The Despotism of the Popular: Anarchy and Leon Czolgosz at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

In a tradition that arguably dates back to the American Revolution, American anarchism has been marked by individualist and collectivist strains; all of these strands, however, posited both the state and capitalism as insidious forms of centralized authority to be replaced (violently or not) by de-centered, localist networks of mutual aid. On September 8th, the New York Times announced on its front page an article entitled "Assassin Known as a Rabid Anarchist," while the Dealer from the same day placed in bold letters a quote from Czolgosz linking him to the most well-known anarchist in the American press: "'Emma Goldman Set Me on Fire!'" blared the headline. Perhaps this silence reveals much more about the turn of the century fear of anarchy than the explicit reference to anarchists and anarchism; then, as now, after a tragic act of violence, the nation in mourning avoided opening a debate over its place in the world that might have enabled it to look its fear directly in the face, thereby becoming less afraid.

On September 4, 1901, President McKinley's train entered the outskirts of Buffalo. It was filled with a cross section of the respectable elements in turn of the century America-the President, senators, military personnel, ex-Rough Riders, industrialists, physicians-all weary from touring with the chief executive. At one of the suburban stations, an Artillery Captain named Leonard Wisser waited to touch off a twenty-one cannon, presidential salute as the train passed by. Unfortunately, he commanded a green gun crew. As the train neared the station, it slowed down in deference to the waving crowd, but at that moment all on board heard a tremendous explosion which blew all of the windows to pieces. The gun crew had placed the cannons too close to the cars. Immediately after the blast, however, a shout was heard from the people at the station, "Anarchists! Anarchists! They've wrecked the Train!", and responding automatically, the crowd was transformed into a mob, surrounding a "dark, swarthy" man who stood near the tracks. Fears were allayed and the mob dispersed when a well-dressed gentleman informed the throng that the whole ordeal had been caused not by "dynamite," but by an overzealous cannon crew.

Several days later, McKinley would, in fact, be killed by an anarchist. But the incident presents us with a dense network of contradictions and anxieties in U.S. popular culture at the turn of the century. A sudden, unexplained shock is automatically registered by the crowd as the machinations of "anarchy," represented by the mysterious figure of the "anarchist." The latter is immediately understood by the crowd as an ethnic other, lingering amongst them yet separate from them, wielding the characteristic weapon of the saboteur-dynamite. As significantly, the crowd ironically turns into an anarchistic mass in order to arrest its fears, only to be averted from its task by the voice of respectability and wealth. This same pattern would be repeated following the assassination of McKinley by Leon Czolgosz a few days later, but on a national scale.

What the media coverage surrounding both the assassination and this small incident reveal is the focus of this essay. Within a context of imperialist war, the second wave of European immigration, and the long dreaded class conflicts attending the closing of the frontier in 1890, the signifiers "anarchist" and "anarchy" functioned to embody a wide range of anxieties in public discourse. As Amy Kaplan has noted, "Anarchy is conjured by imperial culture as a haunting specter that must be subdued and controlled, and at the same time, it is a figure of empire's undoing" (13). At the time of the McKinley assassination, furthermore, the figures of "anarchy" and "anarchist" bore a complex relationship to notions of the lynch mob and the vigilante, the supposed inverses to anarchy which the anarchist threatened to unleash. Yet the lynch mob was a mob nonetheless, dialectically related to the anarchist, and bore an uncanny, menacing similarity to its opposite in the minds of the guardians of order. To be sure, the anarchist movement in the United States has always been quite small. In a tradition that arguably dates back to the American Revolution, American anarchism has been marked by individualist and collectivist strains; all of these strands, however, posited both the state and capitalism as insidious forms of centralized authority to be replaced (violently or not) by de-centered, localist networks of mutual aid. At the time of the McKinley assassination, anarchism was concentrated in the industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest, and was primarily a movement of working-class, European immigrants. Given the small size of the actual anarchist movement in the U.S., we might ask why "the anarchist" was such a powerful figure in the turn of the century imagination. For although the movement was small, talk of anarchy and anarchists was everywhere. In a context of imperialism and "trusts," what fears does this figure embody? I would like to investigate the relationship between anarchy, the lynch mob, and the anarchist through the representations of the assassin Leon Czolgosz. Following a definition of anarchy set by Tocqueville, who claimed that anarchy is the latent potential of all democracies, the destabilizing threat of the popular that can emerge at all moments, I will argue that the figure of the anarchist was the mob made flesh. For the forces that formed the nativist, capitalist, hegemonic bloc, defining the contours of the anarchist was the attempt to read the frightening and faceless urban crowd, to contain the fear this crowd embodied by isolating it within a readable, tangible unit-a unit, moreover, which could be easily disposed of. Furthermore, the ambivalent prescriptions for dealing with this threat reveal a culture of discipline at a critical juncture, one which incompletely realized that old methods would no longer suffice.

Czolgosz: The Hostile Face of Anonymity

Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley in Buffalo on September 6, 1901. McKinley had been receiving a long line of people inside the city's Temple of Music, shaking hands with anyone from the public who wished to meet the President face to face. Czolgosz waited in line, greeted McKinley, and then shot him several times. The President did not die immediately; after suffering from the wounds for a week, he finally passed away on September 14th. In the meantime, the public scrambled for details on the assassin. His ethnicity and his politics were immediately established with newspaper headlines emphasizing his politics in particular. On the day after the shooting, The Cleveland Plain Dealer featured the headline, "Crime Done by Cleveland Red." On September 8th, the New York Times announced on its front page an article entitled "Assassin Known as a Rabid Anarchist," while the Dealer from the same day placed in bold letters a quote from Czolgosz linking him to the most well-known anarchist in the American press: "'Emma Goldman Set Me on Fire!'" blared the headline. Both papers also noted his Polish ancestry.

But despite the release of these and other biographical details, Czolgosz had an intedeterminate identity in the papers, even after his capture. To state it another way, the newspapers suggested that he was both no one and everyone simultaneously. The New York Times featured an article in which the reality of the assassin's origins were debated:

Although he asserted that he was a Pole, there was considerable doubt expressed on the subject. The name was in many quarters taken to be more like Hungarian than Polish...On the East Side it was generally declared that the name Czolgosz was not Polish....It was pointed out that the name was probably of Russian origin, in which it would be pronounced "Sholgush." ("Czolgosz's Name")

Holding his identity as indeterminate allowed for the indictment of all sources of East European immigration. The assassin's liminality, in other words, allowed a metonymic relationship to be established between him and a broad class of immigrants; it enabled a reading of the individual as "mass."

But it was not only on the plane of cultural representation that Czolgosz was held to be indeterminate. The "actual" Czolgosz behaved in a way that threw static across any attempts to read him. In his youth, he had participated in a labor strike which resulted in his blacklisting. After this blacklisting, he assumed false names in order to obtain employment, most commonly the name Fred C. Nieman (Johns 36). He soon felt comfortable in his anonymity and continued to use the name even after the problem had passed. Indeed, he used the name so often that when Emma Goldman saw his photo in the paper she stated, "Why, that's Nieman!" (Goldman 296). Additionally, Czolgosz gave his name as "John Doe" when he checked into the hotel the day before the assassination. The clerk asked him the next morning why he refused to give his name, and Czolgosz replied that he was a Polish Jew and feared discrimination (Johns 13). The assassin-to-be was actually Catholic. This blurring of identity found its way into the papers. An article from the Times titled "Czolgosz or Nieman?" debates his name while another reproduces a letter he wrote under the signature "Nieman," effectively performing his dissimulation for the reader ("Assassin").

In Serial Killers, Seltzer argues that the serial killer becomes the "mass in person," writing that the killer enacts the complete fusion with the mass at the expense of the individual. Democracy, for the mass in person, perfects itself in the dead leveling by which all individual distinctions vanish (19). For in Seltzer's notion of the subject, the violence of experiencing oneself as nothing more than a "type" is at the heart of the violence of the psycho killer. His pathology is bound up with the fact that he "traumatically experiences himself as nothing more than a social construction" (108). The serial killer is a person who overidentifies with machine culture on all levels, including its tendency to reduce people to categories without interiors, and thus he carries out what he sees as the "orders" of this machine culture by "voiding the interiors in himself and in others" (109). The link between anonymity and "machine culture" is almost undeniable in the case of Czolgosz (his case forms an especially dramatic example if we remember that he began using pseudonyms as a factory worker). Living under false names, he effectively lives under no name, blending into and ultimately embodying the mass by shrouding his identity. "Blending in" is an act of identification with the mechanical processes which efface all the qualities that make him human: through it he literalizes his rationalization. The larger culture, in turn, reads its own fear of rationalization through his public representation. We find compelling support for this reading of the public's fear of Czolgosz in the consistent media references to him as "silent," "mechanical," "emotion-less," "without expression," all traits of the machine itself.

But while some journalists left his precise origins deliberately unclear, most all gave Czolgosz a fixed identity by ascribing to him some form of non-"native" status. Czolgosz's East European origins were foregrounded in most of his representations, and within a context where the face of "anarchy" in general was unequivocally not American. Most members of the anarchist movement were in fact foreign-born; one account of the Philadelphia anarchists notes that out of a membership numbering between 400 to 500, only forty were native-born Americans (Avrich 131). But the association of anarchy with European immigration had long been established. As part of the screening process at Ellis Island, newly-arrived immigrants were checked for anarchist affiliations. An immigrant would be questioned to "see that he is not an anarchist, bigamist, pauper, criminal, or otherwise unfit" (Polenberg 10). Following the Haymarket Riot in 1886, the New York Sun called for a halting of European immigration because "such foreign savages, with their dynamite bombs and anarchic purposes, are as much a part of...this country as the Apaches of the plains are" (Slotkin 91). These associations came out with a vengeance after the McKinley assassination. The depiction of prominent anarchist Johann Most in The Boston Globe is particularly vicious:

Herr Johann Most, the anarchist, whining like a yellow cur, was led by two big policemen before Magistrate Olmstead in Center-st court today. His fat, greasy face was soaked with tears. He was disheveled, unkempt, dirty -a cringing object as he cowered before the magistrate's bench. ("They'll Hang Me")

"Herr" announces his foreign origin immediately, and, from there, "dirty" and "greasy" flow quite smoothly. If, as Kaplan has asserted, American culture at the turn of the century embodied imperial power in the heroic bodies of virile American men (20), then the spectacle of "Herr" Most's cowardice in this passage also puts forth the anarchist as the antithesis of American manhood, just as anarchy was understood to be the antithesis of empire. Czolgosz is not typically portrayed as a quivering coward as is Most, yet it is not uncommon to see him referred to simply as "the Pole," seen for example in the headline "Police Think the Pole Alone Was Responsible" (ironically, Czolgosz was actually born in the United States). In this climate, nativist sentiments were heightened once again. On September 16th, Senator Chauncey Depew called for the cutting back of immigration in response to the shooting, stating, "We must begin at the fountain-head and stop the reservoirs of European anarchy pouring into our country" ("From Europe").

But if Czolgosz was part of a "pouring reservoir" of immigrants, careful attention was taken to show him as an isolated unit as well, a sort of "lone gunman." Surprisingly, the newspapers allowed other anarchists to distance themselves from the assassin. Most anarchists were quoted by the press as saying that they found the capitalist state detestable, yet felt that shooting the President was a futile and horrible act. One Cleveland anarchist was quoted as saying, "Anarchy means the absence of all and any form of government, but it does not mean the abolishment of that government by harsh measures" ("Police Think"). Alexander Berkman, who had been convicted of shooting steel operator Henry Frick, stated that the assassination of a President was an ineffective act of propaganda within a democracy, as a President is an elected official whom the people see as an embodiment of their will (Goldman 323). Another anarchist protested, "He was never seen at our meetings in Cleveland and is unknown to us as a co-worker or even a co-thinker" ("Police Think"). Lucy Parsons, a famous anarchist who had been convicted in the Haymarket riots, was devoted a full-length article in which she denounced Czolgosz as a "lunatic" ("Czolgosz a Lunatic"). By all accounts, Czolgosz was, in fact, an outsider within the anarchist movement. The New York anarchists had even suspected him of being a spy (Goldman 309).

The papers could have depicted him as an organic part of an organized political movement, or even an integral figure in the Polish American community, but their choice of an atomized representation suggests other desires. As both an immigrant other and an isolated individual mired in no community, Czolgosz presented the picture of the ultimate alien. On one level, his extraction from any community preempted the threat that working class, immigrant readers might interpolate themselves through his actions. Extracting him from the mob also made easy the containment (and extermination) of his person and his threat. But, on another level-in his profile as killer-this aspect of his representation has a broader historical backdrop, as Karen Halttunen's work Murder Most Foul illuminates. Halttunen argues that the killer in colonial America was registered in the language of moral depravity and original sin and that conceiving the killer in such terms ultimately affirmed the common humanity between the condemned and the innocent. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, attorneys had begun to use the insanity defense to explain the behavior of the killer, enacting a pathologization of the murderer which relegated him to the status of "mental alien" (208) with no organic ties to the public.

Thus, in his designation as killer, the groundwork had already been prepared for understanding Czolgosz as an alien being. But a more complex network of associations is at work in his case, for he was not only a killer, but an "ethnic," anarchist killer. Halttunen writes that, in nineteenth century courts, a murderer's beliefs would be offered as evidence of his insanity (222), a now familiar aspect of the American murder trial. In the case of the other Gilded Age presidential assassin, Charles Guiteau, the entire defense revolved around establishing the killer's views and actions as pathological. With Czolgosz, however, the killer's beliefs were universally held to be delusional, yet they were not for a moment considered as evidence of legal insanity. The report of the mental condition of Czolgosz drafted by doctors Spitzka and MacDonald stated that he did not suffer from an

insane delusion or false belief due to disease of the brain. On the contrary, it was political delusion...founded on ignorance, faulty education and warped-not diseased-reason and judgment-the false belief which dominates the politico-social sect to which he belonged and to which he was a zealot...The course and conduct of Czolgosz from the beginning down to his death are entirely in keeping with this [anarchist] creed. (Johns 257)

The report paradoxically concluded, "He is the product of anarchy; sane and responsible" (Johns 256).

When beliefs were political, the doctors implied, the delusion was not innate; political insanity was the result of an otherwise ordinary worker's interpolation by a foul and pernicious ideology. Czolgosz's depravity was not based on original sin, but on a poorly chosen political philosophy which guided the entire course of his actions. And revealed in the concluding phrase "he is the product of anarchy" was a reversal of the usual deployment of the insanity defense, for in this case the defendant's delusional beliefs are cited as the reason for his guilt; his status as mental alien, in other words, is the very thing that justifies his execution (unlike Guiteau, the proceedings against Czolgosz were rather hasty and uneventful, and he was executed without much fanfare). Furthermore, in stating that the interpolation of the anarchist was made fertile by "ignorance," the doctors' report carried the terrible implication that any working class individual held the potential of being an anarchist killer, particularly the immigrant worker with his presumed mental weakness.

In his profile as an immigrant, a worker, a loner, a political radical, and a killer, Czolgosz was an "alien" within the terms of the dominant culture; yet if he was alien, he was alien in a way indicative of his class. Through each of these identities, his representation brought together the various turn of the century images that constituted the overall portrait of the urban masses as a whole. All of his profiles, in other words, were simultaneously stock characters within the cultural narrative of the Gilded Age slum. The dirty foreigner, the scheming radical, the urban criminal, the rootless stranger in the faceless crowd - Czolgosz combined all of these characters into one figure, the mass in person, a villain whose act displayed the dreaded and ultimate potential of an entire class.

The Despotism of the Popular:

Managing the Disposal of the Mass in Person

"Anarchy" has been a loaded signifier in the bourgeois imagination since the foundational moments of the American republic. Tocqueville held anarchy as a borderline which democracy was not to cross, as well as a tendency latent within all democratic societies. Arthur Redding writes:

As Tocqueville's fears suggest (not to mention the famous fears of conservative founding fathers Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and others), anarchy haunts democracy as a kind of limit or spectral potentiality. Anarchical figurations of either a fringe (and terroristic) minority or a boobish majority-the fear of "mobocracy"-stand in for all that has been as unruly and destabilizing, for the despotism of the popular... "Anarchy" summons an unleashed and potentially uncontrollable epidemic of violence...and defines the threshold beyond which democracy lives in fear of passing, a threshold that capitalist democracies nonetheless tend incessantly to produce. (74)

The assassination of McKinley unleashed the threat of anarchy in both its figurations-that of "the terroristic minority" and the "boobish majority"-because Czolgosz's act created an epidemic of vigilante violence against anarchists which authorities were scarcely able to restrain. The anarchy of the "terroristic minority" released the anarchy of the "boobish majority," and the police and ruling class were forced to confront the situation of anarchy fighting anarchy. If the marginalized anarchist is intimately bound up with "mob rule," what does one do with the fact that the very mob rule which civil society exists to contain is unleashed upon the anarchist in an "uncontrollable epidemic of violence?" How does one, in other words, re-establish the threshold of democracy undone by the public deed of the saboteur?

The national frenzy the assassination generated cannot be understated. On the day of the assassination, armed lynch mobs clashed with police outside of the jail where Czolgosz was held. The police were nearly routed by the mob, and only with military discipline and the "bashing of heads" with truncheons were they able to maintain control of the jail (Johns 119-21). Assaults on the police station continued, with further violence between police and crowds, until the authorities finally decided to move Czolgosz to a secret location. But the lynch mobs were not directed at Czolgosz alone. Newspapers from the month of September 1901, reported an attempted lynching of an alleged "anarchist" almost every day. Anyone expressing anarchist sympathies or suggesting the fallibility of McKinley was subjected to beatings and threats, even if their remarks were uttered in relatively private conversations. To take but a few examples: a man in Brooklyn was badly beaten by a crowd after announcing he was an anarchist during a casual conversation in a saloon. After his beating, police held him in jail for twenty-nine days ("Crowd"). Two blacksmiths in Cleveland were almost lynched after making "disrespectful" comments about McKinley while conversing with each other on a streetcar, and when the police arrived, they held the men in jail on a $5000 bond for the charge of inciting a riot ("Alleged"). Violence was directed at anti-imperialists as well. In Columbus, Ohio, the offices of a newspaper were ransacked and its editor almost killed after he printed "May [the spirit of McKinley] never be impelled to wage merciless and relentless war upon the spirits of innocent Filipino patriots" ("Tried to Mob"). A physician in Auburn, Indiana, was dragged down a flight of stairs from his own office and nearly lynched by a crowd of 200; later, police had to guard his home from a threatening mob. His offense was claiming that McKinley was only suffering what he had caused others to suffer in the Philippines ("Dragged"). Emma Goldman summarized the national mood by noting in her autobiography that "the country was in a panic. Judging by the press, I was sure that it was the people of the United States and not Czolgosz that had gone mad" (304).

While many newspaper accounts were entirely uncritical of the treatment of radicals by both the crowds and the police, there was a co-existent discourse which betrayed a sense of uneasiness with the "threat of the popular" evoked by the reactionary lynch mob. The Boston Globe, for example, treated the actions of the police favorably when they tore down the effigy of an alleged anarchist storekeeper that had been erected by a mob from South Boston. The police chased the men back into their own neighborhood and attempted to keep the rest "from collecting in one bunch." The reporter reflected the fear attending any mob action: "Sergt. Driscoll said that if they had gotten together and chosen a leader they would very probably have done great damage" ("Hanged Him"). Similarly, the Globe published summaries of the sermons delivered by noted ministers in the Boston area on the Sunday following the death of the President, and while all these sermons called for the stamping out of anarchy (often in nationalistic language), they also urged calm by asking their flocks not to resort to lynch law.

Richard Slotkin offers a frame which proves helpful in defining the contradictory notions of the lynch mob echoed in public discourse at the time. In Gunfighter Nation, he argues that, following the Civil War, American industrial society was governed under the "managerial model" and the "military metaphor." The "managerial model" and "military metaphor" held that society should follow the organizational structure of the army, with the latter's discipline, clear hierarchy, and efficiency. Many Gilded Age captains of industry had first received their training in "organizing" masses of people through their experiences as officers in the Civil War, and after the conflict, they carried these lessons with them into the sphere of industry. The managerial model they attempted to put in place did not evoke the spirit of the rugged individual, but rather a more authoritarian, un-democratic ideology. In the logic of this model, dissent was registered as insubordination or mutiny, to be dealt with in an organized, swift, and draconian fashion. The workers who resisted the implementation of this metaphor were often conceived as Indian "savages," against whom all of the resources of the nation were to be summoned. Throughout the 1890s, changes in the structure of capitalism would have facilitated this shift in ideology, as the individually-run, "competitive capitalism" was increasingly supplanted by the more administered, corporate structures of monopoly capital. And in 1901, in the midst of a protracted military campaign against Philippine guerillas, the language of militarism would have been readily understood.

With its authoritarian and nationalistic manner of conceiving dissent, the military metaphor necessarily contained contradictory notions of vigilante justice. Slotkin summarizes the notion of discipline attending this ideology in a sentence: "To defend itself against savage anarchy [of the urban mob], society must organize itself as if it were an embattled army of Indian-fighting cavalry" (91-92). In short, military discipline is needed to fight the mob, not disorganized lynchers.

At the height of the national frenzy surrounding the McKinley assassination, we see a clear instance of the military metaphor at work in a curious article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer on September 12. Entitled "Wipe Out Anarchy and Lynch Law," the piece chronicles a demonstration by a predominantly African American group of Civil War veterans, assembled for the purpose of simultaneously denouncing anarchism and lynching. While the attendees have strong views against anarchism, stating that laws must be enacted "if every anarchist is to bite the dust" (1), the primary purpose of the gathering is to denounce lynching. This act is associated, in the article, with the disenfranchisement of Southern blacks, and hence threatens to nullify the accomplishments of the war. The piece resurrects the antagonisms of the war years in order to articulate the lyncher as an unrepentant traitor. A white veteran is quoted as saying, "You who have fought for the preservation of the union are not to be disfranchised by those who fought against it" (7). The vigilante is here presented as an outsider against whose law the entire war was fought in order to destroy. The same veteran states that in order to combat lynching "the nation must be aroused and the honor of law and true Americanism held up for the benefit of all men in our grand commonwealth" (7). The piece generally evokes a feeling of nostalgia for the progressive impulses of the days of the conflict, a nostalgia for the time when the section was unanimous in its military struggle against the lynch law of the confederacy. While it makes no explicit reference to the lynching of anarchists, given the prevalence of attempted lynchings of anarchists in the news at the time, readers could not have avoided the association.

In its glowingly favorable reception of the proceedings, the piece not only supported Reconstruction-era sentiments in the North but it also effectively presented its readership with a model for dealing with the anarchist threat. It provided the spectacle of a disciplined army, firm in its anti-anarchist beliefs, but even firmer in its belief that the rule of law symbolized by troops in uniform was the path toward progress. It was the military metaphor in full-force, a call for the public to handle the menace of anarchism like soldiers. The "threshold of democracy" was not to be surpassed by any form of popular impulse, it tells us, for that threshold is firmly guarded by organized force.

For one moment in 1901, the long-ballyhooed, fictional construct of the anarchist and anarchism passed from metaphor into reality, snatching away the chief executive in an act undeniably real. But in the anxious press accounts of both Czolgosz the anarchist and the mobs combing the streets brutalizing anyone who bore his resemblance, one referent is conspicuously absent - the Philippines. The U.S. armed forces were in the process of suppressing a tenacious guerilla insurgency on the opposite side of the globe, and the effort was suddenly without a commander-in-chief. This effort, as has been widely documented, was in itself bound up with all manner of anxieties about the future of a republican United States following the close of the frontier. As I have shown, the press made passing mention of an anti-imperialist thrown down the stairs by an angry crowd, but a substantive dialogue as to the fate of the imperial project abroad was nowhere to be seen. And a criticism of that imperial project in the face of Czolgosz's act was yet more unthinkable still. Perhaps this silence reveals much more about the turn of the century fear of anarchy than the explicit reference to anarchists and anarchism; then, as now, after a tragic act of violence, the nation in mourning avoided opening a debate over its place in the world that might have enabled it to look its fear directly in the face, thereby becoming less afraid.

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