Background
Anarchism came to public attention in the United States with the Haymarket Affair of 1886. On May 4, a policeman was killed and several others were wounded, of which six later died, after a bomb exploded in Chicago's Haymarket Square. [1] Eight members of the recently formed International Working People's Association (IWPA) were found guilty of the bombing. [1] The IWPA's 1883 manifesto called for the "destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international action". [1]
The idea of excluding anarchists from immigrating was first mentioned at a Congressional hearing in 1889. [2] A bill introduced on July 20, 1894 sought to restrict the entry of anarchists by requiring potential immigrants to visit a U. S. consulate for a political review before immigrating. [3] A substitute bill proposed a system within the United States to detect, question, and deport immigrants accused of anarchism. [4] Both died in committee. [3]
On September 6, 1901, Leon F. Czolgosz, an American-born son of Polish immigrants and a self-proclaimed anarchist, assassinated President William McKinley. [5] The police responded by arresting a number of anarchists, including Emma Goldman and a group of Chicago anarchists that published Free Society , the leading English-language communist-anarchist periodical in the US at the time. [6] They were all later released because no evidence of conspiracy could be found. Also, there were some viewpoints in the anarchist opinion that strongly denounced Czolgosz, with some calling him a "dangerous crank," despite what was to come next.
Theodore Roosevelt urged the exclusion and deportation of anarchist immigrants in his first address to Congress on December 3, 1901: [7]
I earnestly recommend to the congress that in the exercise of its wise discretion it should take into consideration the coming to this country of anarchists or persons professing principles hostile to all government ... They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came.
Legislation
President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Act, officially "An Act To regulate the immigration of aliens into the United States, x ch. 1012, 32 Stat. 1222, [8] into law on March 3, 1903, the last day of the 57th United States Congress. [9] [10] It codified previous immigration law and added four inadmissible classes: anarchists, people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes. [11] It also allowed for the deportation within two years of anyone unlawfully in the country and raised the head tax on immigrants to the United States to $2.00. It further allowed the deportation of immigrants who became a public charge within their first two years in the country. [12]
It was the first legislation in the US since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that called for questioning potential immigrants about their political beliefs. [13] The Act barred anyone "who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining or teaching such disbelief in or opposition to all organized government." [14] The law also limited the deportation of non-citizen anarchists to the first three years of their residency in the US.
Enforcement
The impact of the law was slight. The Commissioner-General of Immigration reported that from the time the law took effect in 1903 to June 30, 1914, a total of 15 anarchists were denied entry to the US. He reported that four anarchists had been expelled in 1913 and three in 1914. [15]
In October 1903, immediately following a speech given by the British anarchist John Turner at the Murray Hill Lyceum in New York, Bureau of Immigration officials arrested him and found a copy of Johann Most's Free Society and Turner's speaking schedule, which included a memorial to the Haymarket Martyrs. That was enough evidence to order his deportation. Emma Goldman organized a Free Speech League to contest the deportation. She recruited Clarence Darrow and Edgar Lee Masters to defend him. [16] After Goldman organized a meeting at Cooper Union of those opposing the deportation, a New York Times editorial argued in favor of the Act and the deportation of Turner. It referred to the people at the meeting as "ignorant and half-crazy dreamers" and declared that it was the country's "right - in the belief of Congress and of many, probably of most, Americans', it makes it our duty - to exclude him." [14]
Darrow and Masters presented their defense of Turner before the US Supreme Court. They argued that the law was unconstitutional and that Turner was merely a "philosophical anarchist" and therefore not a threat to the government. Chief Justice Melville Fuller wrote the Court's decision holding that the Bill of Rights does not apply to aliens, and Congress had the right to deny entry to anyone whom it deemed a threat to the country. Turner became the first person deported under the act. [16]
Amendment
The Act was re-enacted on June 29, 1906. [17]
Advocates for using the immigration laws to combat radicalism campaigned to expand the law's definitions of those who could be excluded or deported. Immigration officials complained about the law's limitation on deportation to the first three years of an immigrant's residency:
The anarchist of foreign birth... remains very quiet, as a rule, until the time limit protects him from deportation and then he is loud and boisterous and begins his maniac cry against all forms of organized government.... There should be no time limit to the deportation of these criminals... and should one remain in hiding sufficiently long to become naturalized he should, at the first symptoms, be shorn of his cloak and forthwith deported. [18]
The 1903 Act was amended by the Immigration Act of 1918, which expanded and elaborated the brief definition of anarchist found in the 1903 Act and enhanced the government's ability to deport adherents of anarchism. [19]
Emma Goldman was a Lithuanian-born anarchist revolutionary, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Alexander Berkman was a Russian-American anarchist and author. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, famous for both his political activism and his writing.
Voltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist, feminist writer and public speaker. Born into extreme poverty in Michigan, de Cleyre taught herself how to read and write, and became a lover of poetry. She was educated at a Catholic convent, which improved her literary and linguistic capabilities, but also influenced her turn towards anti-theism and anti-authoritarianism. After graduating, de Cleyre began her activist career in the freethought movement, lecturing around the country and writing for a number of rationalist publications. Drawn towards socialism and individualist anarchism, she converted fully to anarchism in the wake of the Haymarket affair, which radicalized her against the state and capitalism.
Paul Avrich was an American historian specializing in the 19th and early 20th-century anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. He taught at Queens College, City University of New York, for his entire career, from 1961 to his retirement as distinguished professor of history in 1999. He wrote ten books, mostly about anarchism, including topics such as the 1886 Haymarket Riot, the 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti case, the 1921 Kronstadt naval base rebellion, and an oral history of the movement in the United States.
Luigi Galleani was an Italian insurrectionary anarchist best known for his advocacy of "propaganda of the deed", a strategy of political assassinations and violent attacks.
Fanya Anisimovna Baron was a Russian Jewish anarchist revolutionary. She spent her early life participating in the Chicago workers' movement, but following the Russian Revolution in 1917, she moved to Ukraine and participated in the Makhnovist movement. For her anarchist activities, she was arrested and executed by the Cheka.
Hippolyte Havel was an American anarchist who was known as an activist in the United States and part of the radical circle around Emma Goldman in the early 20th century. He had been imprisoned as a young man in Austria-Hungary because of his political activities, but made his way to London. Then in the British metropolis he met anarchist Emma Goldman on a lecture tour from the United States. She befriended him and he immigrated to the United States.
Anarchism in the United States began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
Dyer Daniel Lum was an American labor activist, economist and political journalist. He was a leading figure in the American anarchist movement of the 1880s and early 1890s, working within the organized labor movement and together with individualist theorists.
John Turner was an English-born anarchist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent."
Alexander "Sanya" Moiseyevich Schapiro or Shapiro was a Russian anarcho-syndicalist activist. Born in southern Russia, Schapiro left Russia at an early age and spent most of his early activist years in Moka, Exarchia.
The Haymarket affair, also known as the Haymarket massacre, the Haymarket riot, the Haymarket Square riot, or the Haymarket Incident, was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The rally began peacefully in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after the events at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, during which one person was killed and many workers injured. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing retaliatory gunfire by the police caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.
The United States Immigration Act of 1918 was enacted on October 16, 1918. It is also known as the Dillingham-Hardwick Act. It was intended to correct what President Woodrow Wilson's administration considered to be deficiencies in previous laws, in order to enable the government to deport undesirable aliens, specifically anarchists, communists, labor organizers, and similar activists.
There have long been ideological restrictions on naturalization in United States law. Nativism and anti-anarchism at the turn of the 20th century, the red scare in the 1920s, and further fears against communism in the 1950s each shaped United States nationality law. Though ideological exclusions on entry were largely eliminated in 1990, ideological bars arising from each of these time periods and prior still exist in American naturalization law. This long history has resulted in a naturalization statute that requires naturalization applicants to be "attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States" and forbids them from adhering to several more specific ideological principles such as totalitarianism, communism, and anarchism.
The International Working People's Association (IWPA), sometimes known as the "Black International," and originally named the "International Revolutionary Socialists", was an international anarchist political organization established in 1881 at a convention held in London, England.
Ninfa Baronio (1874-1969) was an Italian-American anarcha-feminist activist during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After emigrating from Northern Italy to Paterson, New Jersey, she helped found Paterson's anarchist Gruppo Diritto all'Esistenza ; co-founded a local feminist group and performed in feminist plays; and, with her companion Firmino Gallo, ran an anarchist bookstore said to be "America's richest storehouse of extreme radical literature."
Freie Arbeiter Stimme was a Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper published from New York City's Lower East Side between 1890 and 1977. It was among the world's longest running anarchist journals, and the primary organ of the Jewish anarchist movement in the United States; at the time that it ceased publication it was the world's oldest Yiddish newspaper. Historian of anarchism Paul Avrich described the paper as playing a vital role in Jewish–American labor history and upholding a high literary standard, having published the most lauded writers and poets in Yiddish radicalism. The paper's editors were major figures in the Jewish–American anarchist movement: David Edelstadt, Saul Yanovsky, Joseph Cohen, Hillel Solotaroff, Roman Lewis, and Moshe Katz.
Jacob Abraham Maryson (1866–1941) was a Jewish–American anarchist, doctor, essayist and Yiddish translator. Maryson was among the few Pioneers of Liberty who could write in English. He was among the Pioneers who launched the Varhayt in 1889, the first American anarchist periodical in Yiddish.
The Congress of Socialists of the United States, better known as the 1881 Chicago Social Revolutionary Congress, was a meeting of anarchists and socialists in Chicago in October 1881 to organize the new social revolutionary groups splintered from the American Socialistic Labor Party.
