fifty thousand people saw this film across the country by December.131 The McNamara case pushed Gompers and the AFL farther to the left than at any other time in the union’s history. Gompers promised to raise the $350,000 needed to retain Clarence Darrow and took full responsibility for the defense fund. Though he kept his distance as best he could, Gompers accepted the support of the Socialist Party and publicly praised Eugene Debs in a new spirit of unity between trade unionism and popular radicalism. The AFL declared Labor Day 1911 to be “McNamara Day,” and tens of thousands of supporters marched in

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New York, Cleveland, Atlanta, Seattle, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Diego. The largest McNamara protest occurred on June 21, where Socialist congressman Victor Berger and IABSIW president Frank Ryan spoke to a rally of over eighty thousand citizens in Chicago. Twenty thousand workers marched through downtown Los Angeles, carrying banners for the mayoral election reading “Register Your Protest against the McNamara Frame-­Up!” Armed with marches, movies, and money, the campaign to free the McNamaras fed a serious electoral campaign to win California for the Socialist Party. “There is but one way for the working class to get justice,” wrote J. J. McNamara from his prison cell: “elect its own representatives to office.”132 As if answering J. J.’s strategic demand, the Socialist Labor Party nominated Job Harriman as their candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. A lawyer by trade, Harriman was a longtime Socialist Party ally of Morris Hillquit, the former vice presidential running mate of Eugene Debs and author of a best-­selling pamphlet on the Coeur d’Alene mining war. That summer the legal defense and mayoral campaigns merged into a single fight, with Harriman using the bombing case as an emotional issue to draw the working class of Los Angeles to the Socialist Party, and by August it seemed possible that Harriman could actually win as part of a wave of electoral victories for Socialist candidates across the nation. Rumors circulated around the Harriman campaign that should he be elected mayor, he would arrest Otis for the defective gas system that caused the explosion. The unified power of labor radicalism and electoral socialism in Los Angeles seemed on the verge of turning the world upside down. “One may say,” declared the Appeal, “that this is the first battle ever fought between supreme plutocracy and a working class just becoming conscious of its real interests.”133 For the first time in the factional and divisive history of the American Left, all the fissures were dramatically, if temporarily, overcome. The anarchist magazine The Agitator noted, “The promptness of the response of organized labor to the call of duty in the Los Angeles kidnapping outrage, is a delightful sign of the times.”134 The celebrated muckraker Lincoln Steffens traveled to Los Angeles to defend the McNamara brothers in the name of Christian charity.135

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“Never before had there been such a nationwide class consciousness on the part of the working class of America as in the last half of 1911,” wrote Louis Adamic a generation later. “There were practically no right and left wings of the movement.” The political mobilization and unity around the McNamara trial marked a critical high point in the dialectics of conspiracy, in which a legal-­political contest to define a conspiracy and assign criminal guilt in a deadly incident threatened to spill out beyond the narrow confines of a courtroom battle and legal defense campaign to seize political power for itself. To detective Burns, the threat was real, and “a social revolution seemed at hand.”136 “DYNAMITE CONSPIRACY” AND THE MCNAMARAS’ CONFESSION The entire effort, however, was a lit powder keg with a very long fuse. The McNamaras were guilty, and the prosecution had the goods on them. The IABSIW had been locked in a series of violent battles with the National Erectors’ Association for years, a crusading open shop organization that counted U.S. Steel as a major backer.137 Since the Homestead strike of 1892, U.S. Steel had successfully broken every union representing its employees, including the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, as well as unions of molders, machinists, carpenters, bricklayers, masons, seamen, and longshoremen. By 1910, the only union left to resist J. P. Morgan’s billion-­dollar steel trust was the IABSIW. These trade union men waged their battles not on picket lines but by dynamiting more than a hundred non-­union work sites starting in 1905.138 In this literally explosive context of local and national class conflict, James B. McNamara, ordered to act either by his brother or possibly by union leaders in San Francisco, placed a dynamite bomb outside the Los Angeles Times’ printing plant in what was known as Ink Alley. J. B. never intended to kill anyone; the bomb was supposed to destroy the medieval fortress of a building that Otis had built for his conservative paper. But the ink stored in large barrels in the alley instantly vaporized, spreading a fiery blast through the building which killed the workers inside. Well before jury selection began in October 1911, with the public

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willing to believe that the McNamaras were innocent victims of a capitalist frame-­up, an already exhausted Darrow fell into despair. “It was not easy to combat the powerful forces of society in the courts,” wrote Darrow in his autobiography. “I was now weary of battling against public opinion. . . . Hard as it was to give them [the AFL] my ‘Yes,’ it would have been harder to say ‘No’”139 Unlike the public, who read the competing headlines of the Appeal and the Los Angeles Times, Darrow alone on the defense knew the strength of the prosecutor’s case. Making matters more difficult, the McNamara brothers faced no less than twenty-­one separate indictments for murder and conspiracy. This meant that even if Darrow could do it all over again and win a first trial, there could follow an endless series of trials which the prosecution promised to carry out in the event of an acquittal. Investigators were working their way up the union’s chain of command and readying indictments for a list of labor leaders in both San Francisco and Indianapolis. And then there was the difficulty of defending against what Darrow called “the law of conspiracy.” As he put it, “Under the constant stretching of the conspiracy laws we could see that evidence showing any unlawful use of dynamite anywhere in the United States would be held competent under the statement of the prosecuting attorneys that they expected to connect it up with the defendants, or with someone else who would be linked up with the defendants.”140 In other words, any evidence of a “dynamite conspiracy” anywhere within the AFL or its affiliates could be used against the McNamaras to prove a conspiracy in Los Angeles. As Darrow recalled his experience of the trial, his best, if previously unthinkable, option was to plead out his defendants, save them from the death penalty, and try to prevent the AFL’s complete legal destruction. While the union that hired him expected an epic public fight, Darrow saw his duty differently. One would never have known any of this from the stories Shoaf ran in the Appeal to Reason.141 “At the time,” wrote Shoaf many years later, “I hadn’t the remotest idea of who might be responsible for the explosion. And, truth to tell, I didn’t care. Many times through the years I had become so exasperated and enraged because of the lies against labor publicized by the Times that I felt like doing the job myself.”142 While the Appeal was fully committed to the cause, the paper never

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exuded the same confidence it had shown during the Haywood trial. “The McNamara brothers have about as good a chance of acquittal,” Shoaf cynically observed, “as Harrison Grey Otis of earning the love and respect of the working class.”143 As the southern California summer turned almost imperceptibly to fall, Shoaf and Darrow, who had been consulting frequently, now grew apart. And when Shoaf learned that Darrow intended to offer a plea deal, Shoaf ’s life and work reached an excruciating crisis. Once Shoaf was faced with the truth of the brothers’ guilt and had to concede a crushing political victory to the despised Otis and Burns, something inside him snapped, turning the now famous reporter back into the unknown revolutionary hoaxer from his days in Chicago. “What can I write?” pondered Shoaf upon learning of the impending confession. “The owner and editor of my paper, influenced by my reports, believe in the innocence of the McNamaras. So do hundreds of thousands of Appeal to Reason readers. So do the rank and file of organized labor membership in this country. Job Harriman . . . has almost a cinch in winning the election. Does he know what this confession will mean to his candidacy?”144 So on August 13, 1911, George Shoaf crafted a frame-­up of his own. That night he attended a party at the home of local socialists where he cryptically told whoever would listen that he had in his possession information capable of blowing the case wide open, and that for this knowledge he was in grave danger. After the party, at about midnight, the residents of Shoaf ’s rooming house heard a loud thud on the stairs, and the next morning they found a lead blackjack and a battered derby with the name G. H. Shoaf printed inside. Neither George nor his vital notes were anywhere to be found. “SHOAF IS SLUGGED!” the next headline of the Appeal screamed out. “The slugging of Shoaf and his mysterious disappearance is the most sensational aspect of the labor war in California to date.”145 Below the fold, the Appeal reprinted Shoaf ’s last letter, promising to deliver a story in which “I charge Otis with the full responsibility of ‘The Times’ explosion, naming the man hired to destroy the building.” After expressing fear for his own safety, Shoaf ended on a different, much sadder note: “This fight with me is the business of my life,” he reflected. “All my life I have sacrificed and toiled for my ideal. . . . All that I am and have, and hope to be, long ago I dedicated to the work

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of bringing about the emancipation of those who toil. I am satisfied. . . . I may not have done much—­I don’t suppose I have—­but I am square and sincere and full of fight, and I am no quitter.”146 In retrospect, it seems strange that Shoaf would choose to bare his soul to his editor with his last words rather than divulging the dangerous knowledge promised. At first the Appeal’s staff was genuinely shocked. Warren hired Shoaf ’s father, the former San Antonio chief of detectives, to investigate, and offered a $500 reward to anyone who could find out what had happened to his star reporter.147 For a time Shoaf ’s disappearance played out in a war of headlines between the Appeal and the Los Angeles Times.148 Within a few weeks, several socialist papers, led by the Daily People, the organ of Daniel De Leon’s New York–­based Socialist Labor Party, called Shoaf ’s bluff and mocked the Appeal’s “sensationalism” and “yellow journalism.” Many of the socialist papers and individual journalists had long resented the Appeal’s popularity and tone, but few more so than Olive M. Johnson, one of only three women journalists (all socialists) who covered the Haywood trial. “I happen to know Shoaf from Boise,” reported Johnson, describing him as a divisive presence among the small community of socialists and trade union groups. To Johnson, Shoaf was the master conspirator, a man who called himself an “Anarchist,” and worked for “the most ultra-­sensational of all Hearst’s sheets,” while announcing with “whispered bombast” that “he believed Orchard’s confession to be true and that the prisoners would be convicted.” Shoaf had told her that all the socialists could do was “put up the bluff that the jury is bought, and all the witnesses perjured.” Johnson had kept this story to herself for years, including the accusation that Shoaf had “seduced a 15-­year-­old-­child, the grandchild of an Idaho farmer,” and had to skip town immediately after the verdict when the affair was discovered by his landlady. But now that Shoaf ’s disappearance dominated the front page of the Appeal, Johnson was convinced that the “whole matter was manufactured between himself and the Appeal.”149 After a month of investigation, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Shoaf ’s father reported his understanding that his son’s disappearance was for “personal reasons.” Proof finally arrived when a letter written by Shoaf and dated September 13 was intercepted by Piet Vlag, editor of the

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new radical arts magazine The Masses. Written to Elsa Untermann, the seventeen-­year-­old daughter of the Marxist philosopher and Wilshire’s reporter Ernest Untermann, Shoaf ’s letter proved that the two had been having an affair while Shoaf was in Los Angeles and provided instructions on how to keep his whereabouts a secret. With this discovery, an ugly scandal erupted into a battle of personal recriminations between the folksy Appeal, the urbane Masses, and the outraged father.150 Ernest Untermann fired off angry letters to Warren, Debs, Vlag, and others in the party demanding they turn over Shoaf to him before he went public with the story. “The Appeal people don’t want to find Shoaf,” wrote Untermann in a letter published in the Miners’ Magazine. “He has always acted like a Pinkerton, working in an underhanded way throughout the movement. . . . His activities may have increased the circulation of the Appeal, but the interests of the Appeal and of the Socialist party are by no means identical.”151 With accusations like this, Shoaf disappeared and stayed gone. He remained persona non grata on the left for decades, resurfacing only to write a series of reminiscences for socialist magazines and, finally, an autobiography published in 1953. To the end he remained evasive about the McNamara case, calling it “the only story that went sour,” adding, “That is where I made my first bad guess and prediction.”152 As for his own frame-­up, Shoaf flatly explained: “I sat down, typed my letter of resignation from the Appeal to Reason, and went into hiding. I didn’t have the guts to face anybody.”153 The Shoaf scandal raged hot inside the editorial offices of radical magazines until the first of December, when Darrow and the McNamara brothers marched into court and pled guilty. Darrow, encouraged and aided by Lincoln Steffens, had spent weeks working on a deal. At first, Darrow pleaded with the brothers to accept an arrangement in which J. J., the union president, who was not in California during the bombing, would be released and all future prosecutions of the union abandoned in exchange for a confession and life sentence for J. B. The Los Angeles Merchants and Manufacturers Association agreed, provided J. J. accepted a ten-­year sentence and the confession came before the December 5 mayoral election. The judge then raised J. J.’s sentence to fifteen years, and this too Darrow and Steffens persuaded the brothers to accept. “It was

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my intention to injure the building and scare the owners,” admitted J. B. before the court. “I did not intend to take the life of anyone. I sincerely regret that these unfortunate men lost their lives.” Darrow, wallowing in a sorrow he carried with him for the rest of his life, told reporters outside the courtroom: “Murder was never in [J. B.’s] thoughts. He is not a murderer at heart.”154 The confessions heralded a total defeat for the brothers’ supporters. Not only had there been no frame-­up, but also, for the first time the public heard a full confession proving the AFL harbored and protected dynamiters. Supporters of Job Harriman’s campaign threw their buttons and banners in the gutter, and in the election held just four days later, Los Angeles voters elevated the Republican Party into power. “Scoffing, anarchistic Socialism has been crushed,” triumphantly declared the Los Angeles Times, “with the same swift, merciless annihilation that the heel of a giant crushes the head of a reptile.”155 Otis’s position as the “apostle of antiunionism” went national. Burns’s pursuit of the nationwide “dynamite conspiracy” became the subject of a fawning series in McClure’s Magazine.156 In the end, prosecutors made liars out of Darrow and Steffens, ignoring the Los Angeles deal and indicting fifty-­four union officials for conspiracy, including President Frank Ryan of the Iron Workers Union along with the whole of his executive committee. The trial, which began on the two-­year anniversary of the Los Angeles Times bombing, featured McManigal as the key witness and resulted in thirty-­eight convictions: Ryan received seven years, O. A. Tveitmoe, secretary of the California Building Trades, got six years, and the rest were sentenced to terms in Leavenworth from one to four years. “Pretty bad?” asked Steffens in his autobiography on his experiment in negotiating a peace between labor and capital. “Yes, the experiment was a failure.”157 Upon learning of the confession, Sam Gompers simply wept. “The McNamara brothers have betrayed labor,” he moaned, having held faith in their innocence to the last moment. After the tears, the work of damage control began. “Organized labor of America has no desire to condone the crimes of the McNamaras,” read an official statement from the AFL issued December 7, 1911. “It joins in the satisfaction that the majesty of the law and justice have been maintained and the culprits commensurately punished for their crimes.”158

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Not only did the socialist-­labor coalition break down, but each side turned on the other. Gompers used the pages of the American Federationist to denounce every socialist in the country from Schenectady mayor George Lunn and Milwaukee congressman Victor Berger to Debs and Haywood, and even Karl Marx himself.159 The radicals shot back in kind. “Admitting that the McNamaras are guilty,” Debs wrote, “their acts are the logical outcome of the impotency and hopelessness of the craft form of unionism, typified by Samuel Gompers . . . and of which the condemned men are faithful disciples and loyal devotees.”160 Debs’s argument was that if a union’s only goal was to protect itself and make selective deals with capital rather than create revolutionary social change for the whole of the working class, trade union men were little better than gangsters, willing to use violence in the name of clannish self-­interest. Gompers strategically retreated from his solidarity with radicalism, and after 1912 he refused to support any of the major labor defense campaigns of the next decade, including those on behalf of Tom Mooney and Sacco and Vanzetti. “The affair, as it turned out,” wrote Adamic, “took the militant spirit out of the American Federation of Labor.”161 The AFL turned toward formal and electoral politics, helping to establish the U.S. Industrial Commission to investigate the causes of industrial violence.162 With the election of Woodrow Wilson, the AFL launched a major lobbying campaign to build ties to the Democratic Party and win legal reforms for labor rights. “Even should the activities of labor organizations be rightfully classified as conspiracies,” wrote Gompers in a letter to Wilson, “has not the time come when it must be considered whether these ‘conspiracies’ of organized labor do not do more for the advancement of humanity and national welfare than the property interests which have been heretofore carefully safeguarded?”163 In 1913–19­14 Gompers helped win passage of the Clayton Act, a law designed to restrict injunctions and exempt unions from the Sherman Act. The courts, however, quickly rendered the law’s vague provisions ineffective, once again undoing labor’s legislative efforts by judicial activism. Nevertheless, Gompers maintained his attachment to the Democratic Party, supporting Wilson’s counterrevolutionary war on the IWW and the Socialist Party during and after World War I, all in the hope of demonstrating the AFL’s patriotism and legitimacy. This strategy failed badly, as the AFL’s support for the violent

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repression of radicalism gained his trade unionists no protection from an emboldened “open shop movement” that turned against the AFL in the 1920s. Soon enough, Samuel Gompers was back to his old rhetoric, opposing an “Open-­Shop Conspiracy to Crush Organized Labor.”164 Wounded by the McNamara case and the abuse heaped upon him by his former comrades, Darrow immediately faced a conspiracy trial of his own. Charged with attempting to bribe two jurors, Darrow gained an acquittal in the first trial, while the second trial ended in a hung jury.165 During the closing arguments of the second trial, in which he acted as his own attorney, Darrow offered his most succinct explanation of the meaning of the McNamara trial and his decision to plead the men guilty: I know I could have tried the McNamara case, and that a large class of the working people of America would honestly have believed, if these men had been hanged, that they were not guilty. I could have done this and saved myself. . . . I know if you had hanged these men and other men, you would have changed the opinion of scarcely a man in America, and you would have settled in the hearts of a great mass of men a hatred so deep, so profound, that it would never die away. And I took the responsibility, gentlemen. Maybe I did wrong, but I took it, and the matter was disposed of and the question set to rest. . . . I did not deserve praise, but where I got one word of praise, I got a thousand words of blame!166

As close as Darrow was to the events of Haymarket, and as clearly as he understood the explosive potential of judicial martyrdom, he chose resolution in the truth, insofar as it was possible, over the social divisiveness and endless legal, political, and historical battles of the dialectics of conspiracy. Darrow chose to put a stop to the reciprocal cycles, save the brothers’ lives, and try to heal the hatred between labor and capital and thus save the nation from a class civil war. In so doing, Darrow parted ways with the radicals and left the class struggle behind, spending the next six years in Chicago recovering his health and taking only minor criminal cases. As with Gompers, it took the peak of the Red Scare in 1919–­1920 to bring Darrow back to the Left. Though deeply saddened by the confession and Harriman’s defeat, many radicals refused to condemn the McNamaras. Instead, what they

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found in the case was deeper evidence of a far more totalizing conspiracy of capital, an enemy against which one simply had to choose sides. Emma Goldman said it plainly: “Mother Earth cries out against the cheap and vulgar excuse: ‘We were deceived, we thought the men innocent, we did not know.’ Deceived of what? That there is a war? That there are two forces pitted against each other in a savage combat? Innocent of what? That the McNamaras did not stake their lives in behalf of their class, or that they had any choice between love and hate?”167 Big Bill Haywood, speaking as leader of the IWW, told a crowd at Cooper Union, “I am with the McNamaras and always will be.”168 As for the socialist Henry M. Tichenor, “I have no mortal use for the self-­confessed methods of James McNamara,” he wrote, “but I have a damned sight less use for the whole pack of hypocritical thieves that have stolen their millions and back their stolen property with cannon. . . . The amazing wonder is that the earth isn’t over-­run with half-­crazed dynamiters.”169 The Masses also recognized the existence of a class war, claiming that only a “powerful and terrible” class consciousness could overcome the “conspiracy” tactics of the trade unionists: “Labor once organized . . . has no necessity for plotting, secrets or lies.”170 The Appeal to Reason suffered the most. “The McNamara brothers were not socialists,” the paper shouted, shallowly pointing out that they were registered Democrats. The Appeal accused McManigal of being “the hired spy of the Manufacturers association,” a charge that the paper had not leveled before, committed as it was either to the gas explosion theory or to blaming Otis alone. The Appeal also lashed out at Darrow, denouncing him as a “traitorous attorney” who “shoved the dagger in [Harriman’s] breast and at least tried to stab to death the whole working class of the Pacific coast.”171 Debs never gave up his belief that the Los Angeles Times was destroyed by the conspiracy of capital. In a long review of the McNamara case, he admits that J. J. placed the bomb, but, Debs asked, “who placed Jim McNamara?”172 He insisted: There is nothing in the whole affair to indicate that the McNamaras acted on their own initiative, but on the other hand everything tends to prove that they were but the dupes and tools of the actual dynamiters. The magnitude of the conspiracy, the continental scale upon which its

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operations were carried on, the deep plotting and unceasing vigil of the active minds directing it . . . prove that it was a capitalist conspiracy which had for its object the twofold purpose of destroying rival contractors upon the one hand and upon the other wiping out organized labor.173

The catastrophe of the McNamara confession drew the Left-­labor coalition back to the question of class struggle, dividing the movement between those who saw this as a recognizable (if not entirely supportable) act of class war and those for whom the McNamara brothers were simply criminals. Many of those who held tightly to the class war argument after the McNamara case saw its dynamics as essentially conspiratorial, placing the blame for this tragedy in the hands of the monopolists who ruled America. “The Appeal does not hesitate to say,” announced the paper, “that somewhere along the slimy trail of this conspiracy you will find the footprints of the agents of Mr. Morgan’s steel corporation.”174 After three bombings, two trials, one victory, and one defeat, the Appeal seemed to have reached the ultimate horizon, finding in the conspiracy of capital a totalizing theory of history. “THE INSPIRATOR OF THE MOVEMENT” The collapse of the Los Angeles Times case signaled a turn in fortune for the Appeal to Reason. In April 1911, the Appeal came in for a new round of indictments and legal harassment in which the government charged the paper with passing obscene material through the mail for a series it ran on the inhumane conditions in Leavenworth federal prison. A year later, another indictment charged Wayland and Warren with contempt of court based on the allegation that they had corrupted a government witness. A small army of private detectives and investigators descended upon Girard to spy and harass, regularly ransacking the Appeal’s offices, with lead federal prosecutor Harry J. Bone quoted as saying, “I’m going to bankrupt the Appeal, force its editors into exile and suicide or land them behind the bars of Leavenworth.”175 The Appeal, quite correctly, took these attacks as proof of its national effectiveness and proudly defended itself with multimillion-­issue special editions.176 Despite the

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legal harassment, the paper spent 1912 promoting Eugene Debs’s run for the White House and encouraging all of its readers to vote for the Socialist Party. In the masthead of its November 16, 1912, issue, the Appeal claimed that “the total number of papers circulated” between the first of the year and the presidential election totaled 32.4 million, equivalent to 736,700 copies a week, adding, “Notice how nearly the average circulation of the Appeal approximates the total vote of the Socialist party.”177 Officially the Appeal was enthusiastic about the 1912 turnout, in which Debs earned nearly 900,000 votes; in fact, however, the editors in Girard were bitterly disappointed. The Socialist Party, it seemed, would never replace the major parties. The despondency hit bottom when J. A. Wayland took his own life on the night of November 10, 1912. His community of friends and supporters offered many explanations and consolations: he was worn down by the legal persecution, depressed over the failure of his political dreams, saddened by the recent death of his wife. “The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort,” read Wayland’s suicide note. “Let it pass.” Though a tremendous sadness overshadowed the “Temple of the Revolution,” the Appeal continued to be mailed out every Saturday. The “one-­hoss editor” had handed over most of the day-­to-­day work of the paper to Warren many years earlier. While a huge campaign after Wayland’s death pushed the Appeal to its peak circulation in 1913, the paper went into steep decline soon thereafter. Warren came under fire from all sides of the Socialist Party, and Eugene Debs finally left to write for the National Rip-­Saw, a monthly edited by Frank and Kate Richards O’Hare. Warren canceled its magazine The Coming Nation after A. M. Simons and Charles Edward Russell became solidly affiliated with the Berger-­Hillquit (electoral and middle-­ class) right wing of the Socialist Party. After a failed effort to expand the paper into the growing New York socialist milieu, Warren resigned, turning the Appeal over to Wayland’s sons in 1914. In the years to come, the Appeal’s circulation steadily dropped, especially after the paper capitulated to wartime postal censorship, renamed itself New Appeal, and took up a pro-­war position. In 1918 the Appeal was formally purchased by its editors Louis Kopelin and Emmanuel Haldeman-­Julius, who made

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the Appeal Publishing Company into a major enterprise, turning out millions of the cheap Little Blue Books that were beloved by autodidacts for generations. After the war, the Appeal to Reason returned and tried to restart a big campaign to free Debs, who had been incarcerated for an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. The Appeal waved the banner for Tom Mooney, the IWW, and all the other victims of the Red Scare, but it brought little light or heat. In the assessment of the historian Eliot Shore, “the paper was effectively reduced, as it had been since the McNamara fiasco, to a defense organ for oppressed socialists, . . . After 1912 it became an alternative paper, one that pointed out the problems facing the nation but that no longer offered an effective alternative political solution for them. It shared its demise with that of the Socialist party.”178 The Appeal ceased publication in 1922. Toward the climax of the McNamara case, in the midst of the Appeal’s calculated backpedaling away from Shoaf, an article by W. J. Ghent titled “The Appeal and Its Influence” appeared in Survey Magazine. As the author of Our Benevolent Feudalism, a frequent contributor to the Appeal, and now personal secretary to Congressman Victor Berger, Ghent provided an unvarnished assessment of what he saw as the Appeal’s success: The Appeal has its own notions of the psychology of the crowd; it has its devoted mission of propagating Socialism, and it is resolved to win attention for the cause. . . . Often it goes too far; often it does harm to its own cause by uttering loose and reckless assertions and sensational appeals. It has, in an eminent degree, the defects of its qualities. But, with all its defects, it inspires the army to action. . . . So, in a sense it leads the movement; not wholly, or perhaps even generally, along lines chosen by itself, but by exhortation and encouragement along lines that for the time are commonly accepted as most effective. If it is not a representative of the best thought of the movement, it is at least a representative of the courageous spirit and the dauntless determination of the movement.179

The Appeal is not the parlor socialist’s paper, admits Ghent; it is written for the people, it professes to lead the people, and it is clearly loved by a wide body of readers. Within this nexus of ideology, strategy, and style are contained all the paradoxes and contradictions of popular socialist culture and the place of conspiracy theories therein. The Appeal’s

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history gives us both the tremendous advantages of conspiracy theory in the Haywood trial and its disastrous failures in the McNamara case. Shouting “conspiracy” may rally many to your side in a public conflict over injustice, but it threatens to drown out the quieter, harder work of “talkin’ socialism” and building a revolutionary mass movement. Yet the Appeal walked that line, blending socialist education with sensationalist propaganda for a decade in the rise of American popular radicalism. That the Appeal to Reason failed to make an American socialist revolution will in the end surprise no one. But the fact that it tried, and in so doing built a distinctly American mass culture of revolutionary socialism, should impress us all; it remains one of the great forgotten stories of the American Left and an example of what an aggressive, self-­promoting activist press can achieve. The Appeal went after the conspiracy of capital, not just looking to map its activities and metaphorical contours but aiming to pick a fight, force the enemy to reveal itself, and maybe just win the class war. This kind of cognitive mapping, fueled by optimism and devotion, held firmly that socialism represented the most dangerous knowledge of all, that learning the truth about the conspiracy of capital might just set the world on the path to the cooperative commonwealth.

Chapter 3

“The Marks of Capital” The Wobblies versus the Invisible Government I am the last Wobbly. I believe in one big union and one big conspiracy. —John Leonard, When the Kissing Had to Stop (1999)

No one can be certain where the Industrial Workers of the World got their nickname “the Wobblies,” but ideas abound as to its origins. The labor folklorist Archie Green (who called his work “laborlore”) spent decades tracing the origins of this unusual name, asking why an onomatopoetic word that signifies instability and inconsistency came to describe American labor’s most loyal, most steadfast, most committed revolutionaries.1 Though the IWW was founded in 1905, the popular nickname did not take hold until after 1912–­1913. In his lexicographic search, Green cites three possible sources for the name: a secret code word used in a telegram by IWW leaders calling for reinforcements at the 1913 Wheatland riot; a pejorative term used by a class enemy—­attributed to Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis—­and appropriated by the union as a badge of honor; and a humorous story about a Chinese camp cook in the Pacific Northwest who couldn’t pronounce the letter 142

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“W” and called his friends the “eye-­wobble-­wobble.” Each version of the term’s origins speaks to some indelible aspect of the One Big Union’s culture and character. The third version spoke to the union’s internationalism, a comradely laugh shared between white and Chinese workers around a hobo jungle campfire, translating an immigrant worker’s struggle with English into an inclusive symbol of the entire union—­the only union in America at the time that recruited everyone and anyone, including Chinese American workers. The second version spoke to the IWW’s sense of humor, playfully transforming the countersubversives’ accusation into a term of pride and power (much as social movements since the 1960s have adopted racist and sexist insults as terms of empowerment). This was the side of the IWW that recognized the existence of the class enemy, a conspiracy of capital that they sought to expropriate, even if they had to begin by taking and transforming the enemy’s words. For Green, the most intriguing source for the nickname came out of the hop fields of the Sacramento Valley. In August 1913, some three thousand men, women, and children of various nationalities and languages gathered on the Durst brothers’ hop farm near Wheatland, California, to harvest the summer crop. “Wheatland,” wrote Wobbly leader Ralph Chaplin, “was typical both of the medieval working conditions and of the semi-­feudal labor relations which grew out of them.”2 When migrant workers arrived in such numbers that dysentery broke out in their camps, the Durst brothers responded by slashing wages. Two IWW activists among the harvest stiffs, Richard “Blackie” Ford and Herman “Hook-­Nose” Shur, called for a strike, and the Dursts brought in an armed sheriff ’s posse. “Wheatland was not a strike,” insists Carey McWilliams in his account, “but a spontaneous revolt.”3 On August 3, 1913, a riot broke out in the fields and four men fell dead; the district attorney, a sheriff ’s deputy, and two workers, immigrants from Puerto Rico and England. Following the riot, the governor called in the National Guard, workers fled the farm, and the Durst family hired the Burns Detective Agency to arrest the ringleaders. Blaming the two IWW men for the four deaths, but unable to place the murder weapons in their hands, Yuba County prosecutors focused on a series of telegrams sent by the organizers to build a conspiracy case. On the afternoon of the riot,

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Ford and Shur sent multiple telegrams to local IWW offices calling for reinforcements: “Strike on in full, demands turned down, IWW ordered off the grounds but are here to stay. Send all speakers and wobbles possible. Money needed, lots of families destitute, boycott all employment sharks. Answer.”4 The term “Wobbles” or “Wobblies” circulated orally in California before the strike, but this telegram seems to be the first written record in the archive. But what did it mean? During their January 1914 trial, Ford and Shur’s telegrams, with their repeated use of the term “Wobbles,” became a critical piece of evidence. From the courtroom to the press, the term “Wobbles”—­which Harper’s and others misspelled as “Wobblies”—­entered into the common vocabulary of labor conflict. Ford and Shur were convicted, received life sentences at San Quentin and Folsom, respectively, and served their time until 1926, when, after a long labor defense campaign, the state retried Ford and found him innocent and paroled Shur. Sometime in 1914, after the riot and trial, a new song appeared in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook called “Overalls and Snuff,” in which an “old-­time hop picker” tells the story of the Wheatland riot and the Ford-­Shur trial. This man, an itinerant worker, a homeless proletarian filled with song and fight, is clearly identified in the chorus: “I knew he was a wobbly, by the button that he wore.”5 Playful and adversarial, yet perceived by California’s feudal growers as evidence of an insurrectionary conspiracy, the IWW’s nickname emerged out of the dialectics of conspiracy and came to define the organization. This chapter takes up the IWW’s battles with the conspiracy of capital, seeking out the structural and historical sources of conspiracy theory in the Wobblies’ culture of popular radicalism. This question takes us through the union’s history from the high point of its success in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, “Bread and Roses” strike of 1912, a celebrated event that included a now forgotten attempt by one of the city’s richest textile barons to plant dynamite on IWW leaders. From this success, the narrative moves on through the years of growing vigilante and state violence against the union, culminating in the wartime mass federal conspiracy trials of the IWW’s national leadership in 1918. I argue that the Wobblies’ mapping of the conspiracy of capital was neither extremist nor

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pathological, but rather represented a systemic analysis of the very real class violence and countersubversive activism that dramatically escalated between 1912 and 1918. The Wobblies were denounced as foreign radicals and a subversive conspiracy by the capitalist press, anti-­labor politicians, federal prosecutors, and plutocrats alike. It is with good reason that the IWW relied on a conspiracy theory of capitalism, for it may have been the most thoroughly demonized and conspired-­against organization of the Haymarket generation. To put it another way, the IWW were not conspiracy theorists at all, for they came to know the public, private, and vigilante system of labor discipline, political repression, and physical violence, not as sociologists, lawyers, or political theorists, but principally as its targets and victims. “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital,” declared Big Bill Haywood, “but I have the marks of capital all over my body.”6 As a result, not only did the IWW develop the twentieth century’s first sustained analysis of the conspiracy of capital as a theory of the repressive state apparatus, but also, along the way, it helped transform Darrow’s critique of the conspiracy doctrine into a new politics of civil liberties. ONE UNION, ONE LABEL, ONE ENEMY: WOBBLY IDEOLOGY In the history of American labor, the Industrial Workers of the World—­ the IWW or Wobblies—­has no equal in its militant use of nonviolent direct action, its vibrantly proletarian culture, its egalitarian values, and its absolute belief in the possibilities of worker self-­organization and industrial democracy in the Age of Monopoly.7 The IWW dedicated itself to building the One Big Union of all workers, including the thousands of workingmen and women whom most craft or trade unions considered unorganizable. The Wobblies organized itinerant workers, tramps, and hoboes, men and women who were, in the words of Wobbly poet, cartoonist, and national leader Ralph Chaplin, “the perfect proletarian type: possessionless, homeless and rebellious. He is the reverse side of the gilded metal of present day society.”8 The IWW thrived among the lumberjacks and mill workers of the Pacific Northwest and the South, Rocky Mountain hard rock miners, dockworkers and merchant sailors

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on both oceans, California pickers and harvesters, and New England textile workers. This meant that the IWW carried a culture of union solidarity to all laboring men, women, and even children, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or language. The Wobblies organized African Americans and Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese, Slavic and Irish, Catholic and Jewish workers into integrated locals, and printed their papers in dozens of languages. Through its direct-­action advocacy of free speech, the IWW built a small but significant base of support among urban intellectuals and radical bohemians, embodying a muscular image of revolutionary heroism to a generation of artists seeking their own distinctly modernist forms of liberation. Open combatants of the class war, the IWW’s strategy focused equally on specific shop floor struggles and included tactics like sabotage and slowdowns, leading all the way up to the grand revolutionary “general strike” against capitalism. Despite the fact that the Wobblies built no stable organizations, nor did they leave a lasting structure when they organized (particularly in the form of labor contracts signed with employers), the IWW is arguably, rightly or wrongly, the most ambitious, aggressive, uncompromising, and, subsequently, most romanticized movement of the Haymarket generation and possibly in the history of the American Left. According to Big Bill Haywood, the union radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World was simply “Socialism with its work clothes on.” Founded in Chicago in 1905 at what Haywood called “the Constitutional Convention of the working class,” the IWW grew into a multicultural revolutionary labor movement, embracing various strains of immigrant Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism, ready to organize the whole of the working class into One Big Union. As we have seen, at the time of the IWW’s founding, Haywood was the leader of the Western Federation of Miners, America’s most radical union, and at 37,000 strong they were the largest delegation in the IWW and in dire need of a nationwide organization. At this founding convention, the IWW dedicated itself to becoming an organization of all industries and all workers, recognizing a universality of all union memberships. Yet the young organization divided sharply over the question of political participation and almost broke up several times into feuding factions of direct action radicals, who believed in strikes and labor action, versus political socialists, who wanted to run a legal political party and win elections.9

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In the end, a syndicalist line emerged, which dedicated the organization to battling directly on the economic front. According to William Z. Foster, a militant labor leader, syndicalists “maintain that there is but one kind of industrial question—­the economic—­and that but one working class organization—­the labor union—­is necessary. . . . They assert that the so-­called political ‘field’ does not exist,” Foster continues. “They have proven time and again that they can solve the many so-­called political questions by direct action.”10 From the factory floor, the ripened field, the lumberyard, the mine shaft, railcar, and ship’s engine room outward, the Wobblies would lead the One Big Union in revolution against capitalism, abolish the wage system, and remake the new world from within the shell of the old. The IWW believed in “direct action” in either the form of strikes or, most notoriously, sabotage. The word sabotage, tracing its political lineage to the wooden shoe (or sabot) that Dutch and French strikers threw into the industrial machinery that was destined to steal their livelihoods, came to mean much more for the Wobblies than a latter-­ day form of Luddism. Sabotage was “the conscious withdrawal of the worker’s industrial efficiency,” or, according to a demand printed on thousands of stickers and buttons: “Good pay or Bum work.” To the Wobblies, sabotage was never imagined to be violent; it was more like a deliberate slowdown of the industrial process, an on-­the-­job action designed to sap the industrial process of the ability to extract surplus value (its profitability) without costing the workers their jobs or inviting the violent repression and injunctions that strikes so often brought. Without profits, the economic rulers could not hire detectives, bribe politicians, or corrupt the law. “Sabotage is not aimed at the consumer,” explained one IWW pamphlet, “but at the heart and soul of the employing class—­the pocketbook.”11 This exclusive emphasis on economic struggle meant that the focus of the IWW’s ideological and political animus, the “One Enemy” of its slogan, was the capitalists, or as the Wobblies called them, “the bosses.” Of course, for the capitalist class the idea of sabotage left the countersubversive imagination dangerously overstimulated. Officially the IWW neither produced nor revered any major theoreticians or “traditional” intellectuals. “We are not philosophers, not pacifists, but fighters,” editorialized the IWW’s Chicago weekly paper,

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Solidarity, in 1917.12 “The pick, the shovel and the hammer,” quipped Big Bill with proletarian panache, “are mightier than the pen, the sword and the cross.”13 The IWW maintained, in line with the syndicalist tradition, that working-­class militancy, and the intellectual and cultural tools that support such militancy, should be derived from the immediacy of workplace struggles. It rejected the Leninist notion of a “vanguardist” cadre of professional revolutionaries who lead the masses to communism, as well as the Socialist Party model in which party intellectuals translated Marxist theories for the working class, bringing class consciousness to the people as mediated through the party structure. While Wobblies paid their respects to Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, Jack London, and Emma Goldman, the ordinary Wobbly did not need party philosophers and radical professors like Daniel De Leon, Ernest Untermann, Louis Boudin, or any other “sophisticate” to explain to them the nature of exploitation, the class character of political institutions, or the proletariat’s historical mission to throw off the shackles of capitalism and liberate humanity. “One has to feel exploitation perhaps before one understands it,” wrote Randolph Bourne, one of those New York bohemian intellectuals who were seduced by the IWW.14 A Wobbly knew this in his or her bones, as it was pounded into workers hour after hour, day by day, through their collective experience under the yoke of capitalism. Theirs was the vernacular Marxism of militant proletarians by themselves and for themselves, and it represented the culmination of the Haymarket generation’s culture of popular radicalism. The Wobblies called their class enemy many names. In the years before U.S. entry into World War I, they appropriated a key term from one of their most hated political enemies. “The government,” wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1913, when he first ran for president as a Progressive, “which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” So powerful was this body, according to Wilson, that most political leaders knew “there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”15 While Wilson was suggesting in very vague terms his desire to reform the political process and make

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it more transparent, the IWW and the rest of the Haymarket generation latched onto the term and radicalized it (much as the New Left used Eisenhower’s term “military-­industrial complex” or antiwar protesters adopted George H. W. Bush’s phrase “new world order”). “I thank you, Woodrow Wilson,” wrote Upton Sinclair, “for the one thing you have done in your life—­that phrase ‘the invisible government.’”16 At the hands of socialists, the language of “secret” or “invisible” government formed a mainstay of the conspiracy of capitalism, imagining plutocracy’s rule through, in the words of one IWW member, “a net-­work or a system of secret government that runs through society from top to bottom.”17 As we can see in a 1916 cartoon by Ralph Chaplin, to the IWW, formal politics was a “hocus-­pocus” game in which the political parties were created and manipulated by plutocrats (fig. 17). Democracy was theater populated by stooges, dupes, and puppets; a game that the class-­conscious working class would have to learn to see through in order to face the real battle on the economic front, against the monopoly capitalists who pulled the strings. The IWW leadership consisted not so much of intellectuals and theoreticians as of a collective of charismatic workingmen and rebel women who identified themselves as “fellow workers.” Leaders like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Big Bill Haywood, Ben Fletcher, and others were “rough-­and-­tumble” intellectual types, folks who excelled at propaganda, strike tactics, soapbox oratory, and what the union simply called “organizing.” IWW cartoonists, editors, songwriters, and orators were all examples of what Antonio Gramsci defines as “organic intellectuals of the proletarian class,” men and women of working-­class origins who came to articulate the dynamics of exploitation, class struggle, and industrial violence by participating in them.18 Action was more highly prized than analysis by the IWW, and theoretical pursuits were at best untrustworthy and at worst disdained as bourgeois.19 This is not to say that the IWW rejected education or courted ignorance. Quite the contrary. The IWW produced a small industry of book publishers, pamphleteers, and newspapers, as well as official organizer training schools, propaganda leagues, and industrial education clubs.20 The IWW also formed the first permanent labor defense organizations. “Wherever, in the West,” wrote the Harvard-­educated journalist and

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Figure 17. Ralph Chaplin, “Now He Understands the Game,” Solidarity, November 11, 1916.

revolutionary John Reed, “there is an IWW local, you will find an intellectual center—­a place where men read philosophy, economics, the latest plays, novels; where art and poetry are discussed, and international politics.”21 Wobbly papers like the Industrial Worker, Solidarity, and the One Big Union Monthly found a wide circulation and gained fame for their cartoons, like Ernest Riebe’s “Mr. Block,” as well as the hundreds of drawings sent in by anonymous workers and supporters.22 Wobbly culture grew immeasurably richer for all the songs written for the cause, such as Ralph Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever,” or Joe Hill’s “Rebel Girl” and “The Preacher and the Slave.” The IWW believed, much like the civil rights movement two generations later, that song was not only spiritually invigorating and potentially didactic but also helped stir the solidarity of the members and lead them in collective action.

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(Reading, by contrast, just leads one to sit alone in silence.) “Remember,” warned Reed, “this is the only American working-­class movement which sings. Tremble then at the IWW, for a singing movement is not to be beaten.”23 “Unlike orthodox Marxists,” wrote Ralph Chaplin, “we had no revolutionary Bible. Our simple creed was summed up in the Little Red Song Book, the I.W.W. Preamble and a handful of ten-­cent pamphlets.”24 Chaplin would know: it was his songs, his pamphlets, his cartoons, and his newspapers that did so much to shape Wobbly culture during the organization’s most volatile years. Chaplin was born in Kansas in 1887 but raised in Chicago, where his first memories went back to his father losing his job to Pinkerton strikebreakers and watching the army march into the city during the Pullman strike of 1894. Chaplin worked as an artist while his interest in radicalism grew with Debsian socialism, the radical publishing house Charles Kerr and Co., the writings of William Morris, and the events of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Chaplin befriended Big Bill Haywood shortly after his acquittal in Boise in 1907, but it was not until 1913 that Chaplin officially joined the IWW. Thrown into the midst of America’s increasingly violent class struggle, Chaplin responded with song, writing “Solidarity Forever” in 1915. By 1917 he was editor of the IWW’s official organ, Solidarity, author of hundreds of political cartoons and “silent agitators” (Wobbly stickers), and effectively second in command of the Chicago main office under Haywood. Arrested with the rest of the IWW national leadership in 1917, Chaplin spent the next six years in and out of prison, where he wrote poetry and songs and continued to draw. Both fundamental to and emblematic of Wobbly ideology, Chaplin’s cartoons featured sinister plutocrats and heroic workers; he sang of vigilante gangs and prison walls, and his journalism investigated the crimes committed against Wobbly organizers—­all illustrated, performed, and written in near perfect tune with his proletarian audience. The Wobblies’ struggle against the conspiracy doctrine and its exercise through capitalist justice also came to them not through theory but through the experience of their very first legal case. Goldfield, Nevada, was the early IWW’s lost paradise, where the Wobblies came close to

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organizing an entire community between 1902 and 1907. But this came to an end on March 10, 1907, when several members of the IWW rallied outside a local restaurant to protest the firing of a union waitress. Furious at the picketing of his establishment, owner John Silva grabbed his gun and rushed at Morrie Preston, the protest’s organizer, making loud threats to kill him. In a panic, Preston pulled out his own pistol and shot Silva in the stomach, inflicting a lethal wound. Rather than register this shootout as an act of self-­defense in a violent mining town where seemingly everyone went about armed, the state of Nevada charged Preston, his fellow socialist Joseph Smith, and seventeen other members of the IWW and WFM with conspiracy to commit murder. Preston and Smith were eventually found guilty of murder after a trial rife with accusations of perjury and prosecutorial misconduct. “The conspiracy charge,” wrote Preston after his conviction, “[is] an instrument of oppression and the last resort of legal tricksters . . . held in reserve almost exclusively for members of Organized Labor.” In a pamphlet published as part of his own legal defense campaign, Preston urged the IWW and its supporters to look to Darrow’s successful strategy of confronting the legal enemy with “a counter-­charge of conspiracy,” that is, “that the prosecution had conspired to convict the defendant.” Furthermore, “seeing the viciousness of the criminal conspiracy practices,” argued Preston, “it behooves the Unions and other working class partizans, to exert every effort to abolish the common law conspiracy doctrine; by legislation, if possible, otherwise if necessary.”25 Legal defeat in the Preston-­Smith conspiracy trial sealed the IWW’s fate in Goldfield while at the same time it cemented the Haymarket generation’s battle against conspiracy laws into the culture and legacy of the IWW’s early years. From its origins, then, the IWW was the continual enemy of quite real and frequently deadly conspiracies perpetrated by employers, private detectives, vigilantes, the military, and eventually an entire national security apparatus explicitly created to destroy it. In the rest of this chapter I narrate the key moments in this story, starting at the peak of IWW power in Lawrence in 1912, the vigilantism used to silence the Wobblies’ free speech campaigns, the martyrdom of Joe Hill and Frank Little, and the wartime mass conspiracy trial of the IWW. But before there was a

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national political intelligence system, before J. Edgar Hoover and the second Ku Klux Klan, before Lenin and Trotsky and the black radicals of Harlem, before the IWW became the demonized bogeyman behind the Hun menace and the Red Scare, the national story of the IWW began with a strike and a spy near the birthplace of American industrial capitalism. “CAPITALIST DYNAMITERS” IN THE LAWRENCE STRIKE OF 1912 On January 20, 1912, the headlines of national newspapers screamed out a now familiar story. In the strike-­racked textile mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the state police located several caches of dynamite, caps, and fuses which they said belonged to members of the IWW. Press and police accused a union conspiracy of plotting to blow up the mills, kill their owners, and start a revolution. An informant led police to three bombs: one in the tailor shop and home of Joseph Assef, a labor militant from the Syrian community; the second at the base of a tree in St. Mary’s cemetery; and the third in Urban Di Prato’s shoe shop, next door to Antonio Colombo’s print shop, where strikers printed thousands of Italian-­language pamphlets and where most of the IWW strike leadership received their mail (fig. 18). Police arrested eight “foreigners,” and the same countersubversive narrative conventions that had shaped the ideological contours of the class struggle since Haymarket were again spelled out for the reading public: “When the strikers use or prepare to use dynamite,” editorialized the New York Times before anyone knew whose dynamite it was, “they display a fiendish lack of humanity which ought to place them beyond the comfort of religion until they have repented.”26 Such a discovery was perfectly timed. It was less than two months since the McNamara brothers confessed to dynamiting the Los Angeles Times. And now similar charges threatened to derail the surprisingly effective drive for industrial unionism in the northeastern textile industry. Police and militias closed off the streets of Lawrence to picketers using thousands of bayonet-­wielding state militiamen alongside hundreds of Harvard students out to demonstrate their elite masculinity in the fires of class conflict.27

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Figure 18. Philips Russell, “The Dynamite Job at Lawrence, Illustrated,” International Socialist Review 13 (October 1912).

Nine days before the discovery of the dynamite, the Lawrence “Bread and Roses” strike began spontaneously when a great mass of Polish women and girls marched out of the Everett cotton mill to protest short pay—­pay already so low as to impose near-­starvation conditions on the mill hands. Seeing a stark choice between an early death and resistance, the immigrant women of Lawrence chose to strike. Together they marched through the other mills until they gathered a large enough

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crowd to shut down most of the city’s textile mills within a few hours.28 By the end of the week, some twenty thousand men, women, and children were out on strike in Lawrence. Despite the unofficial martial law imposed on the town by tens of thousands of police, state militiamen, and private detectives, the strike held solid. Not only did the mass pickets and marches organized by the multilingual strike committees succeed in keeping the scabs out, the mills idle, and the military at bay, but the strikers remained steadfastly nonviolent in their protests and gained increasing public sympathy. Inexperienced at strike tactics, the workers reached out to the IWW for help in building an organized movement, and together they showed such solidarity—­and “Solidarity” quickly became the watchword for the strikers—­that even across the twenty-­seven different languages and dialects spoken by the striking workers, the Lawrence strike came to define the possibilities of industrial unionism. “There is no foreigner here except the capitalists,” declared Haywood at a mass rally in Lawrence. “Do not let them divide you by sex, color, creed or nationality. Billy Wood [owner of the largest woolen factory] can lick one Pole, in fact he can lick all the Poles, but he cannot lick all the nationalities put together.”29 No longer able to keep their “hands” internally divided, the local mill owners drew upon every repressive state and private apparatus at their collective disposal. “We are opposed by the courts, police, detectives that now spy among you,” declared Haywood, “pulpit, press, soldiers, and legislature—­all are arrayed against us.”30 Police inflicted an extraordinary level of violence on the strikers, including deliberate attacks on women and children by rioting police officers and a steady use of bullets and bayonets that resulted in the deaths of several protesters. The growing violence in Lawrence finally caught the attention of the public, including influential northeastern liberals as well as a significant sector of the national political establishment, much of which came to sympathize with the workers. In the face of this new attention, the discovery of bombs could only mean disaster for the union, guaranteeing raids and injunctions while tarring the strikers with the stain of violence, the ignominy of the McNamaras, and the deaths in the Haymarket.

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Like the anarchists after the Haymarket bomb, the WFM after the murder of Frank Steunenberg, and the AFL after the Los Angeles Times bombing, the immigrant radicals and their Wobbly leaders in Lawrence denied any knowledge of the bombs and demanded an investigation. “The bosses are losing,” claimed Joseph Ettor, an Italian American Wobbly and one of the strike’s most accomplished leaders. “They are desperate and that accounts for the dynamite. If any bombs or dynamite sticks are found it will be found by those who planted them. The bosses are trying to raise dust to blur the issue. The Strike Committee is confident of its position and urges all strikers at this critical time to be cool and collected.”31 Despite the papers’ initial pronouncements, reporters quickly realized that the discovery of the bombs was not what it was first made out to look like. In the days before the discovery, local newspapers printed rumors of “an anarchist element among the strikers” trying to smuggle dynamite into Lawrence. Someone tipped off Hearst’s Boston American, which published full details of the bomb plot on the very day that investigators discovered the bombs.32 After the arrests, local police could tell that not even the most fraudulent legal case could be made against any of the strikers or shopkeepers for planting or possessing those bombs. This was an obvious and inept frame-up. When interviewed about where the dynamite came from, two of the witnesses told police the same story: a stranger, a white man speaking perfect English, came to their place asking, even demanding, to leave a plain wrapped package with them for a few days. The dynamite bundle destined for Ettor’s mailbox was delivered to the wrong address, and so the unsuspecting shoe repair man put the package wrapped in a magazine in his store window, where the police found it. Such was the incompetence of the plotters that a police inspector found attached to one of the makeshift bombs a scrap of paper from an undertaker’s journal bearing a local Lawrence address. The day after the bomb’s discovery, the State Police released the men and women they had arrested and made a public statement clearing the strikers of any connection to the bombs. A man named John J. Breen informed the police where they might find each of the bombs, including a detailed drawing of the St. Mary’s

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cemetery plot made after the police could not locate the bomb upon first inspection, only to return with Breen’s map to find the dynamite sitting on a stump in plain sight. This was no ace cloak-­and-­dagger man, no accomplished private detective; Breen had botched the plot. A longtime resident of Lawrence and well connected within the local elite, Breen was the son of a former mayor with ambitions of his own, an elected alderman, a current member of the school board, pals with mill owners and Boston-­area newspapermen, and an undertaker by profession. The police arrested Breen late in January and his trial began in May, when his lawyers succeeded in keeping him off the witness stand. The judge dismissed the charge of conspiracy to discredit the textile strikers, but the jury convicted Breen of placing dynamite in the homes of innocent men. For this offense, Breen received a $500 fine and a suggestive reprimand by the judge. “If what I hear is true,” the judge told Breen before the court, “it was a foolish attempt on the part of any man to help a friend.”33 What this meant was a mystery, one that soon came under investigation by various grand juries and newspaper reporters throughout the state. Though the conspiracy charge had been dropped, it seemed inconceivable that Breen had worked alone, and one assistant district attorney openly called Breen’s meager fine a “whitewash.” Solidarity, the IWW’s weekly organ, declared, “Among the intelligent members of the working class the outcry against Breen is regarded as a sawdust throwing game, meant to blind the workers.”34 For the strikers, the arrest of Breen quickly became a sideshow to a rapidly expanding struggle, for on that same late January day, a pitched battle between police and marching strikers ended in the shooting death of a young strike supporter named Annie LoPezzo. Tensions in the city had escalated for days surrounding the discovery of the dynamite. Strikers reported that gangs of “rough-­necks” had been arriving in Lawrence “on the late train from Boston” to start fights and destroy property.35 Terrorized and provoked, the strikers in Lawrence grew more susceptible to violence, and the result was a riot that left young LoPezzo dead. The strikers and the militia each blamed the other for the girl’s death, and despite more than a dozen witnesses who testified that a policeman named Oscar Benoit shot and killed the girl, only one side’s

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accusation carried any weight with the police. Though neither Joe Ettor nor Arturo Giovannitti was present at the march, they were the most prominent of the IWW organizers in Lawrence, and so police arrested and charged them with “inciting and procuring the commission of the crime in pursuit of an unlawful conspiracy.”36 This was a capital offense, and for conspiring to murder one of their own strikers—­a murder known to have been committed by a policeman—­Ettor and Giovannitti faced Massachusetts’s electric chair. Ettor and Giovannitti were in their own ways ideal examples of the IWW organizer. Ettor was at the time just twenty-­six years old and the son of a proud union man who had been injured in the Haymarket riot of 1886. He spent his youth traveling the country working as a cooper, a water boy on the railroads, and became a skilled shipbuilder before joining the IWW on the West Coast, where he organized lumber strikes in Oregon. A gifted and innovative organizer, Ettor led strike meetings in English, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, and Hungarian, building multiethnic solidarity as the foundation of the Lawrence strike. Arturo Giovannitti was born in southern Italy before migrating to Canada and then to New York. There he migrated leftward, step by step through the Socialist Party, and by 1909 he joined the IWW’s Italian-­ language paper Il Proletario as its editor. During his year in prison awaiting trial, Giovannitti found his gift for poetry, beginning with the publication of his poem “The Cage.” His later years found Giovannitti struggling to balance his work as a celebrated poet and playwright with his commitments to radical organizing, a dilemma that typified the vibrant culture of the IWW.37 “They want you, Joe,” wrote the well-­experienced Haywood to Ettor in the days before the arrests, “and they will get you if they can. Get your committee in shape so that every detail of work will go on without interruption, even if you are arrested.”38 Haywood knew from experience that at this moment in the strike, the countersubversive playbook called for arresting the strike leaders, and that the planted bombs were supposed to ensnare the IWW, not a tailor and a shoemaker, let alone backfire and lead to the indictment of an undertaker with local Democratic Party ties. In fact, the police had searched Ettor and Giovannitti a week

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before their arrest with the hope of connecting them to the dynamite conspiracy, but the plot was too badly botched to succeed as a frame-­up. This time, with the testimony of two Callahan Detective Agency operatives (neither of whom spoke Italian, yet both gave detailed testimony of Giovannitti’s violence-­inciting speeches), the strike leaders were held without bail for eight months awaiting trial. A critical Wobbly legal defense campaign grew on top of the massive textile strike, and a new but again familiar chant resounded through the crowded streets of Lawrence: “Shall Ettor and Giovannitti Die? Then One Million Workingmen Will Know the Reason Why!” Ettor and Giovannitti accomplished a tremendous amount in the weeks before their arrest; Ettor built the strike committee, while Giovannitti organized the relief effort. With their arrests, leadership of the Lawrence strike passed to Big Bill Haywood, William Trautman, Carlo Tresca, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Though Haywood had faded from public view since the Boise trial, Lawrence marked the reemergence of Big Bill as America’s most dangerous radical. When he arrived in Lawrence on January 24, 1912, over fifteen thousand people came to greet his train, and for the next six weeks he led the strike with calm tactical confidence. For Carlo Tresca, a leader of the Federazione Socialista Italiana, Lawrence marked his introduction on the American scene, especially during the protracted defense campaign for Ettor and Giovannitti. As for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had been organizing in Lawrence since 1909, the Bread and Roses strike transformed her into a feminist radical of equal stature to Emma Goldman. A tireless and inspiring speaker, Flynn became a hero especially for the women and children who made up well over half of the strikers. Her charisma and hard work at Lawrence launched the young radical into a life of political activism that lasted until the mid-­1960s.39 By February, the ceaseless violence and harsh winter cold made for miserable conditions in the workers’ tenements, and the idea was hit upon of sending the children of strikers out of the city until the strike was won. Socialist Party officials in New York organized the “evacuation” and arranged for families in the city to receive these young refugees of the class war. On February 10, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the radical

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feminist and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger led the first group of children from Lawrence to New York City. A parade of sickly and emaciated children marching down New York’s Fifth Avenue created a sensation among the public and great anger among the mill owners who employed these children. This spectacle turned out to be such an effective tactic for the strikers that the mill owners determined that the “Children’s Exodus” had to stop. On February 24, the Lawrence police, under direct orders from city marshals, attacked a parade of about forty children who were on their way to board a train bound for Philadelphia, indiscriminately beating women and children with batons and rifle butts. Reports of this incident shocked the liberal and progressive elite, including Senator William Borah—­who led the prosecution of Haywood in Boise—­who called it “an invasion of Constitutional privileges.” Victor Berger, now sitting in Congress as the nation’s first Socialist Party representative, denounced the attack as “one of the most outrageous invasions of Constitutional rights that has ever occurred in this country,” and opened a full investigation. The strikers sent their children to Washington to testify as to the working and living conditions. “It’s like a chapter in the story of Russia’s brutal treatment of the Jews,” commented one U.S. senator after the hearings. “The state of Massachusetts, in Lawrence, is Russia.”40 After all this, the picket lines stood stronger than ever on the streets of Lawrence, and the mill owners began to look for ways to make a deal. Through a series of negotiations, the strikers won most of their demands, and on March 24, seventy-­five days after the initial walkout, strike leaders declared victory. “You, the strikers of Lawrence, have won the most signal victory of any organized body of working men in the world,” declared Haywood at a mass celebration. The International Socialist Review proclaimed, “The greatest victory in American labor history has been won by the Industrial Workers of the World.”41 The impact of the Lawrence strike could be felt throughout the nation, and especially across the textile industry, where an estimated 438,000 workers won wage increases and improved working conditions. “Labor has seldom, if ever,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, “won so complete a victory.”42

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But the immediate struggle was not yet over; Ettor and Giovannitti remained in prison. In the months between the resolution of the strike and their trial, socialists and organized labor around the world held rallies in Berlin, Sweden, Bologna, and in industrial towns across the United States. Directed by the Italian community in Lawrence, the defense of Ettor and Giovannitti was remarkably inclusive, bringing together the AFL, the IWW, the Socialist Party, and prominent American liberals in a way that not even the McNamara defense had done. Every major socialist, anarchist, and labor newspaper carried news of the campaign, for not only had a capitalist been convicted of planting bombs on innocent workers, but there could be no question that Ettor and Giovannitti were not to blame for Annie LoPezzo’s death. In Lawrence, mass actions, general walkouts, twenty-­four-­hour strikes, and talk of a general strike anticipated the forthcoming “Second Battle of Lawrence.” In the weeks before the scheduled start of Ettor and Giovannitti’s trial, a political bombshell burst in Lawrence as some forgotten problems dramatically reappeared. William M. Wood, the president of the American Woolen Company with 35,000 employees and estimated capital at $35 million, a man who had outraged the nation when he nonchalantly testified before Congress that he did not know precisely how many automobiles he owned, was arrested by police on August 30, 1912, and charged with conspiracy.43 The arrest itself was theater. Solidarity called it “the usual prearranged capitalist affair,” for upon arraignment, legal team at the ready, Wood produced the necessary $5,000 bond in cash from his pocket. Nevertheless, the indictment was real, and Wood faced six counts of conspiracy. Labor relished the opportunity to quote from the indictments: First, that William M. Wood, Dennis J. Collins and a third person whose name is not disclosed, on January 20 last, in Boston, conspired with John J. Breen and Ernest W. Pitman to place dynamite in the building of Joseph Assaf and Urbano di Prato and on the premises of Phillip Holland in Lawrence with the intention of falsely accusing the strikers of having the explosives in their possession with the intention of injuring certain of the mill owners and their property.

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Second, that the three defendants are charged with conspiring with Breen and Pitman to place dynamite in the premises of Lawrence people with the intention of injuring the persons who were found with the explosives in their possession unlawfully.44

Since Haymarket, radical movements had seen their leaders arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts, under vague and easily manipulated conspiracy statutes. But this was the first arrest of a real robber baron, lord of the wool trust, and the leading citizen of Lawrence, on charges of conspiring against the working class and attempting to frame the IWW. Front-­page news nationwide, Wood’s arrest threw new light onto the case of Ettor and Giovannitti, and it gave a renewed sense of justification to the now well-­established conspiratorial visions of the IWW. Of course, no radical was optimistic enough to go on record predicting that Wood would be convicted. Everyone in the left-­labor coalition expected him to get off and for the conspiracy to ultimately end in mystery. But for many, the sight of a plutocrat in court answering charges of planting bombs on militant workers represented a form of ideological vindication that did not require an actual conviction. Here, for the first time, the veil had come off the conspiracy of capital, the countless working-­class accusations of a frame-­up had their clearest example, and a plutocrat was to face his day in court. The history of the “Lawrence dynamite conspiracy” trial began when a well-­known mill architect by the name of Ernest W. Pitman met a friend, Suffolk County district attorney Joseph Pelletier, at a hotel in Lawrence. Over drinks, Pitman casually confessed the inside story of how he and several mill owners had met in Boston to plot ways of ending the strike by framing the union. The following day, Pelletier brought Pitman into his office and questioned him thoroughly on the record; the previously convicted John J. Breen—­still a member of the local school board—­ was brought in to corroborate Pitman’s story. Wallowing in financial difficulty and personally indebted to his powerful friends, Pitman had been persuaded by the local mill owners to procure several pounds of dynamite from a construction contractor and old acquaintance named W. H. Rice. From there, Pitman delivered the dynamite to Breen and Dennis Collins, a local opportunist identified as a “dog fancier” in the

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papers, who fashioned the bombs and transported them to Lawrence, where the two men planted the packages of dynamite and blasting caps at three preselected locations. Whatever his reasons for initially turning to the DA (most accounts claim Pitman believed the case to be beyond the law after the conviction of Breen), Pitman realized only too late that he had exposed himself and his influential friends to an eager civil servant. Pelletier, it seemed, harbored political ambitions of his own, hoping to put into action his campaign slogan “justice to rich and poor alike” as a gubernatorial candidate.45 When Pitman received his summons to appear before the grand jury on August 27, he walked out to his backyard and shot himself in the head.46 While this certainly damaged the case against Wood (Pitman’s out-­of-­court statements were inadmissible as evidence), the DA managed to persuade the grand jury to order the arrest of the city’s richest citizen and his accomplices for conspiracy. Meanwhile, rumors circulated freely that two more indictments were pending, including one for Joseph J. Donohue, the anti-­union Boston American reporter who had written the mysterious article on the discovery of the bombs before they were actually discovered. While the reporter was not arrested, a man named Frederick E. Atteaux, a prominent dealer in dyes, chemicals, and mill supplies, was indicted for conspiracy as a result of his role as middleman between Wood and Breen. The political conspiracy trial of Wood and Atteaux opened in the summer of 1913, with Collins turning state’s evidence after confessing that he had been paid to transport the dynamite. District Attorney Pelletier introduced into evidence proof that Wood had paid Atteaux $2,600 during the strike for various services, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts could not prove a conspiracy linking Wood to Breen. The trial ended with Collins found guilty; Atteaux faced a hung jury, and Wood was acquitted. “While President Wood of the American Woolen Company has been exonerated,” reported the National Civic Federation’s magazine The Square Deal, “a conspiracy to dynamite has been proven. . . . In this case it seems as if the conspirators merited greater punishment than any that should be meted out to ordinary workingmen.”47

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Bigger than Breen’s initial conviction, the indictment of Wood carried tremendous symbolic weight. “For the first time in the history of the labor movement of America,” claimed the IWW, “the class of parasites who have been instrumental in destroying labor unions and sending innocent men and women to jail, have at last been caught with the goods on them.”48 In the midst of the anti-­union and countersubversive frenzy on the West Coast, a direct reversal had occurred in the East, and what was a blatant capitalist conspiracy to frame nonviolent strikers had dramatically backfired. “It is easy to entertain the suspicion that the manufacturers tried to get strikers falsely condemned for using explosives,” observed the Philadelphia Record. “To attempt to make it appear that the Lawrence strikers were preparing to blow up the mills and kill innocent people by dynamite explosion,” declared the New York Evening Post as part of a cascade of public opinion favoring the strikers, “is an offense on the part of capitalism which pales the worst acts ever committed by labor unions.”49 Could this have been, at last, vindication for the unresolved battles over Haymarket and the Independence Depot, if not the Los Angeles Times? Samuel Gompers certainly thought so. His version of the conspiracy narrative remains one of the most detailed accounts to be published. In a concluding passage full of strained future tenses and circular construction, Gompers presented what he felt to be the real meaning of Wood’s arrest: The secret ways and means of business organizations are rarely revealed to public view, but . . . when the story of financial greed, heartlessness, and determination to disrupt labor organizations shall have been established, the world will have confirmed previous criminal conspiracies of merciless and unscrupulous capitalist antagonism to organized labor and will have a new viewpoint from which to judge the work, methods, and policies of the labor movement, and a new appreciation of the hazards and obstacles to be overcome in the fight for economic betterment and social uplift.50

In this passage one can detect the hidden transcripts of Gompers taking his revenge for the personal defeat he suffered over the McNamara case. While Gompers seemed to be fighting a rear-­guard action in the

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discursive war of position (while encouraging skilled AFL workers in Lawrence to break the strike), the Wobblies saw a grand opening to take the advantage in their active war of maneuver. “Do not let the capitalist editor befog the present situation for you,” warned the Ettor-­Giovannitti Defense Committee: The more one studies the recent developments connected with the dynamiting conspiracy here . . . the more certain it is that the killing of Anna La Pizza [sic], the girl striker, and the subsequent arrest of Joseph J. Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, was but the result of a widespread and infamous plot, or rather, a chain of plots, whose purpose was to “get” Ettor and Giovannitti at any cost and thus put a sudden end to the uprising of the workers.51

The arrest of Wood became a major moment in the campaign to free the two imprisoned strike leaders, further galvanizing popular support behind the IWW. Big Bill and other Wobbly leaders claimed a detailed and dangerous knowledge of the larger history of the conspiracy of capital, contributing to a kind of cynicism. “The indictment of William M. Wood . . . is no surprise to me,” commented Big Bill. “While the work of planting the dynamite was done secretly, it was known among us that the thing had been pre-­arranged long before the trap was set on us.” Nevertheless, Haywood had to admit, “things have turned out better than we hoped.”52 The trial of Ettor and Giovannitti opened in Salem on September 30 with the IWW threatening a general strike if the men were not acquitted. This trial of Wobbly leaders, much like those that had come before, became an effort to put the ideas and tactics of the IWW itself on trial. The prosecution quoted speeches, pamphlets, and essays by the IWW in an effort to paint the organization as a revolutionary conspiracy bent on the violent overthrow of the industrial order. Though the prosecution had no trouble demonstrating the militancy of the IWW, they still had no direct evidence of a criminal offense by Ettor and Giovannitti, and after a fifty-­eight-­day trial, the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict following only a few hours’ deliberation. The Wobblies’ two-­part victory in Lawrence stands as the most significant in their history. Not only did it demonstrate that unskilled

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immigrant workers could organize and improve the material conditions of their lives, but it again proved to the Wobblies the existence of a criminal conspiracy of capital. It is hard to say to what degree the conviction of Breen and the arrest of Wood assisted or enabled the Wobblies’ victory. These events also earned the Wobblies a new level of public credibility, proving that their language of “frame-­ups” was based (at least in this case) in fact. Of course, had Breen been more capable in his plotting, and had the frame-­up worked as it was supposed to (or had the dynamite exploded and killed anyone), who can say what the results might have been? It could have made Lawrence the end of the IWW rather than its high-­water mark. The story of the Lawrence dynamite conspiracy offers two key insights into the history of the IWW. First of all, there is the special significance of Breen’s and Wood’s prosecution for criminal conspiracy. The legal question of criminal agency behind the series of bombings from Haymarket to Los Angeles had been placed squarely on labor’s shoulders, establishing a firm countersubversive response to the asymmetrical violence in labor conflicts. But the prosecution of Breen and Wood, though neither was accused of a capital crime, must be considered a landmark in the modern dialectics of conspiracy, offering proof that a conspiracy of capital to frame union men was a legal and political fact. A wealthy monopolist had attempted to frame the IWW by planting dynamite on nonviolent strike leaders and was exposed only by the utter incompetence of his minions. If the McNamara confession had definitively proved the existence of union dynamiters, this case had similarly proved the existence of a capitalist conspiracy against the IWW. Second, the victory in Lawrence introduced the One Big Union to a much wider audience. The significance of fair, if not openly positive, accounts of the strike in new mass magazines like Collier’s and Harper’s, a major congressional investigation, and a new interest shown by a collection of New York artists and intellectuals helped acquaint American readers with the idealism of the IWW and its language of “free speech,” “solidarity,” and “direct action” as well as utopian slogans like “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All” and “The One Big Union.”53 In the end, “the Lawrence strike touched the most impervious,” wrote Walter Lippmann.

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“Story after story came to our ears of hardened reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary.”54

THE EMERGENCE OF A COUNTERSUBVERSIVE ANTI-­WOBBLY STRATEGY With the IWW’s new level of prominence within the radical movement, the Wobblies soon came under attack from the middle-­class electoral wing of the Socialist Party. Led by New York party leader Morris Hillquit and Wisconsin congressman Victor Berger, the electoral Socialists threatened to split the party at the 1912 convention between “Socialists versus syndicalists” or “political action versus direct action.” The IWW’s radical rhetoric and aura of class warfare threatened what Berger hoped to build into a legal, largely reformist political party. Haywood had been elected to the national executive committee of the Socialist Party, and in a debate at Cooper Union between the party’s left and right wings (with Eugene Debs trying to hold it all together), he argued that Socialists must prioritize industrial organizing over electoral politics, recounting the history of the WFM and the Lawrence strike to assert the centrality of class struggle in the socialist tradition. But he also underscored the revolutionary edge of the Haymarket generation and his own career as dynamiter and brawler. To “tremendous applause” and shouts of agreement, he told the audience: So you understand that we know the class struggle in the west. And realizing, having contended with all the bitter things that we have been called upon to drink to the dregs, do you blame me when I say that I despise the law and I am not a law-­abiding citizen. And more than that, no Socialist can be a law-­abiding citizen. When we come together and are of a common mind, and the purpose of our minds is to overthrow the capitalist system, we become conspirators then against the United States government. And certainly it is our purpose to abolish this government and establish in its place an industrial democracy. . . . Am I absolutely correct when I state this as being the position of the Socialist party not only of New York, but of the United States and of every nation of the world?55

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This kind of declaration of illegality and revolutionary conspiracy worried the electoral Socialists, who remembered the fate of Job Harriman (who lost an election after a union bombing) as much as that of Albert Parsons (who was executed after an anarchist bombing). For Debs, who believed above all in propaganda and spreading the word of class consciousness, conspiracy and “guerrilla war” were simply unsound tactics for a mass political party. “I am opposed to any tactics which involve stealth, secrecy, intrigue, and necessitate acts of individual violence for their execution,” said Debs, explaining, “Such tactics appeal to stealth and suspicion, and cannot make for solidarity.”56 At the convention, delegates on the party’s right introduced Article 2, Section 6 of the Socialist constitution, stating, “Any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from the party.”57 As his faction chanted “The syndicalists must go!” on the convention floor, Berger explained the need for such a clause: “Comrades, the trouble with our party is that we have men in our councils . . . who use our political organization—­Our Socialist party—­as a cloak for what they call direct action; for I.W.W.-­ ism, sabotage and syndicalism. It is anarchism by a new name.”58 By evoking the specter of Haymarket within the Left, Berger’s electoral side won, leading to a split in the Socialist Party that ultimately saw Haywood recalled from the national committee. The purge of the syndicalists from the Socialist Party, on the vague grounds of advocating “crime” or “sabotage,” offered a preview of the various criminal syndicalism laws and the legal repression faced by the entire Left, including the more moderate Socialist Party, during the First World War and Red Scare. This irony was not lost on Big Bill, who, writing from his Russian exile near the end of his life, recalled, “The many who have been persecuted can thank the traitors of the Socialist Party who adopted Article 2, Section 6 against the working class.”59 At the peak of its power as both a labor and a social movement, the IWW suddenly found itself politically isolated.60 While the Wobblies’ success became a source of factionalism among the social movements of the Left, the IWW had the opposite effect on the

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countersubversive Right. Industrial and political elites, citizens’ alliances, and the Republican Party, alongside organized nativists and reactionaries of every stripe and station, all agreed that the IWW represented an increasing threat. And the first response came as a new form of vigilantism challenged the growing union. Histories of nineteenth-­century vigilantism—­particularly in the western states that gave birth to the Wobblies—­romantically imagine vigilantism as a temporary embodiment of popular sovereignty, the actions of a body of citizens compelled to preserve local order on the frontier in the absence of legitimate law enforcement. Such histories tend to narrate the decline of vigilantism in the 1850s as a function of the arrival of civilization—­civil society and the rule of law.61 Of course, this moment marks not so much a decline in vigilantism as a transformation. As a self-­styled civic organization with the explicitly political goal of enforcing class privilege, the famous San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 became the father of countless citizens’ alliances, employers’ associations, commercial clubs, loyalty leagues, and other innocuously democratic-­sounding bourgeois and petty-­bourgeois vigilante groups which arose in every community threatened by working-­class organization across the nation.62 As noted by Richard Slotkin, the use of extralegal violence by these new civic organizations marked a shift in vigilante ideology “from an assertion of natural and democratic right to violence to an assertion of class and racial privilege.”63 This was the vigilantism of the “respectable classes,” the civic leaders and upstanding citizens against the “dangerous classes,” and now it took the form of public morality campaigns, racial and ethnic cleansing, or anti-­labor violence. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the IWW faced down this bourgeois vigilantism and the armed forces of civil society with increased regularity. Perhaps the most startling examples of this conflict came during the many “free speech campaigns” in western towns like Fresno, Denver, Spokane, and some twenty other places between 1909 and 1914. The IWW came to these places with the explicit intention of organizing the migratory workers who rode the rails from job to job, the tramps and hoboes of a permanent, disenfranchised working class who could be reached only by street corner organizers standing on a soapbox

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before an assembled crowd, singing songs and declaring that a better world could be won by joining the One Big Union. To the “respectable” citizens of these commercial centers and transportation hubs, the Wobblies were “outside agitators,” bums and anarchists whose presence was a moral, ethnic, and insurgent threat to the social order. Given that this form of soapboxing and street speaking is ostensibly protected by the Constitution as the exercise of free speech and assembly, community leaders resorted to a combination of city ordinances, police repression, and outright vigilante terrorism to drive the Wobblies out of town. In these conflicts, in which hundreds of IWW members faced arrest and violence as they engaged in direct, nonviolent civil disobedience to defend their constitutional rights, the rough-­and-­tumble Wobblies developed a national following of liberals, artists, and intellectuals who supported their right to free speech and defense of civil liberties.64 The longest and most violent of these free speech campaigns occurred in San Diego in the spring of 1912.65 As they had in the dozens of free speech fights across the West, thousands of Wobblies poured into San Diego on boxcars to aid in the struggle. Under siege by outside agitators, the San Diego city council passed ordinances against street speaking and attempted to ban the IWW outright. Several members of the Socialist Party and the IWW were prosecuted for conspiring to violate the speaking ban, resulting in a sentence six times as severe as that for violating the speaking ban itself. “This latest atrocity on the part of the San Diego authorities,” editorialized the International Socialist Review, “is an attempt to revive an old English conspiracy law and to apply it to the labor disturbances in America. It is sweepingly menacing in its application, for Socialists everywhere may be railroaded to the penitentiary without ever having violated any of the laws of the land.”66 The IWW saw this as a challenge to their right to exist at all. The zealous enforcement of unconstitutional laws was only half the battle facing the IWW. In San Diego, police commonly arrested Wobblies and turned them over to vigilante gangs in the middle of the night, night after night, whereupon they were beaten and tortured, tarred and feathered, and in one incident IWW members were forced to kiss the flag and sing the national anthem at the point of a bayonet. These victims

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were finally abandoned in the middle of the desert just over the county line. “Hanging is too good for them and they would be much better off dead,” announced the San Diego Tribune, as if issuing orders to a hidden army of righteous marauders.67 When Emma Goldman arrived in town with her partner, Ben Reitman, ostensibly to deliver a public lecture on Ibsen and modern drama, the two were besieged in their hotel, repeatedly threatened by an angry mob, and warned by its emissaries—­the respectable elite of San Diego—­ that “Red Emma” would not be allowed to speak. “Why don’t you use the same measures against these people that you have against the free-­speech fighters?” Goldman demanded of the mayor, implying his complicity with the mob. “Your ordinance makes it a crime to gather in the business districts. Hundreds of IWW’s, anarchists, socialists, and trade-­union men have been clubbed and arrested, and some even killed for this offense. Yet you allow the Vigilante mob to congregate in the busiest part of the town and obstruct traffic. All you have to do is disperse these lawbreakers.”68 Such was the terror of San Diego that even Emma Goldman, perhaps the most fearless of American radicals, was forced to cancel her public lecture and flee the county in the middle of the night. Reitman was not so fortunate. Having been separated from Emma, he was kidnapped by the mob and beaten, scalded with hot tar and finally had the letters “IWW” burned into his flesh. “We could tear your guts out,” one of his kidnappers told Reitman, “but we promised the Chief of Police not to kill you. We are responsible men, property-­owners, and the police are on our side.”69 After nine months, the egregious violence and persistent lawlessness finally brought protests from the state and federal governments, and the fight for free speech in San Diego ended more or less in a bitter draw. The vigilantes backed down under threat of criminal prosecution, but the city never fully restored free speech and assembly rights, and San Diego remained a reactionary stronghold of the “open shop,” all but abandoned by the IWW as an “outlying province of Russia.”70 In the midst of this open class war in San Diego and Wheatland, leading southern California Republicans appealed to President Taft, shouting loudly about a foreign conspiracy to overthrow the government and demanding that the federal government step in to crush the

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IWW. But the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General George Wickersham, found no evidence of Wobbly violence, let alone a vast revolutionary conspiracy, and despite the pressure coming from the West Coast, he refused to indict the leaders of the IWW. In 1912 there were as yet no effective legal or political tools available to use against the IWW, as the attorney general refused to invoke Section 6 of the penal code, a Civil War–­era statute that prohibits “seditious conspiracy.”71 Though they posed a serious challenge to the ruling class in southern California, the fundamentally nonviolent IWW members remained within their rights to dissent, at least as far as the federal government was concerned. As one anti-­Wobbly farmer bluntly stated, “You can’t kill ’em; the law protects ’em.”72 The countersubversive activists of southern California had to wait for that as yet unforeseeable moment when historical conditions would prove more amenable to their anti-­radical demands. WOBBLY MARTYRS: JOE HILL AND FRANK LITTLE The counterrevolution against the IWW began with the start of war in Europe. The execution of itinerant worker and Wobbly bard Joe Hill by the state of Utah on November 19, 1915, was the first political prosecution of a radical artist in this period, and it transformed Hill from a “fellow worker” into the central martyr of the IWW, the legendary “man who never died.”73 In the words of his fellow Wobbly songwriter Ralph Chaplin, Joe Hill wrote “songs of and for the worker, written in the only language he can understand and set to the music of Joe Hill’s own heart.”74 Born in Sweden as Joel Hägglund, also known as Joseph Hillstrom, Joe Hill emigrated to the United States in 1902 and officially joined the IWW in San Pedro in 1910. Active in strikes and free speech drives up and down the Pacific coast, including the 1912 San Diego free speech drive, which left him permanently scarred, Hill soon found himself blacklisted. Were it not for the witty, caustic, and rebellious songs that he wrote “to fan the flame of discontent” among the immigrants, the uneducated, and the radical, Hill could very well have spent his life an unknown bum, an anonymous member of the Wobblies’ rank and file. Yet his songs, set to the popular tunes of the day, spread from labor

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camps and union halls, sung at rallies, on picket lines, and in prisons, galvanized an activist chorus to feats of solidarity and rebellion until Hill’s name and poetry were finally set down in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook. By the time Hill arrived to work in the mines outside Salt Lake City, his popularity was already growing. On the night of January 10, 1914, two masked men entered the Salt Lake City grocery store of John Morrison, a former policeman and father of two. One of the assailants yelled, “We’ve got you now,” and proceeded to shoot John and his son Avling dead, leaving Morrison’s younger son, fourteen-­year-­old Merlin, the only witness. Nothing was stolen from the store, and according to Merlin, Avling managed to shoot at least one of his attackers before meeting his own end. Several days later, after interviewing a number of suspects, the police arrested Joe Hill. When they found him, Hill was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest, yet the police managed to shoot him again in the hand while arresting him. As it turns out, late on the night of the murders, Hill appeared at the office of Dr. Frank McHugh seeking treatment for a gunshot wound; the bullet had passed through his body, piercing his lung. Hill, who carried a weapon of his own, told the doctor that he’d been shot in a dispute over a married woman, and that he wished to keep the affair quiet. Hill’s roommate vanished immediately after the murders, leading the police to suggest that the two had been accomplices in the attack. Hill pled not guilty at his arraignment, but he steadfastly refused to offer an alibi that would besmirch the honor of his sweetheart. He refused to cooperate with the investigation and declined to take the stand in his own defense. Though Hill was never directly identified as the killer, no convincing motive could be presented (other than a failed robbery), and no physical or forensic evidence linked him to the killings, a combination of circumstantial evidence, deep suspicion of foreign Wobblies, and the distrust encouraged by Hill’s silence led the jury to find him guilty. The judge sentenced Hill to death. In the two years between his sentencing and his execution, Joe Hill’s legal defense became an international cause. The IWW began a defense campaign that stretched from coast to coast, selling special issues of the Little Red Songbook to raise money, and promoting the story that Hill was

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the victim of a frame-­up because of his political faith. “The main thing the state had against Hill,” claimed his lawyer, Judge O. N. Hilton, “was that he was an IWW and therefore sure to be guilty. Hill tried to keep the IWW out of it . . . but the papers fastened it upon him.”75 Tens of thousands of letters poured in to Governor William Spry’s office begging for clemency for Hill. Led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others, the defense campaign reached out to the ambassador from Sweden, where Hill was still a citizen. Even President Woodrow Wilson sent two telegrams to Spry asking for a new trial. Spry rejected such “unwarranted influence” and refused all requests for clemency. With his legal options closing, Hill embraced the role of martyr, projecting himself into the legend he became after his death. He spent his time in prison writing letters and song after song, including the radical feminist anthem “The Rebel Girl,” which he dedicated to Flynn. Facing execution, Hill wrote to Flynn questioning the wisdom of fighting labor defense campaigns rather than organizing. “We cannot afford to drain the resources of the whole organization and weaken its fighting strength just on account of one individual,” Hill argued. “There will be plenty of new rebels to come to ‘fill the gaps,’ as the war news puts it.”76 This question came to define the Wobblies in the years to come: Were they a fighting union or were they a labor defense committee? Were they battling capitalism or the conspiracy laws? Joe Hill’s last words to Bill Haywood remain a slogan of the Left throughout the world: “Goodbye Bill. I die a true-­blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”77 Brought before the firing squad on November 19, 1915, Hill gave the order to fire himself. Afterward, his body traveled by train to Chicago, where Joe Hill received a martyr’s funeral with a portion of his ashes ceremonially interred next to the Haymarket anarchists. The International Socialist Review printed photos from his funeral and excerpts from the many eulogies delivered in English, Swedish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, Italian, German, Yiddish, and Lithuanian.78 Chaplin wrote a song eulogizing the fallen radical songsmith, and drew a cartoon to accompany it depicting “Capital” on his throne, pulling wires attached to the rifles of Utah public officials while the sun of “Organization” rises over the prison walls (fig. 19).

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Despite lingering questions about his possible guilt, the legend of Joe Hill remains preserved in literature and song.79 “He had a knack for setting rebel words to tunes,” wrote John Dos Passos in his novel 1919, effectively enshrining Hill as a martyr to two successive generations of the American Left.80 Naturally, after his death mourners wrote songs about Joe Hill. The most famous of which, “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” written by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, sanctified Hill as “the man who never died” and was made popular by Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Joan Baez. In the years after his execution, the IWW followed Hill’s advice and organized a series of winning strikes in the West, showing that militancy could lead to serious gains as their membership reached nearly 100,000. As the drums of war began to beat, the IWW leapt into an antiwar campaign. One widely circulated Wobbly flyer made their case plain: WAR AND THE WORKERS general sherman said, “war is hell!” don’t go to hell in order to give the capitalists a bigger slice of heaven. let those who own the country, do the fighting! Put the wealthiest in the front ranks; the middle class next; follow these with judges, lawyers, preachers and politicians. Let the workers remain at home and enjoy what they produce. . . . Don’t make yourself a target in order to fatten Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, the Rothschilds, Guggenheim, and the other industrial pirates. Don’t be fooled by jingoism.81

The Wobblies saw the World War as an inter-­imperialist conflict and they wanted no part of it. “I contended that it was a ‘capitalist war’ camouflaged with plausible slogans,” recalled Ralph Chaplin, “a secret conspiracy to strengthen the position of war profiteers and international moneylenders at the expense of weaker nations and, of course, at the expense of the exploited and betrayed proletariat of the world.”82 The IWW ceased all antiwar speech, however, once the United States declared

Figure 19. Ralph Chaplin, “Joe Hill,” International Socialist Review 16 (December 1915).

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war on Germany, and from that point took no official stand on the war. Some editorials even encouraged Wobblies to register for the draft and serve. “While being opposed to the Imperial Government of Germany,” wrote Haywood in a deliberate equivocation, “we are likewise opposed to the Industrial Oligarchy of this country.”83 Despite this double-­talk on the war, the IWW refused to stop its strike campaign in the West. By the fall of 1916 the forces of “preparedness” and militarism led a renewed offensive against the IWW. Adversaries mocked the IWW as the “I Won’t Work” or “I Want Whisky,” or the newly coined “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors.” Wobbly strikes in critical war export industries met with violence in the Mesabi iron ore range in Minnesota, the timberlands of Washington, the copper mines of Arizona and Montana, and the wheat fields and orchards of California. On November 5, 1916, during a free speech fight in Everett, Washington, local vigilantes and law enforcement ambushed a boat full of singing Wobblies as it arrived at the dock, killing up to a dozen people in what became known as the Everett Massacre.84 Week after week, and month after month, the International Socialist Review, with Haywood as its editor, and the IWW papers chronicled the rise of what the Wobblies now called “government by gunmen.”85 The largest vigilante action during wartime came in the copper mining border town of Bisbee, Arizona, on July 12, 1917, when some 2,200 deputized vigilantes, working with mining company officials and the leading figures of the town, rounded up 1,186 strikers at gunpoint, marched them through town, forced them onto twenty-­three Phelps Dodge company–­ owned cattle cars, and “deported” them some 180 miles to the middle of the New Mexico desert. “Without precedent in this or any other country, or any other age, was the occurrence of yesterday,” noted the Bisbee Daily Review of the deportations. “It marked a golden date on the calendar; a date when the law-­abiding people of the community drove from their midst the ‘Wobbly.’”86 Two weeks earlier, some 90 percent of the mining workforce walked out on strike to protest low wages and poor safety standards, and to demand an end to the blacklist and the elimination of the “dual wage” system, which segregated Mexican and “American” workers. Though few miners joined the One Big Union, members of the IWW

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actively organized the strike, encouraging solidarity along the racially divided borderland. Welcoming everyone into the One Big Union, the IWW hired Bisbee’s first Mexican union organizers, Benito Garcia and Joseph Robles. Armed deputies launched the roundup to break the strikes in the midst of the wartime spike in global copper prices, but also with the intention to end the challenge to the racial order that this strike and Wobbly ideology threatened. Some 90 percent of the deported men were immigrants representing thirty-­four nationalities; fewer than a quarter were legalized American citizens, and half the deportees were either Mexican or eastern European in origin. A combination of racism and nationalism had merged with the economic needs of a country at war to breed one of the largest vigilante acts in U.S. history. “The Iron Heel at Work,” announced Solidarity, seeing in Jack London’s class war novel a prediction of a future authoritarian capitalism. “Everything shows a well planned preconceived plot on the part of the copper barons of Arizona to perpetrate the greatest wholesale kidnapping of striking workingmen and their sympathizers ever attempted in America.”87 A similar event occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a major processing center for Standard Oil, where a masked mob calling itself the Knights of Liberty abducted eleven Wobblies from their prison cells after arrests on vagrancy charges and proceeded to tar and feather organizers before driving them out of Tulsa. “The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the IWW’s,” editorialized the Tulsa World. “Kill them, just as you would kill any other kind of snake. . . . It is no time to waste on trials and continuances and things like that. All that is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad.” After the Tulsa riot, and the local police refusal to conduct any kind of investigation, Thorstein Veblen began his own investigation, ultimately charging that the oil companies had organized the vigilantes.88 To the IWW, the Everett Massacre, Bisbee deportations, and Tulsa riots stood as examples of a state, corporate, and vigilante conspiracy to rid the country of industrial unionism. Yet the Wobblies interpreted this new lawlessness as a sign of weakness, the desperation of a dying system, a vision that bolstered their determination to take action. “It was difficult for any labor editor to keep up with events in 1917,” commented

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Ralph Chaplin.89 Was this country—­or at least the parts of the country inspired by the IWW—­on the verge of revolution? One Wobbly leader who refused to tone down his opposition to the capitalist war was Frank Little. Rumored to be half i­ndigenous, Little was one of four one-­eyed members of the IWW general executive board and certainly among the most radical. Little organized lumberjacks, oil field workers, harvest bindle stiffs, and, most effectively, mine and mill workers across the West and Southwest. Little was absolutely committed and dangerously brave, and his body bore the physical marks of capital to prove it. “Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to give in,” Little told Chaplin and Haywood. “Either we’re for this capitalistic slaughterfest, or we’re against it. I’m ready to face a firing squad rather than compromise.”90 Little had been in Bisbee, though he missed the mass deportations by a few days, after which he returned to Montana, where the situation in Butte was especially tense. The Butte Speculator Mine was owned by the Anaconda Copper Company, at the time a subsidiary of Standard Oil. In early June, a fire killed 164 miners, who burned alive underground because of inadequate safety regulations. Upon arriving in Butte, Little helped organize the spontaneous strike that followed the disaster, rallying the mourning and enraged strikers with speeches denouncing the profiteering “Copper Kings,” their Pinkerton armies, and the madness of militarism which fed the slaughter here and in Europe. By whatever calculus the limits of dissent are measured, Frank Little had gone too far. In the morning darkness of August 1, 1917, five men arrived at the boardinghouse where Little slept. “We are officers and we want Frank Little,” one of the men demanded of the landlady. These armed men took Little from his bed, beat him, and dragged him behind their car to the outskirts of town, where they lynched him from a railroad trestle. When miners found his body the next day, Frank’s leg was still in a cast from a broken ankle. A warning pinned to his bloodied nightshirt stated “Others Take Notice! First and Last Warning!” followed by a cryptic code. As was common in lynchings in the South and West, local authorities made no effort to investigate the murder of Frank Little.91

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Anti-­union violence now claimed a patriotic motivation, legitimizing Little’s murder as a necessity, for where the law had failed, patriotic citizens had taken the license and duty of the state into their own hands, unleashing terror in defense of the law. Pressing the case for patriotic vigilantism, the Helena Independent editorialized, “[We are] convinced that unless the courts and the military authorities take a hand now and end the IWW in the West, there will be more night-­visits, more tugs at the rope, and more IWW tongues will wag for the last time when the noose tightens about the traitors’ necks.” Across the country, far from the mining towns of the West, newspaper editors greeted the extralegal murder of Frank Little with widespread support. “The howls of the Industrial Workers of the World over the lynching of Little will find, we believe, no echo in any reasonable American’s heart,” declared the Chicago Tribune. And in an explicit endorsement of the Wobblies’ accusation of capitalist conspiracy, the Tribune continued: “If mine owners hired [Little’s] lynchers they only anticipated what the community would eventually be compelled to do if the law did not act. And the law must act with more power and promptness against such men.”92 Such comments by national newspapers fed the Wobblies’ belief that a conspiracy of capitalists lay behind Little’s murder. In a cartoon drawn by Chaplin, first published in Solidarity on August 11, 1917, this conspiratorial collusion is represented by a masked plutocrat, issuing a secret payoff to an equally sinister newspaper editor (fig. 20). “It’s all right, pal,” reads the caption, indicating their professional intimacy, “just tell them he was a traitor.” The two allegorical figures conspire while the lifeless body of Frank Little hangs behind them. This cartoon’s rhetorical power (which is simultaneously its greatest theoretical weakness) is found in the necessary absence of the actual lynchers. The unknown men, with their unknown motivations, are deprived of their own agency as terrorists and displaced onto the recognizable class and capitalist motivations of the mask-­wearing plutocrat. Ultimately, the lynch mob is condensed into a mere tool of the copper trust, as represented by the gun in the plutocrat’s pocket and the note pinned to the body. The brutality of the capitalist system is herein literalized, and the complex series of social relations between law and terror, capital and press, are reduced to the

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Figure 20. Ralph Chaplin, “Copper Trust to the Press,” Solidarity, August 11, 1917.

instrumentalized violence of capital and a subsequent payoff, all through a conspiratorial abstraction. What is missing from this image, and from all the Wobbly talk about “invisible government” as it pertained to vigilantism and anti-­radical violence, was a serious questioning of the increasingly irrational opposition to the IWW and the way ordinary people—­not just the copper trust or the steel industry—­could come to see the One Big Union as a subversive threat to the state. The IWW tended to explain this popular opposition to radicalism by blaming the press and suggesting that most people were simply “dupes” of the conspiracy of capital. They mocked

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the “scissorbills,” the “Harry Dubs,” the “Mr. Blocks” of the working class who had the values and mentality of an employer, fooled into false consciousness, traitors to their class. With each new outrage, the IWW grew more and more dependent on its conspiratorial visions, a generalizing accumulation of individual conspiracy theories into a vast imagining of the “invisible government” pulling the strings in a plot to destroy the IWW and enslave the working class. Whatever their source or motivation, the successful vigilante battles against the IWW emboldened anti-­radical violence on a national scale. “The present administration in completely ignoring the crimes of Bisbee and Butte,” claimed Solidarity, “was showing itself to be but the pliant tool of the Wall-­Street war-­lords.”93 But while the government may have failed to intervene in (if not tacitly approved of) the crimes of Bisbee, Butte, Everett, and Tulsa, this does not mean that federal officials “ignored” these events. State and local officials, like the newspaper editorialists, recognized that these acts of vigilante terrorism were effective only on a local level, purging the IWW town by town, but this would not be enough to destroy the IWW completely. “Why wait?” asked the Wall Street Journal. “The nation is at war, and treason must be met with preventative as well as punitive measures. . . . Instead of waiting to see if their bite is poisonous, the heel of Government should stamp them out at once.” Indeed, “the Bisbee plan does not work,” echoed the New York Globe. “Only the Government of the United States can destroy the troublesome IWW.”94 THE WOBBLY TRIAL OF 1918 With the declaration of war, these local countersubversive voices finally got the dramatic action demanded. In a legislative history we will consider in greater detail in the next chapter, the federal government passed new wartime laws greatly expanding the legal bounds of repression. The Espionage and Sedition Acts criminalized a broad range of revolutionary and antiwar speech and made it a crime to be a member of any organization that advocated revolution or impeded the draft.95 Some states enacted laws directly targeting the IWW, especially California’s

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1919 Criminal Syndicalism Law, which made it a crime to advocate for “a change in industrial ownership or control.” 96 Simultaneously, the the federal government expanded its political intelligence apparatus, established branches of military intelligence and intelligence divisions within the State Department, and, most important, built up the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation with an explicitly anti-­radical General Intelligence Division, originally headed by the ambitious file clerk J. Edgar Hoover.97 Immediately after the passage of the Espionage Act, the Justice Department orchestrated state police and the National Guard, along with thousands of summarily deputized members of the American Protective League, in a nationwide crackdown on the IWW. In a bold display of bureaucratic precision, on September 5, 1917, federal marshals coordinated simultaneous raids on the IWW headquarters in Chicago and sixty-­four local union halls in cities from coast to coast. In the midst of major strikes in the mining and lumber industry, totaling nearly ninety thousand strikers under the banner of the IWW, federal agents rounded up the entire national leadership of the IWW. Government agents destroyed the IWW’s organizational infrastructure in the name of seizing evidence, carrying some five tons of material out of its national offices in Chicago, including all the IWW’s correspondence, membership lists, vast stockpiles of literature, typewriters, and all the desks, chairs, paperclips, even the pictures on the walls. According to the search warrant issued for the raids, the ostensible goal was to look for evidence of a conspiracy, and the federal government now had to dig through tons of paper, building a case against the IWW by using the organization’s own literature to prove that membership in the IWW was a violation of the Espionage Act. That which did not become evidence in the trial was fed to the furnace in an effort to silence the Wobblies, to erase them and their archival traces from history. The press, which in previous weeks had reported that the IWW was a foreign menace funded by “German gold,” now told the nation that government action had thwarted a vast terrorist conspiracy. The goal of these raids, in the words of the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, was “very largely to put the IWW out of business.”98

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Held for nearly a year in the dungeons of the Cook County Jail, Big Bill Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, Ben Fletcher, and the rest of the Wobbly national leadership communed with the spirits of Albert Parsons and the Haymarket martyrs. The Chicago leadership faced 164 indictments on five counts of conspiracy, including conspiracy to obstruct war via sabotage or speech, conspiracy to interfere with workers’ contracts, and conspiracy to evade the draft and to promote military subordination. In total, the federal government charged the IWW with 17,022 crimes, most of which were not illegal before the passage of the Espionage Act, and none of which alleged bomb plots, incitement to riot, or any form of violence whatsoever on the part of the IWW.99 The One Big Union faced a mountain of charges on exclusively political crimes. The atmosphere around the trial, soon to become the longest criminal trial in U.S. history to that point, was a potent blend of the revolutionary and the reactionary. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis presided over the trial, dispensing with many of the social formalities of the courtroom such as his judge’s robes, and allowing spittoons for the defendants. Yet the courtroom was tense, with the United States now fully engaged in the fighting in France, and news of the new Bolshevik revolution trickling into the country each day. When the trial opened on April 1, 1918, all 101 Wobblies sat together in the dock, collectively defended by IWW attorney George Vanderveer. Like any good IWW street corner agitator, Vanderveer argued for the existence of the class struggle, and he challenged the state’s claim that being anti-­capitalist made one a pro-­German traitor. The expansiveness of the conspiracy charge enabled a wide-­ranging courtroom battle which effectively put the nature and goals of the organization itself on trial. The prosecution entered into evidence all manner of IWW literature, from internal correspondence to cartoons to song lyrics, alongside a slew of informants, detectives, and spies who testified in court to the Wobblies’ subversion. “To me, fresh from Russia, the scene was strangely familiar,” wrote John Reed, reversing the poles of conflict. “For a moment it seemed to me that I was watching the Central Committee of the American Soviets trying Judge Landis for—­well, say counter-­revolution.”100 As Morrie Preston suggested in the early days of the IWW, the Wobblies’ legal defense turned the conspiracy charge on its head, arguing

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that “in reality, it is the purpose of the prosecution to destroy the organization with which these men are connected and to break the ideal for which their organization stands.”101 Always ready to take the conspiracy claim head-­on, Haywood fondly recalled an exchange that took place on the stand: Vanderveer asked me if I, with the other defendants, were conspiring to interfere with the profits of certain people who were engaged in the manufacture of munitions supplies. I answered: “We are conspiring. We are conspiring to prevent the making of profits on labor power in any industry. We are conspiring against the dividend makers. We are conspiring against rent and interest. We want to establish a new society, where people can live without profit, without dividends, without rent and without interest if its possible; and it is possible, if people live normally, like human beings should live. I would say that if that is a conspiracy, we are conspiring.”102

Throughout the trial, Haywood seemed ready to embrace a vision of the IWW as an outlaw organization, hinting that the Wobblies might have to “take the underground route.”103 If Haywood suggested some of the idealistic contrariness of the IWW in comments like these, Vanderveer, like Darrow a decade earlier, worked to prove the existence of a real counter-­conspiracy to destroy the IWW by presenting what amounted to a broad lesson in the history of the IWW. “What an education that jury had;” wrote Reed. “The defense has been one long bloody pageant of industrial wrong; Coeur d’Alene, San Diego, Everett, Yakima Valley, Patterson, Mesaba Range, Bisbee, Tulsa . . .”104 It was this historical narrative of class struggle that prompted sympathetic observers and those on trial to question just who was guilty of conspiracy. Recalling the trial nearly fifty years later, Richard Brazier had this to say: The main charge against us was that of conspiracy. . . . How we one hundred and one defendants had conspired together to arrange such a conspiracy we never knew. For most of us had never met prior to our arrests. . . . There were other charges, a lot of stuff introduced as a filler, to make the government indictment look more impressive. But all except the conspiracy charge that carried the heavy sentences was thrown out on appeal. After we had heard the case for the prosecution we became certain that a real charge of conspiracy had been

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proven—­but not against us. We were sure that the real conspirators were the ones who were trying the alleged conspirators. The government itself planned the conspiracy, and we were its victims.105

At the end of the five-­month trial, the jury deliberated for less than an hour, returning a blanket verdict convicting each and every defendant of each and every offense. When Judge Landis read the sentences, most received five years; thirty-­three men received ten years, while fifteen others, including Haywood and Chaplin, faced twenty years in federal prison along with $2 million in fines. Subsequent trials in Sacramento and Wichita produced similar convictions.106 Altogether the raids, trials, and sentences had a dramatic impact on Wobbly political discourse, turning the organization away from individual strikes or local drives and increasingly toward legal defense and civil liberties campaigns in which the IWW struggled to come to grips with and effectively name the economic and political enemy that had engineered its destruction. “One Union, One Label, One Enemy” gradually replaced “Education, Organization, Emancipation” as the slogan on the masthead of Wobbly newspapers. Posters depicting heroic workingmen in prison or doing battle with judges now replaced images of workers battling bloated plutocrats. Terms like “terrorism” and “political prisoners” replaced “solidarity” and “sabotage” in the Wobbly vocabulary. In a cartoon by Maurice Becker in 1919, the masculine body of labor is put on trial by a decrepit conspiracy of the press, capital, and the courts who collectively authored the “frame-­up against the IWW” (fig. 21). Though Becker and Haywood tried to project an image of radical vitality in the face of the countersubversive assault on the IWW, by the time this image appeared, the IWW had lost most of its revolutionary energy. It was now in the process of transforming itself from a fighting organization of the working class into a legal defense organization dedicated to courtroom battles, to freeing its imprisoned comrades and to defending civil liberties. The IWW eventually bailed Haywood out of jail while he awaited appeals, during which time he helped Flynn organize the IWW’s General Defense Committee, made speeches denouncing the trial, and distributed a pamphlet titled Break the Conspiracy! As a veteran of so many difficult

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Figure 21. Maurice Becker, “Labor Ready to Crush the Conspiracy,” One Big Union Monthly, December 1919.

legal and political struggles, Haywood was exhausted; yet he could always manage to keep himself and his readers buoyant. “Our backs are against the wall,” he wrote. “We have been robbed, looted and persecuted by the profiteers until it is time to call a halt. This conspiracy against the Industrial Workers of the World and the working class generally must be broken. We do not ask you to help if it hurts you, but assure you it will hurt you worse later if you don’t help now.”107 The manly defense of working-­class militancy made Haywood both a celebrity and a target. While the Wobblies’ legal appeal stood pending before the Supreme

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Court in 1920, Haywood made the decision to leave “capitalist America” and join his comrade Emma Goldman in exile in the Soviet Union. By the Red Summer of 1919, the IWW had been defeated by the combination of vigilante strikebreakers, federal agents, and mass conspiracy trials. Yet calls for its further repression grew with the end of the war. “The average citizen doubtless looked upon the conviction of William D. Haywood and ninety-­two other officers and members of the Industrial Workers of the World, for conspiracy . . . as the end of that organization,” editorialized Forum magazine at the start of 1919. “But this was the mildest sort of homeopathic treatment for the cancerous growth of the IWW. Only the keen knife of Government surgery to absolutely remove it can stop its malignant growth.”108 This is a classic countersubversive argument harnessed to the new powers of the national security state, marking radicalism as a disease, a physical impurity in the national body for which only the expanded powers of the government, serving as both healer and vivisectionist, can provide the cure. By 1919, with the war over and wartime orthodoxy expanding into the Red Scare, the modern American political intelligence apparatus was firmly in place, beholden to the belief that constitutional guarantees were more obstacles than protections, and possessed by an intractable antipathy to labor, black radicals, and the Marxist Left. The political demands made of the federal government by the San Diego vigilantes back in 1912 had finally come to pass, and with the end of the war and the start of the Red Scare, the decisive battle between popular radicalism and the conspiracy of capital began.

Chapter 4

“The Ku Klux Government” Law and Terror in the Red Scare It is almost always the case that a “spontaneous” movement of the subaltern classes is accompanied by a reactionary movement of the right-­wing of the dominant class, for concomitant reasons. An economic crisis, for instance, engenders on the one hand discontent among the subaltern classes and spontaneous mass movements, and on the other conspiracies among the reactionary groups, who take advantage of the objective weakening of the government in order to attempt coup d’état. —Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (1930)

The Red Scare begins and ends with a bomb on a crowded city street. The first bomb exploded on the corner of Steuart and Market streets in the commercial heart of San Francisco at 2:06 p.m. on July 22, 1916. The bomb detonated in the midst of a “Preparedness Day” parade through the city center, leaving ten people dead and more than forty seriously injured. Though this story begins in the sudden blast of dynamite, this particular bombing case went on to become one of the longest legal fights in the history of the American Left. The campaign to save from the gas chamber, then to exonerate and finally liberate, two local labor radicals framed for the crime, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, lasted until 1939. The Mooney case connected the Haymarket generation with the Popular Front generation in a continuous fight, linking a period of 189

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historic defeat for the Left to the moment of its boldest resurgence in the 1930s. But in its moment, the case of Tom Mooney seemed to draw all the themes and threads of the Haymarket generation into a single conspiracy theory while marking a transition to a new phase of class and culture war. Working between the Market Street bomb of 1916 and the Wall Street bomb of 1920, this chapter considers the dialectic of law and terror during the Red Scare. I argue that this period of revolutionary upheaval and counterrevolutionary violence was driven by an escalation in the dialectics of conspiracy in which terrorist bombs and vigilante terrorism, massive strikes and government raids, lynch mobs and government surveillance fed off one another in the heightened tensions of wartime and postwar class struggle and racist nationalism to create the greatest wave of countersubversive repression in the twentieth century. This searing, transformational period in American history marked the defeat of the Haymarket generation’s surge of popular radicalism—­a defeat that came by way of both legal repression and lawless terror, quasi-­legal conspiracies and the legislative expansion of conspiracy laws, a combination of exceptional violence and sovereign state–­building practices that by 1920 the Wobblies and a new generation of black radicals had come to describe as the “Ku Klux Government.” I begin with Preparedness Day, a terrorist bombing and the frame-­up of labor radical Tom Mooney in California, which sets the context in which the Haymarket generation came to recognize a new political enemy they called “militarism.” This brings us to a larger discussion of the European war—­how the United States became involved, and the abundance of conspiracy theories on all sides that served to explain the origins of the Great War. Once the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, a new repressive apparatus emerged to forge a partnership between, on the one hand, the voluntarism of patriotic vigilantes like the KKK and the American Protective League and, on the other hand, the newly created national security state, exemplified by the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The chapter ends with the postwar Red Scare, an era of global revolutions met by a wave of “white terrorism” and legal repression that reached its

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peak in the Centralia massacre, the Wall Street bombing of 1920, and the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti. In short, the story told in this chapter is of the comprehensive defeat of the Haymarket generation by an emergent countersubversive form of American fascism. PREPAREDNESS DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO, 1916 The organization of San Francisco’s Preparedness Day parade was a deliberate provocation by pro-­business and countersubversive forces in the divided city. The parade occurred in the midst of a violent waterfront strike that was but an immediate outbreak in an ongoing conflict between the labor movement in the nation’s most thoroughly unionized city and a new “open shop” offensive led by the city’s trusts. The parade was officially sponsored by the Pacific Defense League, an organization known to be little more than patriotic cover for an effort by the powerful San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to wrap an open shop demonstration in the American flag. Earlier that summer, the Chamber of Commerce had publicly launched a campaign to break the unions’ power in the Bay Area, establishing a “Law and Order Committee” and raising more than a million dollars to “rid San Francisco of anarchist elements.” Sixty years after their original appearance in the Gold Rush era, the Vigilantes had returned to San Francisco. The city’s major newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and Hearst’s Examiner, backed the open shop drive and promoted the parade, predicting a huge turnout. Many large enterprises like the streetcar trust (United Rail Roads, or URR) told their employees to march or be fired. Organized labor responded by boycotting the parade, while antiwar activists and pacifists held a large “Anti-­Preparedness Mass Meeting.”1 In the weeks before the parade, more than two hundred handwritten letters began arriving in the mail for local newspapers, event organizers, and city leaders. The letters came from an unnamed group and threatened to “use a little ‘direct action’ on the 22nd” to stop the parade and halt the drive for war. The letter received by the liberal antiwar editor Fremont Older claimed, “we have sworn to do our duty to the masses,” promising to “give only the hypocritical patriots who

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shout for war but never go a real taste of war.” The letter was signed “the determined exiles from militaristic governments, italy russia russia italy Germany Holland U.S.”2 These letters, written by a single hand and sent from within the city by what appeared to be an international anarchist conspiracy, triggered neither warnings to the public nor preparedness among the police. Two conspiracies—­one a rich army of big-­business vigilantes, and the other a tiny sect of militant terrorists—­stalked the fog-­shrouded fringes of San Francisco’s class conflict that summer. In addition to being a union city, San Francisco was home to a significant anarchist and socialist movement, which, quite apart from whoever sent these letters, now included Alexander Berkman, who began publishing a new anarchist journal called The Blast (fig. 22). Back in 1892, Berkman had been Emma Goldman’s lover and comrade, and together they ran an ice cream parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts, where they first heard about the gun battle between striking steelworkers and the Pinkerton strikebreakers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Filled with confidence that the great revolution was upon them, Berkman climbed aboard a train to Pittsburgh, where he attempted his attentat, his grand revolutionary gesture, by shooting and stabbing but ultimately failing to kill Carnegie Steel Works boss Henry Clay Frick. After his fool’s errand, the public turned against the strikers, the National Guard moved into Homestead, the strike failed, and Berkman spent the next fourteen years in prison. When he emerged in 1912, Berkman wrote his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and gradually found his way back into the ceaseless activity of being America’s second-­most-­famous anarchist. In 1915 he moved to California to support the labor defense campaign of two anarchists arrested in affiliation with the Los Angeles Times case and to aid in the defense of two Mexican revolutionary brothers, Ricardo and Enrico Flores Magón.3 At the time of the Preparedness Day parade, Berkman had been heavily engaged in organizing against “militarism,” which he defined as “the worship of the mailed fist, of force and violence, of wholesale slaughter by powder, lead and dynamite.”4 As the drive to war accelerated and the radical resistance to it grew, militarism became a new kind of character on the radical Left, an enemy combining

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Figure 22. Robert Minor, “Worshiping the God of Dynamite,” The Blast, August 15, 1916.

elements of plutocracy, imperialism, and patriotism into a new vision of the capitalist foe.5 On the day of the parade, Berkman and his companion, Mary Eleanor Fitzgerald, played host to none other than Emma Goldman at their apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District. Red Emma was on a West Coast tour, giving speeches on birth control and modern drama and

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a talk titled “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter.” As she recalled in her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), on July 22 the three friends—­Emma, Fitzi, and Sasha—­were enjoying lunch on a “golden California day” when Berkman got a phone call in The Blast’s offices: “‘A bomb exploded in the Preparedness Parade this afternoon,’ he said; ‘there are killed and wounded.’ ‘I hope they aren’t going to hold the anarchists responsible for it,’ I cried out. ‘How could they?’ Fitzi retorted. ‘How could they not?’ Sasha answered; ‘they always have.’”6 In fact, the call came from a reporter asking if Berkman cared to claim responsibility or make a comment on the explosion. The legacy of Haymarket remained undiminished thirty years later. Though police and private investigators raided the offices of The Blast within the week, officials in California never accused Berkman or Goldman of involvement with the bombing. They had already chosen another target. The Law and Order Committee of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce pinned the bombing on Tom Mooney, one of the most committed, well known, and consequently most deeply hated labor radicals in the Bay Area. Born in Chicago in 1882, Mooney was the son of an Irish mother and a father who was a coal miner and member of the Knights of Labor. As a young man Mooney joined the steel molders’ union and traveled the country from job to job. While employed at an ironworks in Stockton, California, Mooney became radicalized, taking out a subscription to the Appeal to Reason and joining the Socialist Party in 1907. Within a year Mooney was riding aboard Eugene Debs’s “Red Special” train as a campaign worker during Debs’s run for president, beginning a career in which Mooney seemed to be everywhere in the American radical Left. He joined the IWW in 1910 and spoke alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the Spokane free speech fight. After winning a subscription sales contest for Wilshire’s Magazine, Mooney earned a trip to the International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen, where he met V. I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Big Bill Haywood. Upon returning to California, Mooney founded a militant newspaper, The Revolt, organized a chapter of the International Workers’ Defense League, and ran the San Francisco chapter of the McNamara brothers’ defense committee. Later he joined William Z. Foster’s Syndicalist

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League of North America, welcomed Berkman and The Blast to the Bay Area, and led a failed effort to unionize the carmen of United Railroads. Mooney worked in both the brightly lit public squares as well as the dark underground of the post-­McNamara labor movement in California, publicly campaigning for a linemen’s union against Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) while organizing efforts to dynamite or pull down power line towers to disrupt the state’s largest utility. Consequently, by 1914 Mooney and his wife, Rena—­a music teacher by trade—­found themselves surrounded by detectives and spies, men who shadowed their every move, especially after Mooney survived three unsuccessful prosecutions for dynamiting electrical towers that delivered power to Oakland. One of Mooney’s comrades in the PG&E strike, Warren K. Billings, was a young militant renowned for his skills at infiltrating companies and spying on strikebreakers for the unions by posing as a scab. These counterespionage activities came to an end in 1913, when private detectives arrested Billings in Sacramento with a briefcase full of dynamite, landing him in Folsom Prison for two years. The PG&E detectives who busted Billings had been pursuing Mooney, and they swore that their enemy had slipped through their grasp for the last time. In this suffocating cloak-­and-­dagger atmosphere Mooney was a marked man, hunted by a disgraced former Pinkerton named Martin Swanson. PG&E, and later United Railroads, hired Swanson to track Mooney and somehow stop his strike activities. Swanson’s big break came when he convinced San Francisco DA Charles Fickert that the power line dynamiting and the Market Street bomb were linked. Fickert then hired Swanson as the lead investigator in the bombing case, though he had no experience in criminal investigation or forensics. “There was never any scientific attempt made by either the police or prosecution to discover the perpetrators of the crime,” concluded the 1932 report by the congressional Wickersham Committee, formed by President Hoover to scrutinize the U.S. justice system. “The investigation was in reality turned over to a private detective,” it continued, “who used his position to cause the arrest of the defendants. The police investigation was reduced to a hunt for evidence to convict the arrested defendants.”7 In the days after the bombing, the San Francisco police arrested five people in a series

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of warrantless raids, starting with Warren Billings; local union man Ed Nolan, who police claimed had stored bomb-­making materials in the garage where Mooney kept his motorcycle (these turned out to be Epsom salts and modeling clay); and the leader of the Jitney Bus Operators’ Union, Israel Weinberg, whose only connection to Mooney was that his young son took music lessons from Rena Mooney and he had once given the Mooneys a ride to a railroad union meeting. Tom and Rena Mooney were on an excursion outside the city when the local papers named them as the prime suspects. After telegraphing the chief of police, the couple returned to the city by train, where they were picked up by police who told the press they had caught the fugitive pair trying to flee. Upon arrest, all of the accused were held incommunicado, without charge or arraignment for weeks. The city refused them access to an attorney and subjected them to the “third degree,” including beatings, systematic sleep deprivation, and constant interrogation. Pushed by this torture, an exhausted, distraught, and completely innocent Weinberg offered to confess to anything to make it stop. Not content to let the police gather evidence, the Chamber of Commerce offered $17,000 in reward money to anyone who could help convict the five conspirators. This successfully drew a long line of cons and petty criminals who sold stories to the prosecution for a cut of the prize money. At the same time, Fickert and Swanson roughly turned away several eyewitnesses who gave detailed descriptions of a man, “Mexican or Spaniard, being very dark complexioned . . . about five foot seven in height,” placing a large briefcase at the exact spot of the detonation, but whose concurring recollections did not match the blond hair of Billings or the large frame and ruddy complexion of Mooney.8 Several other witnesses, including a young dental assistant named Estelle Smith, appeared in DA Fickert’s office before a collection of the city’s newspapermen to face Warren Billings, whereupon she raised an accusing finger and screamed, “That’s him, that’s the man!” When she repeated her claim during the hastily convened trial, it served to convict Billings for a life sentence. In the weeks after his guilty verdict, Estelle Smith was revealed to be a prostitute who had been accused of murder in Los Angeles, and her mother, Alice Kidwell, also a witness at the trial, had written her husband, Daniel Kidwell, then

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sitting in Folsom Prison for forgery, to say that Fickert had promised her a cash reward and a pardon for her husband if she would join her daughter and help finger Mooney. Many of the witnesses in Billings’s trial went bad, including one who was exposed as a male prostitute who had been convicted of giving his seventeen-­year-­old wife syphilis. Convicting him with similar speed and controversy, the court sentenced Mooney to death for first-­degree murder. Yet within a year, the state’s case against Mooney and Billings came apart. Proof of detective Swanson’s manipulation of the investigation, the exposure of widespread perjury, and the acceptance of bribes by state witnesses undermined the public’s faith in the convictions. After the sentence, photographic evidence appeared (at first suppressed and then visually mutilated by the DA’s office) proving that Tom and Rena Mooney could not have planted the bomb (fig. 23). Eventually the judge, several witnesses, and most of the jurors in the original trial publicly declared that the case against Mooney was fixed and demanded a new trial. In the days immediately after the bombing, the city was overwhelmed with fear caused by the explosion itself and the rapidity of the vigilantes’ response. “What the dynamiting of the Times was to Los Angeles,” wrote Carey McWilliams, “the Preparedness Day bombing was to San Francisco: both events symbolized a crushing defeat for the labor movement.”9 Police and vigilantes broke the longshoremen’s strike; a strike of cooks and waiters was similarly suppressed; the jitney bus drivers, long accused by the URR of cutting into their profits, got banned from downtown streets; and the city passed an anti-picketing ordinance. Through a combination of vigilantism and state power, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce broke the strikes, captured its archenemy, and turned the tide toward the open shop in California. And as goes California, so goes the nation. With the local labor organizations and liberal groups looking for cover, only the most radical elements in the city rose to Mooney’s defense. “The Blast is the voice of the awakened toilers,” announced Berkman in the days following the bomb. “It will fight to the last ditch the heinous murder conspiracy of Capital. The enemy is athirst for blood: it is planning to transplant to San Francisco the gallows of 1887 when five

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Figure 23. Robert Minor, The Frame-­Up System: Story of the San Francisco Bomb, 7th edition (San Francisco: Tom Mooney Molders Defense Committee, 1917).

of Labor’s best and truest friends were strangled to death in Chicago.”10 Evoking the memory of the Haymarket martyrs, Berkman began the legal defense of his friend, drawing the attention of the international anarchist movement to the frame-­up. “The McNamara confession was still haunting, ghostlike, the waking and sleeping hours of their erstwhile friends among the labor politicians,” recalled Emma Goldman. “There was not a single prominent man in the unions on the Coast who now

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dared speak up for his arrested brothers. . . . But we could not sit by idly and be a party to the conspiracy of silence.”11 As leaders of the legal defense, Berkman, Goldman, and the cartoonist Robert Minor understood that an international effort was needed to “defeat the conspiracy of Big Business.”12 Under their leadership, protests to save Mooney sprang up around the world. Workers in pre-­ revolutionary St. Petersburg were reported to have marched to the American embassy chanting, “Muni, Muni, save Muni!” French, British, and German soldiers wore “Save Mooney” buttons in the trenches, an international and class-­conscious act of defiance against the nationalist lines drawn by the war.13 Eventually such pressure, including massive “Mooney Day” parades across the United States, prompted President Wilson to ask California’s Republican governor William Stephens to grant Mooney a new trial or commute his death sentence. At first the governor delayed the execution for four months before relenting to the pressure—­but just a little. Governor Stephens commuted Mooney’s death sentence but gave him life in prison for a crime he did not commit. Mooney would live, and in the following year, the three remaining defendants, starting with Rena, were acquitted and released. But California did not let Tom Mooney go, and it took another twenty-­two years before he would again walk down Market Street a free man.14 It seemed that everything about San Francisco that summer was a conspiracy, whether it be union, anarchist, vigilante, or hatched inside city hall. Yet within this maze of plots, most observers knew nothing of the actual terrorist conspiracy that had mailed out threats and planted the bomb. According to the leading historians of American anarchism, Paul Avrich and Nunzio Pernicone, the most likely candidates for the Preparedness Day bombing are followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani. His followers orchestrated and carried out a chain of bombings in the United States and Italy starting in 1914 and stretching to Wall Street in 1920, many of which were similarly preceded by letters and formal threats of violence. During his deportation hearings in the fall of 1918, Galleani answered several questions about his writings on the San Francisco case, at one point snapping at the questioner:

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a.  It isn’t an impression that I have that Mooney is innocent; I have the mathematical certitude that he is innocent. q.  Do you realize that this is of vital interest to the country if you could prove that he is innocent . . . ? a.  It is a very ticklish affair upon which I do not wish to comment; I am positively sure that it was not Mooney who threw the bomb.15 Is this the same assuredness that Emma and Sasha may have offered, given the trail of perjury and bribery already revealed about the case? Or is it, as Avrich asserts, a braggart’s confession covered by the false modesty of a man familiar with the games of police interrogation? Beyond this possible clue, historians cannot name those responsible for the San Francisco bombing, making it one of the most persistent historical mysteries of the Red Scare era.16 In this sense, the political cartoonist turned radical activist Robert Minor was entirely correct when he asserted, “The real criminals have never been looked for!”17 For Minor, who led the legal defense campaign in its early years after Berkman returned to New York, the San Francisco bombing case felt like a repeat of the Haywood trial, the event that had helped to radicalize him as a young man. A self-­taught artist originally from San Antonio, Texas, Minor was eventually hired at Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, where he became one of the nation’s best-­known and highest-­paid cartoonists. Despite his fame, his politics moved sharply leftward, leading him to join the Socialist Party and publish cartoons in the Appeal to Reason. During a year studying in Paris, Minor became an anarchist, a commitment that cost him his job at the New York Evening World after its editorial board backed U.S. entry into the war. Cut loose from the capitalist press, Minor began drawing cartoons for Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and The Masses, the Greenwich Village bohemian journal of art and radicalism. He was resting in California, on his way back from reporting on the U.S. war in Mexico, when the Preparedness Day bomb exploded. For the next year and a half, Minor led Mooney’s International Workers’ Defense League and drew many memorable covers for The Blast. In a series of best-­selling pamphlets on the Mooney case, Minor argued that a “frame-­up system” had grown out of the ad hoc capitalist conspiracies

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since Haymarket, expanding into a kind of criminal capitalist machinery in which “Justice and Truth have no part, and courts of law are but mills that grind out favors or—­vengeance.” The idea grew on the left that the conspiracy of capital was no longer a singular plot to frame agitators, as with Haymarket or Idaho, but a functioning and reiterative “system.” There was something clearly familiar—­or systemic—­about the Mooney case for the members of the Haymarket generation. And yet there was something dramatically new about the Mooney case that the experience of the Haymarket generation made it slow to recognize, marking a critical transition in the twentieth century’s repressive state apparatus. The Preparedness Movement, represented an activist combination of corporate militarism, patriotic nationalism, and anti-­radical repression, all pitched as a popular demand for the expansion of military readiness. In “A Plea for Preparedness” issued by the Pacific Coast Business Men’s Preparedness League (and reprinted in The Blast three weeks before the bombing), these patriotic business leaders drew the necessary connections between preparing for international war and waging a class war: In the general apprehension for greater Preparedness to cope with foreign nations it is believed that a necessity fully as grave and serious is being overlooked . . . and that is the need for an adequate military establishment to act as a civil police force. . . . Due to the lack of sufficient militia, business men in the United States have frequently been placed under the undue burden of having to engage and pay for the services of men recruited privately and to have them commissioned as deputies by the civil authorities. . . . Certainly no intelligent person can oppose “Preparedness” when he reflects upon what may happen in the event of a general strike of the two million railroad workers of the country to gain the eight-­hour workday, and which is even now threatened.18

For the Bay Area anarchists of The Blast, this was an important admission, one that confirmed their own anti-­authoritarian ideology and fears that the conspiracy of capital was gunning for them. Preparedness for foreign wars was, in this sense, a cover story for both the immediate repression of labor radicalism as well as the push for a future in which the state must take over the expensive yet sovereign work of suppressing dissent. But where did the drive for war itself come from?

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“WARS ARE MADE IN THE DARK BEHIND CLOSED DOORS” Radicals of all stripes had long predicted a war between Germany and the United States or England.19 “Such a war would virtually put the Oligarchy in possession of the world-­market,” writes Jack London, in his speculative dystopian novel The Iron Heel. “Also, such a war would create a large standing army that need never be disbanded, while in the minds of the people would be substituted the issue, ‘America versus Germany,’ in place of ‘Socialism versus Oligarchy.”20 London’s novel optimistically imagines that the Socialist International thwarts this capitalist plot with a worldwide general strike, the first move in a coming global revolution. This is, of course, exactly what did not happen when war broke out, as every Socialist member of the Second International—­except for the Socialist parties in the United States and Russia—­capitulated to the nationalist drive for war, helping to ensure that the postwar revolutions would be led by communists and not socialists.21 When the Great War did come in 1914, seemingly every side, from royalists to communists, believed that it began in a conspiracy. The most common origin story blames the “Black Hand,” a group of very young Serbian nationalists demanding independence from the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire, who—­with the assistance of a shady Serbian regicide and head of military intelligence known as Apis—­assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on their visit to Sarajevo on June 28 of that year. On the basis of the confessions of the nineteen-­year-­old assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and his accomplices, Austria threatened to hunt down and punish the rest of the Serbian conspirators. This demand became one of several conditions Austria sought to impose on Serbia in what came to be known as the July Ultimatum, an event that destabilized the brittle networks of European empires and alliances, leading to their rapid collapse into a global war by the end of August.22 Beginning with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia by a group calling itself Narodnaya Volya, or “The People’s Will,” in 1881, no fewer than thirteen heads of state had been assassinated by anarchists in a startling string of violence. French president Carnot in 1894, Spanish

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prime minister Cánovas in 1897, Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, King Umberto I of Italy in 1900 (murdered by anarchists from Paterson, New Jersey), President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz in 1901, King Alexander of Serbia and his wife in 1903, Russian interior minister Count Wenzel von Plehve in 1904, Grand Duke Sergei of Russia in 1905, King Carlos I of Portugal and his son in 1908, Prince Ito of Japan in 1909, Russian prime minister Stolypin in 1911, and King George I of Greece in 1913.23 Only this assassination in Sarajevo, by a bumbling gang of nationalists (as in not anarchists), led to a war of previously unimaginable carnage, the permanent destruction of the Austrian, German, and Russian empires, and set off a global wave of revolutions. American Progressives like Woodrow Wilson blamed the war on Europe’s web of “secret treaties,” an accusation that initially served as a good enough reason to stay out of the war. Wilson won reelection in 1916 with the votes of liberals, the AFL, and urban immigrants by using the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” But in the six months after the election, Wilson’s position on the war changed (attributed publicly to the sinking of the Lusitania by German U-­boats). He took up new slogans like “We Must Fight to Make the World Safe for Democracy” and got a congressional declaration of war just twenty-­nine days after beginning his second term. Many Progressive intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, George Creel, and Edward Bernays joined Wilson’s cause, seeing the coming war as an opportunity to use state power to rationalize the economy, expand the influence of government reform, and democratize international relations.24 Wilson’s Fourteen Points, proposed during America’s short military engagement in Europe, was based on the principles of national self-­determination, a diplomacy of “open treaties openly arrived at,” and the deliberative League of Nations, all framed as a democratic solutions to the diplomatic conspiracies of Europe’s long nineteenth century.25 Socialist Party leaders like Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit, and Eugene Debs all opposed the war on principled, pacifist grounds, calling it “a crime against the American people.” But once war was declared, the space for Socialist opposition disappeared as the party’s antiwar position undermined its relationship with middle-­class reformers, the pro-­war

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AFL, and many of those who had propagandized for the movement.26 Socialist intellectuals like Charles Edward Russell, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Clarence Darrow, A. M. Simons, William Edward Walling, W. J. Ghent, and John Spargo all took up a position against “Prussian militarism” and in favor of Wilson’s “war to end all wars.” This split prompted an excoriating attack from the radical essayist Randolph Bourne. “It must never be forgotten that in every community it was the least liberal and least democratic elements among whom preparedness and later the war sentiment was found,” wrote Bourne. “The intellectuals, in other words, have identified themselves with the least democratic forces in American life.”27 Wilson’s ostensibly Progressive war aims, and the narrowing confines of wartime expression, effectively split the antiwar opposition. Many of those on the pro-­war center Left came to regret their positions, including Clarence Darrow and in particular Upton Sinclair, who reflected in 1927, “We sent a million men overseas, and they showed themselves heroes, and we stayed at home and showed ourselves the prize boobs of history, and taught our money-­masters that there is literally nothing we cannot be made to believe.”28 For those on the socialist Left the origins of the war were plainly economic. The leading thinker on this question was the exiled Bolshevik revolutionary V. I. Lenin. World War I and the global crisis it sparked, argued Lenin, were the result of inter-­imperialist rivalries and a new era of international capitalist competition. It was a war for “the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies, ‘spheres of influence’ of finance capital.” Imperialism, argued Lenin, the western European colonization of Africa and Asia, was a territorial expansion of the concept of monopoly, driven by the concentration of finance capital into national financial oligarchies. “Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression,” writes Lenin, “and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.” And yet, Lenin insisted, imperialism and global rule by banking monopolies left the “rentier state in a state of parasitic, decaying capitalism.” The imperial system was the “weak link in the chain” of the capitalist system, paving the way for an anti-­imperialism to mark “the eve of the proletarian social

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revolution.”29 Lenin’s analysis of “finance capital and its corresponding foreign policy” is not itself a conspiracy theory of the Great War; he is far too impersonal and mechanistic in his approach. But contrary to Lenin, within the language of American popular radicalism an analysis of the economic roots of the war quickly took on the tone of a totalizing conspiracy. Official statements by the Socialist Party of America extended “sympathy to the workers of Europe . . . when they have been plunged into bloody and senseless conflict by ambition-­crazed monarchs, designing politicians and scheming capitalists.”30 At the end of a carefully argued essay for the International Socialist Review titled “The Flag Follows the Investor,” the respected Progressive Frederic C. Howe concluded: “Wars are made by irresponsible monarchs, by privileged interests, by financiers, by commercial groups seeking private profit in foreign lands. Wars are made in the dark behind closed doors.”31 In their theories of the origins of war, American radicals also placed tremendous stress on the role played by munitions manufacturers, what postwar critics came to know and hate as the “merchants of death.” “It is not at all unlikely,” wrote Emma Goldman, “that the history of the present war will trace its origins to this international murder trust.” The antiwar radicals of the Age of Monopoly adopted the term “militarism” from the war’s proponents, those who loudly declared that it was the noble duty of Western democracies to defeat the threat of “German militarism.” But what Teddy Roosevelt and other American voices for preparedness projected onto the failing monarchies of old Europe, American radicals saw rising in their own country. Goldman imagined “this insatiable monster—­militarism” as a kind of vampiric contagion, a “war madness” sweeping the nation. As an immigrant radical, Goldman was among the first to face repression for her opposition to conscription, and she questioned if democracy’s hostility to the dread “German militarism” might not lead “America to follow suit, . . . to be turned over to the American Krupps, the American military cliques?” Though Goldman’s concerns were driven by the political economy of preparedness, she also recognized militarism as a cultural weapon to inflate and mobilize the fears of the masses which fuel the countersubversive tradition. “It is imperative that the American workers realize this,” wrote

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Goldman, “before they are driven by the jingoes into the madness that is forever haunted by the spectre of danger and invasions.”32 In 1916 John Reed, the greatest journalist of the Haymarket generation, published a masterpiece of investigative reporting in The Masses titled “At the Throat of the Republic,” in which he carefully plots the “maze of interlocking directorates” behind American preparedness. Insisting that the United States was perilously unprepared to defend itself (against who or what was never entirely clear), a number of preparedness societies emerged with the goal of building popular support for a military buildup and challenging Wilson’s policy of neutrality. The largest preparedness society was the National Security League, founded in 1914 and financed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Bernard Baruch, Henry Clay Frick, and Simon Guggenheim, and led for a time by Elihu Root.33 There was also the Navy League, whose founders included Charles Schwab and J. P. Morgan, the DuPont family “Powder Trust,” and other “armor plate patriots” who stood to profit from the declaration of war. Published in the same month as the San Francisco bombing, Reed’s investigation named names, detailing the participation of Morgan and Frick, who as owners and directors U.S. Steel and leaders of the Navy League aggressively lobbied Congress for $500 million in additional spending to build a colossal new military. Reed’s accounting, both political and financial, of the monopoly capitalists behind the preparedness drive makes the explicit leap from Lenin’s theory of the “highest stage of capitalism” to a vision of the conspiracy of capital: Back of all this crude agitation on the part of the munitions-­makers is a more grandiose reason for Preparedness—­a conspiracy of the great financial interests, so enormous that its prospective loot makes the war profits look like petty larceny. The real power behind the National Security League, the Navy League and other such organizations is Wall Street. Wall Street does not talk of “defense.” No. Wall Street is getting ready to launch the United States upon a gigantic adventure in World Imperialism, for the benefit of the big financial speculators. And in order to do this, Wall Street must have a great army and navy to protect its foreign investments.34

More than any other American radical, Reed threw himself into the “gigantic adventure” of this militaristic moment in Mexico, in France,

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and in the newly born Soviet Union. Reed’s eager anticipation of an American socialist revolution emerges in the essay’s final lines, in which he speaks on behalf of the exploited American worker who knows that his enemy is not Germany or Japan but “that 2% of the people of the United States who own 60% of the national wealth, that band of unscrupulous ‘patriots’ who . . . are now planning to make a soldier out of him to defend their loot.”35 While the radicals of the Haymarket generation mapped the conspiracy of capital pulling the string of the state, one American radical saw through this “economism” to recognize the new political and cultural forces unleashed by the wartime state. “War is the health of the State,” declared Randolph Bourne with his famous clarity. “It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”36 Bourne recognized, in ways that the rest of the Haymarket generation had yet to, that with the emergence of “the State” during wartime, a new face of repressive discipline emerged, one not simply waging the war of labor versus capital that had dominated since 1877, but a state that enforced a new demand for patriotism, loyalty, and conformity, a changing form of citizenship and racial nationalism that cut across class lines.37 “The State is a jealous God,” wrote Bourne, “and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one, and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-­feeling.” The drive for war—­whatever its secret origins—­called forth a power long concealed in American life, one that unleashed what Bourne called “a white terrorism” against all who would show “more resistance to this unification.”38 WARTIME STRIKES AND “100% AMERICANISM” Whatever its cause, European demand for war matériel like steel, copper, timber, and coal, as well as wheat and, most important of all, finance and credit, led to a dramatic expansion of the U.S. economy. With this came inflation, which workers experienced as a sharp rise in the cost of living, especially for food and energy. The increased demand for workers,

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coupled with the slowing of European immigration across the U-­boatfilled Atlantic, led to a significant rise in the power and militancy of organized labor. Between 1915 and 1920, union membership doubled to over 5 million, drawing large numbers of previously unorganized workers, including recent immigrants, as longshoremen, as maritime workers, and as laborers in textiles, steel, and metalworking, as well as nearly 400,000 women in the needle trades and the electrical industry.39 The result was an escalation in the number of strikes, as well as a deepening divide within the labor movement between the moderate AFL, which curried favor with the Wilson administration, and the revolutionary IWW in the West. As we have already witnessed in California, this rising tide of labor militancy crashed headfirst into what the historian John Higham described as “the most strenuous nationalism and the most pervasive nativism that the United States had ever known.”40 So where antiwar activists and labor agitators saw the war as a conspiracy of imperialist capitalism, the advocates behind preparedness linked patriotism with anti-­radicalism and opportunistically reframed their pacifist and union opposition as disloyal and seditious. The preparedness campaigns transformed into an inflexible demand for “100% Americanism.” The largest of these “100% American” groups was the Ku Klux Klan, reborn at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915 after the lynching of the Jewish factory supervisor Leo Frank in Atlanta and the release of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s cinematic epic depicts the Klan as a secret mobilization of the white racial vanguard, a heroic generation of young Confederate veterans turned by necessity into hooded night riders to restore the political order of the South. Their main task is to protect white women from the clutches of a riotous horde of former slaves, duped with dreams of equality offered by degenerate Radical Republicans. The Klan is projected in Griffith’s film—­based on the novel and stage play The Klansman by President Wilson’s former classmate at Johns Hopkins the Reverend Thomas Dixon—­as a spectacular secret, an open conspiracy of the best men of the South, who meet in the woods by torchlight to invoke their mystical blood rituals and lynch a “renegade negro” wearing a Union uniform. For Griffith, the patriotic vigilantism

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of the Klan achieved more than just the subjugation of black freedom dreams; it successfully reunited a nation fifty years after the Civil War, forging a new patriotism and national identity through racial terrorism and “regeneration through violence.” Never before had American culture celebrated uniformed vigilantism on such a national scale, and this spirit grew throughout the war and Red Scare.41 While Griffith’s film depicts the Reconstruction era Klan, the new Klan became a nationwide mass movement that successfully ran candidates for public office, published newspapers and books, marched on Washington, DC, and hosted public rallies to burn crosses and speak against the horrors of race mixing. This new, modern Klan took on a more comprehensive and ecumenical form of racist nativism, opposing Catholics, Jews, immigrants, alcohol (the KKK formed the vanguard of Prohibition in many states), feminism, and labor radicalism.42 While the white sheets and mystical trappings of the Klan retain their symbolic significance, in wartime America the “Invisible Empire of the KKK” was but one among many reactionary groups radicalized by the push for preparedness. Nativists and nationalist organizations abounded, many of which adopted almost comically intimidating names like the “Sedition Slammers,” the “Boy Spies of America,” and the “Terrible Threateners,” who arose alongside the more official-­sounding “Home Defense League,” the “Knights of Liberty,” the “American Anti-­Anarchy Association,” and Teddy Roosevelt’s own anti-­German organization, which unsubtly called itself “The Vigilantes.”43 “May God have mercy on them,” declared Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory of antiwar dissenters, “for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”44 Gregory, as the nation’s top law enforcement agent, perceived vigilante violence against radicals in Bisbee and Butte as signs of the vitality of Americans’ martial spirit, yet he took it to be his job not to prevent or prosecute mob violence as much as it was to preempt it through legal, though no less “avenging,” government action. Patriotic vigilantes, night riders, and lynch mobs needed to be replaced with government agents and repressive laws, he believed, that would carry out the same essential functions, but with sufficient state legitimacy. This proved necessary because, on the one

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hand, the national scope of radical resistance was simply too large for local or shop-­by-­shop countersubversive action to handle. On the other hand, political liabilities stemming from the use of private armies and strikebreakers, such as the widespread public outcry at the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, exposed the existing disciplinary regime’s dangerous lack of political legitimacy. But with the emergence of Bourne’s “State” during wartime, there began a gradual process toward a system of organizing violence that Max Weber might have recognized as a fully sovereign state system.45 During the scramble to ready the nation for war, the growing national security state deputized a series of transitional and temporary organizations, the largest of which was the American Protective League. In the spring of 1917, a former Chicago ad man named Albert M. Briggs proposed to the Justice Department that he be empowered to form a citizens’ auxiliary to aid in the growing national mission of surveillance and repression of enemy aliens and dissenters. The result was the American Protective League, the self-­described “mysterious power behind our government,” a semi-­legitimate army of an estimated 250,000 volunteer detectives and self-­avowed “superpatriots.” The APL described itself as “a vast, silent, volunteer army organized with the approval and operated under the direction of the United States Department of Justice.”46 For an entry fee of less than a dollar, any loyal American citizen could become an APL “agent,” wear an official badge, and indulge in all of his countersubversive fantasies of maintaining national purpose and purity through violence. The APL participated in raids on the IWW, spied on members of the Socialist Party, and served as the main shock troops in numerous “slacker raids” conducted between April and September 1918, which swept up tens of thousands of young men who were forced to display Selective Service cards at the point of a bayonet or face arrest. By the time the war was over and the APL officially dissolved, the organization claimed to have brought 3 million disloyal citizens and aliens to justice in every major city in the country. By extending pseudo-­legitimacy to an army of patriotic vigilantes, the Justice Department could not only accomplish its basic tasks of ferreting out antiwar radicalism, but also do so at minimal cost and without jeopardizing the state’s legitimacy.

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The leadership of the APL was well aware of their semi-­legal and short-­term status as the vanguard of the Preparedness Movement, and they embraced an emergency, transitional identity akin to that of the Minute Men. “Not prepared—­whole nation in shirtsleeves at the plow—­we became prepared,” writes Emerson Hugh in the APL’s official history. “We fought with one hand, while, with the other, we buttoned on our new tunic for which we had not yet been measured, and in Army, Navy, Aviation, Intelligence, Supply, Motor Transport, and Department of Justice, we learned as we fought—­and won.” A domestic army fighting the radical enemy, the APL carried out a range of what would be considered basic state policing functions. According to its reports, the APL made over a thousand arrests in Seattle in the six months before the armistice, engaging in more than ten thousand “investigations,” including investigations of 399 “alien enemies,” fourteen “bomb and dynamite plots,” 1,198 “I.W.W. agitators,” and 449 cases of “seditious utterances.” These investigations necessitated the unorthodox methods used by the APL, including unwarranted arrests, mail tampering, and breaking and entering. “The League broke some little laws and precedents? Perhaps,” writes Hugh. “But,” he boasts, “it upheld the great law under the great need of an unprecedented hour.” The APL claimed for itself the right to act within the wartime “state of exception” and exempt itself from constitutional restrictions on criminal investigation and procedure, demonstrating just how loose—­and potentially dangerous—­the wartime upsurge in patriotism had made the concept of constitutional rights and sovereignty.47 Before the war, most Progressives and constitutional scholars opposed the creation of what Wilson called a “unified counterespionage agency.” With the outbreak of war, the Secret Service of the Treasury Department, founded in 1865 and the oldest federal intelligence office, and the Bureau of Investigation of the Justice Department, founded in 1908, were understaffed and perceived as inadequate to the task of reining in antiwar subversion. In the summer of 1917, the Justice Department reorganized the existing intelligence agencies in light of the new challenges. While the Secret Service found its jurisdiction and responsibilities reduced, the Bureau of Investigation expanded from three hundred to fifteen

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hundred agents under Chief A. Bruce Bielaski. Charged with surveilling all organizations of enemy aliens, war dissenters, pacifists, and domestic radicals, as well as gathering evidence for all federal prosecutions, the Bureau of Investigation evolved in the years after the war into the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI), the most durable countersubversive bureaucracy in American history. Additionally, with the declaration of war, the Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence (MID and ONI) began spying on Americans, growing from a total of two officers in April 1917 to 272 by November 1918. Originally charged with carrying out counterespionage and tracking down German agents, the MID undertook domestic spying and intelligence-­gathering operations among civilians, “foreign radicals,” Wobblies, and those suspected of “Negro subversion.” The State Department also began tracking immigrant radicals—­especially those from Russia and the West Indies—­as well as the foreign travel of domestic radicals, confiscating and withholding passports and visas of those deemed a threat, and coordinating with the espionage agencies of foreign governments.48 Two pieces of wartime legislation designed to criminalize antiwar dissent established the legal basis for this major bureaucratic expansion of the state’s repressive powers. The Espionage Act, passed in June 1917, expanded Civil War era seditious conspiracy statutes, making it a crime to, among a long list of now criminal practices, conspire to overthrow the federal government. While most of the new law concerned itself with actual foreign espionage, the protection of military secrets, and other issues related to wartime national security, the key aspects of the legislation from the point of view of dissent and free speech read: (1) Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies, (2) and whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, (3) or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment services of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years or both.49

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Eleven months later, at the request of Attorney General Gregory, Congress amended the Espionage Act with the even more restrictive Sedition Act, adding nine more offenses, including saying or doing anything to obstruct the sale of war bonds, and “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language, or language intended to cause contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute as regards the form of government of the United States,” the Constitution, the flag, or the uniform of the military. The new law prohibited any language intended to incite resistance to the United States or promote the cause of its enemies; urging any curtailment of production in war goods with the intent of hindering the war itself; and “advocating, teaching, defending, or suggesting the doing of any of these acts”; as well as words or acts supporting the cause of the enemy.50 The attorney general justified these new powers on the grounds that where such “seditious and treasonous” speech was allowed—­as in Montana or Arizona—­loyal citizens would be forced to take matters into their own hands. In the name of law and order, the Congress and the president followed the lead of vigilantes and lynch mobs from the industrial West. “Doubtless some governmental action was required to protect pacifists and extreme radicals from mob violence,” commented Harvard Law School professor Zechariah Chafee, “but incarceration for a period of twenty years seems a very queer kind of protection.”51 With the passage of the Espionage Act, the federal government began legally prosecuting large numbers of Americans, ranging from ordinary German Americans and other citizens who said the wrong thing in front of the wrong people, to much of the American Left, which faced systematic prosecution. As we saw in the last chapter, federal repression of the Left began with the raids on the IWW. In total, the state imprisoned some nine hundred people for making “disloyal” statements and committing acts in violation of the Espionage Act. But this proved a mere prelude to the postwar Red Scare. Wartime legal repression began with a stepped-­up campaign of censorship of the radical press. Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson was a Texas Democrat known to be one of the most belligerent members of Wilson’s cabinet. Empowered by the Espionage Act, he took up a

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national crusade to revoke the second-­class bulk mailing privileges from any publication that was bold enough, in Burleson’s words, “to impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination.” Burleson further claimed he would destroy any publication which suggested “that the government is controlled by Wall Street or munitions manufacturers, or any other special interests.”52 Solidarity, Appeal to Reason, the International Socialist Review, the National Rip-­Saw, The Masses, the American Socialist, and many more were banned from the mail, forcing them to either adopt a pro-­war position or else suspend publication. With antiwar street meetings banned in most cities, the radical press was all there was of a visible mass movement of popular radicalism, and now this bureaucratic act of censorship largely silenced the Haymarket generation. The attack on the radical press did not stop with the post office. Prosecutors in New York sought more punitive action against the staff of The Masses, a small but influential arts and politics magazine that became the standard-­bearer of free speech rights and Greenwich Village bohemian modernism. The indictment charged editor Max Eastman, cartoonist Art Young, and two journalists, Floyd Dell and John Reed, with conspiracy to interfere with the war effort by publishing poems, cartoons, and stories critical of the war.53 “The charge of conspiracy to overthrow this Government and to obstruct its military enterprise and to break down the foundations of democratic civilization is not proven,” insisted Eastman in his address to the jury at their second trial. “The only thing that is proven against us is that we agree in believing in the philosophy of socialism. We are socialists.”54 Though they faced the possibility of twenty years in prison for cartoons and poetry, the indicted artists and editors seem never to have taken the case seriously. Art Young famously fell asleep during the proceedings and then published a self-­portrait of himself snoozing through the “trial for his life” (fig. 24). “According to the prosecuting attorneys for the government in The Masses trials, we ‘conspired’ at the meetings to overthrow the government of the United States,” wrote Young, recalling the trials. “Yes, Gentlemen of the Jury, we are a band of conspirators ‘and all the more dangerous,’ as one eloquent attorney put it, ‘because they are intelligent young men.’ After our

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indictment I would get post cards from The Masses office announcing a meeting like this: ‘Come over to B’s studio Thursday night—­‘conspiracy.’” While Young and Reed joked, the government was entirely serious; when the first Masses trial ended in a hung jury (with one utterly recalcitrant vote for acquittal), prosecutors expanded the case for a second trial, which similarly ended in a hung jury. The Masses trials stand as a landmark in the legal prosecution of free speech during wartime, and yet, according to Art Young, one of the holdout jurors in the second trial told him after the verdict: “‘It was a good thing for you boys that you were all American born; otherwise it might have gone pretty hard with you.’ In other words, this well-­meaning gentleman admitted that justice as he saw it was subject to change if you happen to be born in a foreign country.”55 Young’s courtroom nap and the “Americaness” of the artists of The Masses may have saved them from prison, but hundreds of foreign-­ born immigrants and radicals were not so lucky. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman—­under surveillance not just for their defense of Mooney but for a lifetime of activism—­were among the first to be prosecuted for violating the new wartime laws. In June 1917, days after the Selective Service Act became law, instituting the first military draft since the Civil War, federal marshals raided the offices of Mother Earth and The Blast and arrested the two editors and leaders of the “No-­Conscription Movement.” The charge was “conspiring to induce persons not to register” for the draft. Throughout the trial, the state accused the two of advocating violence against the government and the draft board. “It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom,” argued Goldman, quoting to the jury from her essay “The Psychology of Political Violence.” And though she admitted freely that they had opposed the draft, just as they opposed the capitalist war, they maintained that no proof of a criminal conspiracy nor any overt act advancing this conspiracy could possibly be found. “We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy,” concluded Goldman, “she must first make democracy safe in America.”56 It took the jury only thirty-­nine minutes to convict the anarchists, earning them a sentence of two years in prison, $10,000 in fines, and a firm promise that they would both be deported upon release.

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Figure 24. Art Young, The Liberator, June 1918, reprinted in Art Young, On My Way: Being the Book of Art Young in Text and Picture (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928).

As the Wobbly trial carried on in Chicago, Eugene V. Debs deliberately tested the Espionage Act with a speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918. There Debs told an enthusiastic audience of antiwar socialists: “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always

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fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—­ especially their lives.” A stenographer for the government furiously took down every word of Debs’s two-­hour speech, and a federal prosecutor in Cleveland ordered Debs’s arrest two days later. After a brief trial in which Debs put up no formal defense, the jury found him guilty, and in a statement to the court before facing sentencing, Debs poured his life’s experience into his opening words: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”57 Unmoved by Debs’s spiritual community of socialist humanity, the judge sentenced him to ten years in the Atlanta federal prison. Upton Sinclar, now the lead editorialist at the renewed Appeal to Reason (a job once held by Debs), declared Debs’s imprisonment proof, as a headline put it, of a “Billion Dollar Plot to Crush Socialism.” The only way to save him, suggested Sinclair, was to elect Debs president of the United States.58 Debs, the hero of the Pullman strike, was once again the most prominent political prisoner in the United States, running one of American history’s most startling presidential campaigns in 1920 polling more than 900,000 votes for a candidate who was the convicted prisoner of the government he sought to lead. President Harding eventually pardoned Debs in 1921, yielding to a national crusade to free many of America’s political prisoners.59 Victor Berger, a moderate leader in the Socialist Party who nonetheless took a fierce antiwar stand, faced a similar indictment under the Espionage Act along with several other Milwaukee socialists, charged with conspiracy to aid the German war effort. While awaiting trial, Berger won reelection to his congressional seat on the Socialist ticket, only to be convicted that December in Judge Landis’s Chicago federal courtroom and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Berger appealed his conviction, posted bail, and traveled to Washington to take his seat in the Capitol, where his fellow congressmen refused to swear him in, declaring his seat officially vacant. This led to a special election in

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December 1919, which Berger won again, this time beating a fusion candidate, only to be denied his seat in Washington a second time. After that, no special election was held, and Milwaukee went unrepresented in Congress for two years. In January 1921 the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Berger’s conviction on the grounds of Judge Landis’s prejudicial conduct thorough the trial, and in 1922 Berger once more reclaimed his seat, which he held until 1928.60 A similar expulsion of elected socialists occurred in 1920, when the New York State Assembly voted to expel five duly elected and sworn-­in state representatives who were members of the Socialist Party, accusing them of being allies of the Soviet government and enemies of America, effectively disenfranchising sixty thousand New York voters. Reactionary orthodoxy now trumped democracy. In their blunt fashion, the IWW called this new constellation of repressive apparatuses the “invisible government.” After facing both legal repression in Chicago and mob violence in copper country, Wobbly leaders and members argued that this meant that the gloves had come off in the fight against the conspiracy of capital: the true nature of the capitalist state and the psychological plague of “patriotism” was finally on display for all to see. Harrison George was one of those indicted before the Chicago trial of 1918, and while awaiting trial in the Cook County Jail, he authored a pamphlet titled Is Freedom Dead? not just to challenge the conspiracy charges filed against him and his fellow “class war prisoners,” but to reinterpret the entire history of the IWW as a battle between organized labor and organized capital: When the true history of this decade shall be written in other and less troubled times . . . truth will show that on some recent date, in a secluded office on Wall Street or luxurious parlor of some wealthy club on lower Manhattan, some score of America’s kings of industry, captains of commerce and Kaisers of finance met in secret conclave and plotted the enslavement of millions of workers. Today details are obscured. The paper on which these lines are penciled is criss-­crossed by the shadow of prison bars; my ears are be-­set by the clang of steel doors, the jangle of fetters and the curses of jail guards. Truth, before it can speak, is strangled by power.61

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Legally prosecuted with charges of “seditious conspiracy” and “criminal conspiracy,” George and the IWW consistently flung a “counter charge of Conspiracy by Capitalism . . . back into the face of the Employing Class.” The repressive power of the state had clearly expanded during the war to include a new regime of spies, agents, and provocateurs; yet the nature of the state within capitalism had not changed in the IWW’s understanding. The state remained what Elizabeth Gurley Flynn described as “the slugging agency” of capitalism, drawing from a literal reading of Marx, who called governments “the executive committee to carry out the wishes of the ruling class.”62 The state remained an instrument of capital, an “invisible government” utilizing “federal secret agents, backed by wealth.” The work of Wobbly intellectuals, then, in this moment of crisis, was to map out, in the titles of two wartime pamphlets, Who Is Guilty of Conspiracy? and Who Are the Conspirators? while Big Bill Haywood exhorting audiences in his public appearances to “break the conspiracy.”63 Demonized in the press and throughout the government, attacked by violent mobs backed by law enforcement, infiltrated by government spies and private detectives, and now prosecuted by the courts in mass conspiracy trials, as the Wobblies reached the end of their rope, they turned to the most totalizing visions of the conspiracy of capital. RED SCARE/WHITE TERROR The war in Europe ended and an armistice was signed just over a month after the IWW leadership began serving their sentences in Leavenworth federal prison. Americans greeted the news with great, if short-­lived, jubilation. War’s end brought a shock to the economy, turning a period of government regulation and surging production into a crisis of economic instability. Employers, seeking to roll back wartime union membership and wage gains, launched a national “open shop” campaign, looking to remake labor relations in the image of post-­Mooney California. At the same time, organized labor and the immigrant industrial workforce grew increasingly militant, as the example of the Bolshevik revolution and the culture of popular radicalism inspired an unprecedented wave of strikes. In 1919 over 4 million Americans, nearly one in five workers,

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went out on strike, including a general strike in Seattle and two nationwide injunction-­defying strikes in the coal and steel industries. Workers organized some 3,600 strikes in 1919 alone, including a police strike in Boston, a textile strike in New England and New Jersey, and an Actors’ Equity strike in New York. Organized labor seemed to pose a more fundamental challenge to the political and economic system in 1919 than at any other time since 1886.64 The rogues’ gallery of countersubversive fears included the dreaded Kraut, Kaiser, and Hun of anti-­German propaganda, along with sinister Reds, Bolsheviki, and communists. In January 1919, two months after the Kaiser’s abdication in the wake of Germany’s surrender, the Spartacist uprising in Berlin set off a wave of communist revolutions across eastern Europe. In Russia, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 surprised the world, and the survival of the Soviet government inspired labor and working-­class movements throughout the world, giving renewed energy and validation to the tradition of underground revolutionary organization. “The October revolution,” argues Eric Hobsbawm, “produced by far the most formidable organized revolutionary movement in modern history.”65 To Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge, and the other Bolshevik leaders who seized power in St. Petersburg in November 1917, underground organization, “the art of insurrection,” and the “science of conspiracy” were essential tools of radical organizing. “In every class society there are enough contradictions so that a conspiracy can take root in its cracks,” explained Trotsky. “An element of conspiracy almost always enters to some degree into any insurrection. . . . But a mass insurrection can be foreseen and prepared. It can be organized in advance. In this case the conspiracy is subordinate to the insurrection, serves it, smoothes its path, hastens its victory.”66 Lenin agreed, and in What Is to Be Done? he argues that under political circumstances in which freedom of speech and democratic elections are foreclosed, the only option available to the effective revolutionary force is to constitute itself as a conspiracy. Under autocratic conditions, practicing “the broad democratic principle” within the revolutionary movement is irresponsible, Lenin observes, and “will simply facilitate the work of the police in carrying out large-­scale raids.”67 This split between the revolutionary conspiracy and public organizations such as labor unions or

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the Socialist Party constituted one of the major political fissures on the left in the breakup of the Second International. In creating the explicitly communist Third International, Lenin issued clear “terms for admission” that stated, “In countries where a state of siege or emergency legislation makes it possible for Communists to conduct their activities legally, it is absolutely essential that legal and illegal work should be combined.”68 Lenin’s description certainly applied to conditions inside the United States in 1919. The Bolshevik revolution split the already weakened Socialist Party into several groups: one that ran Eugene Debs for president, and two smaller communist factions based on Lenin and Trotsky’s example. These two groups, the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party, led by John Reed, eventually unified into the Communist Party of the United States before going underground with the goal of organizing an American revolutionary movement. The irony is that the early Communist Party’s uncompromising revolutionary stance ensured that it would have almost no involvement in the greatest wave of strikes in a generation.69 Unlike the feuding communists, the anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani threw themselves directly into battle, organizing a nationwide bombing plot that propelled the dialectics of conspiracy in the Red Scare to the breaking point.70 Born into a middle-­class family in northern Italy in 1861, Galleani studied law at the University of Turin before turning his energies to waging a war of revolutionary violence against the state and ruling class. He escaped from an Italian penal colony and came to America in 1901, where he settled in the anarchist enclave of Paterson, New Jersey, taking over as editor of La Questione Sociale, the anarchist paper founded by the assassin Gaetano Bresci. In 1902 Galleani helped organize a silk workers’ strike, during which he was shot in the face by police and arrested for inciting a riot. Galleani escaped to Canada before trial, and then infiltrated back into New England, where he began publishing Cronaca Sovversiva, a paper later considered by the Department of Justice to be “the most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.”71 Galleani’s other writings include a bomb-­ making manual (which was every bit as unreliable as Johann Most’s earlier Science of Revolutionary Warfare) and a book titled Faccia a faccia

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col nemico (Face to Face with the Enemy) detailing the legal cases of dozens of anarchist terrorists and martyrs.72 Galleani believed in using “propaganda of the deed” to create a political climate of fear in the ruling class, and inspiring his followers to “continue the good war” and destroy “the vampires of capitalism.” With the start of the war, Galleani advised his followers to go underground, and many of them, including Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fled the United States for a brief exile in Mexico. Galleani himself stayed in the United States, and on June 15, 1917, the same day Goldman and Berkman were arrested in New York, Justice Department officials raided the offices of Cronaca Sovversiva and arrested Galleani for violating the Espionage Act. Another raid of Cronaca’s office in February 1918 recovered the paper’s subscription lists, which the Justice Department used to organize a series of raids on Italian American anarchist groups around the country. In the face of this growing repression, the American Galleanisti made a secret decision to fight back with dynamite, launching a terrorist campaign involving some fifty to sixty militants in what the historian Nunzio Pernicone called “a true conspiracy,” but a conspiracy of radicals “whose proficiency as terrorists was less than outstanding.”73 Not two months after Galleani’s arrest, Milwaukee policemen shot and killed two Galleanisti as they attempted to place a pipe bomb in a church; the bomb later exploded in the hands of a clumsy investigating officer, killing ten detectives and a female bystander. Despite repeated disasters in which anarchist fighters died handling their own “infernal devices,” including four who blew themselves up attempting to bomb the American Woolen Corporation, their campaign accelerated after immigration officials signed the order to deport Galleani on January 27, 1919. Between the issuance of this order and his deportation in June, anarchist fighters plotted two waves of attentats, beginning with a leaflet signed by “The American Anarchists”: GO-­HEAD! The senile fossils ruling the United States see red! . . .  Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire.

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You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. And deport us! We will dynamite you! Either deport us or free all!

The first fruits of this threat appeared in the form of a package wrapped in brown paper addressed to Mayor Ole Hanson of Seattle. Hanson had risen to fame by “Red baiting” the Seattle general strike, a citywide labor protest that began as a waterfront strike and spread to the rest of Seattle for five peaceful days, during which a central labor council effectively organized the city. To Hanson, this was the work of a communist conspiracy, the start of a Red mass insurrection, and he called in federal troops to end the strike. This self-­declared savior of the nation was on a speaking tour seeking to promote his political career when the package arrived at his Seattle office and was opened by one of his staff, revealing a carefully constructed device composed of a vial of acid, fulminate of mercury caps, a stick of dynamite, and a pile of metal slugs. The office worker opened the package upside down, which prevented it from detonating in his hands. The next day, however, a woman named Ethel Williams, an African American servant in the home of Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick, unwrapped a similar package, which exploded and blew off both her hands and seriously burned the senator’s wife. Senator Hardwick was the former chairman of the Immigration Committee and sponsor of the deportation bill. There was a message in these targets, an ideological design and an organized conspiracy behind them, and this realization caused a national panic. In the days that followed, police and government agents found sixteen bombs in the General Post Office in New York, sitting undelivered for lack of sufficient postage. Government officials discovered a total of thirty bombs of the same design, each scheduled to arrive at its target’s home on May Day 1919. None of these bombs got near their intended victims, but the list itself caused a sensation. The targets included Postmaster General Burleson, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Judge Landis, San Francisco district attorney Fickert, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and William M. Wood, the famed capitalist dynamiter of the wool trust.74 Senators and congressmen, cabinet

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secretaries, governors, and police commissioners had all been named by the unknown bombers. As news of the conspiracy accumulated in the press, patriotic mobs attacked May Day parades across the country. In Cleveland a policeman shot and killed a man carrying a red flag, while in New York City a mob sacked the offices of the Socialist Party newspaper The Call, and in Boston police and rioters attacked a labor parade. Having failed to hit their targets, the anarchists stepped up their campaign again. Late on the night of June 2, 1919, a series of far more powerful bombs exploded in seven cities. Each bomb had been delivered by hand to its intended victim’s doorstep—­judges, police, lawyers, corporate managers, and mayors, all of whom had targeted radicals—­and each bombing was accompanied by copies of a new leaflet, titled “Plain Words,” signed by “The Anarchist Fighters.” The most spectacular of these bombs targeted Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, detonating on the front porch of his Washington, DC, home. Palmer and his wife were unharmed, but police who responded to the scene made a grisly discovery: the bomb had apparently blown to bits the man who had delivered it. The Palmers’ porch and much of their neighbors’ yard were splattered with torn and burnt flesh, scraps of clothing, copies of “Plain Words,” and other clues left behind by a dead anarchist. Using the bomber’s largely intact scalp, found on the rooftop of a building on the next block, a race specialist with the Bureau of Investigation somehow determined that the bloody remains were of Italian origin. While the authorities could not immediately finger the dead bomber, they eventually identified him as Carlo Valdinoci, one of Galleani’s boldest followers, renowned among his fellow conspirators for his ability to escape capture and carry out the most dangerous missions—­except for this last one. In the massive manhunt that followed the June 2 bombings, the Galleanisti movement broke up, with members facing arrest, some fleeing back to Italy, others going into hiding, and one ratting his brothers out. In their raids on Italian radical groups, the police arrested Andrea Salsedo, a printer and longtime follower of Galleani who had produced “Plain Words.” Held incommunicado and subjected to the “third degree” for weeks on the fourteenth floor of the Justice Department’s offices in New York City, Salsedo fell out a window to his death on May 3, 1920, after confessing everything he knew about the bombing conspiracy. In the

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minds of his anarchist comrades, Salsedo had been murdered. “I believe he was murdered by the Federal police in New York,” wrote his friend Vanzetti. “If he committed suicide it was because they drove him to it.”75 Those left behind now armed themselves and attempted to escape, which is precisely what Sacco and Vanzetti were doing when police arrested them on May 5, 1920. Fear led both men to lie to the police about their political beliefs and their reasons for going about armed. But instead of being charged with conspiracy and punished for their anarchism, as the Haymarket martyrs had been, the pair were arrested for murder by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the case of a payroll robbery in South Braintree. “If I was arrested because of the Idea I am glad to suffer,” declared Sacco with terrific indignation. “If I must I will die for it. But they have arrested me for a gunman job.”76 The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, like that of Tom Mooney, “whose case is like ours as two drops of water are alike,” wrote Vanzetti from prison, both defined the Red Scare’s countersubversive project. But so too did they become two of the most celebrated labor defense cases in U.S. history, linking the Haymarket generation to the Popular Front generation. Before their electrocution on August 23, 1927, before seven years of protests, literature, legal arguments, and appeals, before they became famous as “a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler,” Sacco and Vanzetti began their political careers as members of an international anarchist conspiracy, waging war on what Galleani called “the beast of property.”77 If the wartime raids on the IWW demonstrated a new degree of state repressive organization, the May Day bombing campaign revealed that radical terrorists were also capable of organizing nationwide resistance. Yet as fear of the Red conspiracy grew among the American people, transformed by countersubversive political cartoonists into a swarthy, bomb-­toting monster threatening the symbols of American patriotism, the real political ability of this small group of anarchists to resist the gathering repression, let alone challenge capitalism and the state, became smaller and smaller. As it had in 1886, once again anarchism came to be identified with the bomb-­throwing foreigner, and stoked by real stories of terrorism and haunted by fantasies of imminent revolt, the Red Scare exploded into a preemptive counterrevolution.

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“Like a prairie-­fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order a year ago,” wrote Attorney General Palmer in 1920. “It was eating its way into the homes of the American working man, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.”78 With these words, Palmer articulated the most totalizing and influential American conspiracy theory of the twentieth century, a true countersubversive metanarrative of the social-­sexual threat of communism. According to Palmer, only a new repressive state apparatus stood between innocent Americans and some “60,000 of these organized agitators of the Trotzky doctrine in the United States.” With the coming of communism, the American political intelligence system—­born of the wartime collaboration between law and terror—­became a permanent feature of the new national security state, a mode of governance organized via surveillance, infiltration, and repression of American popular radicalism. “If World War I created a climate favorable to the federalization of intelligence,” writes the civil liberties lawyer and historian Frank Donner, “the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution gave it a permanent raison d’être, constituency, and mission. . . . The great American nightmare of a foreign-­hatched conspiracy has become a reality.”79 On August 1, 1919, Palmer appointed the twenty-­four-­year-­old attorney and former file clerk John Edgar Hoover to head the General Investigation Division (GID), a unit charged with collecting information on “revolutionary and ultra-­radical groups.” Above all, Hoover admired Allan Pinkerton for building a nationwide criminal registry to support a network of agents and informants capable of infiltrating every labor and radical organization in the country. Furthermore, Hoover admired Pinkerton as the public face of a professional detective industry, and for promoting the Pinkertons with dime novels and innovative publicity campaigns that not only ensured the survival of his company but also popularized the most reactionary forms of countersubversive ideology. Upon taking the reins of America’s first anti-­radical federal political intelligence organization, Hoover began by collecting extensive files on

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over 150,000 individuals and over 650 publications, targeting for surveillance an ever-­expanding list of political targets: socialists, Bolsheviks, anarchists, Wobblies, and militant trade unionists, Japanese and Mexican agitators, German and Russian immigrants, and the full range of “New Negro” movements, including the NAACP and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).80 In its first mission, the GID set up a massive dragnet on the night of January 2, 1920, arresting over ten thousand suspected “communists” in the first of what came to be known as the “Palmer Raids.”81 Many of the foreign-­born and non-­citizens detained in these raids faced procedural deportation hearings rather than formal criminal charges. With the passage of the Alien Act just before the armistice, it was now legal to deport anyone, regardless of how long they had lived in the country, for being a member of a radical organization or espousing radical views. Having determined that “the ‘Reds’ were criminal aliens,” the attorney general decided “that there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws.”82 Mass deportation of aliens and dissenters began with the expulsion of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other suspected Reds from New York harbor on the “Soviet Ark” bound for Finland in December 1919. With each round of the Palmer Raids, the government deported thousands of immigrant radicals. In the words of one senator from Minnesota, “The Constitution was never intended for the protection of people of that kind.”83 Palmer built his reputation (and a possible presidential run) by making outrageous claims about the size and imminence of the Bolshevik conspiracy lurking in the heart of America’s cities. To read the national newspapers, Palmer and his roundups had single-­handedly saved the nation from an enemy that had “infected our social ideas with the disease of their own minds and their unclean morals.” But, Palmer declared, “we can get rid of them!”84 In addition to the vigilante and federal attacks against the Left, some twenty-­three states enacted “criminal syndicalism” statutes designed to destroy the IWW in wartime or peace. It is no accident that the strongest criminal syndicalism laws came from California, Washington,

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Idaho, Arizona, and Montana, states politically dominated by industrial monopolies faced with a significant challenge by the IWW.85 In California, where the law made it a crime to advocate for the use of “force” or “terrorism as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership or control,” the Criminal Syndicalism Law led to more than five hundred arrests and 254 convictions between 1919 and 1921. Upton Sinclair helped lead a boycott of California canned goods and established the California branch of the growing Civil Liberties Union in a campaign against the criminal syndicalism laws, declaring his home state to be “the land of orange groves and jails.”86 While these laws pushed conspiracy statutes to their constitutional breaking point by criminalizing membership in any organization that espoused disloyal ideas, some states passed even more symbolic legislation designed to curtail free speech in the form of “Red Flag” laws, which made displaying the revolutionary banner a felony. LYNCHING AND THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL If a class uprising seemed at hand in 1919, so too were the racial formations of Jim Crow America meeting a new resistance. In just two years between 1916–­1918, more than 450,000 African Americans left the South and created new neighborhoods, cultures, and conflicts in the urban North. In the capital of black America, Harlem, a radical black identity, the New Negro, first emerged in the pages of The Messenger, a black socialist magazine edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen.87 In this insurgent moment, the mostly white and immigrant membership of the socialist Left, the IWW, and other radical groups attempted to forge new connections with black radicals. The revolutionary challenges to corporate capitalism and white supremacy posed by this rising militancy produced an overwhelming countersubversive response. In 1919 the United States experienced eighty-­four lynchings in sixteen different states, seventy-­eight of whose victims were African Americans, including ten war veterans, and eleven people burned alive before large crowds.88 No fewer than twenty-­six riots and racial massacres marred the country that summer. In this context, the militant “New

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Crowd Negro”—­the black radical persona that came to symbolize the great migration of African Americans to the urban North—­emerged as a comprehensive challenge to both the racial state and the mob. One Wobbly writer summed up the “social conditions at present in the United States” during the fall of 1919 as “Riots and Race Wars, Lynchings and Massacres, Military Law, Terrorism and Giant Strikes.”89 Ever since slave owners began blaming slave revolts on abolitionist conspiracies, the white supremacist political imagination has long held black people incapable of organized resistance, insisting that radical organizing among African Americans had to come from “outside agitators.” To the men actively constructing the American intelligence apparatus—­ reactionaries like Hoover and Progressives like Palmer and Wilson—­any stirring of black activism was a result of the Red Menace at work in the black community. Evidence of black armed resistance to racial massacres in East St. Louis, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Chicago spurred the New York Times to trumpet “Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt,” while a New York Tribune headline read “Reds Accused of Stirring Up Negro Rioters; IWW and Other Agitators Charged with Spreading Propaganda Aimed to Breed Race Hatred; Financed by Russia.”90 To the emerging national security state, socialists and Bolsheviks were the new abolitionists. “Not that Negroes who are determined to defend their lives and homes . . . will have any objections to being called Bolshevists for so doing,” wrote Cyril Briggs in The Crusader, “but it is . . . further proof of the hypocrisy and casuistry of the caucasian that he should feel called upon to frame up causes and excuses to explain two outbreaks [the Washington, DC, and Chicago race riots] that were acknowledgedly started by white mobs and in which colored men and women merely fought in defense of their lives and homes.” The new black radicalism was well positioned to expose the tropes of conspiracy in the imagination of what Briggs called “crackerized whites,” for as the Red Scare grew more violent and its legitimacy eroded, the countersubversive logic grew closer to the surface.91 By 1919, Attorney General Palmer had become convinced that “the negro is ‘seeing red.’”92 Claiming that The Messenger was the “most dangerous of all Negro publications,” he sought to suppress it for its

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explicit advocacy of armed resistance to white rioters and lynch mobs, its demands for “social equality,” its open endorsement of the IWW and Debs’s presidential campaign of 1920, and its extended denunciations of “100% American” institutions like the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan. To this end, J. Edgar Hoover organized an extensive counterintelligence campaign against African American political organizations and publications including the moderate NAACP and the Chicago Defender, black nationalist groups like Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, and black socialists like Hubert Harrison and the editors of The Messenger and The Crusader. These federal actions against black political self-­organization lasted well into the 1920s and led to the hiring of the first black federal agents, who were sent by Hoover to infiltrate black radical organizations. After an extensive campaign of surveillance and disruption, federal agents arrested Marcus Garvey on charges of mail fraud in 1923, prompting Garvey to declare, “I am satisfied to be a victim of an international ‘frame-­up,’ a conspiracy.”93 For Hoover, it was his first great success at combating racial radicalism. Yet the dialectics of conspiracy cuts both ways, and African American radicals commonly depicted their political opposition—­the Klan, white lynch mobs and rioters, government spies, white supremacist bosses and politicians—­as participants in terrorist conspiracies and political plots. The critical moment of black radical conspiracy theories followed the East St. Louis race riots in the summer of 1917, when a young Marcus Garvey made his mark on African American politics with a widely reported and reprinted speech on the “conspiracy of the East St. Louis riots.” Garvey railed against the brutality of the white mobs and the betrayal by the police and state militias, which openly sided with the rioters in a massacre that claimed the lives of thirty-­nine blacks and nine whites. For Garvey this was no spontaneous action but nothing less than a conspiracy to halt the Great Migration. Garvey made his explanation to the attentive crowd: “I am convinced that [Mayor Fred Mollman of East St. Louis] fostered a well-­arranged conspiracy to prevent black men migrating from the South much to the loss of Southern Farmers who for months have been moving heaven it seems to prevent the exodus of the labor serfs of the South into the North.” Garvey described how Mayor

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Mollman had worked with several New Orleans farmers’ associations and the Louisiana Board of Trade to put a stop to black migration, which the conspirators believed was leading to labor unrest in the North and a loss of social control in the South. “The whole thing, my friends, is a bloody farce,” Garvey told a cheering audience, “and that the police and soldiers did nothing to stem the murder thirst of the mob is conclusive proof of conspiracy on the part of the civil authorities to condone the acts of the white mob against Negroes.”94 With this speech, Garvey set off on his larger mission to unify the black race into a disciplined and self-­sufficient movement under the UNIA banner—­at least until he fell prey to J. Edgar Hoover’s GID conspiracy, thus proving the cliché that even paranoids have real enemies.95 With the end of the war, a new group, the American Legion, gained fame as the most aggressive vigilante organization in the country. Costumed in their doughboy uniforms and cloaked in wartime patriotism, the Legion members forged a potent cultural legitimacy as a countersubversive army attacking Bolsheviks and Wobblies while offering their services in Palmer’s raids. They were “the Praetorian Guard of capitalism in America,” according to Victor Berger, while in 1920 The Messenger recognized the American Legion as “simply another Ku Klux Klan, but national in scope.” “We are thoroughly aware of the fact that the American Legion is the physical arm of capital,” wrote the editors of The Messenger. “It is organized to beat up and destroy the organized labor movement.”96 Black Americans had suffered at the hands of white terrorist conspiracies since emancipation, and with the Great Strikes of 1919 the labor movement and immigrant radicals increasingly came to suffer the same counterrevolutionary violence, including lynching and massacres, that had destroyed democracy after Reconstruction.97 The bloodiest confrontation between the American Legion and the Haymarket generation came in the lumber town of Centralia, Washington, on November 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the signing of the armistice.98 The major newspapers the next day told a shocking story in which four veterans and American Legion members were shot dead by IWW “snipers” during the town’s Armistice Day parade. The day’s violence climaxed that night when one member of the IWW, himself a uniformed veteran, was abducted by Legion

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members and lynched in the woods. Or in the words of the Los Angeles Times, the Legion gave “to the Reds an application of their own principle of direct action.” Declaring “Centralia’s Horror” to be nothing less than the “expiring spark of another attempt at revolution that has been foiled,” the paper claimed that “documents in the hands of government agents prove that it was not a local outbreak but a part of a general conspiracy.”99 The state of Washington filed charges of conspiracy to commit first-­degree murder against eleven “Reds” for the riot, while groups of Legionnaires were reportedly hunting down remaining member of the IWW. “‘WAR TO THE DEATH’ ON REDS,” announced the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing raids on the IWW up and down the West Coast, lauding the Northwest’s “determination to rid the section of the unclean element that has ridden it.” Demands for “a new judicial definition of treason” rang from the editorial columns of the Washington Post, which saw the necessity of a balance between law and terror in defeating the Red Peril: “The nests of anarchy must be rooted out by local officers. It is too much to expect the United States government to stand watch at every keyhole. Local vigilance can do more than national organization in the running down of plotters.”100 According to the IWW, the Centralia Citizens’ Protective League and the American Legion had planned the raid on the IWW hall well in advance.101 The leading citizens of Centralia let it be known that as a practical exercise in patriotism, they would make a fitting finale to the Armistice Day parade by attacking the IWW hall. A major center of Washington’s lumber industry, Centralia was the last IWW stronghold in the region. And there the members of the One Big Union decided to arm themselves and make their stand. On the appointed day, the parade began around two o’clock in the afternoon. After marching through town, patriotic banners waving in the fall sunlight, the members of the American Legion broke from the rest of the marchers, gathered arms, and, when their officers gave the order, charged the IWW hall. The question of who shot first is of course a point of contention; one former soldier told the coroner’s inquest that the Legionnaires’ foot on the door and the first gunshot were “as nearly simultaneous as any

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human acts could be.”102 The Wobblies who defended their hall were armed and prepared to fight, killing four Legionnaires and wounding dozens more. After a furious exchange of fire, the Wobblies inside the hall became overrun by the advancing mob, who subjected the surviving radicals to a merciless beating. Wesley Everest, a Wobbly lumberjack and veteran wearing his military dress uniform, escaped the hall and fled into the woods, firing desperately at his pursuers with a pistol. Waist deep in a cold and swiftly flowing stream, Everest turned to face his attackers, offering to surrender to police. When his offer was ignored, Everest shot the nearest vigilante, a man named Dale Hubbard, nephew of a local lumber baron, killing him instantly before his gun jammed. Beaten by the mob and dragged back to the city jail by a rope around his neck, Everest reportedly told them they lacked the courage to lynch a man in daylight. The mob dumped him in the prison with the rest of his beaten and bleeding comrades. That night the mob reassembled around the prison, and during a short power outage, local police took Everest out of his cell and handed him over to the crowd. Forcing him into a car, the lynching party took Everest to the outskirts of town, where he was hanged from a bridge and his body riddled with bullets. Though some historians doubt the veracity of the rumor today, it was widely held by both the IWW and the Legion that the mob castrated Everest on his way to the bridge, inflicting on this former soldier and lumberjack, now a martyr of labor’s heroic masculinity, the most symbolic horror of the ritualized spectacle of lynching, reserved for black men accused of rape.103 The next day his body was cut down and dropped in front of his comrades on the floor of the Centralia jail, where it lay for two days before an official forced four union loggers to bury Everest’s body in an unmarked prison yard grave. For the IWW, the war of maneuver in the postwar West was lost. But the fight for justice, martyrdom, and history—­the war of position—­still had to be waged. To this end, IWW leader, artist, and songwriter Ralph Chaplin produced the most detailed study of any single incident in the IWW’s long story of repression. At the time of the lynching, Chaplin was out of prison on bond, pending the appeal of his twenty-­year sentence stemming from

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his conviction at the Chicago IWW trial in 1918. Chaplin traveled to Washington after the news of the battle, where he covered the trial of the Centralia survivors and started their legal defense campaign. Centralia was not safe for an IWW man, especially one of the organization’s national leaders, so Chaplin took up the role of socialist detective, secretly gathering evidence in town before escaping to write his study while hiding out in a “skid row” hotel in Seattle. Chaplin poured his considerable energies into this single case, and after narrating the background, chronicling the battle, drawing the cover art, and including a poem or two, he published an eighty-­page pamphlet titled The Centralia Conspiracy (fig. 25).104 The IWW sold out the first printing of forty thousand copies within a month, and three subsequent printings within a few years, making Chaplin’s study one of the most popular pieces of Wobbly literature, and turning Wesley Everest into the last great martyr of the IWW.105 The Centralia Conspiracy offers up the quintessential Wobbly conspiracy story, connecting an act of capitalist terrorism to a tale of local political corruption, and finally to a deep-­focus vision of class struggle in the social totality. “Was there a conspiracy on the part of the lumber interests to commit murder and violence in an effort to drive organized labor from its domain?” asks Chaplin as the pamphlet opens. “Weeks of patient investigating in and around the scene of the occurrence has convinced the present writer that such a conspiracy existed.”106 Chaplin depicts the Northwest logging industry as “a perfect feudal dominion of the woods,” in which the local banks and the Citizens’ Alliance functioned as an “invisible government,” keeping labor in line and the IWW out of town. The IWW managed to improve conditions in the logging camps, where workers could control the rate of work at the point of production; but in the town of Centralia, where lumberjacks wrangled with hiring agents and gang bosses for jobs, life for the radicals was far more dangerous. In the fall of 1916 a mob attacked the IWW hall, beating Wobblies and expelling them from the county. When the IWW returned in 1918, the citizens of Centralia again raided the union hall during a Red Cross parade, nearly demolishing the building and again brutalizing the radicals. Still the Wobblies persevered, publishing newspapers, holding secret meetings in the woods, and eventually moving into a new union hall in September 1919.

Figure 25. Advertisement for Ralph Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy (Seattle: IWW Publishing, 1920).

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Chaplin argued that the murderous raid on the IWW hall had been planned well in advance by Centralia’s industrial and civic elites and that all the deaths and injuries were the result of a criminal “conspiracy.” Chaplin details the October 20 meeting of the “Citizen’s Protective League” and the start of a plot to coordinate the Armistice Day parade, plan the attack, direct the local newspaper in a campaign to “rid the woods of the agitators,” and, finally, recruit the American Legion “as a ‘cat’s paw’ for the men behind the scenes.”107 But as word of the conspiracy leaked out, the IWW members issued a defiant appeal to the citizens of Centralia, asking that the IWW be treated fairly and violence averted. Under the accumulating cloud of threats, both the owner of the building from which the Wobblies rented their hall and the IWW’s attorney Elmer Smith appealed to the state government for protection, but no help arrived. On the day before the parade, both the American Legion and the IWW knew what was coming. After the violence broke out, it became the task of the local judiciary to complete the conspiracy by sending the surviving Wobblies to prison. The trial of eleven IWW members for conspiracy to commit murder opened in January 1920, with armed American Legion and state militia members surrounding the courthouse, a judge who offered a eulogy for the slain Legionnaires at their funerals, and George Vanderveer, “attorney for the damned,” defending the IWW. All evidence of premeditation and conspiracy by local businessmen was thrown out and with it the IWW’s self-­defense argument. The result was a series of convictions on second-­degree murder charges. The IWW’s General Defense Committee, the Centralia Publicity Committee (which published Chaplin’s pamphlet), and the newly formed American Civil Liberties Union took up a legal defense campaign, which, one by one, gained the Centralia prisoners their freedom staring in 1930, with the last prisoner released in 1939.108 No longer effective as a revolutionary organization with Haywood in exile, the rest of its leadership imprisoned, and its publications banned from the mail, the IWW became a defense organization, one still dedicated to promoting its conspiracy theories of capitalist aggression, but now only as a means of arguing for the release of its comrades. The horrors of 1919 helped forge significant links between African

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American activists and both immigrant and native-­born radicals. As more and more African Americans joined the northern and midwestern industrial labor force, the radical movements of the Haymarket generation came face-­to-­face with the ongoing reconstitution of the American working class. Leaders like Debs, Flynn, and the IWW made open appeals for African Americans to join the socialist radicals, arguing that only a class revolution could overcome the racial caste system in which capitalists deliberately pitted white workers against blacks. Debs had long led the way for the socialists, refusing to address segregated audiences, encouraging the Socialist Party to support the NAACP’s pickets of Birth of a Nation, and boldly declaring, “The Negro is my brother.” In response, a number of African American radicals after 1919 threw their support behind these interracial initiatives, finding common cause within a revolutionary agenda against a conspiracy of capital that used white racism as a lever to keep the working class divided. The editors of The Messenger, Randolph and Owen, not only declared their magazine to be “the Only Magazine of Scientific Radicalism in the World Published by Negroes,” but also openly embraced Debs as “the great ‘Gene,” published his speeches on race, and supported his presidential campaign in 1920. In July 1919, The Messenger gave its endorsement of interracial radicalism in an editorial titled “Why Negroes Should Join the IWW.” Their argument began by stating the simple fact that the IWW “is the only labor organization in the United States which draws no race or color line.” But beyond its lacking the racism of the AFL, which they describe as a “machine for the propagation of race prejudice,” Randolph and Owen recognized the strategic ways in which black radical and Wobbly issues aligned. “The Negro must engage in direct action,” the editors urged, explaining that because blacks were forcibly disenfranchised, like so many of the itinerant workers of the IWW, political and electoral power was beyond their reach. “Therefore, the only recourse the Negro has is industrial action,” and “it is simply logical for him to throw his lot with the Industrial Workers of the World.” But more than sharing a set of strategic goals, in this moment of race and class war The Messenger reminded its readers that the IWW and black radicals had the same enemies. “Most of the forces opposed to the IWW

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are also opposed to Negroes,” wrote Randolph and Owen, concluding, “We, therefore, urge the Negroes to join their international brothers, the Industrial Workers of the World.”109 In this same spirit, a new radical magazine, The Liberator, Max and Crystal Eastman’s successor to the suppressed Masses, raised new points of connection between revolutionary unionism and black radicalism. The Eastmans brought the Jamaican-­born radical poet Claude McKay on as editor and asserted in its inaugural issue The Liberator’s commitment to “the social and political equality of the black and white races, to oppose every kind of racial discrimination, and conduct a remorseless publicity campaign against lynch law.”110 In accordance with this agenda, The Liberator published a review essay during the summer of 1920 in which the connections between race and radicalism, conspiracies and riots were made explicit, resulting in a startling psycho-­political analysis of countersubversion. Reviewing Chaplin’s Centralia Conspiracy and the NAACP’s anti-­lynching pamphlet An Appeal to the Conscience of the Civilized World, the reviewer opens with a clear articulation of the dialectics of conspiracy: The newspapers have been making a great to-­do about an alleged plot on the part of workingmen to murder various representatives of the capitalist class, for class-­reason. Perhaps the explanation of the willingness of capitalists to believe, in the complete absence of any evidence, in such “plots,” is to be found in the fact that they, the capitalists, are and have been, engaged in a tacit conspiracy to murder workingmen for class reasons. The proofs of this widespread and long-­standing tacit capitalist conspiracy are to be found in these two pamphlets.

Beginning with the case of lynching, The Liberator uses the facts supplied by the NAACP’s pamphlet to argue that “race prejudice” is as inadequate an explanation for lynching as the myth of rape, especially when one considers the “51 colored women and girls” lynched since the 1880s. “Race prejudice is used as the emotional force for carrying out this economic terrorism,” comments the reviewer, noting, “The same facts are apparent in the capitalist conspiracy to murder workingmen in the Northwest.” The author continues, “Here, as in the case of the Negroes, an attempt was made to exploit the emotions of race prejudice,

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so as to use one section of the workers to help murder another section of them, by alleging the ‘foreignness’ of their organization, the IWW.” In both cases, racism is imagined as a kind of deception, an irrational response imposed by the ruling class to keep the working class divided against itself.111 The question thus arises, now that these connections have been drawn between race riots, the lynching of African Americans, and the recent attacks on the IWW, what is to be done? For the IWW the answer is always the same: Organize! But this answer is seen as potentially dangerous for African Americans, since “any attempt to organize for their own protection would be crushed out with immediate massacre.” This seems a startling recognition of what we might today call white privilege, an acknowledgment that, although the problem of lynching has the same sources whether the victims are African Americans or white union members, the mode of redress cannot be the same, and that class solidarity might not be the only answer. Nevertheless, in its final image the short essay seeks to expose the singular countersubversive psychology of the white terror: Meantime, in the light of these facts, the capitalist talk about murderous “plots” against themselves is shown up as the hysteria of a guilty conscience. The capitalist class wakes screaming from a nightmare in which its guilty mind has prefigured its own horrible end; it does not realize the patience of the workers, nor how far from mere revenge are their thoughts. But when it wakes crying “Bloody Murder!” in the headlines of the capitalist press, let us reply, “Yes, your murders are bloody, and it is no wonder that you do not sleep well o’nights thinking of them!”

Projection, guilt, and the “return of the repressed” within the dialectics of conspiracy: what this closing comment appears to offer is perhaps the first available political theory of countersubversive paranoia in American letters.112 The Liberator’s comments are remarkable for the clarity with which they articulate the ideological centrality of white supremacy within the countersubversive tradition and its function as the structure of feeling behind vigilante conspiracies. It also, however, rigidly subordinates the structuring importance of race and racism to the materialist reality of

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the class struggle, effectively delimiting race hatred to the position of propaganda employed by conspiring elites, a kind of cover story used to trick white workers into undermining their own class interests.113 This position is described by the historian David Roediger as a “conspiratorial view of racism,” in which racism is perpetuated by the ruling class to maintain class oppression, thereby casting “white workers as dupes, even if virtuous ones.”114 For example, to the leaders of the Socialist Party in 1919, racism was a pernicious outgrowth of capitalist exploitation. According to a unanimously adopted resolution of the Socialist Convention held in September of that year in Chicago, “the economic basis of society, the profit system, under which we now live, will be found by all who investigate to be the basis of the racial antagonism which culminated in the recent race riots.” But, concludes the resolution, if plutocrats and their interests in dividing the working class are the secret agents of racism, then “the only final solution of the race problem is the abolition of Capitalism.”115 Roediger’s vital corrective was to emphasize the ways in which white workers embraced and acted upon race hatred as a means of claiming what W. E. B. Du Bois called “a sort of public and psychological wage” of whiteness, a means by which white workers willingly embraced their racial “status and privileges” over African American workers in a post-­emancipation re-­articulation of white supremacy.116 The radical’s faith that the capitalist enemy was the fountainhead of all forms of inequality and division in the case of white racism obscures more problems than it addresses, presenting a strident denial of the social and psychological complexities of racism and bigotry in the name of forging the working class in all its diversity into a singular revolutionary movement. We can see this conspiracy theory of racism at work in a cartoon published in The Messenger in 1919 (fig. 26). A distressed capitalist appears to be making off with bags bulging with profits while two angry men ride the backs of two workers. All three men marked by dollar signs are shouting instructions. First, the boss demands that his managers “fool them” to “keep ’em apart.” Then management shouts to labor, one man demanding that the white worker privilege his race over class consciousness, while the other warns the black worker to keep his distance

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Figure 26. W. B. Williams, “Workers of the World Unite!!” The Messenger, August 1919.

from “white trash.” Either way, it is capital’s henchmen who employ the n-­word, twice, while the black and white workers, similarly chained and saddled, reach toward each other as comrades and brothers. Yet if both black and white radicals during the Red Scare failed to recognized the centrality of race and racism to American society in the Age of Monopoly, this recognition of interracial radical solidarity contributed to a novel and foreboding political prediction of America’s future. Through the shared experience of mob violence and legal repression, Wobbly and black radical intellectuals came closer than any other political thinkers in this era of crisis to formulating a political theory of what would, by 1922, take the name fascism. “The Legion is constituting itself as a National Ku-­Klux Loyalty League or a National Vigilante movement,” recognized the Wobblies. “Draped in the Stars and Stripes these Ku-­Klux Vigilantes are going to initiate a system of oppression against the citizens, carrying out the order and suggestions of the secret and invisible government.” In the eyes of the IWW, the capitalist conspiracy that pushed the nation into militarism and war

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now had its own uniformed vigilante army. “It is intended as a tool of autocracy and will be so used,” warned the IWW. “It is the forerunner of a capitalist autocracy based on military dictatorship.”117 The language used to mark out the political enemy for both groups merged, as the enemy of the IWW, the “invisible government” of Wall Street, merged with the “invisible empire” of the Klan to constitute a new vision of a countersubversive state that the IWW called the “Ku Klux Government”: Over and above the government, federal and state, instituted by the vote of the people, there is a secret and invisible government, which affects our daily life in a most disastrous manner. . . . The same invisible government left traces at Homestead, at Ludlow, in Everett, on the Mesaba Range and in Lawrence, etc. It left traces behind at the hanging of Frank Little, at the legal murder of Joe Hill, at the numerous lynchings thruout the country, at the repeated Ku Klux visits. . . . It is leaving traces in the imprisonment in Kansas jails for nearly two years of two score fellows without trial. The same invisible government is leaving traces in the tar and feather parties at Tulsa, in the illegal closing of IWW halls at Seattle, and in the equally illegal mass arrests of the IWW men in California.118

Rewriting the history of the repression of the Haymarket generation from this moment of unveiling, the IWW’s vision of the “Ku Klux Government” seems to present the Wobblies’ most totalizing vision of the conspiracy of capital, a singular “blood stained trail” of the class struggle. Yet in the face of the historical defeat of the Haymarket generation, the Wobblies held tight to both their vision of the conspiracy of capital and their revolutionary faith: Our fight is with the secret and invisible government, which to us is neither secret nor invisible. We know where that government is located and we know of what persons it is composed. Its capitol is in Wall Street, and its officials are the defenders of the private ownership of the means of production thruout the country. Its executive servants are the stools, finks, gunmen and murderers. That government, we frankly confess, we intend to overthrow.119

At this point it was impossible to see this last line as anything less than a final gasp. The social movements of the Haymarket generation had been

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defeated by a combination of law and terror, state violence and public relations, white supremacy and Red baiting. But if the revolutionary vigor, let alone the social movement itself, was gone, a new critique, a new conception of political and economic power had been attained. The war had concentrated the trusts into the financial power of Wall Street, the “invisible government” had become the “nation-­wide spy system” of the national security state, and the once secret Klan had now become an armed patriotic mob which threatened America’s basic freedoms. As Art Young imagined it in 1921 in a nine-­part drawing of the 1921 inaugural parade, the United States began the 1920s bearing all the markers of a fascist state, led by finance capital, followed by the rich with their patriotic bluster, backed up by the terrorism of the KKK (fig. 27). THE DISTANCE BETWEEN MARKET STREET AND WALL STREET When the final act of violent resistance to the Red Scare came with the Wall Street bombing on September 16, 1920, there was little left of the radical movement to play out the dialectics of conspiracy. The bomb was built and planted by Mario Buda, the last active member of the Galleanisti conspiracy in America, comrade to Andrea Salsedo and Carlo Valdinoci, and dear friend of Sacco and Vanzetti. Buda filled a pushcart with dynamite and shrapnel, covered it with a tarp, and parked it at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in lower Manhattan, directly across from J. P. Morgan and Co. The cart exploded just past noon, killing thirty-­eight people. One hundred and forty more were injured, most of them clerks, delivery boys, and secretaries looking to get a jump on the lunchtime rush. Between panicked demands for further repression of the Reds and wild speculation as to who was responsible for the carnage, the press was filled with familiar phrases, digging deeper into its already overtaxed vocabulary of vituperation and countersubversive invective to convey the unprecedented carnage of the attack. Competition between publicity-­seeking private detective agencies and political turf wars between anarchist hunters in the New York Police Department and

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Figure 27. Art Young, “Good Morning’s Inaugural Parade,” section 4, Good Morning, February 15, 1921.

Bolshevik hunters in the Justice Department prevented the authorities from ever finding the bomber, who had long since slipped quietly out of the country.120 Meanwhile, largely unacknowledged in the chaos, every major outlet of the radical press still publishing denounced the attack, attributing it to either a construction accident or an act of provocation by police, private detectives, and the invisible government. “Everyone you meet seems to be convinced that the bomb ‘outrages’ of the last year were all frame-­ups by the Palmer stools,” claimed the IWW, “and that Palmer’s porch was blown up at his own suggestion, to make political capital for himself, to make him a martyr, and to give a plausible back ground for the suspension of all laws and constitutional guarantees in dealing with the ‘the reds.’” A cynical Debs wrote from his Atlanta prison cell: “Being in prison is not without its advantages. Had I made a speech in New York the night before that Wall Street explosion there would have been a clear case against me. As it is, I have a perfect alibi.”121 The story of Haymarket, the Independence Depot, and Joe Hill still rang out among the surviving radicals in 1920, but the culture of popular radicalism no longer included the mass mobilization and labor defense rallies. A pair of anarchist bombs planted at the center of America’s twin financial districts frame the Red Scare between Market Street and Wall

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Street. Neither of these bombings truly threatened American capitalism, let alone claimed the lives of any famous plutocrats or Red hunters. These were the criminal acts of violent political plotters waging war against their ideological conception of the historical totality—­a real conspiracy plotting against a metaphor, a symbol, their chosen root of all evils. During the Red Scare, millions of America’s striking workers, socialist voters, anti-­lynching activists, and modernist rebels resisted the rising tide of nativist repression. Only a very few of those who acknowledged and waged the class war chose to build and detonate bombs; but who those bombs spoke for, and what they meant to say, was always already lost in the rubble of broken laws, terrified people, and the voice of the state calling out its enemies. We can see just how much the Haymarket generation learned about the countersubversive tradition from a cartoon drawn by the IWW artist “Dust” Wallin and published in the One Big Union Monthly in May 1920 (fig. 28). That month the hysteria of the Red Scare reached a kind of peak, in which Attorney General Palmer warned the nation of an impending Red May Day bombing campaign, predicting a revolutionary uprising of American Bolsheviks.122 This uprising did not happen, and the fever of the Red Scare seemed to break and subside. But this exercise in countersubversive fantasy, amidst all the very real violence and repression of the Red Scare, gave rise to this remarkable image. The cartoon depicts three sinister beasts of the forests (one marked “IWW” and another “Bolsheviki,” along with a giant, nameless owl) who at first glance appear to be sneaking up behind an unsuspecting, unconcerned, and unlabeled man. This man is not a bloated financier, the iconic plutocrat, but a middle-­class or petty-­bourgeois white male American in fighting trim, chomping on a cigar while charging forward at a determined pace. Upon closer inspection, this man seems to be far more menaced by what is in front of him, though there is no evident obstacle to his forward progress, than he is by the monsters looming at his back. Bearing down on the viewer with a dark scowl on his face, he brandishes his cane upside down as if he means to use it as a club. As frightening as the cartoonish monsters may be, once we see the club in the man’s hand and recognize his desire to do harm to us, we begin to suspect that this angry little man is the real threat in this image.

Figure 28. “Dust” Wallin, “One Misconception of the I.W.W.,” One Big Union Monthly, May 1920.

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Wobbly cartoons were as much allegorical lessons to be learned as jokes to be enjoyed, and here the radical artist has drawn his working-­ class readers into the image, addressing them as fellow workers so as to reveal how the countersubversive logic of capitalism really works. If we place ourselves in the context of this image, imagining ourselves as a surviving member of the One Big Union, it appears that we readers are far more likely to be bludgeoned by the business end of that cane than this petty-­bourgeois vigilante is to be bitten by the rather plodding bear. From this point of view, the Russian giant and growling bear are exactly what they look like: overblown fantasies of the reactionary mind, inflated to create fear in the public needed to legitimate the ongoing violent assault on labor and the Left. If this little man is so beset by Bolsheviki, why does he not turn around and fend off these terrible creatures with his club like some protective knight? Can’t he hear them stomping along the trail and feel them breathing down his neck? Why does he continue to fix his destructive intent upon us? Unless it is we who are his real enemies, and the cartoon monsters are the projective and protective products of his countersubversive imagination. In this reading, these demonized visions of the Left become the guardians of the capitalist vigilante rather than its enemies. The nightmarish landscape illustrates the realm of bourgeois political fantasies rather than the reality of revolutionary radicalism, revealing how reactionary fantasies and projections serve to protect class power. In this sense, this image reveals Michael Paul Rogin’s claim that “the label countersubversion points to the fact that the important bearers of American political demonology have not been extremists or subversives, but their foes.”123 Despite this unprecedented assault on the Haymarket generation, its radical spirit survived its physical destruction. Its deepest legacy was on the legal front, where it fought the conspiracy doctrine while advancing the traditions of legal defense, civil liberties, and free speech campaigns. Clarence Darrow even came out of his self-­exile from labor and left causes to defend twenty members of the Communist Labor Party in Chicago accused of seditious conspiracy. The 1920s marked “the fall of the house of labor” and a period of exaggerated nativism. Wartime postal censorship and public bans on street meetings lasted for years

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after the armistice. The rate of deportations accelerated, reaching more than 38,000 per year until the late 1920s. Conservative unions purged their radical members and popular radicalism lost touch with the labor movement. The war and Red Scare had cost the Haymarket generation the mass audience it once seemed possible to build. It took the collapse of the Age of Monopoly and the next generation of radicals, the Popular Front of the 1930s, raised on what Louis Adamic described as the “rather dreadful story” of bombings, frame-­ups, and martyrs’ ballads, to finally win the Haymarket generation’s battles for an eight-­hour workday, to bring an end to the use of labor spies and judicial injunctions, and to create once again a popular culture of American radicalism.124

Conclusion

“Will Fascism Come to America?” Civil Liberties, Antifascism, and the Legacy of the Haymarket Generation Next, and decisively, you find you have to believe—­and in this, from my whole experience, I was well prepared—­that this [socialist] transformation of society has an enemy. Not just an electoral enemy or a traditional enemy, but a hostile and organized social formation which is actively trying to defeat and destroy you. —Raymond Williams, “You’re a Marxist, Aren’t You?” (1975)

How are we to take stock of the legacy of the Haymarket generation? This is, after all, a generation largely remembered by history for its failures and martyrs, a movement of “beautiful losers.” But is this true? Did this generation of popular radicalism fail? Did it vanish without a trace? True, much of this history is forgotten or neglected, but its fire still burns, carried on by the generations that followed it. Of equal importance, the issues first confronted by the Haymarket generation, such as corporate personhood, private mercenaries, freedom of speech, and government surveillance, are critical issues again in the twenty-­first century. So in bringing this book to its conclusion, I would like to tie up a few loose ends on this conspiracy theory. 249

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First I return to the question of American exceptionalism and ask the century-­old question: Why is there no socialism in America? This leads into a brief account of how the Left’s conspiracy theories, once a core organizational tool, came to be a discrediting and delegitimizing liability, or how conspiracy theories assumed the pejorative identity they currently possess. Second, I consider the ways in which the dialectics of conspiracy became institutionalized in American politics during the 1920s, established in the institutions and discourses of civil liberties, anticommunism, and the national security state. Last, I take up the generational exchange between the Haymarket generation and the Popular Front as the conspiracy of capitalism became a vision of American fascism. WHY THERE IS NO SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES At the start of the twentieth century, a member of the German Social Democratic Party, Werner Sombart, traveled through America as a kind of socialist Tocqueville, no longer asking why is there democracy in America but now asking why is there no socialism in America. Sombart offered many explanations, but in the end it came down to food: American workers were satiated by the relatively high standard of living among the industrial workforce, or as Sombart famously wrote, “All Socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.” Yet Sombart, writing in the year of the Haywood trial of 1906, predicted that this situation was about to change: “All the factors that till now have prevented the development of Socialism in the United States are about to disappear or to be converted into their opposite.”1 The prospects for building a mass workers’ political party under the banner of socialism did indeed expand in the United States between 1906 and 1919; and yet, as I have narrated, the war and the Red Scare halted this growth in a massive wave of legal repression and violent terrorism. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of American labor’s defeat,” writes labor historian Mike Davis of the failed strike wave of 1919.2 And in many ways, the explanations for the lack of socialism and the causes of this defeat are similar. Conservative and consensus

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historians emphasize the same claims that Sombart did. Because America does not have a history of feudalism and aristocracy, it does not have a European-­style class system either. America was born as an experiment in capitalism and democracy, and in this new world, Marxism is fundamentally “foreign” in nature. Without an aristocratic hierarchy, the argument goes, Americans concern themselves primarily with “status conflict” rather than “class conflict.”3 For radical historians surveying this defeat, a different set of explanations come to the fore (many of which were also offered by Sombart). These arguments include the delimiting effects of the American two-­party political system and the political power held by the white supremacists of the Solid South. The lack of Left unity is blamed on the fracturing effects of socialist, anarchist, and labor sectarianism—­including the use of dynamite—­resulting in a failure of integration between the labor movement and the Socialist Party after 1912. Race is a key issue in this question, as the ever-­changing ethnic and regional composition of the American working class limited class solidarity, especially in the context of mass migrations of peasants from eastern Europe and African Americans from the South into industrial cities. While America may not have a feudal past, we do have origins in settler colonialism, genocide, and slavery, an experience that forged a national culture grounded in propertied individualism, white supremacy, and countersubversion.4 To the members of the Haymarket generation who fought for socialism and suffered defeat during the Red Scare, these explanations had a limited appeal. For loyal Socialist Party members, the readers of the Appeal to Reason, Solidarity, or the International Socialist Review, American socialism did not “fail” so much as it was deliberately crushed by the “Iron Heel.” The Red Scare was a moment of apocalypse for the American Left, a great unveiling of the system, in which activists could now clearly see the grand and malevolent totality of their countersubversive enemy. Upton Sinclair sums up his vision of that totality in 1920: Operating in darkness, behind the scenes, the organizations of Big Business in America—­our “Invisible Government,” to use President Wilson’s priceless phrase—­raising enormous sums of money, employing an army of spies and informers and provocateurs, bribing, corrupting, inciting,

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threatening, egging on public officials—­and in cases where public officials refuse to act, organizing private mobs of rowdies in uniform, beating, terrifying, robbing, tarring, feathering and hanging men and women who are guilty of the offense of holding and expressing opinions.5

In the imagination of Sinclair and the badly wounded Appeal, all of the violence and anger of this violent and angry moment was under the cognizant direction of the plutocracy. Samuel Gompers also denounced a “Conspiracy to Crush Organized Labor,” which he blamed for the fall of the house of labor.6 The AFL had been a faithful ally of Wilson during the war, but after the armistice, Gompers lamented that open shop activists made no distinction between his “patriotic, constructive organization . . . and an organization of anarchists and bolshevists.”7 Gompers, who had done so much to point the finger at radicals after the McNamara debacle, now had no one left to stand by him when the open shop drive—­soon known as the “American Plan”—­took aim at the AFL. Rather than gaining acceptance for the “pure and simple unionism” of the AFL, in the early 1920s Gompers faced an organized capitalist enemy determined to eradicate all American unions. “Labor has repeatedly made the charge that there exists a conspiracy to destroy the trade-­union movement,” begins Gompers in a widely published essay from 1922, “that there is under way a concerted movement on the part of the employers to restore and maintain autocratic control of American industry.” As proof, Gompers cites a secret network of “Associated Industries” and “Employers’ Associations” formed by the giant trusts, while naming the agencies of organized capital, the National Erectors’ Association, the National Industrial Conference Board, the United States Steel Corporation, the National Open Shop Association, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufactures (NAM), as the arch-­conspirators. “The fact is, as labor sees it,” writes Gompers, “that while prior to the war there was what might be termed a normal opposition to the organizations of workers, there has been since the conclusion of the war an abnormal or stimulated opposition inspired and, in all probability, more or less actively directed from a central point.”8

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The AFL’s accusations became the subject of a heated public debate, one of the first of its kind in American history, a debate on the nature of conspiracy theory itself, in which the NAM effectively turned around Gompers’s accusation against itself in a calculated public relations drive to discredit unionism.9 “It is a curious mental process that brings Mr. Gompers to this illogical and absurd conclusion,” writes Samuel Harden Church, president of the Carnegie Institute, “and yet, the conclusion is an easy invention to a mind forced, as his mind is forced, to find a palatable explanation for an unpalatable situation.”10 The NAM simply asserts that there is “no guiding voice, no ‘power behind the throne’” of the open shop drive, claiming that the NAM offers only “moral support” for a movement that is “100% spontaneous.” “Why does he not indict the whole American people,” asserts the NAM’s spokesman, “for the almost universal support accorded the open shop?”11 The assertion is that Gompers is imagining a conspiracy because he cannot accept the reality that the American people have rejected unionism. Gompers disagreed with this interpretation, though he knew his union was sharply in decline. But was this decline of unionism the result of a conscious and coordinated capitalist plan? Was it the natural unfolding of the logic of the capitalist system? A shifting balance of contingent political forces? Or was it a demonstration of the independent will of the American people? The question is not just ideological but fundamentally polarizing, because the answer depends entirely upon whose side you are on. But not only did his enemies in the NAM assert that Gompers was mentally defective for his allegations of a capitalist conspiracy; they also insisted that he was no longer a man of the people, representing nothing more than his own broken psychology. The NAM’s claim is that Gompers’s position—­as the voice of working people—­was now best represented by a countersubversive corporate rights movement. The most important outcome of this debate, or at least what is revealed by this debate, was that by the 1920s, accusing capital of conspiracy had become a self-­discrediting approach, one that left the claimant on the hook for both evidence and acumen, unable to assert clearly enough just who this “they” really was. Organized capitalist violence had not destroyed

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the Haymarket generation, insisted this new anti-­radical orthodoxy; the American people through their independent sprit had rejected socialism, and anyone who pointed out the Klansman or G-­man under the rug was a psychotic, or, to borrow a key twentieth-­century term, paranoid. “It has become quite fashionable to be the victim of paranoia,” wrote Emma Goldman, one of American radicalism’s least paranoid figures, in a statement that is probably truer now than when she wrote it in 1917.12 Few commentators have ever found this preoccupation with conspiracy to be healthy for our national polity, especially when it is advanced by a growing mass movement. It is no accident that this discourse of critically psychologizing radical social movements begins in the Age of Monopoly. With the rise of modern social movements after the Civil War, there originated the now time-­honored tradition of intellectuals and other spokespeople for a rational, pluralist, and consensus-­driven society to lament (and correct) what they see as a popular obsession with conspiracy. In this era, we find the earliest sustained move to break out of the dialectics of conspiracy, attack the popular revolutionary movements, and forge a centrist path between capitalism and the pluralist state from which it was possible to look back and see socialism as having been all but guaranteed to fail. “The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming which transpire is almost uncanny,” wrote the Progressive intellectual Walter Lippmann in 1914. “‘Big Business,’ and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life.” Then in the process of retreating from his youthful flirtation with socialism and psychoanalysis, Lippmann had just quit his highly coveted job as Lincoln Steffens’s research assistant to found The New Republic. Soon he would join the Wilson administration’s pro-­war propaganda project the Committee for Public Information (CPI). For Lippmann, both the radical work of muckraking and the Gilded Age’s laissez-­faire capitalism had gone too far, eroding the public’s faith in the system. The “drift” caused by “the chaos of a new freedom” and other irrational responses to modernity had to be matched by the “mastery” of a new class of scientific, liberal intellectuals and reformers. The presence of such fears of freedom, concludes Lippmann,

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is why the exercising of bogeys is so intimate a part of the effort at self-­ government. Think of the ordinary business man’s notion of an anarchist, or the anarchist’s notion of a business man; many men’s feelings about Theodore Roosevelt, or Bill Haywood, or the Capitalist Class, or the Money Power, or Sex Reform—­I use capital letters because these fantasies have become terrific monsters of the imagination. Our life is overwrought with timidities and panics, distorting superstitions and fantastic lures; our souls are misshapen by the pluck of invisible strings.13

This description is notable in that Lippmann’s understanding of conspiracy cuts across both the political right and left, viewing both as sources of irrationality and instability. This positioning enables Lippmann and other liberals to claim the (supposedly) rational center by foregrounding the irrational nature of the extremes. These fears about the intellectual requirements for popular self-­ government continued to drive Lippmann’s later work, especially his post–­Red Scare rethinking of propaganda, political psychology, and democratic theory in his book Public Opinion in 1922. Lippmann argued that democracy faced a serious threat because the “common good,” let alone the vast complexity of modern American life and politics, was very largely eluding the public. This was why a new generation of propagandists, a “specialized class” of self-­conscious manipulators of “stereotypes” and “the pictures inside people’s heads,” was necessary to remake and manage democracy in the image of the mass media. Through “psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication,” Lippmann proposed to lead a “revolution” taking place in the “practice of democracy,” a centralized manipulation of the public mind that he proudly described as “the manufacture of consent.” His conclusion, Lippmann wrote, was “that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today.”14 But who—­besides the editor of The New Republic himself, of course—­was going to do this work of “shaping men’s minds”? The leading figure in this project of “organizing chaos” and “managing democracy” was Lippmann’s fellow CPI employee, and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the man credited with inventing both the name and key practices of the newly forged public relations industry. In

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his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays builds on Lippmann’s understanding of “the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” to assert the power of centralized intellectual management. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” writes Bernays, “is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forms and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” As a leading figure in this invisible government, Bernays was less a theoretician of PR than he was an active practitioner. In a career spanning more than seventy years, Bernays worked for presidents, media outlets, and the biggest corporations in the United States, along the way scoring two legendary victories by encouraging women to take up smoking cigarettes (“torches of freedom”) on behalf of the American Tobacco Company and guiding the CIA overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954 on behalf of his client the United Fruit Company. Is it sufficient to call it irony when the unresolved contradictions of Lippmann’s principled effort to purge the American mind of conspiracies and bogeys leads directly to some of the twentieth century’s greatest sources of distrust and conspiracy theories?15 Between corporate public relations, government secrecy, and the manipulations of and by the news media, we find the central forces that fuel many of today’s most pervasive conspiracy theories. Perhaps it is no accident that these three entities—­multinational corporations, the national security state, and the media monopoly—­all agree that socialism is un-­American and that its failure in America was inevitable. CIVIL LIBERTIES AND ANTICOMMUNISM Though the Haymarket generation suffered defeat with the Red Scare, their stories, images, and strategies endured in part because the surviving fragments of the American Left rallied around the defense of their imprisoned comrades. With so many of its leaders and members in prison, by 1919 the IWW actively organized more legal defense

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campaigns from coast to coast than strikes or free speech protests. The language of “political prisoners” appeared for the first time in American politics through Wobbly literature, in which “prisoners of the class war” became living martyrs imprisoned for the cause of defending their civil liberties. Inside the walls of San Quentin, Leavenworth, or the Cook County Jail, Wobblies fought for their basic rights by leading prison strikes to challenge the appalling conditions in federal penitentiaries and injustice of their criminal convictions. Those on the outside committed countless hours to the work of raising money, aiding lawyers, managing appeals, publishing pamphlets, visiting the incarcerated, helping their families, and organizing amnesty campaigns for wartime political prisoners. Politicizing legal defense campaigns has been at the center of popular radicalism since 1886, both an awful necessity and a vital opportunity that made legal defense a powerfully unifying theme across the Left’s many divisions. More than the theory of surplus value or class struggle, narratives of legal injustice were (and still are) critical building blocks of mass social movements. But how to translate this mass “outrage” at instances or practices of injustice into an ideological movement capable of demanding structural transformation has long been one of the most vexing strategic problems for social justice activists. And then there is the question, raised by Joe Hill during his 1915 trial, whether legal defense campaigns distract from what a social movement should be doing, or if, instead, permanent legal defense organizations should be built to keep the activism and defense aspect of labor and radical social movements separate. As we have seen, before 1919 legal defense efforts were largely organized on an emergency basis with ad hoc alliances of unions and social movements, the radical press, and dedicated “movement lawyers” like George Vanderveer and Clarence Darrow. Given the legal repression they experienced, it is no surprise that the Wobblies pioneered the new strategic model for waging legal defense campaigns. IWW “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn led the movement in building a permanent and independent legal defense structure, uniting the IWW, the Socialist Party, and the left-­leaning locals of the AFL behind the formation of the Workers Defense Union in 1914. In addition

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to using her many opportunities to defend herself in court as a Wobbly, a feminist, and a communist, Flynn became a founding member of the Civil Liberties Bureau in 1917, which reorganized into the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920.16 With the federal indictments of the IWW in 1918, legal defense necessarily became a more permanent institutional presence within the One Big Union, and upon his release from Leavenworth on bail, Big Bill Haywood helped found the Wobblies’ General Defense Committee. According to the Wobbly turned Trotskyite James P. Cannon, Haywood once suggested when the two men met in Moscow that a permanent legal defense organization should be a top priority for American radicals. This suggestion—­to institutionalize legal defense campaigns—­marks Big Bill Haywood as, in Cannon’s words, “the connecting link which helped to establish continuity between the old movement and the new.”17 The primary organ of this new movement was the International Labor Defense (ILD), founded by Cannon in 1925. Originally designated a non-­ factional working-­class organization, the ILD sought to make permanent the solidarity forged in the legal defense cases of the past. “Anarchists, socialists, communists, IWWs, members of the AF of L and workers without affiliation,” announced Cannon in Labor Defender, the ILD’s illustrated paper, “have found the hand of the ILD ready and able to aid them at all times.”18 In the organization’s founding manifesto, the ILD sets out its agenda as a legal and lobbying organization dedicated to combating the conspiracy of capital in court: The International Labor Defense will seek to collect material and give publicity to all cases of working persecution, to expose brutal treatment of class war prisoners and to bare secret anti-­labor activities such as labor spy systems, etc. . . . The International Legal Defense will organize and lead nation-­wide campaigns for the release of all class war prisoners, conduct a relentless struggle against anti-­labor legislation, and fight for the repeal of all criminal syndicalism, criminal anarchy and sedition laws—­exceptional measures designed to give a legal covering to the attacks of the ruling class upon militant workers and the whole labor movement.19

Throughout the 1920s, the ILD and the Labor Defender mounted major legal and political campaigns against the continued incarceration of

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Tom Mooney, Warren Billings, and the Centralia defendants, and even defended the long-­forgotten J. B. McNamara as “America’s oldest surviving political prisoner.” The ILD fashioned a new version of radical history in which the story of the Haymarket generation and its struggles with the conspiracy doctrine provided a connecting link between two generations of social movements from Haymarket to the Popular Front.20 Perhaps most important of all the ILD’s cases was its global movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti, a seven-­year-­long struggle that carried the memory of labor’s past into the 1930s and 1940s. Older radicals found new audiences via the Sacco and Vanzetti defense movement: Upton Sinclair wrote his protest novel Boston, and Ralph Chaplin contributed numerous songs and cartoons. In his study of movement culture in the Popular Front era, Michael Denning describes the ILD as “the earliest Popular Front organization” and notes that “its campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti was the first act of the new Left of the depression.” More than a legal organization, the ILD was “the heart of the political and artistic energies of the proletarian avant-­garde,” writes Denning, detailing the impact of ILD cases on the artistic imagination of such seminal figures as Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, whose first two volumes of the USA trilogy feature an Appeal to Reason–­reading Wobbly named Mac and modernist portraits of Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, and Wesley Everest, while the final volume ends by evoking the activist Mary French’s pain at having failed to save Sacco and Vanzetti.21 In its later history as a specifically communist organization, the ILD carried on the legal defense campaigns for victims of Jim Crow justice such as Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Nine, contributing significantly to the vital fights for racial solidarity and anti-­lynching within the Popular Front. Behind the long list of celebrated political conspiracy trials and labor defense campaigns from 1886 to the 1920s lay the vast legal terrain of the conspiracy doctrine, civil liberties, and First Amendment rights. During World War I, and indeed throughout American history since 1886, anarchists, Wobblies, and other radicals engaged in the endless struggle for freedom of speech by demanding the right to speak, to organize, to strike, and to bargain collectively. Radical modernists and feminists also claimed the right to freedom of speech, demanding an end to the censorship of art, literature, and human sexuality. Attacked

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by federal agents, the postmaster general, and the federal courts, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, Zechariah Chafee, and others waged battles that formed the basis for what we recognize today as the discourse of “civil liberties.” According to the historian Eric Foner, the concept of civil liberties was effectively born out of the abuse of individual rights and political freedom during the Red Scare.22 Individual liberties and the First Amendment became major political issues when pro-­war liberals and former Progressives recoiled at the excessive if not unconstitutional coercion asserted by the state over the individual in the name of abstractions like democracy and progress. The mass arrests of war dissenters in 1917 led to the formation of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which became the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. Headed by Roger Baldwin, the ACLU began as a small, beleaguered organization of lawyers, pacifists, and Progressives. But when they tried to step in and defend some of the thousands of immigrants rounded up in Justice Department raids, the ACLU (and indeed everyone who defended the radicals) suddenly found themselves banned from the mails, subjected to intrusive searches, and under constant surveillance by what one ACLU pamphlet called “the Nation-­Wide Spy System.”23 The ACLU clearly had its work cut out for it, especially after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, the imprisonment of Debs, and dozens of other wartime free speech cases. Nonetheless, the ACLU persevered, demanding freedom of speech for all, and uniting radicals and liberals behind the defense of constitutional liberties. If the pressures of wartime split radicals and labor from their liberal and Progressive support, the excesses of the Red Scare managed to bring some of these groups back together in their common defense. If the right to free speech and civil liberties is the lasting legacy of the Haymarket generation, then the “invisible government” of the FBI and other political surveillance agencies is the lasting legacy of countersubversives in the Age of Monopoly. With the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of global communism, and the survival of the Soviet state, the new federal repressive state apparatus created during the war did not face the same postwar demobilization as the army or navy. In fact, through the Red Scare and after, the power of the Bureau of Investigation continued

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to grow, creating a dual system of labor discipline in which organized labor faced a two-­front fight against both the government and private detectives. In 1921 William J. Burns, former head of the Secret Service, founder of the Burns Detective Agency, and hero of the McNamara brothers’ case, became director of the Bureau of Investigation. Here he worked in common purpose with the large private detective firms, especially his own company, then run by his sons. FBI agents explicitly aided the American Plan, infiltrating unions and coordinating efforts to break the 1922 railroad strike.24 In May 1924, Burns left the Bureau after it came to light that he had used the agency to entrap and discredit Senator Burton K. Wheeler, an ardent critic of the Justice Department in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal. This confirmed lawlessness in attacking a senator, along with a growing reputation for cronyism and corruption, led the new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, to promise the public that the “Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is concerned only with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice to human liberty, which it should be our first concern to cherish.”25 Political leaders and elite opinion received these words warmly, yet Stone appointed J. Edgar Hoover as the new director, despite the fact that Hoover, as head of the Bureau’s anti-­radical General Intelligence Division, had organized the Palmer Raids. Serving as director of the Bureau of Investigation until his death on May 2, 1972, Hoover was the country’s most powerful countersubversive for a half century, transforming the anticommunism of the Red Scare into a fundamentalist civic religion that shaped both domestic politics and the global Cold War.26 Under Hoover, the FBI shed its roots in labor spying and deputized vigilantism and took up the banner of scientific investigation, promoting itself in the 1930s as the incorruptible scourge of kidnappers and social bandits like John Dillinger.27 But despite the Bureau’s carefully packaged image of crusading “G-­men” and suit-­and-­ tie-­wearing fingerprint experts, Hoover’s FBI remained in essence a countersubversive political police. Hoover made no effort to combat organized crime in urban America; in fact, he denied the existence of la Cosa Nostra for forty years. Only direct orders from President

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Roosevelt compelled the FBI to investigate the far right in the 1930s and 1940s, while in the 1960s the FBI used its deep ties to the southern Klan to investigate, harass, and kill activists in the civil rights movement. Hoover used the full weight of the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” all political movements espousing Marxist ideologies within the New Left, civil rights and Black Power groups, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian Movement in the Bureau’s secret counterintelligence programs, or COINTELPRO. Only after Watergate, with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and Hoover’s death could detailed studies of his rule appear. In thousands of pages of declassified documents, the truth emerged that the FBI had systematically and illegally conspired to violate the civil liberties of thousands of America citizens for decades.28 The fear that pervades all social justice movements at some level, the knowledge that there are informants and spies inside every movement, the distrust that activists in America have to fight against and struggle to overcome with one another, these too are the psychological and political legacies of the Age of Monopoly. “WALL STREET’S FASCIST CONSPIRACY” Despite the rising profile of the FBI in the interwar years, private detectives and hired vigilantes remained on the front lines of class conflict well into the 1930s. Labor spies and professional strikebreakers worked steadily in heavy industries like mining, steel, and especially the auto industry, meaning that organized workers in the interwar period, including those involved in the militant labor drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), faced a countersubversive combination of mercenaries, vigilantes, cops, and government spies. As early as 1923, members of the IWW had a name for this international counterrevolutionary apparatus, this combination of big business, criminal gangs, and the secret state that they found first in America. Adopting Benito Mussolini’s terms, the IWW called this new politics Facism.. The Popular Front initially recognized fascism in the expansion of what the Haymarket generation knew as “Pinkertonism.” Throughout the

“Will Fascism Come to America?”   263

1920s, a new generation of plutocrats like the “people’s tycoon” and fervent anti-­Semite Henry Ford and his chief competitor, General Motors’ Alfred P. Sloan, relied on armies of private detectives and spent millions of dollars a year to keep their factories union free. In fact, under the direction of the former boxer and gangster Harry Bennett, Ford’s innocuously named Service Department grew to become the single largest division in the Ford Motor Company, maintaining discipline on the assembly lines, spying on employees at home, relying on violence and intimidation to stop union organizers. Bennett’s ruthlessness led to the murders and beatings of dozens of union activists; his enforcers, known to the workers as “Ford’s Gestapo,” successfully kept the UAW out of River Rouge until 1941 (the last of the major auto plants to be unionized). While Ford ran his own in-­house army, the other major auto manufacturers outsourced their labor spies. GM became the Pinkertons’ largest industrial client in the mid-­1930s, and Chrysler hired men from the Corporations Auxiliary Services to run stool pigeons, infiltrate unions, and break strikes.29 After decades of protest, the corporate use of private detectives came under sustained political pressure during the Depression. President Roosevelt encouraged a congressional investigation into the practice, and Senator Robert M. La Follette subpoenaed the heads of America’s five largest detective agencies in an investigation into the violation of civil liberties by the “the labor spy racket.” In his book on the La Follette hearings, Leo Huberman wrote: “Many years ago, Henry Demarest Lloyd, a great American, made a profound observation about the ghastly business of industrial espionage. He said, ‘A spy at one end of an institution proves that there is a tyrant at the other’” (fig. 29.)30 An outraged public closely followed the committee’s investigation as it revealed the enormous costs and scale of private policing. This outrage helped bring about real change, hastening the decline of labor spies as collective bargaining, union recognition, and a legal right to strike effectively shifted the work of labor discipline from management onto the union bureaucracy, reining in worker militancy in exchange for less violence, higher wages, and job security.31 As the disciplinary work of the labor spy waned in the 1930s, the cultural work of the private detective story changed directions. If Allan

264  Conclusion

Figure 29. Cover of Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937).

Pinkerton invented the popular American detective novel (apologies to Edgar Allan Poe) as the consummate countersubversive genre in the 1870s, one of his company’s former employees managed to reinvent the genre as a form of left-­wing cultural criticism, turning the dime novel

“Will Fascism Come to America?”   265

procedural into the paperback hardboiled detective novel in the late 1920s. Born in 1894, Dashiell Hammett lived the life of a wandering proletarian until he took a job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency starting in 1914. Hammett once claimed that the Anaconda Copper Company offered him $5,000 to kill the IWW leader Frank Little during the 1916 strike in Butte, Montana. Hammett refused the contract killing, and less than a week later, unknown men abducted Little and lynched him from a railroad trestle. This sequence of events led to a political crisis for Hammett. As his partner Lillian Hellman later recalled: I remember sitting on a bed next to him in the first months we met, listening to him tell me stories about his Pinkerton days when an officer of the Anaconda Copper Company had offered him five thousand dollars to kill Frank Little. . . . From Frank Little’s murder I think I can date Hammett’s belief that he was living in a corrupt society. In time he came to the conclusion that nothing less than a revolution could wipe out the corruption.32

Hammett set off for Europe, where he served as an ambulance driver during the Great War. “Dash” returned to the Pinkertons, staying until 1921, when his declining health and his growing ambitions led him to become a writer. Based on the nameless, unattractive company detective that he might have been himself, Hammett’s “Continental Op” is the most unlikely of heroes in a landscape of pervasive corruption when the detective is sent back to Butte to exact the justice that Little was denied. A thrilling tale of violence, sex, drinking, and more violence, Hammett’s masterpiece Red Harvest—­originally published as a serial in Black Mask magazine in 1927–19­28—­is more than a genre-­making exercise in American prose; it is an allegory of American fascism inspired by the experiences of the IWW. Hammett’s detective arrives in the remote mining town of Personville just as the man who hired him, the last honest man in town, is murdered, leaving the detective to do the job of cleaning up the town on his own terms. To get the skinny on the town all the locals call “Poisonville,” the Op finds the local IWW leader, produces a fake “Red Card” which any good labor spy must carry, and gets the backstory of this terrorized town. Elihu Willsson, the father of the murdered man, who hires the

266  Conclusion

Op, “had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts,” including the mining company, the bank, the town’s only two newspapers, and “along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.” The IWW organized Personville during the war, but in 1921 Willsson went to war and locked the union out, forcing a strike in which “both sides bled plenty.” While the Wobblies did their own bleeding, however, Willsson hired gunmen, strikebreakers, the National Guard, and the army to do his bleeding for him, and by the time the strike came to an end, “organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker.” But as the old Wobbly character explains to his new friend over countless drinks, “old Elihu didn’t know his Italian history. He won the strike but he lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn’t get rid of them. . . . They had won his strike for him and they took the city for their spoils.”33 The novel’s backstory, a historical mapping of corruption and labor violence in the West, comes straight from an old Wobbly’s vision of the conspiracy of capital. One plutocrat, threatened by the One Big Union, makes a deal with gangsters who rule through intimidation and greed. So the Op, motivated by his own moral code as a workingman, sets about pitting these competing factions against one another. A carefully chosen word here, a select rumor there, and the city’s rogues’ gallery unleashes a bloody war on itself. Though Red Harvest was written in the American vein, and published before the Crash and before Hitler’s National Socialists broke the German unions, the Popular Front generation read it as a vision of fascist America, especially as Hammett himself gave up writing in 1934 and became an active member of the Communist Party. If Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel found new readers in the 1930s (such as Leon Trotsky and George Orwell) who were convinced that it was a prophecy of the coming of fascism, twenty years later Hammett’s novel demonstrated to the American Left that fascism, born of a conspiracy between monopoly capitalism and gangsterism, had been upon us since before the Red Scare. This was no revelation to the IWW and African American radicals, who recognized the threat posed by a coalition of monopoly capitalists,

“Will Fascism Come to America?”   267

private detectives, and nativist vigilantes. They saw little difference between the Ku Klux Government and the rise of fascist parties in Europe. Writing in the Industrial Pioneer, a Wobbly monthly magazine, in 1923, an anonymous author puts forward a novel question that would come to dominate the international Left for the next twenty-­five years: What is fascism? The Workers’ Dreadnought of London, England answers “Fascism is the politics of the bruisers.” Or as we Americans would say, it is government by strong arm men and with strong arm methods. But fascism is something more than a reign by terror. Behind fascism, whether in Italy, or in this country, is big business. . . . Big business fears the legal course of political and economic development resulting from the world war. Big business uses force to abort such development as detrimental to itself. . . . Thus in the last analysis, fascism is the terrorism employed by big capitalism to save itself from the revolutionary aftermath of the world-­war and the dawn of the new era. In other words, fascism is the reaction of big business to its own revolutions.34

For the Popular Front generation, fascism meant more than just Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. There were aggressive fascist movements, reactions to both the Bolshevik revolution and the Great Depression, in all the “Western democracies,” most of which rose and fell without taking power. For the Popular Front in the United States, the question “Will fascism come to America?” grew deadly serious from the mid-­1920s to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the threat of fascist conspiracies not only unified the Popular Front but also placed it firmly within the New Deal’s historical bloc.35 The Filipino American farmworker and poet Carlos Bulosan joined a multiracial labor conspiracy against what he recognized as an “open conspiracy to undermine democratic government,” or what he and Carey McWilliams together called “Farm Fascism” in California.36 “From this day onward my life became one long conspiracy,” wrote Bulosan, “working in the daytime and meeting other conspirators at night. I was so intensely fired by this dream of a better America that I had completely forgotten myself.”37 Unlike in Italy after 1922, in Germany after 1933, or in Spain after 1936, the United States lacked a unified fascist party led by a singular charismatic leader, but rather witnessed a scattered set of political phenomena during the 1930s that pushed parts of a recognizably fascist agenda without ever successfully unifying and seizing power. First there were the

268  Conclusion

small but politically significant U.S. supporters of European fascism, like the German American Bund or the American Order of Fascisti. These movements circulated fascist ideology among immigrant groups, were probably responsible for the murder of former IWW radical Carlo Tresca in New York in 1943, and generally fueled the belief that America was riddled with fascist spies.38 The countersubversive vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion grew in the 1920s and expanded to include domestic terrorists like Detroit’s Black Legion, which intimidated and murdered union leaders while serving as night-­riding strikebreakers for the auto industry.39 Right-­wing populism and radio demagoguery expanded throughout the 1930s in reaction to the New Deal and the CIO, led either by driven men at the helm of uniformed social movements, like William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, or charismatic men claiming mass-­mediated followings, like Huey Long with his Share Our Wealth movement or Father Charles Coughlin with his National Union for Social Justice. While many of these groups reflected the anti-­corporate populism of the Depression, they did so by appealing to Americans not as workers but as taxpayers or through right-­wing appeals to race and nation rather than social democracy, placing them well to the right of the New Deal.40 Last, there was a series of business leaders who sought to lead the people against the New Deal either directly, as with William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford, or via quasi-­patriotic organizations like the DuPont-­and General Motors–­funded American Liberty League.41 It was with these well-­financed and reactionary corporate enterprises in mind that George Seldes, an inveterate critic of the capitalist press and one of the Popular Front generation’s best investigative journalists, warned his readers of what he called a “fascist fifth-­column conspiracy in American big business.”42 Though it is almost entirely forgotten today, the 1930s featured a failed attempt by the reactionary rich to organize a fascist coup d’état to depose FDR. In the summer of 1933, representatives of the Liberty League approached retired marine major general Smedley Darlington Butler and asked him to run for the presidency of the American Legion. Butler was skeptical of these rather shady emissaries’ intentions, especially after he got the speech they wanted him to deliver to the Legion, calling for a return to the gold standard. Nevertheless, Butler went along with the

“Will Fascism Come to America?”   269

Figure 30. “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy,” The New Masses, February 5, 1935.

plot until it became clear to him that the real goal was to use the Legion as a domestic army with which to overthrow the president and institute a fascist America. Butler blew the whistle and demanded a congressional investigation. The evidence presented by Butler to the McCormack-­ Dickstein Committee confirmed the facts of the plot, but the committee withheld information connecting the conspiracy to the DuPont family and J. P. Morgan and Company. This left the radical journalists Seldes

270  Conclusion

and John L. Spivak to expose “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy” in the pages of The New Masses (fig. 30). “An organized conspiracy exists to seize the government by a fascist coup,” writes Spivak, one of the Popular Front generation’s brashest radical journalists. “The Congressional Committee appointed to investigate just such activities has not only failed to follow the trail of evidence to its fountain head—­Wall Street—­but has deliberately suppressed evidence pointing in that direction.”43 Just as John Reed had done with the Preparedness Movement, Seldes and Spivak traced the Liberty League back to many of the largest financial interests in the United States, including a number of companies with considerable investments in Nazi Germany. In the antifascist culture of the Popular Front, a Wall Street–­financed coup attempt was one thing—­New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia dismissed it as a “Cocktail Putsch”—­but war itself was the greatest conspiracy of all. After exposing the plot and testifying before Congress, General Butler became an aggressive campaigner against war. In 1935 he published War Is a Racket, a forgotten classic of American politics. He writes: War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows about what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of that very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-­class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.44

The personal odyssey of Smedley Darlington Butler, transitioning from the nation’s most decorated soldier to supporter of the Bonus Marchers and the army’s harshest critic, is on one level the story of one man’s radicalization through the exposing of a fascist and countersubversive conspiracy. But on another level, it is the ideal articulation of how Americans viewed Nazism in the run-­up to World War II—­as a gangster state

“Will Fascism Come to America?”   271

ruled by a tiny cabal of funny-­looking men out to steal as much of the world and enslave as many of its people as they could. To the radicals of the Popular Front, this monstrous new political formation became the name of the enemy, completing the story of how the conspiracy of capital mutated into fascism. The claim that a conspiracy lay behind aggressive war played itself out through the end of World War II, after which came perhaps history’s greatest conspiracy trial: the Nuremberg trials of twenty high-­ranking Nazi Party and military officials. Here, leading Nazi intellectuals and military commanders sat together in the dock with the directors of industrial armament companies and finance ministers, charged by the international community with a criminal conspiracy against peace, conspiracy to make aggressive war, and conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity. For the first and perhaps the only time in history, an American prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, used the surplus repressive capacity and evidentiary procedures of the conspiracy doctrine to serve the progressive political purpose of defending civil liberties and human rights against their most violent enemies, a moment fueled by the Popular Front’s understanding that fascism was a conspiracy against democracy and the world’s many peoples.45 The power to name the enemy, to recognize and personify that enemy, has long been the very basis of political power.46 For the countersubversive right, these names speak of a demonized other and the power of violence to define national identity: the savage Indian, the Negro rapist, the anarchist dynamiter, the subversive communist, the Islamic terrorist. For the Left, naming the enemy is equally important: plutocrats and autocrats, the bosses, fascists, the Man, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the media monopoly, the 1 percent, the Koch brothers, racist police, the alt-­right. Such naming is often essential in building coalitional politics, in drawing people together into a common fight and establishing the adversarial relationships that are an essential element in politics. But for the Left, the power that comes with naming the enemy is often a double-­edged sword. Naming a specific enemy can be both empowering and limiting; it can be focused and concrete, but it can also be inflexible,

272  Conclusion

unsophisticated, and demonizing in a way that threatens to mirror the countersubversive tradition. The temptation since the 1960s has been for the Left to name pure abstractions as the enemy: the system, pollution, structural racism, patriarchy, globalization, or inequality. While these terms carry sufficient intellectual integrity, they also serve as the hallmark of a political Left that is more capacious in critique than in praxis. Whatever names are given to the enemies of progress and equality, we find ourselves in the twenty-­first century in a similar place to the early twentieth. We find a similar recognition that American democracy is both deeply flawed and constantly threatened. That a powerful combination of the rich and the racist threatens us all. That courts which place property rights over human rights drive political and economic inequality. That privatized war, incarceration, and policing threaten social stability. That those who wear uniforms do not serve a universal purpose. And in this ongoing crisis, those who believe in social justice need to understand that the enemy is not some abstraction, that confrontation and direct action are necessary, because those who wield real power do not share a common definition of freedom and progress, and that there is more at work than just a complex, overdetermined, and impersonal system that denies the world’s majority basic social justice. That we have a real enemy, with names and faces, who benefits from injustice and stands in the way of human equality, an enemy who must be seen, named, and fought. This remains a fundamental lesson to be learned and relearned about the “conspiracy of capital” from the first Age of Monopoly.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: “THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL” 1.  Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 38. 2.  Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It (Washington, DC: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1914), 22–­23; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1939); Frederic C. Howe, Privilege and Democracy in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 59–­63. 3.  Sarah E. V. Emery, Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People, rev. ed. (1887; Lansing, MI: Robert Smith & Co., 1894); John Moody and George Kibbe Turner, “Masters of Capital in America: The Seven Men,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1911, 418–­28; Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (1909; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1937), 96; Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1894); William T. Brown, “Plutocracy or Democracy?” International Socialist Review 1 (July 1900): 12–­13; Clarence Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies (Portland, OR: Otto Newman Publisher, 1912). 4.  Clinton Bancroft, The Conspiracy of Capital (Girard, KS: J. A. Wayland, 1901); Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 2 (1931; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 704; Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 206. 5.  In writing the history of the Haymarket generation, I am taking an explicitly “generational” approach like that pioneered by Raymond Williams, Culture & Society: 1780–­1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); and Michael Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn,” in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), 75–­96. 273

274  Notes to Pages 4–7

6.  The term “popular radicalism” is taken from the work of the English labor historian E. P. Thompson, who coined the phrase to describe the “intellectual culture” and “political consciousness” among ordinary working people as a means by which grassroots social movements advance “the articulate consciousness of the self-­taught.” E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 711. 7.  Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78. On sovereignty and legitimacy, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (1932; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 8.  Philip Taft and Philip Ross, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome,” in History of Violence in America, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Bantam, 1969), 281. The term “repressive state apparatus” derives from the work of Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–­88. On the history of private detectives, see Robert Weiss, “Private Detective Agencies and Labor Discipline in the United States, 1855–­1946,” Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1986): 87–­107; Weiss, “The Emergence and Transformation of Private Detective Industrial Policing in the United States, 1850–­1940,” Crime and Social Justice 9 (Spring–­Summer 1978): 35–­48; Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-­ Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937); Edward Levinson, I Break Strikes!: The Technique of Pearl L. Bergoff (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1935); Frank Morn, “The Eye That Never Sleeps”: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982). 9. “Conspiracy,” The Masses, September 1914, 6. 10.  Zechariah Chafee Jr., Free Speech in the United States, 2nd ed. (1941; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969), 85. 11.  Jeff Greenfield, “Conspiracy: Darling of the Prosecutor’s Nursery,” New York Times, May 30, 1971; Francis B. Sayre, “Criminal Conspiracy,” Harvard Law Review 35 (February 1922): 393–­427; Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Geoffrey M. Pommer, “The Political Use of the Conspiracy Charge in America” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1976). 12.  Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States (New York: Verso, 1991); James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–­1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984).

Notes to Pages 7–9 275

13.  Gramsci describes the “organic intellectual” as an “active participation in practical life, as conductor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” The organic intellectual emerges out of a specific social formation or position and then seeks to articulate the political vision and demands of that same community. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 10. 14.  The historian Donald Sassoon provides a useful definition of pre-­1914 “vulgar Marxism” as consisting of three principles: (1) The capitalist system is unfair because the wage relation disguises a fundamentally unequal relationship of economic power between employer and worker; (2) history proceeds through a constantly evolving series of stages and struggles, and while each stage corresponds to a specific economic system and ruling class, the current stage of capitalism is not everlasting; and (3) the working class is a fundamentally homogeneous class regardless of superficial divisions of race or nation, and workers the world over have the same interests in common and must collectively organize to bring about a more just world. This simple trinity of vulgar Marxism embraces the Marxist economic theory of exploitation and surplus value, the theory of class struggle and historical materialism, and the political agendas of working-­class internationalism. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1996), 5–­8. 15.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Penguin Press, 1996), 11. 16.  Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-­American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-­Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-­Masonic, Anti-­ Catholic, and Anti-­Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 2 (1960): 205–­24; Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right (New York: Anchor Books, 1963). 17.  Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 140–­41. 18.  This book builds on the contributions of many scholars working in the field of conspiracy studies, especially Kathryn Olmsted’s work on the contradictions between state secrecy and democracy in the twentieth century, Mark Lane and Peter Knight’s works on 1990s conspiracy theory as a postmodern narrative form, and Jodi Dean’s work on how beliefs around UFOs help illuminate the epistemological roots of political community and conflict. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy

276  Notes to Pages 9–11

Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-­Files (London: Routledge, 2000); Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Culture from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Patricia Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Eric Ward, ed., Conspiracies: Real Grievances, Paranoia, and Mass Movements (Vancouver: Peanut Butter Publishing, 1996); George E. Marcus, ed., Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lance deHaven-­Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 19.  In writing this book has I have learned a great deal from scholars who have rewritten the history of American terrorism after 9/11, including Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York: Verso 2007); Mike Davis, “Artisans of Terror,” in In Praise of Barbarians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 263–­72; Jeffory A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Timothy Messer-­Kruse, The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 20.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowks (New York: Penguin, 1990), 414. 21.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–­1880 (1935; repr., New York: Meridian Books, 1962); David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2017); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Verso, 2003). 22.  Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-­American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978); Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998); Glenda E. Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–­1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 23.  Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-­Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919–­1925 (Bloomington:

Notes to Pages 11–20 277

Indiana University Press, 1998); Shelley Streeby, Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 24.  Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 70. 25.  David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 9–­10. 26. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 39. 27.  Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, chap. 10. 28.  “Federal Criminal Conspiracy,” American Criminal Law Review 41 (2004): 611. 29.  Appeal to Reason, May 31, 1913, 1. 30.  “A Criminal Conspiracy” The New Day, September 11, 1920, 3. 31.  Eugene Debs, “The Cartoonist and the Social Revolution,” in The Red Portfolio: Cartoons for Socialists (Girard, KS: Appeal Press, 1912). 32.  Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 193–­224; Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911–­1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); William L. O’Neill, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–­1917 (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989). 33.  Floyd Dell, “The Story of the Trial,” The Liberator, June 1918, 7–­23; John Reed, “About the Second Masses Trial,” The Liberator, December 1918, 36–­38; Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-­and-­Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 219–­51. 34.  Michael Mark Cohen, “‘Cartooning Capitalism’: Radical Cartooning and the Making of American Popular Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 35–­58. 35.  There are two versions of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World. The first version was adopted at the founding convention in Chicago in 1905, and a second, slightly longer version was adopted in 1908. This concluding line, reprinted in Becker’s drawing, appears only in the 1908 version. Both versions can be found in Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1998), 12–­13. Also see the website www. cartooningcapitalism.com. 36.  Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 9–­84; Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 145. 37. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 76, 86. 38.  Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 356. 39.  The Marxist concept of totality, as used by Jameson, begins with Georg Lukács, who calls it “the all-­pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts.” For

278  Notes to Pages 20–24

“in the last analysis,” writes Lukács, “Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent science of law, economics or history, etc.: there is nothing but a single, unified—­dialectical and historical—­science of the evolution of society as a totality.” Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 27–­28. Inspired by Lukács, but tempered by postmodern sensibilities, Jameson is skeptical of the representational possibilities of totality. He argues that every model of totality fails, but that a failed model of totality is better than no model at all. And those failures are themselves revealing. “Without a conception of the social totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social system),” concludes Jameson, “no properly socialist politics is possible.” Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 355; also see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 40.  Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 353. 41. Marx, Capital, 1:254; Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (New York: Verso, 2011); David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books: 2012); Robert Paul Wolff, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 42.  Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), 590. 43.  Karl Marx, “Thesis on Feuerbach” (1845), in Early Writings (New York: Penguin Press, 1974), 423. 44.  Hofstadter first delivered this lecture on November 21, 1963, followed by publication in Harper’s magazine a year later. A complete version of the essay appeared as the opening chapter in a book of the same title: Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 3–­40. 45. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 14, 7, 5. 46.  See Bell, The Radical Right; Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Boston: Addison-­Wesley, 1954); Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 47.  The most controversial aspect of Hofstadter’s argument was his critique of the Populists in The Age of Reform. The sharpest and most sustained critique of Hofstadter’s version of Populism comes from Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967); and C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 29, no. 1 (Winter 1959–­60): 55–­72. For more recent interventions in this debate, see Jeffery Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History 69, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 1–­27; Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In 2006, Jon Weiner summed up the current consensus on this debate: “Hofstadter’s argument that the historical roots of

Notes to Pages 25–36 279

McCarthyism lay in the Populist tradition . . . is simply wrong.” Jon Weiner, “America, Through the Glass Darkly,” The Nation, October 23, 2006, 36–­40. 48. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 3. 49.  Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xiii. 50. Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie, xiii. 51.  Theodor W. Adorno, “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column,” in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook (New York: Routledge, 1994), 88. 52.  Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 53.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), trans. George Lawrence (New York: Perennial Library, 1988), 193.

CHAPTER 1: “THIS WORN-­O UT PIECE OF TYRANNY” 1.  Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932), 64–­65. 2. Darrow, Story of My Life, 122–­23. 3.  Clarence Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies (Portland, OR: Otto Newman Publisher, 1912), 4. This pamphlet reprints a lecture by Darrow in the Heilig Theater in Portland, Oregon, on September 10, 1912, shortly after his acquittal on bribery charges in Los Angeles. 4.  Clarence Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy: The Kidd Case, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 1898,” in Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom, ed. Arthur Weinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 276–­326, 269. 5.  Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1995); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006). 6.  On the history of dynamite and revolutionary conspiracy, see Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1934); Timothy Messer-­Kruse, The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution, 1789–­1848 (1962; repr., New York: Vintage, 1996), 109–­31; James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).

280  Notes to Pages 36–41

7.  Fielden is quoted in James Green, Death in the Haymarket, 186. In addition to Green’s work, this account is based on several full-­length studies of the Haymarket bombing, including Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986). 8.  The exact accounting of the dead in the Haymarket has been performed by Timothy Messer-­Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 187–­88. 9.  Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 10.  Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe: Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators (Chicago: F. J. Schulte & Co., 1889), 156; Chicago Times quoted in Green, Death in the Haymarket, 192–93. 11.  Mother Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925; repr., Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1996), 21. 12.  Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7–­43. 13.  “Merritt Conspiracy Act,” in The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America, vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Kittrie and Eldon Wedlock (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 247. 14.  Shelley Streeby, Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 36–­107. 15.  Franklin Rosemont, “A Bomb-­Toting, Long-­Haired, Wild-­Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture,” in Roediger and Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook, 203–­12; Jeffory A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 33–­68. 16.  Schnaubelt himself wrote in April 1887: “Had I in fact thrown the bomb, I would surely have no reason to be ashamed. As it was, such an act had never occurred to me.” Despite this fact, he remains the most commonly cited culprit. Frank Harris, in his 1908 novel The Bomb, presents the fictionalized confession of Schnaubelt as the bomb thrower. Historian Timothy Messer-Kruse also agrees with the Chicago police, claiming that Schnaubelt was the “likely bomber.” Messer-­Kruse, Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists, 17. Few historians agree with this claim. In The Haymarket Tragedy, Paul Avrich insists that Schnaubelt had nothing to do with the bombing, nor was he a spy. Instead, Avrich argues that the most likely candidate for the bomb thrower was a German shoemaker and militant named George Schwab (no relation to the accused Michael Schwab), who refused to speak publicly or turn himself in, especially after it became clear that his stepping forward would only make him one more victim. In subsequent publications, Avrich offered up another possible name, that of George Meng,

Notes to Pages 41–45 281

a militant atheist and anarchist born in Bavaria around 1840, an active participant in the formation of the American anarchist movement. On the basis of evidence provided by Meng’s granddaughter, Avrich is “inclined to believe” that Meng threw the bomb, but solid proof remains unavailable. Paul Avrich, “The Bomb-­Thrower: A New Candidate,” in Roediger and Rosemont, Haymarket Scrapbook, 71–­73. 17.  Quoted in Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 277. 18.  “Address of Michael Schwab,” in The Chicago Martyrs: The Famous Speeches of the Eight Anarchists in Judge Gary’s Court and Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab by John P. Altgeld (San Francisco: Free Society Publishers, 1899), 17. 19.  Timothy Messer-­Kruse, James O. Eckert Jr., Pannee Burckel, and Jeffrey Dunn, “The Haymarket Bomb: Reassessing the Evidence,” Labor: Studies in Working-­Class History of the Americas 2, no. 2 (2005): 39–­51; Bryan Palmer, “CSI Labor History: Haymarket and the Forensics of Forgetting,” Labor 3, no. 1 (2006): 25–­36. 20.  On Albert Parsons, see, Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 3–­55. 21.  “Address of August Spies,” in The Chicago Martyrs, 7. 22.  “Address of Michael Schwab,” 17. 23.  “Address of Albert R. Parsons,” in The Chicago Martyrs, 105. 24.  “Address of Albert R. Parsons,” 97–­98. 25.  Two books on Haymarket by Timothy Messer-­Kruse published in 2013, The Haymarket Conspiracy and The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists, reopened discussions about the legal details of the case. Messer-­Kruse asks two crucial questions: Was there a conspiracy to attack the police in the Haymarket on May 4? And did the arrested men get a fair trial according to the standards of their day? Messer-­Kruse answers yes to both questions, challenging what he describes as an “orthodoxy” among historians who see the men as victims of state violence, rendering these violent revolutionaries “pacified and disarmed by New Left historians” (Haymarket Conspiracy, 185). While Messer-­Kruse is convincing in his evidence that Lingg and Spies built bombs and planned to attack the police on May 4, his larger conclusions do not address the case of Albert Parsons. This is because Parsons was innocent of the conspiracy charge and wrongfully executed for his political solidarity. While Avrich and Green put Parsons at the center of works that insist on the injustice of the Haymarket trial, Messer-­Kruse marginalizes Parsons’s story from his works which condemn the anarchists. What is at stake in my argument is the central role played by the dialectics of conspiracy in narrating and convicting the Haymarket anarchists. “Fair” trial or not, the political threat posed by the conspiracy charge was never lost on this generation of radicals. 26.  Judge Gary, “The Chicago Anarchists of 1886: The Crime, the Trial, and the Punishment,” Century Illustrated Magazine, April 1893, 830, 809. 27.  John P. Altgeld, “Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab,” in The Chicago Martyrs, 153. 28. Darrow, The Story of My Life, 101. 29.  Quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 441.

282  Notes to Pages 46–52

30. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 444. 31.  On the history of labor defense campaigns, see Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-­Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). On the history of May Day, see Philip S. Foner, May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886–­1986 (New York: International Publishers, 1985); Peter Linebaugh, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). 32.  Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255. 33.  Eugene V. Debs, “The Martyred Apostles of Labor,” in Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1908), 263. 34.  Eugene V. Debs, “Looking Backward,” Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, 286. 35.  Art Young, His Life and Times, ed. John Nicholas Beffel (New York: Sheridan House, 1939), 81; Young, “Haymarket Square, Chicago, May 4, 1886,” The New Masses, May 2, 1939, 11–­13; “From Art Young’s Notebook,” The New Masses, April 11, 1939, 10–­13. 36. Young, His Life and Times, 221. 37.  Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (1931; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 10. 38.  Voltairine de Cleyre, The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895–­1910, ed. Paul Avrich (New York: Cienfuegos Press, 1980), 3; Blaine McKinley, “‘A Religion of the New Time’: Anarchist Memorials to the Haymarket Martyrs, 1888–­1917,” Labor History 28, no. 3 (1987): 386–­400. 39.  Lucy Parsons, Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878–­1937, ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003); Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976); Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 40.  Alexander Berkman, “The Causes of the Chicago Martyrdom,” Mother Earth, November 1912, 283. 41. Darrow, The Story of My Life, 32. 42.  In addition to Darrow’s autobiography, I have depended on Arthur and Lila Weinberg, Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel (New York: Atheneum, 1987); Andrew Kersten, Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011); John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (New York: Doubleday, 2011). Also see the University of Minnesota Law Library’s Clarence Darrow Digital Collection http://darrow.law.umn.edu/index.php. 43. Darrow, The Story of My Life, 41. 44.  Clarence Darrow, “Letter to the Ashtabula Democratic Standard, Chicago, Wednesday 24 August 1887,” in In the Clutches of the Law: Clarence Darrow’s Letters, ed. Randall Tietjen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 56–­60. 45. Darrow, The Story of My Life, 99.

Notes to Pages 52–56 283

46.  Krulewitch v. United States, 336 U.S. 440 (1949), 336, Justice Jackson concurring in the judgment and opinion of the Court. 47.  Hampton L. Carson, The Law of Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements: As Found in the American Cases (New York: Blackstone, 1887), 92; Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 30–­75; Jeff Greenfield, “Conspiracy: ‘Darling of the Prosecutor’s Nursery,’” New York Times, May 30, 1971. 48.  This division is suggested by Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power; Fred J. Abbate, “The Conspiracy Doctrine: A Critique,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 3, no. 3. (Spring 1974): 295–­311. 49. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power, 30. 50. Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies, 6. 51. Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies, 10. 52.  On the Santa Clara case and corporate personhood, see Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1856–­1900 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 148–­91; Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (Autumn 1987): 1441–­83; Robert P. Griffin, “Corporations: Artificial ‘Persons’ and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Michigan Law Review 48, no. 7 (May 1950): 983–­93. 53.  Howard Jay Graham, “The ‘Conspiracy Theory’ of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Yale Law Journal 47, no. 3 (January 1938): 371–­403; Graham, Everyman’s Constitution: Historical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “Conspiracy Theory,” and American Constitutionalism (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1968), 23–­97; James F. S. Russell, “The Railroads in the ‘Conspiracy Theory’ of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41, no. 4 (March 1955): 601–­22. 54.  Clarence Darrow, “Strike, Arbitration: Anthracite Miners, Scranton and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1903,” in Attorney for the Damned, 404. 55.  Francis B. Sayer, “Criminal Conspiracy,” Harvard Law Review 35 (February 1922): 420. 56. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power; William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Josiah Bartlett Lambert, “If the Workers Took a Notion”: The Right to Strike and American Political Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Herbert Hovenkamp, “Labor Conspiracies in American Law, 1880–­1930,” Texas Law Review 66, no. 5 (April 1988): 919–­65; Anthony Woodiwiss, Rights v. Conspiracy: A Sociological Essay on the History of Labor Law in the United States (New York: Berg, 1990). 57.  Forbath includes a complete list of court challenges to labor-­backed laws in the appendices to Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, 177–­203. 58. Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies, 5.

284  Notes to Pages 56–62

59.  David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96. 60.  Robert Weiss, “Private Detective Agencies and Labor Discipline in the United States, 1855–­1946,” The Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1986): 87–­107; Weiss, “The Emergence and Transformation of Private Detective Industrial Policing in the United State, 1850–­1940,” Crime and Social Justice 9 (Spring–­Summer 1978): 35–­48; Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937). 61.  Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 19–­66. 62.  Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. 63. Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires; Gowan quoted in Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (Pittsburgh: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1965), 53. 64.  Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877; repr., New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1905); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-­Class Culture in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1998). 65.  Foner denied the existence of the Molly Maguires, insisting, “The entire case was a conspiracy of reactionary employers against a militant labor movement.” Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1, From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 464. 66. Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 10. 67.  Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy,” 269–­70. 68.  On the Oshkosh strike, see Kersten, Clarence Darrow, 85–­95. 69.  Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy,” 271, 273. 70.  Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy,” 248–­49. 71.  “Ordinance concerning Conspirators” (33 Edw. I, AD 1305): “Conspirators be they that do confeder or bind themselves by oath, covenant or other alliance, (1) that every of them shall aid and (bear) the other falsely and maliciously to indite (or cause to indite); or (2) falsely or move or maintain pleas; (3) and also such as cause childred within age to appeal men of felony whereby they are imprisoned or sore grieved; (4) and such as remain men in the country with liveries or fees for to maintain their malicious enterprises; and this extendith as well to the takers as to the givers; (5) and stewards and bailiffs of great lords, which by their seignory, office or power undertake (to bear or maintain quarrels, pleas or debates that concern other parties) than such as touch the estate of their lords or themselves.” See Alan Harding, “The Origins of the Crime of Conspiracy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 89–­108; Frank P. Blair, “The Judge-­Made Law of Conspiracy,” American Law Review 37 (1903): 33–­62; John Bryan, “The Development of the English Law of Conspiracy,” Johns Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science, vol. 27 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1909).

Notes to Pages 62–67 285

72.  Archie Green, “Fink: Streets, Docks, Factories,” in Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 140–­75. 73.  Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy,” 298, 282, 297, 310. 74. Weinberg, Attorney for the Damned, 267. 75.  Sayre, “Criminal Conspiracy,” 398. 76.  Sayre, “Criminal Conspiracy,” 402. 77.  Sayre, “Criminal Conspiracy,” 406. 78.  Rex v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge (88 Eng. Rep. 9, 10, 1721); Hattam, Labor Visions, 35. 79.  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage 1966), 198, 515–­21. 80. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 472–­602. 81.  Darrow, “Somewhere There Is a Conspiracy,” 296–­97. 82.  The complete transcripts of the Philadelphia and New York Cordwainers cases are reprinted in John R. Commons and Eugene A. Gilmore, eds., Labor Conspiracy Cases, 1806–­1842, vols. 3 and 4 of Documentary History of American Industrial Society, ed. John R. Commons et al. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1910), 59–­249, 251–­385; Richard B. Morris, “Criminal Conspiracy and Early Labor Combinations in New York,” Political Science Quarterly 52, no. 1 (March 1937): 51–­85; Marjorie S. Turner, The Early American Labor Conspiracy Cases: Their Place in Labor Law; A Reinterpretation, Social Science Monograph Series, vol. 1, no. 3 (San Diego: San Diego State College Press, 1967). 83. Woodiwiss, Rights v. Conspiracy, 54–­55. 84.  In the 1809 New York Cordwainers case, the judge convicted a combination of shoemakers for using “arbitrary and coercive means” in their strike after deeming the initial organization to be legal. In 1815 a judge used the “restraint of trade” doctrine to convict the union in the Pittsburgh Cordwainers case for their use of “arbitrary and coercive means.” By the time of the 1821 Commonwealth v. Carlisle case in Pennsylvania, labor believed that the “legitimate ends” of collective union activity had been judicially upheld, despite the fact that the broad interpretation of “illegitimate means” nearly always meant that strikes, picket lines, boycotts, or any other direct action made union activity illegal. But even this minor legal concession was withdrawn only a few years later. Christopher L. Tomlins, “Criminal Conspiracy and Early Labor Combinations: Massachusetts, 1824–­1840,” Labor History 28, no. 3 (1987): 381; Sean Wilentz, “Conspiracy, Power, and the Early Labor Movement: The People v. James Melvin et al., 1811,” Labor History 24 (1983): 572–­79. 85.  Quoted in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 1:78. 86.  Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–­1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 291. 87. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 294. 88.  David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–­1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 146–­47.

286  Notes to Pages 67–73

89.  Clifford Brigham, “Strikes and Boycotts as Indictable Conspiracies at Common Law,” American Law Review 21 (January–­February 1887): 41–­69; Arthur James Selfridge, “American Law of Strikes and Boycotts as Crimes,” American Law Review 22 (March–­April 1888): 233–­50; E. P. Cheyney, “Decisions of the Courts in Conspiracy and Boycott Cases,” Political Science Quarterly 4, no. 2 (June 1889): 261–­78. 90.  “Socialists Lifting Their Voices,” New York Times, May 16, 1886; “The Platform of the Socialistic Labor Party (1880),” in Oakley C. Johnson, Marxism in United States History before the Russian Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), 160–­63. On the Socialist Labor Party, see Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States (New York: Verso, 1991), 50–­57. 91. Hattam, Labor Visions. 92.  Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Green, The Labor Injunction (New York: Macmillan, 1930); Donald McMurry, “The Legal Ancestry of the Pullman Strike Injunctions,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 14, no. 2 (January 1961): 235–­56; Hovenkamp, “Labor Conspiracies in American Law, 1880–­1930.” 93.  Numbers of injunctions cited in Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present (New York: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1978), 19. 94.  Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–­ 1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 86–­146. 95.  Quoted in McMurry, “The Legal Ancestry of the Pullman Strike Injunctions,” 246. 96. Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies, 6–­7. 97. Darrow, Industrial Conspiracies, 7. 98.  Eugene Debs, “How I Became a Socialist,” originally published in The Comrade, April 1902; reprinted in Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, 80–­81; Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949); Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). 99.  Almont Lindsey, The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942); Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: Chicago from 1892–­1905 (New York: Marcus Wiener Publishing, 1986); Richard Schneirov, Sheldon Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). 100.  Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1972), 85. 101.  “In re Debs Injunction,” in Kittrie and Wedlock, The Tree of Liberty, 252–­55. 102.  Debs, “Why I Became a Socialist,” 82–­83. 103. Papke, The Pullman Case, 44. 104. Lindsey, The Pullman Strike, 299.

Notes to Pages 75–83 287

105.  Darrow quoted in Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, 24. 106.  United States v. Debs, 64 F. 724 (C.C. Ill. 1894), Federal Reporter, vol. 64, 735. 107.  Originally published in Eugene Debs, “Present Conditions and Future Duties,” Railway Times, January 1, 1897; reprinted in Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, 20. 108. Ginger, The Bending Cross. 109.  Quoted in Ralph Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy (Seattle: IWW Publishing, 1920), 76.

CHAPTER 2: “SENSATIONAL WRITING AND A FIGHT” 1.  Harry Orchard, “The Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard,” McClure’s Magazine, November 1907, 125. 2.  Quoted in Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 143. The most detailed account of the Haywood trial is J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). At more than eight hundred pages, Lukas’s book delves deeply into the case and ranges widely across its background, yet the Pulitzer-­winning journalist could find no clear evidence of Haywood’s guilt. Sadly, Lukas committed suicide before finishing the book. In his conclusion, he suggests that Haywood was probably guilty, as proven somehow by the behavior of Appeal to Reason journalist George Shoaf, discussed later in this chapter. This conclusion, I argue, is wholly unconvincing. On the publication history of Big Trouble, see Doreen Carvajal, “Survived by His Book,” New York Times, October 12, 1997. Also see David H. Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters: The Story of the Haywood Trial (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1964); Abe C. Ravitz and James Neal Primm, ed. The Haywood Case: Materials for Analysis (San Francisco: Chandler Press, 1960). 3.  Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy (New York: Wilshire Book Co., 1907), 196. 4.  Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-­Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1998), 118. 5.  George Allan England, “The Story of the Appeal to Reason,” Appeal to Reason, August 30, 1913, 2. 6.  For a full breakdown of the Appeal’s circulation and its relationship to Socialist Party membership, see Fred Warren, The Appeal’s Arsenal of Facts (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1913), 11–­17. 7.  “The President’s Ire Aroused by the Appeal’s Great Story!” Appeal to Reason, April 21, 1906, 2; Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Pasadena: Published by the author, 1920), 47; Anthony Arthur, Upton Sinclair: Radical Innocent (New York: Random House, 2006).

288  Notes to Pages 83–87

8.  A. M. Simons, “J. A. Wayland, Propagandist,” Metropolitan Magazine, January 1913, 25. 9.  Lenin quoted from 1916 in Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 75. Daniel Bell, by contrast, referred to the Appeal as “socialism’s cracker-­barrel weekly.” Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 47. 10.  England, “The Story of the Appeal to Reason,” 2. Elliott Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Radical Press (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988); John Graham, ed., “Yours for the Revolution”: “The Appeal to Reason,” 1895–­1922 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Paul Buhle, “The Appeal to Reason,” in The American Radical Press, 1880–­1960, vol. 1, ed. Joseph R. Conlin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 50–­59; Allen Ruff, “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); James R. Green, Grass-­Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–­1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill Company, 1953), 175–­209; Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–­1912 (1952; repr., Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004). 11.  George H. Shoaf, “The Biggest Little Paper This Country Ever Knew,” Monthly Review 3 (July 1951): 96. 12.  Fredric Jameson writes about the “social detective” who exposes crimes of a broader, more “collective” significance, thereby necessitating a “supplement of motivation” beyond the ordinary drives of the police or private detectives. Fredric Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 37. 13.  J. A. Wayland, “Appeal Held Up by Military Authorities in Colorado,” Appeal to Reason, February 20, 1904, 1. 14.  “Psychologists aren’t sure whether powerlessness causes conspiracy theories or vice versa. Either way, the current scientific thinking suggests these beliefs are nothing more than an extreme form of cynicism, a turning away from politics and traditional media—­which only perpetuates the problem.” Maggie Koerth-­Baker, “Why Rational People Buy into Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2013, 15. 15.  J. A. Wayland, Leaves of Life: A Story of Twenty Years of Socialist Agitation (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1912); George D. Brewer, The Wayland I Knew: A Character Sketch of the “One Hoss” Editor and Founder of the Appeal to Reason (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1912); England, The Story of the Appeal. 16.  On the economic transformation of Colorado, see Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: American’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–­1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 17.  Quoted in Simons, “J. A. Wayland, Propagandist,” 26. 18.  Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn

Notes to Pages 87–93 289

of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 19.  Appeal to Reason, January 3, 1903, 1. 20.  “The Story of the Appeal Strike and Its Settlement,” Appeal to Reason, November 7, 1903, 1; Elliott Shore, “The Walkout at the Appeal and the Dilemmas of American Socialism,” History Workshop, no. 22 (Autumn 1986): 41–­55. 21.  Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–­1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 113–­18; Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 149–­61. 22.  Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 45–­67. 23.  Advertisement for The Appeal Almanac and Arsenal of Facts for 1915, Appeal to Reason, March 23, 1915, 5. 24.  Appeal to Reason, August 31, 1895, 1. 25. Warren, The Appeal’s Arsenal of Facts, 11–­17. 26.  Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955), 60–­93; Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 172–­73; Jeffrey Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History 69, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 4, 24. 27. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism; Green, Grass-­Roots Socialism. 28.  Appeal to Reason, August 31, 1901, 3. 29.  Worth Robert Miller, Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third-­ Party Movement in the 1890s (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2011); Dave Gilson, “Octopi Wall Street!” Mother Jones, October 6, 2011. 30.  “The Paper That Does Things,” Appeal to Reason, November 1, 1913, 1. 31.  Appeal Army Picture Gallery (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1905); The Who’s Who in Socialist America for 1914 (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1914); also see James R. Green, “The ‘Salesmen-­Soldiers’ of the ‘Appeal Army’: A Profile of Rank-­and-­File Socialist Agitators,” in Socialism and the Cities, ed. Bruce M. Stave (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975), 13–­37. 32.  Debs contributed to the Appeal from its earliest issues. Eugene Debs, “Money Power Now Exerts Barbaric Sway—­In No Country Are Conditions More Deplorable,” Appeal to Reason, October 28, 1895, 2. 33. Warren, The Appeal’s Arsenal of Facts, 11–­17. 34.  Mary Vincent Cummings, “Memories of Girard, Kansas, Eugene V. Debs and Me” (published by Merrily Cummings Ford, 1976), Labadie Collection, University of Michigan; J. A. Wayland, “One Year’s Work,” Appeal to Reason, September 14, 1907, 1. 35.  Berger quoted in Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 198. 36.  Frank Bohn, “The Socialist Movement in the Middle West,” The Revolt, June 3, 1911. 37.  John Spargo, “The Class War in Colorado,” The Comrade 3 (July 1904): 207; Henry O. Morris, “The Conspiracy Against Labor in Colorado,” Wilshire’s, May

290  Notes to Pages 93–98

1904, 219; A. M. Simons, “Russianizing America,” International Socialist Review 4 (January 1904): 385–­86. 38.  Job Harriman, The Class War in Idaho: The Horrors of the Bull Pen; An Indictment of Combined Capital in Conspiracy with President McKinley, General Merriam and Governor Steunenberg, for Their Crimes against the Miners of the Cour D’Alenes, 3rd ed. (New York, 1900); Melvyn Dubofsky, “The Origins of Western Working-­Class Radicalism, 1890–­1905,” Labor History Reader, ed. Daniel Leab (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Vernon Jensen, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous Metals Industry up to 1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968); David Berman, Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890–­1920: Socialists, Populists, Miners, and Wobblies (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2007). 39.  Quoted in George G. Suggs Jr., Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1972), 39. On the history of the Colorado mining wars, see Emma F. Langdon, The Cripple Creek Strike: A History of the Industrial Wars in Colorado, 1903–­4–­5; Being a Complete and Concise History of the Efforts of Organized Capital to Crush Unionism (Denver: Great Western Publishing Co, 1904–190­5); Mary Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925), 94–­113; Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Maryjoy Martin, The Corpse on the Boomerang Road: Telluride’s War on Labor, 1899–­1908 (Montrose, CO: Western Reflections Publishing, 2004); Suggs, Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle, 1969), 36–­56. 40. Langdon, The Cripple Creek Strike, 153. 41.  “An Advertisement for Colorado,” Miners’ Magazine, October 15, 1903, 8. 42.  Colorado Mine Operators Association, Criminal Record of the Western Federation of Miners (Colorado Springs, 1904), 39; Western Federation of Miners, Reply of the Western Federation of Miners to the “Red Book” of the Mine Operators’ Association (Denver, 1904), 2. 43.  “Colorado’s Shame,” Miners’ Magazine, June 16, 1904, 1; “Gradually the Truth Appears,” Miners’ Magazine, June 30, 1904, 5. 44. Jameson, All That Glitters, 226–­34. 45.  “The Plot Exposed!” Appeal to Reason, June 4, 1904, 3. 46.  Appeal to Reason, June 25, 1904, 1. 47.  “The Plot Exposed!” Appeal to Reason, June 4, 1904, 3; “Here Is the Agreement Which Farmed Out the Colorado Militia to the Mine Owners,” Appeal to Reason, June 15, 1907, 4; George H. Shoaf, “Who Blew Up the Independence Depot?” (Girard, KS: Appeal Press, 1906), 4. 48.  Eugene V. Debs, “Colorado, Capital and Crime,” Appeal to Reason, July 2, 1904, 2, 3. 49.  Robert MacDougall, “The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and

Notes to Pages 98–106 291

Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation,” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (September 2006): 715–­41. 50.  Appeal to Reason, March, 23, 1907, 6. 51.  The details of Shoaf ’s life come from his autobiography, George Shoaf, Fighting for Freedom (Kansas City: Simplified Economics, 1953). Additionally, Shoaf published two pieces in the early 1950s on the Appeal: “The Biggest Little Paper This Country Ever Knew,” and “Debs and the ‘Appeal to Reason,’” American Socialist 2 (November 1955): 10–­16. 52.  Quotations are from Shoaf, Fighting for Freedom, 33–­35, 50, 53. 53.  Shoaf, “Bell, the Boaster,” Appeal to Reason, July 9, 1904, 3. 54. Shoaf, Fighting for Freedom, 64. 55.  Miners’ Magazine, January 18, 1906, 4. 56.  “Pinkerton Reports,” in Ravitz and Primm, The Haywood Case, 70, 71, 74. 57.  George Kibbe Turner, “Introductory Note to the Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard,” McClure’s Magazine, July 1907, 296. 58.  Samuel Hopkins Adams, “Review of ‘The Confessions of Harry Orchard,’” The Bookman, March 1908, 57. 59.  Hugo Münsterberg, “The Third Degree,” McClure’s Magazine, October 1907, 614–­22. 60.  Harry Orchard, “The Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1907, 379; September 1907, 508; July 1907, 302; October 1907, 661. 61.  Orchard, “Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard,” McClure’s Magazine, November 1907, 122, 125. 62.  “Pinkerton Reports,” 117. 63.  Supreme Court opinions in the case of Pettibone v. Nichols, Supreme Court of the United States, 203 U.S. 192, argued October 10, 11, 1906, decided December 3, 1906. The Appeal reprinted Justice McKenna’s dissent on December 15, 1906. 64.  On the history of the IWW, see chapter 3. 65.  William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (1929; repr., New York: International Press, 1977); Peter Carlson, Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); Dubofsky, We Shall Be All. 66.  Appeal to Reason, March 3, 1906, 1; Henry Morris, “The Conspiracy of the Mine Owners,” Appeal to Reason, March 3, 1906, 2; George Shoaf, “The Mystery of Steunenberg’s Death,” Appeal to Reason, March 10, 1906, 6; Shoaf, “The Conspiracy Unfolds,” Appeal to Reason, March 24, 1906, 1. 67.  Appeal to Reason, March 10, 1906, 1. 68.  Howard H. Quint, “The Challenge and Wilshire’s Magazine,” in Conlin, The American Radical Press, 1880–­1960, 1:72–­81. 69.  Gaylord Wilshire, “Strike to Set Them Free,” Wilshire’s, April 1906, 1.

292  Notes to Pages 106–114

70.  “Editorial: Conspiracy to Murder,” International Socialist Review 6 (March 1906): 558–­59. 71.  Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 1, no. 144 (March–­April 1984): 104. 72. Lukas, Big Trouble, 360–­61. 73.  “$1,000.00 Reward!: The Appeal to Reason Will Pay $1,000 in Gold to the Person or Persons Who Will Kidnap Ex-­Governor Taylor and Return Him to the State Officials in Kentucky, Where He Is Wanted on a Charge of Murdering Goebel,” Appeal to Reason, January 12, 1907, 1. On the prosecution of Fred Warren, see George Brewer, “The Fighting Editor,” or, Warren and the Appeal (Girard, KS: Appeal Publishing, 1910); Charles Kerr, “Fred Warren Goes to Jail,” International Socialist Review 11 (January 1911): 427–­28. 74.  Quoted in Adamic, Dynamite, 148–­49. 75.  “Roosevelt and the Conspiracy,” Appeal to Reason, May 12, 1906, 4. 76.  Appeal to Reason, April 7, 1906, 1. 77.  Jack London, Iron Heel (1908; repr., Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1980), 133; Philip S. Foner, “Jack London, an American Rebel,” introduction to The Social Writings of Jack London, ed. Philip S. Foner (1947; repr., Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1964), 3–­130. 78.  Jack London, “Something Rotten in Idaho: The Tale of the Conspiracy against Moyer, Pettibone and Haywood,” in Foner, The Social Writings of Jack London, 408, 410. 79.  Miners’ Magazine, April 5, 1906, 8. 80.  “Moyer-­Haywood Parade, New York, May 4, 1907,” Wilshire’s, June 1907, 6; “20,000 Parade for Accused Miners,” New York Times, May 5, 1907, 1–­2. 81. Lukas, Big Trouble, chap. 10. 82.  Josephine Conger-­Kaneko, “Meeting with Maxim Gorky,” Appeal to Reason, May 5, 1906, 2; “German Leaders on the Conspiracy: By August Bebel and Karl Kautsky,” Appeal to Reason, June 22, 1907, 4. 83. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, 198. 84.  Appeal to Reason, April 14, 1906, 3. 85.  Denver Republican, quoted in Appeal to Reason, October 27, 1906, 3. 86. Lukas, Big Trouble, 632–­86. 87.  Oscar King Davis, “Orchard Tells about Murders,” New York Times, June 6, 1907. 88.  Oscar King Davis, “Orchard Tells Story of Bomb,” New York Times, June 7, 1907. 89.  “Haywood Defense Is Counter Conspiracy,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1907. 90.  The range war theory of Steunenberg’s assassination appears in Appeal to Reason, March 17, 1906, 1; Oscar King Davis, “Haywood Defense to Show a Plot,” New York Times, June 28, 1907. 91. Lukas, Big Trouble, 701. 92.  Charles A Siringo, A Cowboy Detective: A True Story of Twenty-­two Years

Notes to Pages 115–121 293

with a World-­Famous Detective Agency (1912; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Siringo, Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism (Chicago: Charles A. Siringo Publishers, 1915). 93. Friedman, Pinkerton Labor Spy, 22, 42. 94. Friedman, Pinkerton Labor Spy, 112–­16. 95. Friedman, Pinkerton Labor Spy, 227–­28. 96.  Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xvii. 97.  “The purpose of paranoia,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1895, “is thus to fend off an idea that is incompatible with the ego, by projecting its substance into the external world. . . . It is, therefore, the abuse of the mechanism of projection for purposes of defense.” Freud’s first writings on “dementia paranoides” (1895) presents a largely untheorized topology of paranoid types, including the litigious paranoiac, the hypochondriac, the impotent alcoholic, the unsuccessful bureaucrat. Freud then goes on to describe what he calls “mass paranoia.” Freud found mass paranoia among the citizens of a defeated nation who resort to delusions of betrayal and conspiracy. For reasons that are readily apparent, this version of collective paranoia proved very influential among the Frankfurt School of Marxist and antifascist psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, “Paranoia,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, Pre-­Psycho-­Analytic Publications: 1886–­1899, ed. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1966), 206–­12; Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911),” in Three Case Histories (New York: Touchstone Books, 1993), 83–­160. 98.  John R. McMahon, “Morris Friedman—­Witness in Haywood Trial,” Wilshire’s, August 1907, 4. 99.  “Closing Argument of W. E. Borah,” in Trial Transcripts, Haywood Trial, vol. 11, 622. Full trial transcripts can be found at the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection, http://darrow.law.umn.edu/trials.php?tid=3. 100.  Quoted in Lukas, Big Trouble, 706. 101. The Appeal to Reason reprinted the whole of Darrow’s closing argument, filling the entire four-­page issue. “The Conspirators’ Waterloo,” Appeal to Reason, August 10, 1907, 1–­4. All quotations are from this issue. 102.  “Courts Instructions to Jurors,” Trial Transcripts, Haywood Trial, vol. 11, 650, 686. 103. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, 222. 104.  Quoted in Adamic, Dynamite, 155. 105.  “Orchard, 88, Idaho Bomb Slayer Dies,” Washington Post, April 14, 1954. 106.  Appeal to Reason, March 23, 1907, 1. 107.  Appeal to Reason, March 23, 1907, 6. 108.  George H. Shoaf, Love Crucified: A Romance of the Colorado War (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1905). 109.  Eugene Debs, “The Scarlet Shadow: The Book of the Hour,” Appeal to

294  Notes to Pages 121–126

Reason, November 23, 1907, 4; Fred Warren, “A Red Mark,” Appeal to Reason, December 7, 1907, 4; Walter Hurt, The Scarlet Shadow: A Story of the Great Colorado Conspiracy (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1907). 110. Hurt, Scarlet Shadow, 239. 111.  “A Victory Gained,” International Socialist Review 8 (August 1907): 112. 112. Adamic, Dynamite, 143. 113.  “General Otis, the Storm-­Center of the Unpacific Coast,” Current Literature 52 (January 1912): 35. 114.  Theodore Roosevelt, “Mr. Gompers, General Otis and the Dynamiting Charges,” Outlook, June 17, 1911, 330–­32. 115.  Grace Heilman Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955); “Otis’ Armored Automobile,” Appeal to Reason, September 2, 1911, 3. 116.  Quoted in Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 5, The AFL in the Progressive Era, 1910–­1915 (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 9. 117.  Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1987). 118.  The most complete historical studies of the McNamara case can be found in Adamic, Dynamite, 179–­253; Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 5:7–­31; Herbert Shapiro, “The McNamara Case: A Crisis of the Progressive Era,” Southern California Quarterly 61 (Fall 1977): 271–­87; Sidney Fine, “The National Erectors’ Association and the Dynamiters,” Labor History 32 (1991): 5–­41; Stimson, Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles, 331–­430. 119.  Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1910. 120.  Ortie McManigal, The National Dynamite Plot (Los Angeles: Neale Company, 1913), 7. 121.  William Burns, The Masked War: The Story of a Peril That Threatened the United States by the Man Who Uncovered the Dynamite Conspirators and Sent Them to Jail (New York: George H. Dornan Co., 1913), 11. 122.  Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1911; Adamic, Dynamite, 215. 123.  Eugene Debs, “The Los Angeles Times—­Who Committed That Crime,” Appeal to Reason, October 15, 1910, 1. 124.  William D. Haywood, “Get Ready,” International Socialist Review 11 (June 1911): 725; Unionist, “The Los Angeles Conspiracy against Organized Labor,” International Socialist Review 10 (November 1910): 262–­66. 125.  Frank E. Wolfe, Capitalism’s Conspiracy in California: Parallel of the Kidnapping of Labor Leaders in Colorado and California; Outline of the Beginning at Los Angeles of the Great Struggle between Labor and Capital on the Pacific Coast (Los Angeles: White Press, 1911), 6, 30. 126.  Appeal to Reason, April 29, 1911, 1. 127.  Appeal to Reason, May 6, 1911, 1.

Notes to Pages 126–133 295

128.  Samuel Gompers, “A Call to Labor,” American Federationist 18 (June 1911): 451. 129.  Samuel Gompers, “The McNamara Case,” American Federationist 18 (June 1911): 450. 130.  Samuel Gompers, “Gompers Speaks for Labor,” American Federationist 19 (March 1912): 204. 131.  Though the film itself has been lost, a complete scenario was discovered by Philip Foner. See Philip Foner, “A Martyr to His Cause: The Scenario of the First Labor Film in the United States,” Labor History 24 (Winter 1983): 103–­12; Steven J. Ross, Working-­Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 132.  Appeal to Reason, May 6, 1911, 1. 133.  Appeal to Reason, May 6, 1911, 1. 134.  The Agitator, May 15, 1911, 1. 135.  Herbert Shapiro, “Lincoln Steffens and the McNamara Case: A Progressive Response to Class Conflict,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 39, no. 4 (October 1980): 397–­412. 136. Adamic, Dynamite, 250; Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 5:20. 137.  Sidney Fine, “Without Blare of Trumpets”: Walter Drew, the National Erectors’ Association, and the Open Shop Movement, 1903–­57 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 81–­130. 138.  See Adamic, Dynamite, 187–­253. 139. Darrow, The Story of My Life, 173–­74. 140. Darrow, The Story of My Life, 176. 141.  George Shoaf, Appeal to Reason, July 22, 1911, 1. 142. Shoaf, Fighting for Freedom, 119. 143.  Shoaf, “Shoaf Sees Their Danger,” Appeal to Reason, August 5, 1911, 1. 144. Shoaf, Fighting for Freedom, 122. 145.  “Shoaf ’s Disappearance” and “Socialist Detective Slugged,” Appeal to Reason, August 26, 1911, 1. 146.  “Shoaf ’s Last Letter,” Appeal to Reason, August 26, 1911, 1. 147.  “The Work to Be Done,” Appeal to Reason, September 2, 1911, 1; “Shoaf Slugged and Taken to Sea,” Appeal to Reason, September 16, 1911, 1. 148.  “Cloven Hoof in Trail of Slime,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1911, reprinted in Appeal to Reason, September 23, 1911, 1. 149.  Olive M. Johnson, “The ‘Shoaf Case,’” Daily People, September 10, 1911; “Paid Disturbers in Socialist Ranks,” Weekly People, November 25, 1911, 2; Wade Parks, “The ‘Shoaf Case,’” Daily People, October 25, 1911. 150. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 213; Lukas, Big Trouble, 753–­54. 151.  Ernest Untermann to the Western Federation of Miners, reprinted in Weekly People, December 16, 1911, 2. 152.  Shoaf, “The Biggest Little Paper,” 95.

296  Notes to Pages 133–138

153.  George H. Shoaf, “Clarence Darrow and the McNamara Case,” American Socialist 2 (December 1957): 16. 154. Adamic, Dynamite, 229–­31. 155.  Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1911. 156.  Harvey J. O’Higgins, “The Dynamiters,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1911, 346–­64; “How Burns Caught the Dynamiters,” McClure’s Magazine, January 1912, 325–­29; “Gompers and Burns on Unionism and Dynamite,” McClure’s Magazine, February 1912, 363–­76; also see Gompers’s response in American Federationist 19 (March 1912): 206–­7. 157.  Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 689. 158.  “Report of McNamara Ways and Means Committee,” American Federationist 19 (March 1912): 230–­31. 159.  Samuel Gompers, “Socialist Methods versus Trade Union Methods,” American Federationist 19 (February 1912): 135–­41. 160.  Eugene Debs, “The McNamara Case and the Labor Movement,” International Socialist Review 12 (January 1912): 398. 161. Adamic, Dynamite, 249. 162.  Graham Adams Jr., The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–­1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 163.  Samuel Gompers to Woodrow Wilson, March 14, 1913, in The Samuel Gompers Papers, vol. 8, Progress and Reaction in the Age of Reform, 1909–­1913, ed. Peter J. Albert and Grace Palladino (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 466. 164.  Samuel Gompers, “The Conspiracy Against Labor,” American Federationist 29 (October 1922): 721–­39. 165.  Geoffrey Cowan, The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer (New York: Random House, 1993). 166.  The closing arguments are reprinted as “They Tried to Get Me: Darrow in His Own Defense,” in Attorney for the Damned, ed. Arthur Weinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 528. 167.  Emma Goldman, “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, December 1911, 290–­92. 168.  Quoted in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 5:27. 169.  Henry M. Tichenor, A Wave of Horror: A Comparative Picture of the Los Angeles Tragedy (St. Louis: National Rip-­Saw Publishing Co., 1912), 11, 15. 170.  “Brains or Bombs?” The Masses 3 (January 1912): 5. 171.  “Who Are the Big People Protected by the McNamara Confession?” Appeal to Reason, December 9, 1911, 1. 172.  Eugene Debs, “McNamara Case Reviewed,” Appeal to Reason, December 16, 1911, 1, 2. 173.  Eugene Debs, “Capitalists Behind the Dynamiting Plots,” Appeal to Reason,

Notes to Pages 138–145 297

January 6, 1912, 1. Debs made the same argument in “The McNamara Case and the Labor Movement,” International Socialist Review 12 (January 1912): 397–­401. 174.  “The Dynamiters,” Appeal to Reason, January 11, 1913, 1. 175.  Appeal to Reason, November 30, 1912, 1. 176.  Appeal to Reason, November 16, 1912, 1. 177.  In the 1912 presidential election, Eugene Debs received 898,619 votes. Calculating weekly circulation as an average based on the total issues printed is a slightly deceptive way of quantifying the paper’s popularity. The Appeal regularly published millions of copies of its semiannual special editions, pushing the average circulation numbers through the roof. Nevertheless, the Appeal generally mailed out between 480,000 and 550,000 copies a week through 1912. The circulation peak of 750,000 for 1913 cited by sympathetic historians is a calculated average with the special editions factored in, so while it may not accurately reflect weekly circulation, the distribution of a half-­million radical newspapers every week remains an unmatched achievement in the history of the American Left. Appeal to Reason, November 16, 1912, 1. 178. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 220–­21. 179.  W. J. Ghent, “The Appeal and Its Influence,” Survey Magazine, reprinted in Appeal to Reason, October 14, 1911, 2.

CHAPTER 3: “THE MARKS OF CAPITAL” 1.  Archie Green, “The Name Wobbly Holds Steady,” in Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 96–­138. 2.  Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-­and-­Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 143. 3.  Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), 152–­67. 4.  Green, “The Name Wobbly Holds Steady,” 102. 5.  Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno, eds., The Big Red Songbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007), 153. 6.  Quoted in Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States (New York: Verso, 1991), 95. 7.  Paul Brissenden, The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957); Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–­1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (New York: Quadrangle, 1969); Salvatore Salerno, Red November Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); Joyce Kornbluth, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr,

298  Notes to Pages 145–152

1998); Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years (Cincinnati: IWW Publishing, 2005). 8.  Ralph Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy (Chicago: IWW Publishing, 1920), 9. 9.  On the founding of the IWW and the ideological controversies of its early years, see Brissenden, The IWW. 10.  William Z. Foster and Earl C. Ford, Syndicalism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 23; James Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 11.  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Walker C. Smith, and William E. Trautman, Direct Action and Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, ed. Salvatore Salerno (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1997), 75. 12.  “The Wooden Shoe vs. The Iron Heel,” Solidarity, August 18, 1917, 2. 13.  William D. Haywood, “Blanket Stiff Philosophy,” International Socialist Review 12 (December 1911): 370. 14.  Randolph Bourne, “What Is Exploitation?” in War and the Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 138; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Owl Books, 2000). 15.  Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913), 27, 35, 62. 16.  Upton Sinclair, “The Story of a Frame-­Up,” Appeal to Reason, January 24, 1920, 3. 17.  John Sandgren, “Under the Spell of Terrorism,” One Big Union Monthly, March 1920, 27. 18.  Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–­24. 19.  This antipathy for intellectuals could sometimes take on an unsympathetic form. According to Ralph Chaplin, when vigilantes burned the letters IWW into the flesh of Ben Reitman, the “literary anarchist” and companion of Emma Goldman, during the San Diego free speech fight of 1912, “the IWW boys, always partisan for the ‘One Big Union,’ claimed that Reitman, a mere intellectual, ‘wasn’t worthy of the honor.’” Chaplin, Wobbly, 151. 20.  Larry Peterson, “The Intellectual World of the IWW: An American Worker’s Library in the First Half of the 20th Century,” History Workshop 22 (Autumn 1986): 153–­72. 21.  John Reed and Art Young, “The Social Revolution in Court,” The Liberator, September 1918, 24. 22.  Ernest Riebe, Mr. Block: Twenty-­four IWW Cartoons (1913; repr., Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1984). 23.  Reed and Young, “The Social Revolution in Court,” 22. 24. Chaplin, Wobbly, 147; Ralph Chaplin, “Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever,” The American West 5 (January 1968): 19–­27, 73–­74. 25.  Morrie R. Preston, The Smith-­Preston Case: Exposing the Criminal Injustice

Notes to Pages 153–159 299

of the Common Law Doctrine of “Conspiracy” as Employed by the Enemies of Labor to Hang Innocent Men (New York: Mahony & Scheid Printing, ca. 1915), 32–­36; Richard Brazier, “Conspiracy!” Solidarity, September 29, 1917, 6; Sally Zanjani and Guy Louis Rocha, The Ignoble Conspiracy: Radicalism on Trial in Nevada (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986). 26.  “Pity for the Poor,” New York Times, January 26, 1912. 27.  Stephen H. Norwood, Strike-­Breaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 15–­33. 28.  Justus Ebert, The Trial of a New Society (Cleveland: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1913); Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 158–­96; Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4:305–­50; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 227–­62; William Cahn, Lawrence 1912: The Bread and Roses Strike (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980); Michael Miller Topp, Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 92–­134; Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–­1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 241–­75; Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–­1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Bruce Watson, Bread & Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (New York: Viking, 2005). 29.  Haywood quoted in Mary Marcy, “The Battle for Bread in Lawrence,” International Socialist Review 12 (March 1912): 538. 30.  Quoted in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4:329. 31.  Ettor quoted in “Cache of Dynamite in Lawrence Strike,” New York Times, January 21, 1912. 32.  “Fear Dynamite in Lawrence Strike,” New York Times, January 18, 1912; Ebert, The Trial of a New Society, 63. 33.  Quoted in Samuel Gompers, “The Lawrence Dynamite Conspiracy,” American Federationist, October 1912, 817. 34.  “Capitalist Dynamiter,” Solidarity, June 22, 1912, 1. 35.  Philip Russell, “The Dynamite Job at Lawrence,” International Socialist Review 13 (October 1912): 309; “Murder of Girl Is Part of Plot,” Industrial Worker, September 19, 1912, 1. 36. Ebert, The Trial of a New Society, 69. 37.  Arturo Giovannitti, The Cage (Riverside, CT: Hillacre Bookhouse, 1914); Giovannitti, Arrows in the Gale, intro. by Helen Keller (Riverside, CT: Hillacre Bookhouse, 1914); The Collected Poems of Arturo Giovannitti (New York: Arno Press, 1962); Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 184–­96. 38.  Quoted in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4:335. 39.  William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (1929; repr., New York: International Press, 1977), 239–­58; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography; My First Life, 1906–­1926 (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 127–­51.

300  Notes to Pages 160–169

40. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4:329. 41. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4:342–­43; Leslie H. Marcy and Frederick Sumner Boyd, “One Big Union Wins,” International Socialist Review 12 (April 1912): 613–­29. 42. Cahn, Lawrence 1912, 216. Neither the workers of Lawrence nor the IWW were able to preserve the gains made after their initial victory in 1912. In the years after the strike, the IWW was gradually pushed out of Lawrence, while the labor and living conditions of the mill workers deteriorated. In 1919 the textile workers of Lawrence once again went on strike, struggling to reclaim this earlier triumph, but in the conditions of the postwar Red Scare the strike was easily crushed. 43.  “W. M. Wood Is Held in Dynamite Plot,” New York Times, August 31, 1912. 44.  The full indictment is reprinted in Gompers, “The Lawrence Dynamite Conspiracy,” 822–­23. 45.  Quoted in “Capitalist Dynamiters,” Solidarity, September 7, 1912, 1, 4. 46.  “Capitalist Dynamiter Commits Suicide!” Industrial Worker, September 5, 1912, 1. 47.  “Lawrence Dynamite Conspiracy,” The Square Deal, July 1913, 571. 48.  “Mill Owners Are in Conspiracy,” Industrial Worker, September 12, 1912, 1; Justus Ebert, “The ‘Conspiracy’ Cases,” Solidarity, June 15, 1912, 1, 4. 49. Cahn, Lawrence 1912, 146. 50.  Gompers, “The Lawrence Dynamite Conspiracy,” 815, 823. 51.  “Strike! Quash Indictment Against Ettor and Giovannitti,” Industrial Worker, September 19, 1912, 1. 52.  “Not Surprising, Says Haywood,” Solidarity, September 7, 1912, 1. 53.  Richard Washburn Child, “Who’s Violent? The Judiciary, the Militia, the Police, or the Labor Leaders?” Collier’s, June 29, 1912, 12–­13, 22. 54.  Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1913), 277–­78. 55.  William D. Haywood, “Socialism the Hope of the Working Class,” International Socialist Review 12 (February 1912): 461–­7 1. 56.  Eugene V. Debs, “Sound Socialist Tactics,” International Socialist Review 12 (February 1912): 482–­83. 57.  Quoted in Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–­1912 (1952; repr., Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004), 408. 58. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4:406. 59. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, 254–­60. 60.  James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America: 1912–­1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984). 61.  David A. Johnson, “Vigilance and the Law: The Moral Authority of Popular Justice in the Far West,” American Quarterly 33 (Winter 1981): 558–­86. 62.  For a detailed study of one powerful Citizens’ Alliance, see William Millikan, A Union Against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and Its Fight Against Organized Labor, 1903–­1947 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2001).

Notes to Pages 169–175 301

63.  Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­ Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 173–­74. 64.  David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 44–­128. 65.  “The History of the San Diego Free Speech Fight” (1914; repr., San Diego: Industrial Workers of the World, 1973); Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (1931; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 494–­503; Flynn, Rebel Girl, 177–­79; Mary Anderson Hill, “The Free Speech Fight at San Diego,” The Survey, May 4, 1912, 192–­ 94; Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 94–­126. 66.  “Conspiracy and Street Speaking,” International Socialist Review 14 (July 1913): 42. 67. Editorial, San Diego Tribune, March 4, 1912. 68. Goldman, Living My Life, 1:497. 69. Goldman, Living My Life, 1:500. 70.  “Vigilantes in San Diego,” Solidarity, May 18, 1912, 1; “A Damnable Plot Against Workers,” Industrial Worker, June 6, 1912, 1, 4; “Plague Sweeps over San Diego,” Industrial Worker, September 5, 1912, 1. 71.  The seditious conspiracy statute reads as follows: “If two or more persons in any state or territory . . . conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take or posses any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof; they shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than six years, or both.” Quoted in William Preston Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–­1933, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 314n. 72. Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 43. 73.  Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2002); Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 127–­57; Philip S. Foner, The Case of Joe Hill (New York: International Publishers, 1965); William Adler, The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). 74.  Ralph Chaplin, “Joe Hill: A Biography,” Industrial Pioneer, November 1923, 23. 75.  “Judge O. N. Hilton in the Joe Hill Case,” International Socialist Review 16 (September 1915): 171–­72. 76.  Quoted in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 311. 77.  “Joe Hill,” International Socialist Review 16 (December 1915): 330; Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 191–­95. 78.  Ralph Chaplin, “Joe Hill’s Funeral,” International Socialist Review 16 (January 1916): 400–­405. 79.  For decades, debates persisted on the actual guilt or innocence of Hill. Researchers such as Vernon Jensen and Wallace Stegner, working within living memory of the execution, argued that Hill was guilty of the crime for which he

302  Notes to Pages 175–179

was executed. “There is no doubt in my mind that Joe Hill was a profound believer and unflagging fighter in the cause of the worker,” wrote Stegner in 1948, “but the burden of evidence is that he was also a stick up man.” Stegner’s claims were rebuffed by the Friends of Joe Hill Committee and by Philip Foner, who dedicated a book-­ length study to the proposition that Hill was the victim of a conspiracy to frame him for murder because of his radicalism. More recently, thorough reviews of the case, including Franklin Rosemont’s Joe Hill and William Adler’s The Man Who Never Died, argue convincingly that Hill was innocent. Vernon H. Jensen, “The Legend of Joe Hill,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 4 (April 1915): 356–­66; Wallace Stegner, “Joe Hill, the Wobblies’ Troubadour,” The New Republic, January 5, 1948, 20–­24, 38. For a detailed defense of Joe Hill’s case, see Friends of Joe Hill Committee, “The Case of Joe Hill,” The New Republic, November 15, 1948, 18–­20; Foner, The Case of Joe Hill. 80.  John Dos Passos, 1919 (1932; repr., New York: Signet Classic, 1979), 420. 81.  Walker C. Smith, “War and the Workers,” Wayne State University Archives, box 77, IWW Collection. 82. Chaplin, Wobbly, 205. 83.  Quoted in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 358. 84.  Walker Smith, The Everett Massacre: A History of Class Struggle in the Lumber Industry (Chicago: IWW Press, 1918). For the oral history of Jack Miller, the last surviving Wobbly witness to the massacre, see It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America, ed. Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 236–­48. 85.  John Kenneth Turner, “Government by Gunmen,” Appeal to Reason, May 9, 1914, 1. 86.  Leslie Marcy, “Eleven Hundred Exiled Copper Miners,” International Socialist Review 18 (September 1917): 160–­62; Rob E. Hanson, The Great Bisbee IWW Deportation of July 12, 1917 (Bisbee, AZ: Signature Press, 1990); Katherine Benton-­ Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Divisions and the Labor Wars in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 117–­43. 87.  “The Iron Heel at Work,” Solidarity, July 21, 1917, 1. 88.  See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 7, Labor and World War I, 1914–­1918 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 294–­95; Thorstein Veblen, “Using the IWW to Harvest Grain,” Journal of Political Economy (December 1932): 797–­807. 89. Chaplin, Wobbly, 211. 90.  Little quoted by Chaplin, Wobbly, 209. 91.  Arnon Gutfeld, “The Murder of Frank Little: Radical Labor Agitation in Butte, Montana, 1917,” Labor History 10 (Spring 1969): 177–­92; Mike Byrnes and Les Rickey, The Truth about the Lynching of Frank Little (Butte, MT: Old Butte

Notes to Pages 180–184 303

Publishing, 2003); “The Man That Was Hung,” International Socialist Review 17 (September 1917): 132–­38. 92.  Editorials on the Little lynching are compiled in “Lynch-­Law and Treason,” Literary Digest, August 18, 1917, 12–­13. 93.  “The Capitalist State and ‘Invisible Government,’” Solidarity, September 1, 1917, 2. 94.  “The IWW Develops into a National Menace,” Current Opinion, September 1917, 153; Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 7:298–­99. 95.  Zechariah Chafee Jr., Free Speech in the United States, 2nd ed. (1941; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969), 36–­107; Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 135–­233; Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 248–­98. 96.  Espionage Acts and the Criminal Syndicalism Laws reprinted in The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America, ed. Nicholas Kittrie and Eldon Wedlock, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 297–­303. 97.  Michael R. Belknap, “The Mechanics of Repression: J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation and the Radicals, 1917–­1925,” Crime and Social Justice 7 (Spring–­Summer 1977): 49–­58; David Williams, “The Bureau of Investigation and Its Critics, 1919–­1921: The Origins of Federal Political Surveillance,” Journal of American History 68 (December 1981): 560–­79; Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 3–­51; Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919–­1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 1–­18. 98.  See Harrison George, The IWW Trial: Story of the Greatest Trial in Labor’s History by One of the Defendants (Chicago: IWW Publishing Bureau, n.d.), which combines extensive trial transcripts with analysis and comment by a Wobbly who had a front-­row seat. Autobiographical accounts include Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book; 290–­325; Chaplin, Wobbly, 219–­83; Richard Brazier, “The Mass IWW Trial of 1918: A Retrospect,” Labor History 7 (Spring 1966): 178–­92; Paul F. Brissenden, Justice and the IWW (Chicago: General Defense Committee, n.d.). Also see John Reed and Art Young, “The Social Revolution in Court,” The Liberator, September 1918, 20–­28; Helen Keller, “In Behalf of the IWW,” The Liberator, March 1918, 13; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 118–­51; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 423–­44; Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 7:292–­314; Philip Taft, “The Federal Trials of the IWW,” Labor History 3 (Winter 1962): 52–­65; Francis Shor, “The IWW and Oppositional Politics in World War I: Pushing the System beyond Its Limits,” Radical History Review 64 (1996): 74–­94. 99.  IWW indictments reprinted in International Socialist Review 18 (November–­December 1918): 268–­79; Philip S. Foner, “United States of America vs. Wm. D. Haywood et al.: The IWW Indictment,” Labor History 11 (Fall 1970): 500–­530. 100.  Reed and Young, “The Social Revolution in Court,” 22.

304  Notes to Pages 185–197

101. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, 317. 102. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, 322. 103.  Evidence and Cross-­Examination of William D. Haywood in the Case of USA vs. Wm. D. Haywood et al. (Chicago: IWW Publishing, 1918), 186–­89. 104.  Reed and Young “The Social Revolution in Court,” 25, 26. 105.  Brazier, “The Mass IWW Trial of 1918,” 179. 106.  Harvey Duff, The Silent Defenders: Courts and Capitalism in California (Chicago: IWW Press, 1919); Clayton R. Koppes, “The Kansas Trial of the IWW, 1917–­1919,” Labor History 16 (Summer 1975): 338–­58; Earl Bruce White, “The United States v. C. W. Anderson et al.: The Wichita Case, 1917–­1919,” in At the Point of Production: The Local History of the IWW, ed. Joseph R. Conlin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 143–­64. 107.  William D. Haywood, “Break the Conspiracy,” One Big Union Monthly, December 1919, 7; Haywood, Break the Conspiracy (Chicago: General Defense Committee), 3. 108.  Lynn Ford, “The Growing Menace of the IWW,” Forum, January 1919, 62.

CHAPTER 4: “THE KU KLUX GOVERNMENT” 1.  Curt Gentry, Frame-­Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 73; Estolv E. Ward, The Gentle Dynamiter: A Biography of Tom Mooney (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1983). 2. Gentry, Frame-­Up, 13. 3.  Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912; repr., New York: New York Review Books, 1970); Berkman, ed., The Blast (1916–­1918; repr., Oakland: AK Press, 2005); Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 2 vols. (1931; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 1:83–­114, 2:575–­82; Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter, eds., Dreams of Freedom, A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader (Oakland: AK Press, 2005). 4.  Alexander Berkman, “Worshiping the God of Dynamite,” The Blast, August 15, 1916, 2. 5.  Michael Mark Cohen, “Imagining Militarism: Art Young and The Masses Face the Enemy,” Radical History Review 106 (Winter 2010): 86–­108. 6.  Emma Goldman, “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (New York: Humanity Books, 1998), 347–­56; Goldman, Living My Life, 2:577. 7. Gentry, Frame-­Up, 359. 8. Gentry, Frame-­Up, 16. 9.  Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (1946; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 145; Kevin Star, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Notes to Pages 198–203 305

10.  Alexander Berkman, “Planning Another 11th of November,” The Blast, August 15, 1916, 3. 11. Goldman, Living My Life, 2:579–­80. 12.  Alexander Berkman, “The San Francisco Conspiracy,” The Blast, September 1, 1916, 3–­4; Robert Minor, “The San Francisco Frame-­Up,” International Socialist Review 17 (October 1916): 216–­17. 13.  Joseph North, Robert Minor: Artist and Crusader (New York: International Publishers, 1956), 96–­97. 14.  “The Mooney Case,” New York Times, June 30, 1918. 15.  Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 138; Nunzio Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian Anarchist Terrorism in the United States,” Studi Emigrazione/Études Migrations 30, no. 111 (1993): 469–­89. 16.  Charles Howard McCormick, Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005). 17.  Robert Minor, The Frame-­Up System: Story of the San Francisco Bomb (San Francisco: International Workers’ Defense League, 1916), 14. On Minor’s biography, see North, Robert Minor; Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 79–­120. 18.  Pacific Coast Business Men’s Preparedness League, “A Plea for Preparedness,” reprinted in The Blast, July 1, 1916, 3. 19.  George D. Herron, “War and Peace under Capitalism,” International Socialist Review 9 (December 1908): 431–­43. 20.  Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907; repr., Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1980), 133. 21.  Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1996), 27–­59; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–­2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 119–­38. 22.  Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2013), 3–­64, 367–­432. 23.  Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-­Colonial Imagination (New York: Verso, 2005), 69–­81; Mike Davis, “Artisans of Terror,” in In Praise of Barbarians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 263–­72; Richard Bach Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16 (Spring 2004): 116–­53. 24.  Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13–­43. 25.  Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

306  Notes to Pages 204–208

26.  James Weinstein, Decline of Socialism in America: 1912–­1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 133, 119–­76. 27.  Randolph Bourne, “War and the Intellectuals,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–­1919 (New York: Harper, 1946), 5. 28.  Upton Sinclair, Money Writes! A Study of American Literature (Long Beach, CA: Published by the author, 1927), 26. 29.  V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, a Popular Outline (1917; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1939), 9–­11, 66, 14; Neil Harding, Leninism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 113–­41. 30.  Alexander Trachtenberg, ed., The American Socialists and the War: A Documentary History of the Attitude of the Socialist Party toward War and Militarism since the Outbreak of the Great War (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1917), 8–­9. 31.  Frederic C. Howe, “The Flag Follows the Investor,” International Socialist Review 17 (July 1916): 11–­14; Scott Nearing, The Germs of War: A Study in Preparedness (St. Louis: National Rip-­Saw Publishing, 1916). 32.  Goldman, “Preparedness,” 354. The interwar period developed a deeply pessimistic memory of the war, bringing much of the public in line with what Goldman and the radicals had been arguing from the beginning. Three key texts in this revision were John Kenneth Turner, Shall It Be Again? (New York: H. W. Huebsch, 1922); H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934); and Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (New York: Round Table Press, 1935). 33.  John Reed, “At the Throat of the Republic,” The Masses, July 1916, 12; Robert D. Ward, “The Origin and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–­1919,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (June 1960): 51–­65; The Education of John Reed (New York: International Publishers, 1955); Reed, Insurgent Mexico (1914; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1969); Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919; repr., New York: Penguin, 1977); Robert A. Rosenstone, John Reed: Romantic Revolutionary (New York: Knopf, 1975). 34.  Reed, “At the Throat of the Republic,” 12. 35.  Reed cites congressional data that revealed the level of economic inequality in this era, noting that “2% of the people of the United States own 60% of the property of the country, 65% own only 5%, and . . . 95% own only 40%.” Reed, “At the Throat of the Republic,” 12. 36.  Randolph Bourne, “The State,” in War and the Intellectuals, 71. 37.  Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 38.  Bourne, “The State,” 77. 39.  David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–­1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 332; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol.

Notes to Pages 208–213 307

7, Labor and World War I, 1914–­1918 (New York: International Publishers, 1987); Kennedy, Over Here. 40.  John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–­ 1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 195. 41.  Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915); Michael Paul Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” in Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 190–­235. 42.  Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second KKK (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement (New York: Vintage, 1995), 179–­ 238; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 194–­243. 43.  H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–­1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957), 18. 44. Kennedy, Over Here, 78. 45.  Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–­128; Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 46.  Emerson Hough, The Web: The Authorized History of the American Protective League (Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co., 1919), 1. 47. Hough, The Web, 40, 163; Agamben, State of Exception. 48.  Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance (New York: Vintage, 1980); David Williams, “The Bureau of Investigation and Its Critics, 1919–­1921: The Origins of Federal Political Surveillance,” Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (December 1981): 560–­79; William Preston Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–­1933, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919–­1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 49.  Espionage Act, 40 Stat. 217 (1917), reprinted in The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America, vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Kittrie and Eldon Wedlock Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 297. 50.  Espionage Act (as Amended), 40 Stat. 555 (1918), reprinted in The Tree of Liberty, 299. 51.  Zechariah Chafee Jr., Free Speech in the United States, 2nd ed. (1941; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969), 41; David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870–­1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

308  Notes to Pages 214–220

52. Kennedy, Over Here, 76; Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 144–­72; Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 92–­112. 53.  Floyd Dell, “The Story of the Trial,” The Liberator, June 1918, 7–­23; “The Masses Case,” The Liberator, June 1918, 5–­6; John Reed, “About the Second Masses Trial,” The Liberator, December 1918, 36–­38; Art Young, His Life and Times, ed. John Nicholas Beffel (New York: Sheridan House, 1939), 318–­51; Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911–­1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 59–­64; William O’Neill, ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–­1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966). 54.  Max Eastman’s Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial (New York: Liberator Publishing Co, 1919), 12. 55.  Art Young, On My Way: Being the Book of Art Young in Text and Picture (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 278, 298. 56.  Emma Goldman, “Address to the Jury,” in Red Emma Speaks, 361, 370. 57.  “Debs’ Canton Speech” and “Debs’ Speech to the Court,” in The Debs White Book: Full Text of Important Documents in the Famous Debs Case (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1920), 19–­20, 58. 58.  “Billion Dollar Plot to Crush Socialism!” Appeal to Reason, February 28, 1920, 1; “Debs Must Be Freed from Prison and Elected President! This Is the Appeal’s Answer to Wall Street’s Billion Dollar Plot,” Appeal to Reason, March 6, 1920, 1; Kate Richards O’Hare, “Debs and Other Political Prisoners Are Victims of War Profiteers,” Appeal to Reason, July 24, 1920, 1–­2; Upton Sinclair, “Imprisonment of Debs Is Part of Conspiracy Against Your Liberty,” Appeal to Reason, May 22, 1920, 1. 59.  Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 340–­414; Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 60.  100 Years for What? (Chicago: National Office Socialist Party, 1920); Chafee, Free Speech in the United States, 247–­52, 269–­82. 61.  Harrison George, Is Freedom Dead? (Chicago: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1918), 5. 62.  The Communist Manifesto quoted in George, Is Freedom Dead?, 11. 63.  William D. Haywood, “Break the Conspiracy,” One Big Union Monthly, December 1919, 7; Haywood, Break the Conspiracy (Chicago: General Defense Committee, 1919); Who Is Guilty of Conspiracy? (San Francisco: California Branch of General Defense Committee, [1919?]); Who Are the Conspirators? (San Francisco: California Branch of General Defense Committee, [1919?]); The Great Conspiracy (Seattle: General Defense Committee, [1919?]). 64. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 370–­410; Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1972), 101–­43; David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Philip S. Foner, History of

Notes to Pages 220–226 309

the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 8, Postwar Struggles, 1918–­1920 (New York: International Publishers, 1988). 65.  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A World History, 1914–­1991 (New York: Vintage: 1994), 55; Philip S. Foner, The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact on American Radicals, Liberals, and Labor (New York: International Publishers, 1967). 66.  Victor Serge, What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression: A Guide for Activists (1926; repr., New York: Ocean Press, 2005), 79; Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 3, trans. Max Eastman (1932; repr., New York: Pathfinder Press, 1996), 168–­69. 67.  V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 89. 68.  Lenin, “Terms of Admission into Communist International,” Marxist Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm. 69.  Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 199. 70. Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti; Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian Anarchist Terrorism in the United States”; Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 207–­58. 71.  Quoted in Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 95. 72.  Luigi Galleani, Anarchy Will Be! Selected Writing, ed. Barry Pateman (Oakland: AK Press, 2005). 73.  Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian Anarchist Terrorism in the United States,” 472. 74.  Pamphlet and full list of targets cited in Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 137, 143. 75.  Bartolomeo Vanzetti, “Letter to Governor Fuller, July 28, 1927,” in The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (1928; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 383. 76.  Quoted in Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 204. 77.  Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, 282, lv; Mary Heaton Vorse, “Sacco and Vanzetti,” Solidarity, December 11, 1920, 4; Art Shields, Are They Doomed? (New York: Worker’s Defense Union, 1921); Conspiracy against Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston: Sacco-­Vanzetti Defense Committee, 1921); Ralph Chaplin, “Sacco and Vanzetti,” Industrial Pioneer, July 1926, 3–­6; Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927; repr., Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954); Louis Joughin and Edmund Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (1948; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Moshik Temkin, The Sacco-­Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Rebecca N. Hill, Men Mobs, and Law: Anti-­ Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 162–­208. 78.  A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” Forum, February 1920, 173. 79. Donner, The Age of Surveillance, 33.

310  Notes to Pages 227–229

80.  Michael R. Belknap, “The Mechanics of Repression: J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation and the Radicals, 1917–­1925,” Crime and Social Justice 7 (Spring–­Summer 1977): 49–­58; David Williams, “The Bureau of Investigation and Its Critics, 1919–­1921: The Origins of Federal Political Surveillance,” Journal of American History 68 (December 1981): 560–­79; Donner, The Age of Surveillance, 3–­51; Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” 1–­18; Athan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 14–­28; Rhodri Jeffreys-­Jones, The FBI: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–­80; Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House 2013), 3–­70. 81. Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 208–­37; Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present (New York: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1978), 139–­63; Robert W. Dunn, ed., The Palmer Raids (New York: International Publishers, 1948). 82.  Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” 173. 83.  Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 288. 84.  Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” 176. 85.  Eldridge Foster Dowell, A History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation in the United States, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 57, no. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939); California’s Criminal Syndicalism Law (1919 Cal. Stat. 281–­82) and Red Flag Law (Cal. Penal Code 403a [1919]) are reprinted in The Tree of Liberty, 1:300–­301. 86.  Medieval California: Land of Orange Groves and Jails (Chicago: General Defense Committee, 1922), 1; Upton Sinclair, The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair’s California, ed. Lauren Coodley (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2004). 87.  Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–­1936 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998); Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–­1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 120–­57; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 36–­59; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998); Glenda E. Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–­1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Theodore Kornweibel Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–­1928 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975); Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–­1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Michael C. Dawson, Blacks In and Out of the Left (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 88.  An Appeal to the Conscience of the Civilized World (New York: NAACP, 1920), 3–­6. 89.  One Big Union Monthly, November 1919, 9–­10.

Notes to Pages 229–233 311

90. Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” 84–­85. 91.  Cyril V. Briggs, “The Capital and Chicago Race Riots,” The Crusader, September 1919, 5–­6; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–­1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 45–­70. 92. Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” 91; J. M. Pawa, “The Search for Black Radicals: American and British Documents Relative to the 1919 Red Scare,” Labor History 16 (Spring 1975): 272–­84. 93.  Marcus Garvey, “Message from Marcus Garvey, Tombs Prison, New York City, June 19, 1923,” in The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. 5, ed. Robert Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 365–­67. 94.  Marcus Garvey, “The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Race Riots, 8 July 1917,” in The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. 1, ed. Robert Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 212–­18; Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 95. Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” 100–­31. 96.  “Capitalism’s Praetorian Guard,” The New Day, April 2, 1921, 4; “The American Legion—­Our National Ku Klux Klan,” The Messenger, February 1920, 4. 97.  “Abolitionists failed to see that after the momentary exaltation of war, the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers. They did not know that when they let the dictatorship of labor be overthrown in the South they surrendered the hope of democracy for all men.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–­1880 (New York: Meridian Books, 1935), 591–­92. 98.  John McClelland Jr., Wobbly War: The Centralia Story (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1987); Tom Copeland, The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 99.  “Lynch IWW for Slaying of Overseas Veteran: Armistice Parade Red’s Target,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1919; “Centralia’s Horror,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1919. 100.  San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1919; “A Grim Lesson,” Washington Post, November 13, 1919. 101.  Ralph Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy (Chicago: IWW Publishing, 1920); Walker C. Smith, Was It Murder? Authentic Record of the Causes Leading to, the Actual Events of, and the Trial That Followed the Armistice Day Tragedy at Centralia, Wash., Nov. 11, ’19 (Centralia, WA: Centralia Publicity Committee, 1925); Donald A. MacPhee, “The Centralia Incident and the Pamphleteers,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 62 (July 1971): 110–­16. 102.  Coroner’s reports quoted in Washington Post, November 15, 1919.

312  Notes to Pages 233–248

103.  This evidence is sifted in McClelland, Wobbly War, 83–­85; Copeland, Centralia Tragedy, 89–­90. 104. Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy; Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-­ and-­Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 290–­301. 105.  John Dos Passos characterizes Wesley Everest as a Wobbly Paul Bunyan in the final pages of 1919 (1932; repr., New York: Signet Classics, 1979), 453–­56. Also see Thomas Churchill, Centralia Dead March (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1980). 106. Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy, 2. 107. Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy, 35–­36. 108. McClelland, Wobbly War, 115–­242. 109.  “Why Negroes Should Join the IWW,” The Messenger, July 1919, 8. 110. Editorial, The Liberator, March 1918, 3. 111.  “Class Murder in America,” The Liberator, August 1920, 30–­31. 112.  “Class Murder in America,” The Liberator, August 1920, 30–­31. 113.  Barbara Foley argues that the subordination of race to class, and the insistence that racial liberation could come only with the overthrowing of capitalist exploitation, was common among nearly all factions of the American Left after 1919, with both black and white radicals alike sharing this faith. Foley, Spectres of 1919, 1–­70. 114.  David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 9. 115.  Resolution of September 3, 1919, quoted in “Radical Organizations on the Negro Question,” The Messenger, February 1920, 7. 116.  Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 700. 117.  “The ‘American Legion’ a Revolutionary Body,” One Big Union Monthly, December 1919, 9–­10. 118.  “The Ku Klux Government,” One Big Union Monthly, August 1919, 7. 119.  “The Ku Klux Government,” One Big Union Monthly, August 1919, 7. 120. Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded; Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York: Verso, 2007). 121.  “Stools and Fools,” One Big Union Monthly, August 1920, 12; Eugene Debs, “The Wall Street Bomb,” The New Day, October 2, 1920, 1. 122.  “City Under Guard Against Red Plot Threatened Today,” New York Times, May 1, 1920; Philip Foner, May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886–­1986 (New York: International Press, 1986). 123. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, 274. 124.  Clarence Darrow, “Freedom Knows No Limits: The Communist Trial, Chicago, 1920,” in Attorney for the Damned, ed. Arthur Weinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 121–­73; Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 394; Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 396.

Notes to Pages 250–258 313

CONCLUSION: “WILL FASCISM COME TO AMERICA?” 1.  Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906; repr., New York: International Arts & Sciences Press, 1976), 106, 119. 2.  Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York: Verso, 1986), 51. 3.  Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). 4.  James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America: 1912–­1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984); Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States (New York: Verso, 1987); Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 3–­51; Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 57–­80. 5.  Upton Sinclair, “Imprisonment of Debs Is Part of Conspiracy Against Your Liberty,” Appeal to Reason, May 22, 1920, 1, 3. 6.  Samuel Gompers, “Plot Against Unions,” New York Times, September 17, 1922; an expanded version of Gompers’s editorial appeared as “The Conspiracy Against Labor,” American Federationist, October 1922, 721–­39. 7.  Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 8, Postwar Struggles, 1918–­1920 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 184. 8.  Gompers, “The Conspiracy Against Labor,” 723. 9.  The Open Shop “Conspiracy”: By Representatives of Organized Labor, the Public and Organized Industry (New York: National Association of Manufacturers, 1922). 10.  Samuel Harden Church, “Trade Unionism and Crime,” New York Times, October 1, 1922, reprinted in The Open Shop “Conspiracy,” 14, 24. 11.  John E. Edgerton, “The Open Shop ‘Conspiracy,’” in The Open Shop “Conspiracy,” 28, 31. 12.  Emma Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (New York: Humanity Books, 1998), 336. 13.  Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 2–­3, 244–­45. 14.  Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; repr., New York: Free Press, 1965), 158. 15.  Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 37–­38; Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books 1996); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957). 16.  E. G. Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography; My First Life, 1906–­1926 (New York: International Publishers, 1955); Flynn, The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (New York: International Publishers, 1963); Helen C. Camp, Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995).

314  Notes to Pages 258–262

17.  James P. Cannon, Notebook of an Agitator (1956; repr., New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 58. 18. Cannon, Notebook of an Agitator, 42. 19.  Labor Defense: Manifesto, Resolution, Constitution (Chicago: International Labor Defense, 1926), 6. 20.  Rose Baron, They Gave Their Freedom! (New York: International Labor Defense, 1936); Sasha Small, Ten Years of Labor Defense (New York: International Labor Defense, 1935); Vern Smith, The Frame-­Up System (New York: International Pamphlets, 1930). 21.  Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 13, 66; John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1933) (repr., New York: Signet Classics, 1979). 22.  Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 163–­93; Paul Murphy, World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870–­1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 299–­393; Peggy Lamson, Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 23.  American Civil Liberties Union, The Nation-­Wide Spy System: Centering in the Department of Justice (New York: ACLU, 1924). 24.  Robert P. Weiss, “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855–­1946,” History Journal 29 (1986): 98–­102. 25.  Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919–­1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 174–­75; Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 31–­70. 26.  The historian Ellen Schrecker suggests that the proper name for Cold War domestic anticommunism should be “Hooverism” rather than the narrow and shortlived “McCarthyism.” Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 27.  Claire Bond Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-­Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 28.  Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 92; David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1981); Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-­Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Notes to Pages 263–269 315

29.  Edward Levinson, I Break Strikes!: The Technique of Pearl L. Bergoff (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1935); Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Frank L. Palmer, Spies in Steel: An Expose of Industrial War (Denver: Labor Press, 1928); Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Stool Pigeon (New York: New Century Publishers, 1948); Alaine Austin, “‘Force and Violence’ on the Labor Front,” Monthly Review 3 (September 1951): 155–­59. 30.  Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937), 163. 31.  Weiss, “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855–­1946,” 102–­7. 32.  Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 48. 33.  Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992), 8–­9. 34.  “Fascism: Reaction of Big Capitalism,” Industrial Pioneer, October 1923, 44; also see Hubert Langerock, “Economic Background of the Ku-­Klux-­Klan,” Industrial Pioneer, January 1924, 11–­14 . 35.  Stuart Chase, Charles A. Beard, Theodore Dreiser, Norman Thomas, Waldo Frank, Horace M. Kallen, and V. F. Calverton, “Will Fascism Come to America? A Symposium,” Modern Monthly 8 (September 1934): 453–­78. 36.  Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 140–­41. 37.  Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 205; Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), 152. 38.  Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, Sabotage! The Secret War against America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942); John Roy Carlson, Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld in America (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1943); John L. Spivak, Secret Armies: The New Technique of Nazi Warfare, Exposing Hitler’s Undeclared War on the Americas (New York: Modern Age Books, 1939); H. Arthur Steiner, “Fascism in America?” American Political Science Review 29 (October 1935): 821–­30; Susan Canedy, America’s Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma; A History of the German American Bund (Menlo Park, CA: Markgraf Publications Group, 1990); Charles Higham, American Swastika (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1985); Who Killed Carlo Tresca? (New York: Carlo Tresca Memorial Committee, 1945); Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 39.  Peter H. Amann, “Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25 (July 1983): 490–­525; George Morris, The Black Legion Rides (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1936).

316  Notes to Pages 269–271

40.  Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983). 41.  George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–­1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 42.  George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (New York: In Fact, Inc., 1943), 68. 43.  John L. Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy,” The New Masses, January 29, 1935, 9; also see Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, Part 2: Morgan Pulls the Strings,” The New Masses, February 5, 1935, 10–­15; Spivak, A Man in His Time (New York: Horizon Press, 1967); Seldes, Facts and Fascism; Seldes, Even the Gods Can’t Change History (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1976); Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973). 44.  Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (New York: Round Table Press, 1935), 1–­2. 45.  Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Opinion and Judgement (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947). 46.  “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Karl Schmidt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.

INDEX

Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, 129 Amalgamated Wood Workers’ International Union, 60 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 258, 260 American exceptionalism, 24–­25, 28, 256 American Federationist, 135 American Indian Movement, 262 American Legion, 230–­33, 236, 241–­42, 268 American Order of Fascisti, 268 American Protective League (APL), 183, 190, 210–­11 American Railway Union (ARU), 70–­76 American Socialist, 214 American Tobacco Company, 69, 256 American Woolen Corporation, 222 Anaconda Copper Company, 179, 265 Anarchists and anarchism: Burns on, 124–­25; in Chicago, 35–­36; conspiracy of capital and, 1–­7; conviction of, 215; IWW and, 146, 168, 170; postwar, 221–­27; Preparedness Day bombing and, 192–­94, 199–­201; Red Scare and, 227, 232, 243–­45; secret societies and, 56–­57; syndicalism and, 168. See also Haymarket bombing Anarchy and Anarchists (Schaack), 41

abolitionists, 50, 229, 311n97 Ada County Jail, 110 Adamic, Louis, 123, 129, 135, 248 Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 102 Adams, Steve, 110, 113–­14 Adler, William, 302n79 Adorno, Theodor, 26 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 60, 68, 78, 124, 130, 161, 208, 237, 257; McNamara case and, 126–­28, 130, 134–­36; open shop drive and, 252–­53; WFM and, 105, 122; Wilson and, 203, 208, 252; WWI and, 203–­4. See also Gompers, Samuel Age of Monopoly (1877–­1929), 8–­9, 50, 56, 125, 145, 205, 248, 260, 262; criminal justice system during, 6, 29; popular radicalism of, 4, 7–­8, 31; race and racism in, 10–­11, 241; ruling elites during, 17; social movements and, 4, 20, 254 Age of Reform, The (Hofstadter), 278n47 Agitator, The, 128 agrarian radicalism, 88–­89, 119. See also Populism and Populists Alexander (king of Serbia), 202–­3 Alexander II (tsar of Russia), 202 Alien Act, 227 Allport, Gordon, 24 Altgeld, John, 44–­45, 47–­48, 51, 71, 73 317

318  Index Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), 56–­58 Anderson, Perry, 106–­7 anthracite coal miners’ strike (1903), 54–­55 anti-­capitalism, 83, 89 anticommunism, 9, 24–­25, 30, 261, 314n26. See also Red Scare anti-­imperialism, 10, 204–­5 “Anti-­Preparedness Mass Meeting,” 191 anti-­radical politics and violence, 11, 30, 40, 172, 181–­83, 201, 208–­9 anti-­Semitism, 24, 263 anti-­terrorism, 25 anti-­union, anti-­labor politics and violence, 43, 145, 169, 188; in auto industry, 262–­63, 268; Los Angeles Times and, 30, 84; mining industry and, 92; Otis and, 123–­25, 134; Paines and, 61; patriotic claims of, 180; steel industry and, 129; on West Coast, 164 antiwar sentiment, 191, 203–­5, 208–­17, 269–­7 1 Appeal Army, 87, 91, 126 Appeal Arsenal of Facts, The, 88 Appeal Publishing Company, 88, 121, 140 Appeal to Reason, 2, 10, 29, 83–­92, 110–­11, 138–­41, 194, 200, 214, 217; circulation of, 297n177; Colorado mining wars and, 93–­94, 97–­100; Daniel Bell on, 288n9; Debs and, 88, 91–­92, 98, 105–­8, 111, 125–­26, 139–­40; Haywood trial and, 83, 105–­8, 110–­11, 113–­14, 130–31, 287n2; McNamara case and, 125–­26, 128, 130–­33, 137–­38; Shoaf on, 83–­84, 291n51; Socialist Party and, 139–­40, 251 Appeal to the Conscience of the Civilized World, An, 238 Arizona, 177–­79, 182, 209, 213, 227–­28 Armory Show (1913), 14 Armour, Philip D., 35 assassination: by anarchists, 202–­3; of Carter Harrison, 33; conspiracy theories and, 9, 102; by Czolgosz, 9, 202–­3; of Ferdinand, 202; of Garfield,

38; of Kennedy, 23; of McKinley, 99, 203; Siringo and, 114; of Steunenberg, 80–­82, 84, 100–­101, 103, 112–­13. See also bombings Assef, Joseph, 153, 161 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 72 atheism, 50 Atteaux, Frederick E., 163 attentat (propaganda of the deed), 7, 36, 192, 222 Austro-­Hungarian Empire, 202–­3 autocracy, 242 auto industry, 262–­63, 268 Avrich, Paul, 45–­46, 199–­200, 280–­ 81n16, 281n25 Baez, Joan, 175 Bailyn, Bernard, 24 Baldwin, Roger, 260 Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, 56 “Ballad of Joe Hill, The” (Hayes and Robinson), 175 Bangs, George D., 116 Baruch, Bernard, 206 Bebel, August, 110 Becker, Maurice, 12–­17, 186–­87, 277n35 Bell, Daniel, 9, 24, 288n9 Bell, Sherman, 93–­94, 96–­97, 99–­101, 114 Bellamy, Edward, 86, 148 Benjamin, Walter, 47, 80 Bennett, Harry, 263 Benoit, Oscar, 157–­58 Berger, Victor, 5, 77, 89, 92, 128, 135, 139, 160, 167–­68, 203, 217–­18, 231 Bergoff Brothers, 56 Berkman, Alexander, 2–­5, 49, 192–­95, 197–­200, 215, 227 Bernays, Edward, 203, 255–­56 Bielaski, A. Bruce, 212 Big Trouble (Lukas), 287n2 Billings, Warren, 189, 195–­98, 258–­59 Birth of a Nation (film), 208–­9, 237 Bisbee deportations, 177–­79, 182, 209 Black Hand, 202 Black Legion (Detroit), 268

Index  319 Black Mask, 265 Black Power movement, 262 black radicalism, 10–­11, 50, 54, 146, 188, 190, 208–­9, 228–­31, 236–­42, 266–­67, 311n97, 312n113 black socialists, 10, 228–­29, 237 Blast, The, 192–­95, 197–­98, 200–­201, 215 Bohn, Frank, 92 Boise, Idaho, 111, 114, 117, 120, 132 Bolsheviks and Bolshevik revolution, 15, 184, 219–­27, 231, 260, 267; federalization of U.S. intelligence and, 226–­27, 229, 260; Red Scare and, 243–­48. See also Lenin, V. I.; Trotsky, Leon bombings, 30, 37, 46, 82–­83, 166, 244–­25, 281n25; anarchist bombing campaign, 222–­25; See also assassination; dynamite; Haymarket bombing; Independence Depot bombing; Los Angeles Times, bombing of; Preparedness Day bombing; Steunenberg, Frank; Wall Street bombing bomb squads (Red squads), 40 Bone, Harry J., 138 Bonfield, John, 45 Bonus Marchers, 270 Booth, John Wilkes, 9 Borah, William E., 112, 117–­18, 160 Boston, Massachusetts, 109, 224 Boston American, 155, 163 Boudin, Louis, 148 Bourne, Randolph, 148, 204, 207, 210 Brandeis, Louis, 1–­2 Brazier, Richard, 185–­86 Breen, John J., 156–­57, 161–­64, 166 Bresci, Gaetano, 221 Brewer, George and Grace, 92 Briggs, Albert M., 210 Briggs, Cyril, 229 Brown, John, 50 Bryan, William Jennings, 89 Bryant, Louise, 14 Buda, Mario, 243–­44 Buhle, Paul, 7 Bulosan, Carlos, 267

Bureau of Investigation, 183, 211–­12, 260–­61. See also Federal Bureau of Investigation Burleson, Albert Sidney, 213–­14, 223 Burns, William J., 124–­25, 129, 131, 261 Burns Detective Agency, 56, 124, 143, 261 Butler, Smedley Darlington, 268–­70 Butte, Montana, 93, 209, 265 Butte Speculator Mine, 179 Caesar’s Column, 88 Cahan, Abraham, 109 Caldwell, Idaho, 80–­81, 100–­101 California, 126–­28, 197, 267; criminal syndicalism laws and, 182–­83, 227–­ 28; Wheatland riot, 142–­44. See also Los Angeles, California; Los Angeles Times; San Diego, California; San Francisco, California California Building Trades, 134 Call, The, 224 Callahan Detective Agency, 159 Cannon, James P., 258 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 202–­3 Canton, Ohio, 216–­17 Capital (Marx), 7, 77, 88, 145 capitalism and capitalists: characterized as enemy, 1–­4, 89–­91, 97–­98, 108–­9, 122, 143, 147–­48, 155, 222; conspiracy theories and, 28, 252–­54; criminal conspiracy and, 12–­14, 17, 29, 164–­66, 200–­201, 219; IWW and, 147–­48, 155, 167; inequality and, 15; Marx and, 21; Moyer-­Haywood-­Pettibone case and, 81–­82; personification of, 21–­23; racism and, 10–­11, 228, 240–­41, 312n113; socialism and, 35, 46–­47, 83, 108–­9, 122; vigilantism and, 231, 239, 247; WWI and, 204–­5, 208. See also monopoly capitalism capitalist press, 58, 102, 106, 110–­12, 120–­21, 145, 239 cartoons and cartoonists, 7, 14–­15, 26, 28, 225; in Appeal to Reason, 89–­90, 98–­99; by Becker, 12–­17, 186–­87; by Chaplin, 145, 149–­51, 174–­76, 180–­81,

320  Index cartoons and cartoonists (continued) 234, 259; IWW and, 149–­50, 184, 245–­47; by Minor, 193, 199–­200; race and, 240–­41; by Young, 5, 14–­15, 17–­18, 21–­22, 47–­49, 214, 216, 243–­44 Carlos I (king of Portugal), 202–­3 Carnot, Marie François Sadi, 202 Cassidy, Butch, 114 censorship, 14, 213–­15, 247, 259 Centralia Citizens’ Protective League, 232, 236 Centralia Conspiracy, The (Chaplin), 234–­35, 238 Centralia massacre, 190–­91, 231–­36, 258–­59 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 256 Chafee, Zechariah, Jr., 6, 213, 260 Chaplin, Ralph, 14, 143–­45, 172–­79, 180–­86, 259, 298n19; cartoons by, 145, 149–­51, 174–­76, 180–­81, 234, 259; The Centralia Conspiracy, 233–­38; on “Solidarity Forever,” 14, 150 Charles Kerr and Co., 151 Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, 72 Chicago, Illinois, 109, 114, 128, 151, 174; anarchists in, 35–­36; Darrow in, 49–­51; IWW in, 146–­48, 183–­84, 218; Pullman strike and, 71–­73, 75; Shoaf in, 99–­100. See also Haymarket bombing Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, 72 Chicago American, 99–­100 Chicago Defender, 230 Chicago Times, 38–­40 Chicago Tribune, 120, 180 Chinese American workers, 142–­43, 146 Chrysler, 263 Church, Samuel Harden, 253 Circuit Court of Louisiana, 69–­70 Citizens’ Alliance, 169, 234, 300n62; in Colorado, 92–­93, 96–­99, 113 civil liberties, 5, 7–­8, 21, 28, 29–­31, 247, 250, 256–­63; conspiracy doctrine and, 33, 78–­79, 145, 270; legal defense campaigns and, 186, 259–­60. See also freedom of speech

Civil Liberties Bureau, 258, 260 Civil Liberties Union, 228, 236 civil rights movement, 262 Civil War in France, The (Marx), 4 class conflict/struggle, 4–­6, 8, 25, 26, 29, 151, 251; Darrow and, 34–­35, 50; IWW and, 15–­16, 144–­46, 185, 242; Jack London on, 108–­9; McNamara case and, 129, 136–­38; racism and, 239–­40; socialism and, 85, 89–­91, 167 class consciousness, 10, 108, 129, 137, 148, 168, 240–­41 Clayton Act, 135 Cleveland, Grover, 72 Cleveland, Ohio, 224 coal miners, 54–­55, 57–­59, 194 Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 93, 113–­14, 128 “cognitive mapping” (Jameson), 20, 141 Cold War, 9, 261, 314n26 collective bargaining, 263 Collier’s, 166 Collins, Dennis J., 161, 163 Colombo, Antonio, 153 Colorado, 81, 84–­86, 93–­94, 100, 103–­4, 109. See also Cripple Creek, Colorado; Denver, Colorado; Pueblo, Colorado; Victor, Colorado Colorado Farmers’ Alliance, 86 Colorado mining wars, 92–­100, 115–­16, 121 Combination Acts, 64 Coming Nation, The, 86–­87, 139 Committee for Public Information (CPI), 254–­56 Commonwealth v. Carlisle (1821), 285n84 Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), 67 Communist Labor Party, 221, 247 Communist Party of America, 221 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), 9, 10, 19, 221, 266 communists and communism, 24, 148, 220–­21 “Condemned Anarchists as They Appear in Jail, The” (Young), 47, 49 “Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard” (Orchard), 102–­3

Index  321 Conger-­Kaneko, Josephine, 87 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 262, 268 consensus school of American historiography, 24 conservatism, 28 conspiracy, 17–­20, 24, 59, 63–­64. See also dialectics of conspiracy conspiracy doctrine: conspiracy laws, 9, 23, 59–­70, 122; criminal justice system and, 28–­29; demands for repeal of, 67–­68, 96; Darrow and, 29, 32–­35, 51–­56, 61–­65, 74–­75, 78–­79, 145, 247; English common law and, 62–­65, 67, 170, 284n71; expansion of, 28–­29, ­40, 63–­64, 190; Haymarket bombing and, 40–­46; as inchoate crimes, 52, 68; labor unions and, 6, 53–­65, 67–­68, 103, 151–­52; legal defense campaigns and, 259; McNamara case and, 130; Nuremberg trials and, 271; seditious conspiracy, 172, 212, 219, 247, 301n71 conspiracy of capital, 1–­8; Darrow and, 118–­19; Debs and, 125; Haymarket generation and, 4–­7, 9–­11; IWW and, 143–­45, 164–­66, 180–­82, 218–­19, 241–­42; Marx and, 4; as slogan, 67; socialist press and, 84–­85, 98–­100, 138, 141; as system, 201; WWI and, 206, 208. See also capitalism and capitalists; countersubversion; dialectics of conspiracy; “invisible government”; Red Scare conspiracy theory, 4–­5, 9, 17–­31, 256, 288n14; agrarian radicalism and, 88–­89; Appeal to Reason and, 141; countersubversive and, 75, 226; of the Fourteenth Amendment, 54, 283n53; Gompers and, 253; Haymarket bombing and, 40–­46, 85; IWW and, 144–­45; McNamara case and, 125–­26; Mooney case and, 190; racism and, 11, 237–­41; Red Scare and, 226; Steunenberg assassination and, 80–­82; WWI and, 190 Cook County Jail, Chicago, 44, 73, 184, 218

Cooperative Commonwealth (Gronlund), 86 copper miners, 93, 177–­79 “Copper Trust to the Press” (Chaplin), 180–­81 Cornish, John, 116 corporations, laws and rights of, 54–­55, 68–­69, 253, 256; on corporate personhood, 31, 54, 249 Corporations Auxiliary Services, 263 Coughlin, Charles, 268 counter-­conspiracy theories, 42–­43, 63, 84, 113–­14, 117, 152, 185. See legal defense campaigns Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO [FBI]), 262 countersubversion, 25–­28, 35, 58, 75, 82, 101, 109, 147, 164, 191, 209–­10, 220, 251; black radicalism and, 228–­29, 231, 238; fascism and, 271; FBI and, 212; IWW and, 143–­45, 158, 168–­69, 182–­83, 242; Lawrence strike and, 153; militarism and, 205; Pinkertons and, 58, 116–­18; Preparedness Day and, 191; in response to bombings, 166; Rogin’s definition and, 25–­26; white terror and, 239. See also Red Scare countersubversive personality, 116–­17 Creel, George, 203 criminal syndicalism laws, 9, 227–­28; on California criminal syndicalism law (1919), 182–­83, 228 Cripple Creek, Colorado, 93–­94, 96, 113 Cronaca Sovversiva, 221–­22 Crusader, The, 229–­30 Czolgosz, Leon, 9, 202–­3 Daily People, 132 “dangerous knowledge,” 82–­86, 114, 126, 132, 141, 165 Darrow, Clarence, 2, 5; class conflict and, 34–­35, 50; conspiracy doctrine and, 29, 32–­35, 51–­56, 61–­65, 74–­75, 78–­79, 145, 247; counter-­conspiracy theories and, 63, 84, 113–­14, 152; countersubversion and, 35; Haymarket bombing and, 44–­46, 49–­52; Haywood trial and, 29–­30,

322  Index Darrow, Clarence (continued) 112–­14, 118–­20, 122; McNamara case and, 127, 130–­31, 133, 136–­37; as movement lawyer, 257; Oshkosh trial and, 59–­63; Pullman strike and, 70, 72–­78; on Sherman Anti-­Trust Act, 69; Steunenberg assassination and, 81–­82; Steve Adams and, 110; WWI and, 204 Davis, David Brion, 9, 24 Davis, John “Dirty Shirt,” 98 Davis, Mike, 250 Davis, Oscar King, 112, 120 Davis, Stuart, 14 Dean, Jodi, 275n18 death penalty, 47, 50, 53, 58–­59, 130, 158 Debs, Eugene V., 5, 14, 29, 121, 133, 167, 194, 203, 244, 260; Appeal to Reason and, 88, 91–­92, 98, 105–­8, 111, 125–­26, 139–­40; black radicalism and, 11, 237; Darrow and, 33–­35; Espionage Act tested by, 216–­17; Haymarket bombing and, 46–­47, 105–­6; Haywood and, 105–­7, 122, 167–­68; McNamara case and, 125–­27, 135, 137; as presidential candidate, 89, 91–­92, 128, 139, 194, 221, 230, 297n177; Pullman strike and, 70–­78 de Cleyre, Voltairine, 45–­46, 48 Degan, Mathias, 36, 40–­41 De Leon, Daniel, 89, 105, 132, 148 Dell, Floyd, 214 democracy, 21–­23, 28, 31, 255, 271, 272 Democratic Party, 33, 85, 89, 93, 113, 135, 137 demonology, political, 25–­26. Also see countersubversion Denning, Michael, 259, 273n5 Denver, Colorado, 103–­5, 115 Denver Republican, 111 deportations, 114, 177–­79, 199, 222–­23, 227, 248 detective fiction, 58, 82, 263–­66 detectives: on private detectives, 5, 9, 20, 31, 54–­58, 80, 97–­98, 113–­15, 119, 125, 138, 147, 152–­55, 157, 184, 195–­97, 210, 219, 226, 243–­44, 248,

261–­65, 267, 274n8; on socialist and “social detective,” 7, 29, 84, 100, 126, 234, 288n12. See also Baldwin Felts Detective Agency; Burns Detective Agency; Callahan Detective Agency; Corporation Auxiliary Services; labor spies; McParland, James; Pinkerton, Allan; Pinkertonism; Pinkerton National Detective Agency; Siringo, Charles dialectics of conspiracy, 4–­5, 7–­8, 12–­17, 19, 37, 46, 79, 82–­83, 85, 129, 144, 166, 190, 221, 230, 238, 281n25 Díaz, Porfirio, 124 Dillinger, John, 261 Di Prato, Urban, 153, 155, 161 Dixon, Thomas, 208 Donnelly, Ignatius, 2, 89 Donner, Frank, 226 Donohue, Joseph J., 163 Dos Passos, John, 175, 259 Draper, Theodore, 1 Dreier, Mary, 109 Dreiser, Theodore, 259 Du Bois, W. E. B., 8, 10, 240, 311n97 DuPont family and company, 206, 2­68 Durst brothers, 143–­44 dynamite, 5, 9, 78, 81, 94, 98, 101–­3, 111, 120, 124, 129–­30, 134, 137–­38, 144, 189, 192–­93, 195, 211, 243, 251, 279n6, 296n156; Alfred Nobel and, 37; anarchism and, 23, 36–­37, 51, 222–­25, 271; Lawrence dynamite conspiracy, 153–­59, 161–­67. See also bombings “dynamite confessionals,” 102–­4, 124 Dynamiters, The (film), 127 Eastman, Crystal, 14, 238 Eastman, Max, 5, 14, 214, 238, 260 East St. Louis race riots, 230 economic inequality, 50–­51, 207, 272, 306n35 Edwards, Ogden, 66 eight-­hour movement, 35–­36, 40, 41, 43, 67, 93, 248 Elisabeth (empress of Austria), 202–­3

Index  323 Emery, Sarah E. V., 2, 88 Engel, George, 41–­42, 44, 47, 49 England, George Allan, 83 Espionage Act, 9, 14, 190, 222, 260; Debs’s testing of, 216–­17; IWW and, 182–­84; passage of, 212–­14. See also Alien Act Ettor, Joseph, 156, 158–­59, 161–­62, 165 Everest, Wesley, 233–­34, 259 Everett Massacre, 177–­78, 182 extremists, 24–­25 Faccia a faccia col nemico (Galleani), 221–­22 Fair Hope, Alabama, 109–­10 fascism: Butler and exposed conspiracy, 268–­70; countersubversion, 191; in Europe, 267–­68; Farm Fascism, 267; paranoid style and, 24; Pinkertonism and, 262–­63, 265; in United States, 241–­43, 266–­68 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 9, 190, 212, 260–­62. See also Bureau of Investigation Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (Pennsylvania), 68 feminism, 87, 259 Ferdinand, Franz (archduke of Austria), 202 feudalism, 33, 35, 63, 143–­44 Fickert, Charles, 195–­97, 223 Field, Marshall, 35, 38, 45 Fielden, Samuel, 36, 44, 49 “First Anniversary Kidnapping Edition” (Appeal to Reason), 110–­11 Fischer, Adolph, 41–­42, 44, 49 Fitzgerald, Mary Eleanor, 193–­94 Fletcher, Ben, 149, 184 Flores-­Magón, Enrique and Ricardo, 5, 192 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 5, 7, 149, 159–­ 60, 174, 186, 194, 219, 237, 257–­58 Foley, Barbara, 11, 312n113 Foner, Eric, 260 Foner, Philip S., 58, 295n131, 302n79 Forbath, William, 55 Ford, Henry, 262–­63, 268

Ford, Richard “Blackie,” 143–­44 Ford Motor Company, 263 Ford-­Shur trial, 144 Forum, 188 Foster, William Z., 5, 147, 194–­95 frame-­up, 62, 81, 106, 122, 125–­28, 130–­34, 159, 162, 166, 174, 186, 190, 198–­200, 230, 244, 248 “Frame-­Up System, The” (Minor), 197–­98, 200–­201 France, 184, 206 Frank, Leo, 208 freedom of assembly, 5–­6, 45–­46 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 262 freedom of speech: ACLU and, 260; campaigns for, 169–­72, 177, 247; conspiracy doctrine and, 5–­6; Darrow and, 35, 51–­52; Haymarket bombing and, 45–­46; Haymarket generation and, 31; IWW and, 152, 169–­7 1; left activism and, 78, 259–­60; restrictions on, 212–­15, 2­47; social movements and, 28; Supreme Court and, 38 free silver movement, 89 free speech campaigns (IWW), 169–­72, 177, 247 Freud, Sigmund, 293n97 Frick, Henry Clay, 192, 206 Friedman, Morris, 82, 114–­17 Friends of Joe Hill Committee, 302n79 Galleani, Luigi, 199–­200, 221–­22 Galleanisti, 222, 224–­25, 243 Garcia, Benito, 178 Garfield, James A., 38 Garvey, Marcus, 5, 227, 230–­31 Gary, Joseph E., 41, 44 Gaylor, Edward S., 116 General Investigation Division (GID), 226–­27, 231 General Managers’ Association (GMA), 71, 74–­76 General Motors, 263, 268 general strike, 7, 31, 36, 70, 106, 146, 161, 165, 201–­2, 220, 223

324  Index Geneva decision (1835), 66 George, Harrison, 218–­19 George, Henry, 50–­51 George I (king of Greece), 202–­3 German American Bund, 268 German Americans, 10, 213, 227 German Social Democrats, 110, 250 Ghent, W. J., 140, 204 Giovannitti, Arturo, 158–­59, 161–­62, 165 Girard, Kansas, 83, 87, 91–­92, 107–­8, 126, 138–­39. See also Appeal to Reason Goldfield, Nevada, 151–­52 Goldman, Emma, 2–­5, 8, 46; Berkman and, 192–­94; civil liberties and, 260; deportation of, 227; in exile, 188; Flynn and, 159; on Haymarket bombing, 48–­50; militarism and, 205–­6, 215, 222; Mooney case and, 198–­200, 215; Mother Earth, 137, 200; on paranoia, 254; “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter,” 193–­94, 306n32; prosecution of, 215; San Diego free speech fight and, 171 Gompers, Samuel, 5, 78, 126–­27, 134–­36, 164–­65, 252–­54 Gooding, Frank, 101, 104, 117 Good Morning, 14 “Good Morning’s Inaugural Parade” (Young), 243–­44 Gorky, Maxim, 110 Gould, Jay, 20–­21 government raids, 183, 190, 227, 231 Gowan, Franklin, 57–­58 Gramsci, Antonio, 7, 149, 189, 275n13 Great Crash (1929), 9 Great Depression, 9, 267 Great Migration, 10, 228–­31 Great Northern Railroad, 71 Great Uprising of 1877, 9, 35, 67 Green, Archie, 142 Gregory, Stephen, 77 Gregory, Thomas W., 123, 209 Griffith, D. W., 208–­9 Gronlund, Laurence, 86 Grosscup, Peter, 72–­74, 76

Guggenheim, Simon, 86, 206 Guiteau, Charles, 38 Gus and the Anarchists (film), 127 Haldeman-­Julius, Emmanuel, 139 Hammett, Dashiell, 265–­66 Hand, Learned, 52 Hanson, Ole, 223 Harding, Warren G., 217 hard rock miners, 93, 100, 109 Hardwick, Thomas, 223 Harper’s, 144, 166 Harriman, Job, 128, 131, 134, 136, 168 Harrison, Carter, 35 Harrison, Hubert, 230 Harvard, 153 Harvey, “Coin,” 88–­89 Hattam, Victoria, 53, 55 Hawkins, Serjeant, 63–­64 Hawley, James, 112, 117 Hayes, Alfred, 175 Haymarket bombing (1886), 4, 6, 36–­49; conspiracy doctrine and, 40–­44, 52–­53; conspiracy theories and, 40–­46; Darrow and, 29, 34, 44–­ 46, 49–­52; Debs and, 46–­47, 105–­6; legacy of, 194; march on anniversary of, 109; Siringo and, 114; terrorism and, 38, 44–­45 Haymarket Conspiracy, The (Messer-­ Kruse), 281n25 Haymarket generation: American Legion and, 231–­32; cartooning and, 14; Colorado mining wars and, 98; conspiracy doctrine and laws and, 34–­35, 152; conspiracy of capital and, 4–­7, 9–­11, 19, 20, 23, 26–28, 85; Debs and, 73, 77–­78; defeat of, 191, 242–­43, 251; destruction of, 30–­31; emergence of, 35, 46; Haywood and, 106, 122–­23; “invisible government” and, 148–­49; IWW and, 148; legacy of, 31, 247–­49; martyrs of, 42, 47–­48, 73, 99, 184, 197–­98; Mooney case and, 189–­90, 201; Popular Front generation and, 189–­90, 225, 259; silencing of, 214; in twentieth century, 82–­84

Index  325 “Haymarket Riot, The” (Thulstrup), 38–­39 Haymarket Tragedy, The (Avrich), 280–­81n16 Haywood, William “Big Bill,” 5, 7; on capitalism, 145, 167, 219; Chaplin and, 151; in Cook County Jail, 184; Darrow and, 29–­30, 33; defense campaign for, 84, 105–­11 (see also Haywood trial); early life of, 104–­5; Gorky and, 110; Haymarket bombing and, 46; “Is Colorado in America?,” 94–­95; IWW and, 81, 109, 146, 148–­49, 155, 158–­60, 165, 236; Joe Hill and, 174; kidnapped by Pinkertons, 81, 103–­5, 110–­11; legal defense and, 186, 258; Little and, 179; McNamara case and, 125–­26, 135, 137; Mooney and, 194; Orchard’s confession and, 101, 103–­4, 113; in The Scarlet Shadow, 121; Socialist Party and, 167–­68; trial of 1918 and, 185–­88; in USA trilogy, 259; WFM and, 81, 105, 146, 167; WWI and, 177 Haywood trial, 105–­23; Appeal to Reason and, 83, 105–­8, 110–­11, 113–­14, 131, 287n2; Darrow and, 29–­30, 112–­14, 118–­20, 122; Gompers and, 126 Hearst, William Randolph, 86–­87, 99–­100, 132, 156, 191, 268 Helena Independent, 180 Hellman, Lillian, 265 Herndon, Angelo, 259 Higham, John, 208 Hill, J. J., 71 Hill, Joe, 30, 150, 152, 172–­76, 257, 259, 301–­2n79 Hill, Rebecca, 10–­11 Hillquit, Morris, 89, 128, 139, 167, 203 Hilton, O. N., 174 History of the Great America Fortunes, The (Myers), 2 Hobsbawm, Eric, 220 Hofstadter, Richard, 9, 23–­25, 28–­31, 278n44, 278–­79n47 Holland, Phillip, 161 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 38, 223 Homestead steel strike (1892), 129, 192

Hoover, J. Edgar, 183, 195, 226–­27, 229–­ 31, 261–­62, 314n26. See also Federal Bureau of Investigation Hopkins, John, 71 Horsely, Albert, 80–­81, 120. See also Orchard, Harry Hovenkamp, Herbert, 55 Howe, Frederic C., 2, 205 Howells, William Dean, 63 Hubbard, Dale, 233 Huberman, Leo, 263 Hurt, Walter, 121 Idaho, 80–­82, 84, 93–­94, 100–­102, 107–­9, 111–­12, 117–­18, 227–­28. See also Boise, Idaho; Caldwell, Idaho; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Silver City, Idaho Il Proletario, 158 immigrants: deportation of, 178; fascist ideology and, 268; IWW’s internationalism and, 143, 146; Joe Hill and, 172; KKK and, 209; in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 154, 156, 165–­66; organized labor and, 208, 219; radical cartoons and, 14; radicals, 156, 205, 212, 227, 231, 236–­37 (see also Goldman, Emma); Red Scare and, 215, 227–­28, 260; socialism and, 84–­85; Wilson and, 203 imperialism, 192–­93, 204–­6, 208 Independence Depot bombing, 84, 94–­101, 115–­16 Indiana, 85–­86 Indianapolis, Indiana, 124, 130 Industrial Pioneer, 267 industrial socialism, 105 industrial unionism, 29, 77, 104, 153–­55, 178 Industrial Worker, 150 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 10, 19, 30, 68, 145–­53, 208; APL and, 210–­11; Appeal to Reason and, 140; black radicalism and, 228–­ 31, 237–­39, 241; cartoons and, 14–­17; Centralia massacre and, 231–­36; conspiracy of capital and, 143–­45, 164–­66, 180–­82, 218–­19,

326  Index Industrial Workers of the World (continued) 241–­42; countersubversive strategy against, 167–­72, 182–­83, 213; criminal syndicalism laws and, 227–­28; Ettor-­Giovannitti case and, 157–­59, 161–­62, 165; fascism and, 241–­42, 266–­67; free speech campaigns and, 169–­7 1; General Defense Committee, 186, 236, 258; Gompers and, 136–­37; Haywood and, 81, 109, 146, 148–­49, 155, 158–­60, 165, 236; intellectuals and, 146–­50, 298n19; “Ku Klux Government,” 241–­42; Lawrence “Bread and Roses” strike and, 154, 160, 164–­66, 300n42; legal defense campaigns and, 79, 256–­58; Little Red Songbook, 144, 151, 173; martyrs, 172–­82, 234, 265; Mooney and, 194; in Red Harvest, 265–­66; Red Scare and, 245–­48; songs, 144, 150–­51, 169–­70, 172–­74; trial of 1918, 182–­88; Wall Street bombing and, 244; WFM and, 105, 122; Wheatland riot and, 142–­44; Wobblies’ nickname for, 142–­44 Ingersoll, Robert, 13, 50 Inherit the Wind (film), 33 injunctions, 68–­70, 72–­73, 77–­78, 135, 248 inner circles, 101–­2, 110, 112, 116, 126 In re Debs, 77 Intellectuals and McCarthy, The (Rogin), 25 International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (IABSIW), 124, 128–­29 internationalism, 11, 110, 143, 199 International Labor Defense (ILD), 258–­59 International Socialist Congress, 194 International Socialist Review, 2, 83, 126, 160, 170, 177, 205, 214, 251; Haywood trial and, 106, 122; Joe Hill and, 174, 176 International Workers’ Defense League, 194, 200–­201

International Working People’s Association, 35 “invisible government,” 1, 7; Bernays on, 256; fascism and, 241–­43; IWW and, 181–­82, 218–­19, 234; as legacy of countersubversives, 260; Sinclair on, 149, 251–­52; Wilson and, 148–­49. See also conspiracy of capital; “Ku Klux Government” Irish World & American Industrial Liberator, The, 26, 28 Iron Heel, The (London), 108–­9, 178, 202, 266 Iron Workers Union, 134 “Is Colorado in America?” (Haywood), 94–­95 Ito (prince of Japan), 202–­3 Jackson, Robert H., 52, 271 Jameson, Elizabeth, 96–­97 Jameson, Fredric, 19–­20, 277–­78n39, 288n12 Jensen, Vernon, 301–­2n79 Jewish Daily Forward, 109 Jewish radicalism, 10, 109 “Joe Hill” (Chaplin), 174, 176 John Birch Society, 26 Johnson, Olive M., 132 Joliet Prison, 47, 49 Jones, Mary Harris “Mother,” 5, 40, 46, 105 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 83 Justice Department, 2, 14, 107, 183, 210, 221–­22, 243–­44, 260–­61 Kaneko, Kiichi, 87 Kansas, 83, 87–­89, 91–­92 Kautsky, Karl, 110 Kelley, Robin D. G., 10–­11 Kelly’s Army, 89 Kennedy, John F., 23 Kenny, Kevin, 58 Kidd, Thomas I., 60–­63 Kidwell, Alice and Daniel, 196–­97 Klansman, The (Dixon), 208 Knight, Peter, 275n18

Index  327 Knights of Labor, High and Noble Order of, 10, 35, 40, 56, 104, 194 Knights of Liberty, 178, 209 Kopelin, Louis, 139 Kornweibel, Theodore, 10–­11 Krulewitch v. United States, 52 “Ku Klux Government,” 30, 190, 241–­42, 267 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 9, 26, 190, 208–­9, 230, 242–­44, 262, 268 Labor Defender, 258–­59 labor films, 127, 295n131 labor movement and labor unions, 1–­5, 7, 89–­90, 208, 219–­20, 263; black radicalism and, 238–­39; conspiracy doctrine and, 6, 53–­68, 103, 151–­52; corporate rights and, 54–­55; courts and, 55–­56, 65–­67; Darrow and, 33, 64–­65; defeat of, 250–­52; early formation of, 64–­65; Gompers and, 126–­27; Haymarket bombing and, 35, 42–­44, 47; industrial unionism, 29, 77, 104, 153–­55, 178; IWW and, 15–­17, 145–­47; labor republicanism, 77; Lenin and, 220–­21; McNamara case and, 123–­26, 135–­37, 195, 197; Moyer-­Haywood-­Pettibone case and, 81–­82, 101; open shop drive and, 219, 252–­53; Preparedness Day bombing and, 197; Pullman strike and, 70, 73; Red Scare and, 227, 231, 248; secret societies and, 56–­58, 64–­65. See also American Federation of Labor; popular radicalism “Labor Ready to Crush the Conspiracy” (Becker), 186–­87 labor spies and labor espionage, 56, 115, 248, 261–­63. See also detectives Labor Spy Racket, The (Huberman), 263–­64 La Follette, Robert M., 263 La Guardia, Fiorello, 270 Lambert, Josiah Bartlett, 55 Landis, Kenesaw Mountain, 184, 186, 217–­18, 223

Lane, Mark, 275n18 Langdon, Emma, 94 La Questione Sociale, 221 Lawrence, Massachusetts, 144, 152–­67, 300n42 Lawrence “Bread and Roses” strike (1912), 30, 144, 153–­60, 167, 300n42 Lawrence dynamite conspiracy trial, 162–­67 Lease, Mary Elizabeth, 88–­89 legal defense campaigns, 6, 29, 79, 122, 135, 144, 174, 192, 225, 247, 259; for Centralia prisoners, 234, 236; for Ettor and Giovannitti, 159; for Haywood, 84, 105–­11; ILD and, 258–­ 59; IWW and, 256–­58; for Joe Hill, 173–­74; McNamara trial and, 129; for Mooney, 198–­200; for Preston, 152. See also conspiracy doctrine Lenin, V. I., 1–­2, 83, 148, 194, 204–­6, 220–­21 Leonard, John, 142 Leopold and Loeb, 33 liberalism, 24 Liberator, The, 239–­40 Liberty League, 268–70 Lingg, Louis, 41–­42, 44, 47, 49, 281n25 Lippmann, Walter, 30, 166, 203, 254–­56 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 24 Little, Frank, 30, 152, 179–­80, 265 Little Blue Books, 140 Little Red Songbook (IWW), 144, 151, 173 Living My Life (Goldman), 48, 194 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 2, 86, 89, 263 Lockhart, Texas, 98 Lockwood, T. H., 89–­91, 98–­99 London, Jack, 10, 89, 108–9, 148, 178, 202, 204, 266 Long, Huey, 268 LoPezzo, Annie, 157–­58, 161, 165 Los Angeles, California, 123–­25, 127–­30, 133–­34 Los Angeles Times, 123–­25, 129–­32, 134, 142, 192, 232; bombing of, 30, 84, 124–­25, 127, 129, 137–­38, 192

328  Index Louisiana Board of Trade, 230–­31 Luddism, 64, 147 Ludlow Massacre, 210 Lukács, Georg, 277–­78n39 Lukas, J. Anthony, 287n2 Lunn, George, 135 Lusitania, sinking of, 203 Luxemburg, Rosa, 194 lynching and lynch mobs, 5; American Legion and, 231–­33; black radicalism and, 228–­31, 238–­39; Espionage Act and, 213; KKK and, 208; Little and, 179–­81, 265; Red Scare and, 190; Thomas Gregory and, 209 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson), 64, 274n6 “Man Who Pulled the String, The” (Lockwood), 98–­99 Martyr to His Cause, A (film), 127 Marx and Marxism, 4, 7, 10, 21, 23, 219; in America, 135, 188, 251, 262; Capital, 7, 77, 88, 145; The Civil War in France, 4; IWW and, 146, 148, 151; totality and, 277–­78n39; vulgar Marxism, 7, 275n14 Massachusetts, 163, 225 Masses, The, 5–­6, 12–­14, 133, 137, 200, 206, 214–­16, 238 “Masters of Capital in America” (Moody and Turner), 2–­3 May Day, 31, 35, 46–­47, 224–­25 McCarthyism, 278–­79n47 McClure, S. S., 86–­87 McClure’s Magazine, 102, 134 McCormack-­Dickstein Committee, 269 McCormick, Cyrus H., Jr., 35 McCormick Reaper Works, 36 McHugh, Frank, 173 McKay, Claude, 238 McKenna, Joseph, 104 McKinley, William, 202–­3 McManigal, Ortie, 124, 134, 137 McNamara, James B., 124, 127, 129, 133–­34, 137–­38, 258–­59 McNamara, John J., 124, 127–­28, 133–­34, 137–­38

McNamara case, 124–­38; Appeal to Reason and, 125–­26, 128, 130–­33; Burns and, 261; confessions, 133–­34, 137–­38, 198; Darrow and, 127, 130–­31, 133–­34, 136–­37; Debs and, 125–­27, 135; Gompers and, 164, 252; Haywood and, 125–­26, 135; Mooney and, 194; Shoaf scandal and, 131–­33 McParland, James, 57–­58, 80–­81, 101–­4, 109, 111–­18, 120–­21 McWilliams, Carey, 143, 197, 267 Meng, George, 280–­81n16 Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, 123, 133, 137 merchants of death, 205 Merritt Conspiracy Act (1887), ­40 Messenger, The, 228–­31, 237–­38, 240–­41 Messer-­Kruse, Timothy, 41, 281n25 Mexico, 15, 200, 206, 222 militarism, 190, 192–­94, 201, 204–­7, 241 military, U.S., 56, 70, 72, 93–­94, 96 military draft, 177, 182, 184, 215 Military Intelligence Division (MID), 212 Mine Owners’ Association (MOA), 81, 92–­97, 100, 103, 110–­11, 113, 115–­16 Miners’ Magazine, 105, 109, 133 Minor, Robert, 193, 198–­201 Missouri, 85 modernism, 14, 146, 214, 245, 259 Mollman, Fred, 230–­31 Molly Maguires, 57–­59, 101 Molly Maguires and the Detectives, The (Pinkerton), 82 monopoly capitalism, 4, 9, 54, 67–­69, 78, 149–­50, 206. See also Age of Monopoly; capitalism and capitalists Montana, 93, 123, 179, 209, 227–­28, 265 Montgomery, David, 56, 67 Moody, John, 2–­3 Mooney, Rena, 195–­99 Mooney, Tom, 5, 135, 140, 189–­90, 194–­201, 215, 225, 258–­59 Morgan, J. P., 21–­22, 129, 138, 206, 223, 269 Morris, William, 88, 151 Morrison, Avling, 173

Index  329 Morrison, John, 173 Morrison, Merlin, 173 Most, Johann, 45, 57, 221 Mother Earth, 200, 215 Moyer, Charles H., 81, 94, 101, 103–­7, 113, 116, 120 Moyer-­Haywood-­Pettibone case, 81–­82, 109. See also Haywood trial “Mr. Block” (Riebe), 150 muckrakers, 83, 108, 128–­29, 254 Münsterberg, Hugo, 102 Myers, Gustavus, 2 naming the enemy, 271–­72, 316n46 Narodnaya Volya, 202 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 227, 230, 237–­38 National Association of Manufactures (NAM), 252–­53 National Erectors’ Association, 124, 129, 252 National Guard, 56, 60, 93–­94, 96, 143, 183 National Industrial Conference Board, 252 nationalism, 178, 190, 201–­3, 207–­9 Nationalist movement (Bellamy), 86 National Rip-­Saw, 83, 139, 214 National Security League, 206 national security state, 5, 29; federalization of intelligence and, 226, 243; IWW and, 152, 188; socialism and, 256; vigilantism and, 190, 210. See also Federal Bureau of Investigation National Union for Social Justice, 268 National Women’s Trade Union League, 109 nativism, 10, 40, 208–­9, 245–­47 Navy League, 206 Nazi Germany and Nazism, 52, 269–­7 1 Neebe, Oscar, 44 Negro question, 10–­11 New Appeal, 139 New Deal, 69, 267–­68 New Left, 26 New Masses, The, 269, 270

“New Negro” movement, 227–­29. See also black radicalism New Orleans, Louisiana, 230–­31 New Republic, The, 254–­55 New York Call, 83 New York City, 10, 14, 66–­67, 109, 224, 243–­44 New York Cordwainers case (1809), 285n84 New York Evening Post, 164 New York Evening World, 200 New York Globe, 182 New York Police Department, 243 New York Times, 72, 153, 229 New York Tribune, 229 New York Workingmen’s Assembly, 68 Nobel, Alfred, 37 No-­Conscription Movement, 215 Nolan, Ed, 196 Norris–­La Guardia Act, 69 “Now He Understands the Game” (Chaplin), 149–­50 Nuremberg trials, 52, 271 Oakland general strike (2011), 31 Occupy movement, 31 octopus images, 89–­91 Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), 212 O’Hare, Frank and Kate Richards, 139 Oklahoma, 88 Older, Fremont, 191 Olmsted, Kathryn, 275n18 Olney, Richard, 71–­73, 75, 77 One Big Union, 15–­17. See also Industrial Workers of the World One Big Union Monthly, 150, 245–­46 100% Americanism, 208, 230 open shop movement, 136, 191, 197, 219, 252–­53, 261 Orchard, Harry (Albert Horsely), 80–­81, 101, 110, 112–­14, 117–­20, 132 “Ordinance concerning Conspirators” (1305), 62, 281n71 organic intellectuals, 7, 149, 275n13. See also Gramsci, Antonio Orozco, José Clemente, 15 Orren, Karen, 55

330  Index Orwell, George, 266 Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 59–­65 Otis, Harrison Gray, 123–­25, 129, 131, 134, 137, 142 Our Benevolent Feudalism (Ghent), 140 Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims (Altgeld), 51 “Overalls and Snuff ” (IWW song), 144 Owen, Chandler, 228, 237–­38 Pacific Coast Business Men’s Preparedness League, 201 Pacific Defense League, 191 Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), 195 pacifism, 191, 203–­4, 208, 213. See also antiwar sentiment Paine, George M., 59–­62 Paine, Nathan, 62 Paine, Tom, 83 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 224, 226, 229–­31, 244–­45 Palmer Raids, 227, 231, 261 paranoia, 9, 23–­25, 117, 239, 254, 293n97 “Paranoid Style in American Politics, The” (Hofstadter), 23–­25, 30–­31, 278n44 Parsons, Albert: counterconspiracy and, 42–­44, 84; Darrow and, 51; execution of, 44; Haymarket bombing and, 42–­45; in jail, 47, 49; as martyr, 42, 48, 184, 281n25; Shoaf and, 99; Socialist Party and, 168 Parsons, Lucy, 42, 48, 105, 109 Paterson, New Jersey, 221 patriotism, 180, 192–­93, 201, 206–­11, 218, 225, 231, 243–­44 Peabody, James H., 93, 97, 101, 114 Pearl Harbor, attack on, 267 Pelletier, Joseph, 162–­63 Pelley, William Dudley, 268 Pennsylvania, 34, 57–­59, 65, 68, 192, 285n84 Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police, 57–­58 People’s Party, 88–­89. See also Populism and Populists “People’s Will, The,” 202

People v. Faulkner (1836), 66–­67 People v. Fisher (1835), 66 Pernicone, Nunzio, 199, 222 Pettibone, George A., 81, 101, 103–­5, 120 PG&E. See Pacific Gas & Electric Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, 57–­58 Philadelphia Cordwainers case (1805–­ 1806), 34, 65 Philadelphia Record, 164 Pinkerton, Allan, 56–­58, 82, 116, 121, 226, 263–­64 Pinkerton family, 86, 116 “Pinkertonism,” 262–­63 Pinkerton Labor Spy, The (Friedman), 115–­17 Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 5, 9, 23, 56–­61, 123–­24, 133, 151, 179, 192, 195; auto industry and, 263; Burns Detective Agency and, 124; Chaplin and, 151; FBI and, 226; Hammett and, 264–­65; Haymarket bombing and, 43–­44; Haywood case and trial and, 80–­82, 86, 101–­5, 108, 110–­18; kidnappings by, 103–­5, 110–­11; Steunenberg assassination and, 80–­82, 101; Steve Adams and, 110; strikebreaking, 192 Pitman, Ernest W., 161–­63 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 192 Pittsburgh Cordwainers case (1815), 285n84 “Plain Words” (anarchist leaflet), 224 “Plea for Preparedness, A,” 201 Plehve, Wenzel von, 202–­3 plutocracy and plutocrats, 4–­5, 21, 84, 106, 145, 149, 162; cartoons, 22, 98–­99, 151, 180–­81, 240–­41; militarism and, 192–­93; Pinkertonism and, 262–­63; in Red Harvest, 266; Red Scare and, 252 political prisoners, 257 Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 19–­20 Popular Front generation, 189–­90, 225, 248, 259, 262, 266–­7 1 popular radicalism, 274n6; Appeal to

Index  331 Reason and, 84; censorship and, 214; Chaplin and, 151; civil liberties and, 78; culture of, 4–­8, 35, 144, 219, 244, 248; defeat of, 190; Haywood and, 106, 146; IWW and, 144, 146, 148; paranoia and, 117; personification of capitalism and, 21–­23; plutocracy and, 89; Red Scare and, 226, 248; socialism and, 128, 141; unionism and, 127; WWI and, 205. See also Industrial Workers of the World; labor movement and labor unions; socialist movements and socialism Populism and Populists, 2, 25, 29, 77, 84, 88–­89, 119, 278–­79n47 Populist Party, 86, 100 Poulterer’s Case (1611), 63 poverty, 50–­51, 76, 85–­86 “Preacher and the Slave, The” (Joe Hill), 150 “Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World” (Becker), 15–­16, 277n35 Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, 15–­17, 151, 277n35 Preparedness Day bombing (1916), 30, 189–­201, 244–­45 Preparedness Movement, 201, 205–­6, 208–­11 “Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter” (Goldman), 193–­94, 306n32 Preston, Morrie, 152, 184 Princip, Gavrilo, 202 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Berkman), 192 prison strikes, 257 “Products of Civilization, or the Survival of the Fittest (No. 4) J. P. Morgan” (Young), 22 Progress and Poverty (George), 50–­51 Progressive Era (1901–­1920), 8–­9 Progressives, 125, 203–­5, 211, 229, 260. See also Lippmann, Walter; Palmer, A. Mitchell; Sayre, Francis; Wilson, Woodrow Progressive Woman, The, 87

proletariat, 104, 108, 122, 144–­45, 148–­49, 204–­5 propaganda, 254–­56 Propaganda (Bernays), 255–­56 provocateurs 23, 41, 48, 56, 96, 117, 191, 219, 244, 251 “Psychology of Political Violence, The” (Goldman), 215 Public Opinion (Lippman), 255 public relations, 255–­56 Pueblo, Colorado, 85 Puerto Rican independence movement, 262 Pulitzer, Joseph, 86–­87, 200 Pullman, George M., 35, 76 Pullman strike (1894), 29, 34, 70–­78, 151 Quartermass, Walter W., 61 racism, 10–­11, 178, 190, 208–­9, 237–­41, 272, 312n113. See also lynching and lynch mobs; whiteness railroads and railroad workers, 54, 56–­58, 67, 88. See also Pullman strike Randolph, A. Philip, 228, 237–­38 “Rebel Girl” (Joe Hill), 150, 174 Reconstruction (1864–­1877), 8, 9, 240, 311n97 Red baiting, 223, 229, 232, 242–­43 Red Flag laws, 228 Red Harvest (Hammett), 265–­66 Red Scare (1916–­1927), 189–­91, 219–­28; as apocalypse for the Left, 251–­52; Appeal to Reason and, 140; black radicalism and, 228–­31; bombings, 30, 244–­45; Bureau of Investigation and, 260–­61; Darrow and, 136; dialectics of conspiracy in, 221; Haymarket generation defeat and, 4, 31; legal repression of the Left during, 14, 168, 213; racism during, 11; Shoaf and, 99; textile industry and, 300n42; uniformed vigilantism and, 209; WWI and, 188. See also Preparedness Day bombing; Wall Street bombing Red Summer of 1919, 188

332  Index Reed, John, 5, 14, 149–­51, 184–­85, 206–­7, 214–­15, 221, 306n35 Reitman, Ben, 171, 298n19 Republican Party, 54, 69, 85, 93, 110–­11, 113, 134, 171 Revolt, The, 194 revolution: Appeal to Reason and, 84, 98, 105–­7, 141; Haymarket generation and, 31, 122; Jack London and, 108; Lenin and, 204–­5; McNamara case and, 129; Reed and, 207. See also Bolsheviks and Bolshevik revolution Rex v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge, 64 Rice, W. H., 162 Richardson, Edmund, 112–­13, 118 Riebe, Ernest, 150 right-­wing populism, 268 Rivera, Diego, 15 Robbins, Margaret, 109 Robeson, Paul, 175 Robin, Corey, 28 Robinson, Cedric, 10 Robinson, Earl, 175 Robinson, Henry, 96–­97 Robles, Joseph, 178 Rockefeller, John D., 20–­21, 86, 223 Rocky Mountains, mining towns of, 85–­86, 92 Roediger, David, 10–­11, 240 Rogin, Michael Paul, 25–­26, 116–­17, 247, 278n47 Ronald Reagan, the Movie (Rogin), 25–­26 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 261–­63, 268 Roosevelt, Theodore, 83, 107, 109, 205, 209 Root, Elihu, 206 Rosemont, Franklin, 302n79 ruling class, 1, 11, 13, 17, 21–­25, 54; of Chicago’s railroad industry, 75; conspiracy doctrine and, 63, 78; Haymarket bombing and, 38; IWW and, 169; Marx and, 219; Orchard’s confessions and, 102; racism and, 239–­40; retributive violence against, 57, 221; social movements and,

89; wire pullers, 98, 106. See also plutocracy and plutocrats Ruskin, John, 86 Ruskin College, 98–­99 Ruskin Cooperative Commonwealth, 86 Russell, Charles Edward, 87, 139, 204 Russell, Philips, 154 Russian immigrants, 227 Russian Revolution (1905), 151 Ryan, Frank, 128, 134 sabotage, 146–­47, 168, 184, 186 Sacco, Nicola, 222, 225, 243 Sacco and Vanzetti case, 6, 135, 190–­91, 225, 259 Sacramento Valley, 143 Salsedo, Andrea, 224–­25, 243 Salt Lake City, Utah, 173 San Diego, California, 170–­72, 188, 298n19 San Diego Tribune, 171 San Francisco, California, 123, 129–­30, 189, 191–­201. See Preparedness Day bombing San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, 191, 194, 196–­97 San Francisco Chronicle, 191, 232 San Francisco Examiner, 108, 191 San Francisco Vigilance Committee, 169 Sanger, Margaret, 159–­60, 260 Santa Clara Co. v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 54 Sassoon, Donald, 275n14 Savage, Edward, 66 Saxton, Alexander, 10 Sayre, Francis, 55, 63 Schaack, Michael J., 38, 41, 44–­45 Schenck v. United States, 38 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 24 Schnaubelt, Rudolph, 40–41, 280n16 Schrecker, Ellen, 314n26 Schuykill County, Pennsylvania, 57 Schwab, Charles, 206, 244 Schwab, George, 280n16 Schwab, Michael, 41–­44, 49

Index  333 Science of Revolutionary Warfare (Most), 221 Scopes “Monkey Trial” (1925), 33 Scott, D. C., 113 Scottsboro Nine, 259 Seattle general strike (1919), 219–­20, 223 Second Socialist International, 110, 220–­21 “Secret Meeting” (Young), 17–­18 Secret Service, 56, 211 Sedition Act, 182, 190, 213 seditious conspiracy, 172, 212, 219, 247, 301n71 Seeger, Pete, 175 Seldes, George, 268 Selective Service Act, 215 Serbian nationalists, 202–­3 Serge, Victor, 220 Sergei (grand duke of Russia), 202–­3 settler colonialism, 251 Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People (Emery), 2, 88 Share Our Wealth movement, 268 Sherman Anti-­Trust Act, 2, 9, 69–­70, 77–­78, 135 Shoaf, George, 83–­84, 98–­100, 111, 113–­ 14, 121, 126, 130–­33, 140, 287n2, 291n51 Shore, Eliot, 140 Shur, Herman “Hook-­Nose,” 143–­44 Silva, John, 152 Silver City, Idaho, 104 Silver Shirts, 268 Simons, A. M., 87, 106, 139, 204 Simpson, Stephen, 66 Sinclair, Upton, 1, 83, 204, 217, 228, 251–­52, 259 single tax, 50–­51, 109–­10 Siringo, Charles, 114–­15 slavery, 251 Sloan, Alfred P., 262–­63 Sloan, John, 14 Slotkin, Richard, 169 Smith, Adam, 13 Smith, Elmer, 236 Smith, Estelle, 196–­97 Smith, Joseph, 152

Socialist Labor Party, 67, 128, 132 socialist movements and socialism, 1–­5; Appeal to Reason and, 91–­92; black socialists, 10, 228–­29, 237; capitalism as criminal conspiracy and, 13–­14, 29–­30; censorship and, 214; class conflict and violence and, 167; Colorado mining wars and, 97–­98; Debs and, 70, 72–­73, 77–­78, 106, 125–­ 26, 151, 216–­17; factional divisions within, 7; freedom from capitalism and, 35, 46–­47, 122; industrial, 105; “invisible government” and, 149; IWW and, 146; Jack London and, 108–­9; Jewish, 109; labor united with, 122; lack of, in America, 30, 250–­56; legal defense campaigns and, 257; McNamaras’ confession and, 134–­35, 137–­38, 140; in popular fiction, 121; popular radicalism and, 128, 141; Populist movements and, 89; Pullman strike and trials and, 78; racial and ethnic divisions and, 10–­11; Red Scare and, 227; in San Francisco and, 192; Theodore Roosevelt and, 107, 109; vision of, in America, 35; Young’s conversion to, 47–­48. See also Socialist Party Socialist Party: antiwar position of, 203–­5, 217–­18; APL and, 210; Appeal to Reason and, 91–­92, 139–­40, 251; Berger and, 92, 139, 217–­18; black radicalism and, 237; Children’s Exodus and, 159–­60; Debs and, 70, 77–­78; Ettor-­Giovannitti case and, 161; free speech campaigns and, 170; Giovannitti and, 158; Gompers and, 136–­37; Haywood and, 81; IWW and, 148, 167–­68; Jack London and, 108–­9; labor movement defeat and, 251; legal defense campaigns and, 257; McNamara case and, 127–­28; Minor and, 200; Mooney and, 194; Moyer-­ Haywood-­Pettibone case and, 81–­82, 109; postwar, 220–­21; racism and, 240; Shoaf and, 133. See also socialist movements and socialism

334  Index socialist press, 29–­30, 81, 106–­7, 132, 161; class struggle and, 85, 89–­91; conspiracy of capital and, 81, 84–­85, 98–­100, 138, 141; Haywood Trial and, 106–­7; investigative journalism and, 84–­85, 88; Shoaf ’s disappearance and, 132. See also Appeal to Reason; International Socialist Review; Solidarity Socialist Woman, The, 87 social movements and social justice, 6, 23, 28, 50–­55, 89, 121, 125, 257, 262, 272; collective action, 6, 13, 150; Colorado mining wars and, 97–­98; conspiracy doctrine and, 34, 46, 58–­59; direct action and, 145–­47, 167–­68, 191, 232, 237, 272; paranoid style and, 23–­24; 121. See also labor movement and labor unions; popular radicalism; socialist movements and socialism Solidarity, 147–­48, 157, 161, 178, 182, 251; cartoons in, 150–­51, 180–­81; censorship and, 214; Chaplin and, 14, 180–­81 “Solidarity Forever” (Chaplin), 14, 150–­51 Sombart, Werner, 250–­51 “Something Rotten in Idaho” (London), 108–­9 Soviet Union, 187–­88, 206–­7, 220 Spargo, John, 93, 204 Spartacist uprising in Berlin, 220 Spectres of 1919 (Foley), 11 Spies, August, 42–­44, 47, 49, 281n25 Spivak, John L., 270, 271 Spry, William, 174 Square Deal, The, 163 Standard Oil, 69, 178–­79 Star Chamber, 63, 78 State Department, 183, 212 status conflict, 251 steelworkers, 129, 192, 194 Steffens, Lincoln, 21, 128–­29, 133, 160, 254 Stegner, Wallace, 301–­2n79 Stephens, William, 199 Steunenberg, Frank, 80–­82, 84, 100–­ 101, 103, 112–­13

St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, 200 St. Mary’s cemetery, 153, 156–­57 Stolypin, Pyotr (Russian prime minister), 202–­3 Stone, Harlan Fiske, 261 Streeby, Shelley, 10–­11 streetcar trust, 191 strike: bans on strike activity, 6, 67–­72, 197; Great Uprising of 1877, 9, 35, 67; legal right to, 31, 263; slowdowns, 146–­47; strike wave of 1919, 219–­20, 231, 250; wartime strikes, 207–­8. See also labor movement and labor union; individual strikes strikebreaking: Bergoff Brothers agency and, 56; FBI and, 261; in interwar years, 262–­63, 268; by military, 56, 70, 100; Molly Maguires and, 58; Paine and, 60–­61; by Pinkertons, 56, 192; in San Francisco, 197; Siringo and, 114; wartime, 210 Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (Pinkerton), 82 suffrage, 8, 50, 67, 87 Supreme Court, U.S.: Berger and, 218; corporate personhood and, 54; criminal conspiracy and, 52; Debs and, 73, 76–­77; Espionage Act and, 260; free speech and, 38; guilt by association and, 44; IWW appeal to, 187–­88; kidnapping and, 104; Sherman Anti-­Trust Act and, 69–­70 surveillance, 9, 31; of anarchists, 215; APL and, 210–­11; black radicalism and, 230; Bureau of Investigation and, 211–­12; of cartoonists, 14; federal political intelligence and, 226–­27; organized labor and, 260–­61; during Red Scare, 190 Survey Magazine, 140 Swanson, Martin, 195–­97 syndicalism, 9, 77, 146–­48, 167–­68 Syndicalist League of North America, 194–­95 Taft, William Howard, 171 Teapot Dome scandal, 261 Tennessee, 86

Index  335 terrorism, 9, 25, 64, 101–­2, 109; Haymarket bombing and, 38, 44–­45; racial, 208–­9; Red Scare and, 190, 222–­23, 225, 250; in San Francisco, 191, 199; secret societies and, 56–­58; vigilante, 170–­7 1, 177–­82, 190. See also Orchard, Harry textile industry, 153–­55, 160, 300n42. See also Lawrence “Bread and Roses” strike Third International, 221 Thompson, E. P., 64, 274n6 Thulstrup, Thure de, 38–­39 Tichenor, Henry M., 137 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 28 totalitarians, 24 totality, Marxist concept, 20, 22, 277–­78n39 Tracy, Spencer, 33 Trautman, William, 159 Tresca, Carlo, 7, 149, 159, 268 Troiber, Michael, 61 Trotsky, Leon, 220–­21, 226, 266 Trumbull, Lyman, 77 Tulsa, Oklahoma, 178, 182 Tulsa World, 178 Turner, George Kibbe, 3, 102 Tveitmoe, O. A., 134 Two Evil Isms (Siringo), 114–­15 Umberto I (king of Italy), 202–­3 unions and unionism. See labor movement and labor unions United Auto Workers (UAW), 263 United Fruit Company, 256 United Railroads (URR), 191, 194–­95, 197 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 227, 230–­31 unlawful assembly, 12–­17 “Unlawful Assembly” (Becker), 12–­14 Untermann, Elsa, 133 Untermann, Ernest, 133, 148 USA trilogy (Dos Passos), 259 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 252 U.S. Industrial Commission, 135 U.S. Steel, 9, 55, 129, 138, 206, 252 Utah, 172–­73

Valdinoci, Carlo, 224, 243 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 206 Vanderveer, George, 184–­85, 236, 257 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 222, 225, 243. See also Sacco and Vanzetti case Veblen, Thorstein, 178 Versailles, Indiana, 85 Victor, Colorado, 94, 96 Victor Record, 94 “Vigilantes, The,” 209 vigilantism: American Legion and, 61, 151, 231–­33, 241–­42, 261, 262, 269; free speech campaigns and, 169–­7 1, 177, 188; IWW and, 144–­45, 152; KKK and, 9, 208–­9, 268; MOA and, 96–­97; patriotic violence, 180, 208–­11, 231, 239; Red Scare and, 31, 190, 227, 231, 247; Reitman and, 298n19; in San Francisco, 192, 197; wartime, 177–­82, 209–­11, 213 Vlag, Piet, 132 Vrooman, Walter, 99 vulgar Marxism, 7, 275n14 Waldheim Cemetery, Chicago, 48 Walker, Edwin A., 72–­75, 77 Wallin, “Dust,” 245–­46 Walling, William Edward, 204 Wall Street, 44, 106, 182, 206, 214; Becker’s cartoon and, 12–­13; Darrow on, 118–­19; fascist conspiracy and, 270; “invisible government” of, 242–­43; J. P. Morgan and, 21–­22 Wall Street bombing (1920), 30, 190–­91, 243–­45 Wall Street Journal, 182 “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy” (Spivak), 269, 270 War Is a Racket (Butler), 268–­70 Warren, Fred, 97, 100, 10­8, 121, 126, 132–­33, 138–­39 Washington Post, 232 Washington State, 227, 232 Watergate, 262 Wayland, Julius Augustus, 83–­88, 91–­92, 105, 108, 110, 126, 138–­39 Wealth Against Commonwealth (Lloyd), 2, 86

336  Index Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 13 Weber, Max, 5, 210 Weinberg, Israel, 196 Weiner, Jon, 278–­79n47 Western Federation of Miners (WFM): AFL and, 105, 122; Colorado mining wars and, 92–­98; Haywood and, 81, 105, 146, 167; Haywood trial and, 30, 107, 109–­18, 120; IWW and, 109, 122; Orchard and, 80–­81, 102–­4; Preston-­ Smith case and, 152 What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 220 Wheatland riot (1913), 142–­44 Wheeler, Burton K., 261 whiteness, 10–­11, 24–­25, 240; white supremacy, 10–­11, 24–­25, 28, 228–­30, 239–­40, 242–­43, 252; white terrorism, 8, 190, 207, 228–­31, 239, 259 Wickersham, George, 171–­72 Wickersham Committee, 195 Wilentz, Sean, 66 Williams, Ethel, 223 Williams, Raymond, 249 Williams, W. B., 241 Wilshire, Gaylord, 106, 110, 117 Wilshire’s Magazine, 83, 106, 117, 133, 194 Wilson, Woodrow, 199, 203, 211, 213, 229, 254; AFL and, 135–­36, 203, 208, 252; “invisible government” and, 148–­49, 251; WWI and, 203–­4, 206 Winnemucca, Nevada, 104 Wobblies, 142–­44. See Industrial Workers of the World Wolfe, Frank E., 126 “Wonders of Art, The,” 26, 28

Wood, Fremont, 114, 117, 119–­20 Wood, Gordon, 9 Wood, William M., 155, 161–­66, 223 Woodiwiss, Anthony, 55, 65 Woods, William, 72–­73 Woodstock Prison, 73, 76–­78 Workers Defense Union, 157 Workers’ Dreadnought, 267 “Workers of the World Unite!!” (Williams), 240–­41 Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), 57–­58 World War I (WWI), 10, 188, 207, 210–­ 11; censorship and, 213–­15; conspiracy theories and, 190, 202–­7; Espionage and Sedition Acts, 9, 14, 182–­84, 190, 212–­14, 216–­18; IWW and, 172, 175–­77, 184, 218–­19; legal repression of the Left during, 168, 213; secret diplomacy and, 9; strikes and, 207–­8; vigilantism and, 177–­82, 209–­11, 213, 250; wartime state, 207, 210–­11 World War II, 271 “Worshiping the God of Dynamite” (Minor), 193 xenophobia, 38–­40 yellow journalism, 99, 132 Young, Art, 5, 14, 17–­18, 21–­22, 46–­49, 214–­16, 243–­44 Yuba County, California, 143 Zentner, George, 61 Zetkin, Clara, 194

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MICHAEL MARK COHEN is associate teaching professor in American studies and African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cover art by T. H. Lockwood, Appeal to Reason, January 9, 1904. Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

COHEN_cover_FIN.indd 1

COHEN

THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL

B

etween the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalists and their allies in government responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to —Shelley Streeby, author destroy this anti-capitalist movement. of Radical Sensations: World The result was an escalating class Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy. In this detailed cultural history, Michael Mark Cohen argues that a legal, ideological, and representational politics of conspiracy contributed to the formation of a genuinely revolutionary mass culture in the United States, starting with the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, The Conspiracy of Capital offers a new history of American radicalism and the alliance between the modern business corporation and national security state through a comprehensive reassessment of the role of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in American culture.

“Cohen draws upon a strong archival base and an impressively wide range of texts to provide an illuminating analysis of how the politics of conspiracy was central to this era’s culture of popular radicalism.”

THE CONSPIRACY OF CAPITAL Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly

MICHAEL MARK COHEN 5/10/19 10:10 AM