Dynamite and Soup - CtrlAltDelusion Press

How a decade of bombs became the permanent face of a movement that spent the next century running co-ops, strikes, and soup lines

How a decade of bombs became the permanent face of a movement that spent the next century running co-ops, strikes, and soup lines

Café Terminus

On the evening of February 12, 1894, a twenty-one-year-old named Émile Henry walked into the Café Terminus beside the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, ordered a drink, and threw a bomb into a room full of people having one. It killed one person and wounded around twenty.[1]

Henry had done this before. In November 1892 he left a device at the Paris offices of the Carmaux mining company, whose miners were on strike. Someone found it and carried it to the police station on the rue des Bons-Enfants, where it went off and killed five people, four of them police officers. At his trial Henry explained that he had picked the company building because only the bourgeois would be inside, so there would be no innocents among the dead.[2] The Café Terminus was the next step in the same logic. If there are no innocent bourgeois, any café full of them will do.

He went to the guillotine on May 21, 1894. Five weeks later an Italian anarchist named Sante Geronimo Caserio stabbed the president of France, Sadi Carnot, to death in Lyon.

That is the picture most people still carry when they hear the word anarchist. A man in a dark coat. A round black bomb. A lit fuse. The newspapers of the 1890s drew him constantly, and he has never gone out of print. He survived because he was useful, mostly to anarchism’s enemies, briefly to a small number of anarchists, and for a century afterward to anyone who needed a reason not to take the rest of the movement seriously.

The rest of the movement was doing something else. It was organizing miners, running grocery wholesales, feeding people in parks, and writing, in its own newspapers and under its own names, that the bombers were wrong. None of that fits in a cartoon. The bomb does.

The cartoon is wrong about the movement. But the logic inside it, that one act of violence, seen by enough people, can teach a whole society a lesson, is not a museum piece. It outlived the anarchists who wrote it down, and in a country where anyone can get a rifle and a livestream, it is more dangerous now than it was in a Paris café. Both of those things are true. An honest account has to carry both.

I write this from Duluth, at the western tip of Lake Superior, and from here the history looks different than it does from Paris. Across the harbor is Superior, where Finnish immigrants built a cooperative wholesale that sold coffee across three states. An hour north is the Iron Range, where immigrant miners struck U.S. Steel in 1916 with an Italian anarchist among their organizers. At the city’s southwestern edge, Finnish radicals ran a labor college for more than thirty years. And in Park Hill Cemetery, a Finnish dockworker killed by self-described patriots in 1918 lies a few rows from three Black circus workers killed by a crowd of their fellow citizens in 1920. None of the four was killed by an anarchist.

It Started With a Flag

The phrase “propaganda by the deed” did not begin as a synonym for dynamite. It came out of the Jura Federation, the network of Swiss watchmakers and political exiles that formed the anti-authoritarian wing of the First International after the break with Marx. In 1876 Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero argued that actions affirming socialist principles taught better than any pamphlet.[3] The French anarchist Paul Brousse picked the idea up and ran with it. On March 18, 1877, the sixth anniversary of the Paris Commune, he carried a red flag through the streets of Bern, fully expecting the police to attack it.

They did. Brousse explained the point that August in the Federation’s Bulletin. A worker who puts in eleven or twelve hours a day does not come home and read socialist newspapers. He sleeps. So you show him instead: carry the flag the constitution says you may carry, let the state beat you for it, and the lesson about how much freedom he actually has teaches itself.[4] The Bern march was a deed. So was the small armed band Malatesta and Cafiero led into the hills of Benevento that April, trying to spark a peasant rising. It failed. In 1877 a deed meant a demonstration, a seizure, an insurrection, a strike. Some deeds were violent. Most were theater.

The theater did not last. Brousse himself was hedging by the end of 1877, and within a few years he had left anarchism for reformist socialism. The idea stayed behind without him, and it found a sponsor nobody expected.

In September 1880 the first anarchist newspaper in Paris, La Révolution sociale, began publishing. Its money came from the Paris prefect of police, Louis Andrieux, routed through an agent named Égide Spilleux, who went by Serreaux. Andrieux wrote some of its articles himself. In his 1885 memoirs he boasted that he had suggested a bombing at the foot of a statue of Adolphe Thiers, the man who had ordered the Commune crushed, called the paper “la première école de dynamite,” the first school of dynamite, and explained that giving anarchists a newspaper was like running a telephone line from their meeting room to his office.[5]

So the first bombing in France attributed to anarchists was, by the account of the man who paid for the paper, a police project. Kropotkin later recalled that watching Serreaux’s circle push the idea as a weapon at the 1881 London congress is what turned him against the phrase for good.[6] The movement’s most dangerous idea had a French civil servant on its masthead from the beginning.

The Decade of Dynamite

The American version of the story starts with a bomb nobody can attribute. On May 4, 1886, workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the police killing of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works the day before. The mayor attended, judged the crowd orderly, and went home. After he left, police moved in to break up the meeting, and someone threw a dynamite bomb into their ranks. Between the blast and the police gunfire that followed, seven officers and at least four civilians died.[7]

The bomber was never identified. Eight anarchists were tried anyway, most of whom had not been present when the bomb went off, and the prosecution told the jury plainly that anarchy itself was on trial. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887. A fifth, Louis Lingg, died in his cell the day before. In June 1893 Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three survivors and condemned the trial that had convicted them. It ended his political career. The founding American image of the anarchist bomber rests on an unsolved case and a verdict the state of Illinois later disowned.

The 1890s supplied the rest. Ravachol bombed the homes of a judge and a prosecutor in Paris in 1892 and was guillotined that July. In December 1893 Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, wounded several people, killed nobody, and was executed anyway. A week after Vaillant’s execution came Henry and the Café Terminus, and in June, Caserio and Carnot. The French legislature answered with a series of laws the left named the lois scélérates, the villainous laws. The third, passed on July 28, 1894, banned anarchist propaganda outright.[8] That August the state put thirty people on trial together, anarchist writers and editors in the same dock as burglars, and failed to convict most of them. Across the Atlantic, the idea had already walked into an American labor fight. During the Homestead lockout in 1892, Alexander Berkman shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick, who lived. The steelworkers Berkman thought he was avenging did not rally to him, and he served fourteen years. Emma Goldman had helped him plan it.[9]

Spain shows the machinery most clearly, because there the chain of bomb, repression, and revenge ran in the open. On June 7, 1896, someone dropped a bomb onto the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona. It missed the dignitaries at the head and landed among ordinary marchers. Six people died on the spot and dozens more were wounded, though the toll varies by account. The state’s answer was the Montjuïc trial. Police arrested about four hundred people, anarchists and anyone near them, and held them in the fortress above the port. Eighty-seven were tried and five were shot. The engineer Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, arrested in the sweep and later released, escaped to London and published an account of how confessions had been extracted. “Montjuïc” became a European byword for torture.[10] In London, a young Italian anarchist named Michele Angiolillo heard the stories and bought a pistol. On August 8, 1897, he found the prime minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, reading a newspaper at a spa in the Basque country and shot him dead. At his court-martial he said he had done it for the tortured prisoners of Montjuïc. He was garroted twelve days later.[11] Bomb, torture, assassination: each act answered the one before, and the state and the attacker both claimed to be answering violence with justice.

Then the targets got bigger. Italian anarchists killed Empress Elisabeth of Austria on the Geneva lakefront in September 1898 and King Umberto I at Monza in July 1900. The man who shot Umberto, Gaetano Bresci, had sailed from Paterson, New Jersey, to do it. On September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley died on September 14.

The states that had lost a monarch or a president did what states do. Italy convened a conference in Rome that ran from November to December 1898, with fifty-four delegates from twenty-one countries. Historians now describe it as the first international conference on terrorism.[12] The United States stayed out of the European arrangements and changed its immigration law instead. Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress for it in his first message, on December 3, 1901. The Immigration Act signed on March 3, 1903, barred anarchists from entering the country, and it was the first American immigration law to exclude people for what they believed rather than what they had done.[13] An anarchist did not need to have thrown anything to be turned away at the dock.

The Count

The historian Richard Bach Jensen has spent a career counting. His figure for the classic era, 1880 to 1914, leaving out the Russian Empire, is at least 160 people killed and about 500 injured by anarchist bombs, guns, and knives. An earlier version of his count put it at about 150 dead and 470 injured, counting attacks that were only alleged to be anarchist.[14] For scale, he sets it next to Italy’s years of lead: between 1969 and 1986, Italian political terrorism killed 415 people and injured 1,181.

Russia is left out of that count for a reason, and the reason cuts against anarchism. The historian Anna Geifman counts more than seventeen thousand people killed or wounded by revolutionary terrorists in the Russian Empire between 1894 and 1917, most of them in the turbulent first years of the twentieth century, and she gives the anarchists a chapter of their own as a new and especially ruthless type of terrorist. Her totals cover every revolutionary party and armed band in the empire, not the anarchists alone, and the share that belonged to anarchists is uncertain.[15] But the direction of the evidence is clear enough. Where the state faltered, anarchist groups took part in violence on a scale the attacks in Western Europe never approached. That belongs in the ledger too.

Outside Russia, the numbers are small against the fear they produced, and smaller still against the state. In one week in May 1871, the French army killed thousands of Parisians while retaking the city from the Commune. Estimates run from several thousand upward.[16] That single week killed more people than anarchists killed everywhere outside Russia in the thirty-four years Jensen counts.

None of this is an excuse. The person who died at the Café Terminus had come in for a drink and was killed by a man who had decided in advance that nobody in the room was innocent. The four officers at the rue des Bons-Enfants were killed by a bomb meant for someone else. Small numbers are still bodies.

But the image was never sized to the body count. It was sized to the newspapers. Between 1875 and 1914, daily newspaper circulation in France rose from 1.5 million copies to 12.5 million.[17] The bomber arrived at exactly the moment a mass press needed something to put on the front page every morning, and he fit.

The Anarchists Who Said No

The loudest critics of the bombers were anarchists, and they said so at the time, in print, under their own names.

Peter Kropotkin’s position was more tangled than his admirers like to remember. His essay The Spirit of Revolt praised individual acts of rebellion as sparks that could wake a population. But he never believed a bomb could do the work of a movement. A structure built up over centuries, he argued, “cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives.”[18] What he wanted was the slow, collective thing: workers restarting production under their own management, villages running their own affairs. The book he is remembered for, Mutual Aid, came out in 1902, in the middle of the assassination years, and argued that cooperation, not the war of all against all, is how species and societies actually survive.

Errico Malatesta is the harder and more interesting case, because he helped invent the doctrine. By August 1892 he was publicly opposing the attentats in the French anarchist press. In the fall of 1894, with Paris still reeling, he wrote “Anarchy and Violence” for the London paper Liberty. He admitted the public saw nothing in anarchism but bombs and daggers, and he blamed the capitalist press for that, but he also blamed his own comrades for never deciding what kind of violence, if any, their principles allowed. His answer was narrow: violence only “in the defense of ourselves and others against oppression.” Anything beyond that, he argued in a later essay, turned anarchists into the authoritarians they claimed to oppose.[19]

He paid for the position. In March 1921, while Malatesta and two fellow editors sat in a Milan prison on a hunger strike, a small group of Milanese anarchists bombed the Diana Theatre to force attention on their case. Twenty-one people died, and well over a hundred were injured. Malatesta and his comrades ended the strike.[20] The men who said they were acting for him had done the one thing he had spent thirty years arguing against.

Emma Goldman is the case the tidy version of this history leaves out. She had helped Berkman plan the Frick attempt. After McKinley’s death she refused to disown Czolgosz and was arrested in the sweep that followed, then released for lack of evidence. In “The Psychology of Political Violence,” first published in Anarchism and Other Essays in 1910, she argued that acts like his were produced by conditions rather than doctrine, and that set against the organized violence of capital and government, political attacks were “but a drop in the ocean.”[21] That explains and does not endorse, but it does not condemn either. The same essay insists there was no evidence Czolgosz ever called himself an anarchist, a claim hard to square with the standard account of him as a self-proclaimed one. The movement’s best-known American voice did not give the clean answer, and the history should say so plainly.

Voltairine de Cleyre gave the answer Goldman would not, and she gave it with three bullets in her. De Cleyre made her living in Philadelphia teaching English to Jewish immigrants, many of them anarchists, and refused to take fees for her lectures. One of her former pupils, a cigar maker named Herman Helcher, became fixated on her. On December 19, 1902, while she waited alone for a trolley at Fourth and Green Streets, he shot her three times at close range.[22]

Helcher stayed where he was and was arrested. When the police brought him to her hospital bed to identify him, she refused. She asked her comrades to raise money for his legal defense, and by her biographers’ account she argued that what he needed was care, not a cell. The court convicted him anyway and gave him six years. The bullets were never removed, and they caused her pain for the rest of her life.[23] She refused to name him because she did not think the state’s prison was the answer, and she never pretended he had done nothing.

Ten years later, in a lecture published as Direct Action in 1912, she made the point the bomb-thrower cartoon hides. Direct action was not a synonym for violence. It was anything people did for themselves without asking an authority to do it for them: a strike, a boycott, a group of neighbors solving their own problem. She wrote that it could be as violent as anything or as peaceful as a brook, and that people who believed in it were not committed to bloodshed. Her examples ran from the Quakers who kept returning to Puritan Massachusetts after four of them were hanged to the housewives of New York who organized a boycott over meat prices. “All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action,” she wrote.[24] She died that June. The press had spent twenty-five years using her movement’s name for dynamite. In one of her last public arguments, she tried to give it back to the people running co-ops.

The bombing current did not die with the assassination years. It narrowed. In the United States it survived in the followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, who openly advocated attacks and ran a bombing campaign in 1919. Galleani was deported that year. On September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon exploded on Wall Street across from the J.P. Morgan offices at the lunch hour, killing thirty-eight people and injuring hundreds. The case was never solved. The FBI’s own history concludes that a small group of Italian anarchists was most likely responsible.[25] The pockmarks are still on the facade of 23 Wall Street, left unrepaired.

A small faction did the bombing. A much larger movement said it was wrong, repeatedly, in writing. Only one of those made the front page.

What Barcelona Built

The clearest test of what anarchists do with power came in the same city that had given the world Montjuïc. In November 1910, delegates representing about 26,000 workers met in Barcelona and founded the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the CNT, an anarcho-syndicalist union federation. It was banned, legalized, and banned again. Employers hired gunmen to kill its organizers, and some of its members answered in kind. By 1919 it claimed around 700,000 members. At its congress in Zaragoza in May 1936, delegates represented just over 550,000 workers. Membership figures for the CNT vary by source.[26]

Two months later, army officers launched the coup that began the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona the CNT’s members, fighting in the streets alongside police who stayed loyal to the Republic, defeated the rising in the city. What followed across much of Catalonia and Aragon was the largest attempt at an anarchist economy anyone has ever made. Workers took over factories, utilities, and transit and ran them through committees. In the countryside, peasants pooled land into collectives. The numbers are contested: one widely cited estimate puts the total at around 1,865 collectives across Republican Spain, involving somewhere between 1.2 and 1.6 million people. Catalan historians who have gone through the local records think some of the movement’s own figures were inflated, and that individual family farms stayed dominant in rural Catalonia.[27] Even on the conservative counts, hundreds of thousands of people spent a year or more running their workplaces and villages without owners.

It was not only production. In April 1936 a group of anarchist women, tired of being told their liberation would come after the revolution, founded Mujeres Libres. By August 1937, ninety local groups had formed a national federation, running literacy classes, job training, and childcare so that women could actually take part in the collectives the men were running.[28]

The ledger has another column. In the first months after the coup, when the Republican state had effectively collapsed in the areas the coup failed to take, militias and patrols carried out a wave of killings. The Catholic clergy were hit hardest. By the standard count, compiled by the priest and historian Antonio Montero Moreno in 1961, 6,832 priests, monks, nuns, and bishops were killed in the Republican zone during the war, most of them in the summer and fall of 1936. Historians name anarchist militias among the perpetrators, alongside other factions of the left, especially in Catalonia and Aragon, and churches were burned across both regions.[29] A movement that had spent sixty years condemning state terror practiced its own the moment it held a city. The Nationalist side’s killings were far larger, and the Franco regime kept killing for years after the war ended, but that comparison is no alibi.

The experiment did not end because it failed to function. It was destroyed from both sides. In May 1937, fighting broke out in Barcelona between the CNT and Communist-led forces loyal to the central government, and the anarchists lost control of the city. That August, Republican army units dissolved the Council of Aragon, the regional body the anarchists had set up, and broke up many of the collectives. Franco’s army finished the rest in 1939. The CNT went underground for nearly forty years.[30]

Barcelona proves less than its admirers claim and more than its enemies admit. It does not prove anarchists are gentle. It proves that when an anarchist movement had a million workers and a year of freedom, most of what it did was run trams, bake bread, and teach women to read. The bombs of the 1890s were never the movement’s main output. They were the part that fit on a front page.

One distinction keeps that from being a contradiction. The collectives existed because CNT members fought the army in the streets of Barcelona in July 1936, and that was not propaganda by the deed. Nobody was trying to send a message. A military coup was trying to take the city, and the people who lived there stopped it. Defense against an attack already underway is a different act from a bomb meant to teach a lesson, and everything that follows depends on keeping the two apart.

Meanwhile, at the Head of the Lakes

Four years before the wagon on Wall Street, the more representative story of the period played out on the Mesabi Range, an hour or so north of Duluth.

On June 2, 1916, a group of miners at the St. James Mine in Aurora walked off the job over wages and the contract system that set their pay. Within a week the walkout had spread across the range, with estimates running from eight thousand to ten thousand strikers, most of them immigrants: Finns, Swedes, Italians, Croatians, Slovenes. The Industrial Workers of the World sent organizers who could speak the range’s languages, among them Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Frank Little, and the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca.[31] The IWW was a syndicalist union, not an anarchist party, but anarchists were part of its bones, and Tresca was one of its best-known faces.

The violence on the range that summer came from the company side. On June 22 a Croatian miner named John Alar was shot and killed in Virginia during a clash with guards working for the Oliver Iron Mining Company, the U.S. Steel subsidiary that ran most of the pits. Three thousand people walked behind his coffin under a banner that read “Murdered By Oliver Gunmen.” The authorities arrested Tresca and fellow organizer Sam Scarlett for criminal libel. After a later deadly confrontation, Tresca and Little were charged in connection with it even though they had been more than thirty-five miles away. The strike was called off on September 17, 1916. The next year Minnesota passed a criminal syndicalism law aimed in large part at the IWW.[32]

Company guards killed a miner. The anarchist went to jail.

Across the harbor from Duluth, something quieter was being built. Finnish immigrants had started cooperative stores in the region early in the century; the first Finnish-sponsored co-op in the country opened in 1903 near Menahga, Minnesota, when thirteen farm families pooled $170. By 1917 there were more than a hundred Finnish consumer co-ops across northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. That summer, delegates met in Superior and founded the Co-operative Central Exchange, a wholesale that let the stores buy together. One reason they needed it: the region’s largest grocery wholesaler had restricted credit to the co-ops at the urging of the private retailers they competed with.[33]

The Exchange set up in a brick building at 1701 Winter Street in Superior and put its own labels on the shelves. Coffee was a big seller. In 1927 it moved 325,000 pounds of it across three states.[34]

The wholesale had a manager, and his fight is the part worth remembering. Eskel Ronn ran the Exchange through the 1920s. By the end of the decade the Communist Party wanted the co-ops to take direction from it. Ronn and the educator George Halonen led the side that wanted the Exchange run by its own members on the old Rochdale principles, open to anyone and answerable to no party. The fight ran for a year through Finnish halls across the country and came to a vote at the annual meeting in Superior around 1930. The independents won, and the hard-line faction split off and built a rival wholesale that was gone by 1939.[35] Ronn was no anarchist. But the question he fought over, whether the people who run the store answer to the members or to a central committee, is the anarchist question written in a grocery ledger, and he got the answer right. The wholesale he defended merged into Midland Cooperatives in 1963 and became part of Land O’Lakes in 1982, which is its own lesson about how long a co-op stays one.

At the other end of Duluth, Finnish workers built something stranger. In 1903 Finnish Lutherans founded a folk school in Minneapolis and within months moved it to Smithville, then a rural suburb on Duluth’s southwestern edge. The students rebelled against compulsory prayer and a rule forbidding discussion of social questions, and within a few years the Finnish Socialist Federation owned the place and had renamed it Work People’s College. When the Finnish socialists split over industrial unionism in 1914, the college stayed with the syndicalist wing, and by the early 1920s it was formally tied to the IWW. At its peak it housed about 150 resident students. It taught economics and labor history, and also bookkeeping, English, public speaking, journalism, and how to run a meeting.[36] That list is the least glamorous thing in this essay and possibly the most important. Revolutions get the posters. Somebody still has to keep the books, and in Smithville somebody taught them how. Regular classes ended in 1941 and the property was sold in 1953. One of its buildings still stands.

The Superior co-op builders were socialists, and later some of them were communists. They were not an anarchist project, and it would be dishonest to claim them. That is exactly the point. Mutual aid, cooperative ownership, and workers running their own supply chain are what Kropotkin and Malatesta spent their lives arguing for, and working people build them whether or not anyone hands them the theory. The practice was never the fringe. The bomb was.

The practice kept going. In May 1980, a group of anti-nuclear activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organized a bake sale to cover legal costs for a friend arrested at an attempted occupation of the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire. The eight of them became the first Food Not Bombs collective. They served their first full meal outside the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston on March 26, 1981, during the Bank of Boston’s shareholder meeting. The name came from handing out food across the street from a building rumored to house nuclear weapons work: hungry people on one side, weapons money on the other.[37] Chapters spread across the world after an international gathering in 1992. On August 15, 1988, San Francisco police arrested nine volunteers in Golden Gate Park, including the co-founder Keith McHenry, for sharing food and literature.[38] The name is a direct reply to the cartoon, and it reads that way on purpose.

Duluth has its own version, from a tradition with a better claim to the word anarchist than most. In 1989 Angie Miller and Steve O’Neil opened their family home on Jefferson Street to Central American refugees on their way to Canada. It grew into Loaves and Fishes, a Catholic Worker community that has run houses of hospitality for people without homes a few blocks from the lake for more than thirty years, on volunteer labor and gifts, with no government money.[39] The Catholic Worker movement was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and Day was an anarchist and a pacifist. The same movement produced Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, the Catholic Workers who sabotaged sections of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa and then turned themselves in. One tradition, two answers to the question of what to do about a world on fire: break the machine, or change the sheets. Only one of them is on Jefferson Street.

The clearest modern case came out of a flood. When the levees failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Malik Rahim, a longtime organizer and former Black Panther, refused to evacuate from Algiers, the neighborhood on the river’s west bank where he lived. On September 5, 2005, Rahim, his neighbor Sharon Johnson, and anarchist organizers from Austin, Texas, including scott crow, founded the Common Ground Collective. Its slogan was “solidarity, not charity.” Volunteer medics started a first aid station in the Masjid Bilal mosque on September 9; it became the Common Ground Health Clinic. Within a year the collective’s volunteers had set up seven clinics and nearly a hundred community garden projects, gutted flooded houses, and run distribution centers while the Red Cross and FEMA were still struggling to arrive.[40] The clinic still operates. In 2013 it became a Federally Qualified Health Center.

Common Ground has its own informant. Brandon Darby, another Austin activist and one of the collective’s early organizers, disclosed in an open letter dated December 29, 2008, that he had been working for the FBI, informing on protest groups ahead of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul that September. Two young Texans he had traveled with, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, were convicted over Molotov cocktails found during the convention. McKay’s defense argued that Darby had encouraged the idea, and his first trial ended with a hung jury; McKay later said in court that he had lied about Darby originating it.[41] What the record establishes is narrower and still telling: one of the early organizers of the best-known anarchist relief project of the decade was informing for the FBI, and the firebombs at the center of the best-known prosecution from that Minnesota convention came out of a group with a government informant inside it. Andrieux would have recognized the arrangement.

You Cannot Feed a Neighbor You Have Killed

Mutual aid is not a mood. It is a network, and the network is made of people who have decided the person next to them is worth keeping alive. Everything else, the co-op wholesale, the free clinic, the soup table, runs on that decision.

The research on disasters says the same thing in drier language. The political scientist Daniel Aldrich studied recovery in four places: Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake, Kobe after the 1995 earthquake, Tamil Nadu after the 2004 tsunami, and New Orleans after Katrina. Across 225 neighborhoods and villages, the communities with dense social ties recovered faster than similar places with more money and less connection.[42] In Kobe, most of the people pulled alive from collapsed houses were pulled out by neighbors, not firefighters. In New Orleans East, the Vietnamese community around Mary Queen of Vietnam church had most of its residents back within two years, while much of the Lower Ninth Ward still looked like the week the levees broke. What got people out of the rubble was the person two doors down.

Rebecca Solnit made this case at book length in A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), drawing on a century of disaster research from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Katrina. Her finding is that ordinary people in a catastrophe mostly improvise cooperation, and that the panic that turns deadly usually comes from the people in charge, who expect a mob and act to stop one. She wrote about Algiers Point herself, and what follows owes her a debt.[43]

The same storm showed the opposite. Across the river from the French Quarter, in Algiers Point, a group of white residents barricaded the streets, armed themselves, and treated Black people walking toward the Coast Guard evacuation point as intruders. At least eleven Black men were shot there in the days after the flood. One of the shooters, Roland Bourgeois Jr., lived two doors down on Vallette Street from a witness who saw him celebrating with a shotgun. He was eventually charged federally with using force to keep African Americans off the public streets, and in 2019 he was sentenced to ten years for shooting Donnell Herrington.[44] Malik Rahim lived a few streets away. The militia drove past his house pointing guns and calling him the “Mayor of Algiers.”

Common Ground began as the answer to that. Rahim, scott crow, and a handful of others stood on Rahim’s porch armed, and when the trucks came by, they held their ground and the trucks left. By crow’s own account, the collective grew out of that act of self-defense.[45] The same flood, the same neighborhood, the same week: one group of neighbors decided the people walking past were the threat, and another decided they were the network. One produced a body count. The other produced a clinic that is still open.

It happened here, too. On the evening of June 15, 1920, three months before the wagon exploded on Wall Street, a crowd of several thousand white Duluthians gathered outside the city jail on the word of two teenagers who said a group of Black circus workers had robbed them and assaulted the young woman. The doctor who examined her found no physical evidence of assault. The police had orders not to shoot, and they obeyed. The crowd broke down the jail doors with timbers and rails, held a mock trial, dragged Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie to the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East, and hanged them from a light pole. Someone photographed the crowd posing with the bodies, and the picture was sold as a postcard. No one was ever convicted of the murders. Many of Duluth’s few hundred Black residents left the city afterward.[46]

The men who did it were not anarchists, foreigners, or radicals. They were Duluth, and they went home that night to the same streets as the people they had just taught what membership in the city was worth. A memorial to the three men has stood at that corner since 2003. There is a postcard of that crowd. There is no cartoon.

It was not the city’s first. On September 11, 1918, a Finnish dockworker and logger named Olli Kinkkonen and five other men renounced their claim to American citizenship so they would not be drafted into a war they wanted no part of. A week later, on the night of September 18, a handful of men came to his boarding house, one of them in uniform and claiming to be from the draft board, and took him away. They questioned him about his loyalty, found his answers unsatisfactory, and tarred and feathered him. Then they phoned the Duluth papers and sent a letter taking credit in the name of the Knights of Liberty: a warning, they said, to all slackers. On September 30 his body was found hanging from a tree, in Lester Park by most accounts. The police ruled it a suicide. Duluth’s socialist paper, The Truth, answered on its front page that he had not killed himself. No one was ever charged.[47]

Look at what the Knights did: violence against a neighbor, followed by a communiqué to the newspapers explaining the lesson it was meant to teach. That is propaganda by the deed, performed in Duluth by men who thought of themselves as patriots, in the same years Congress was writing laws to deport anarchists for their beliefs. Kinkkonen was buried in an unmarked grave in Park Hill, a few rows from where Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie would be buried two years later. In 1993 a Finnish-American society put up a headstone. It reads “Victim of Warmongers.”

That is the practical case against the bomb, and it is stronger than the moral one. Émile Henry’s argument, that no bourgeois was innocent, turned a whole category of neighbors into targets. The moment a movement accepts that logic, it has written a large share of the people around it out of the network, and it has taught everyone else that the network can decide, one day, that they are next. Malatesta saw it coming. He warned that the danger of being corrupted by the use of violence “exists for all,” anarchists included, and that a movement that made itself a persecutor would have nothing left to offer.[48]

Spain is the hard test. The collectives in Aragon depended on village consent, in places small enough that everyone knew everyone. Every priest killed in a Catalan or Aragonese village in the summer of 1936 was somebody’s neighbor, somebody’s brother, somebody’s confessor. What those killings did to the collectives’ local support is hard to measure, so take this as argument. But it is difficult to imagine a worse way to ask people to pool their land than to begin by killing the man who buried their parents.

The Iron Range strike of 1916 was built the other way. Through that summer the IWW sponsored dances in Virginia so that Finnish, Croatian, Italian, and Slovenian miners who did not share a language would share a Saturday night; at one in June, a Croatian orchestra played for hundreds of strikers, their wives, and their sweethearts.[49] The company fought the strike with gunmen. The union held it together for three months with dances.

Mutual aid is a bet that the person next to you is worth more alive. Violence against that person breaks the bet, and tells everyone watching that it was never real.

The Deed Goes Viral

Propaganda by the deed was always a media theory. Brousse said so plainly in 1877: workers were too tired to read, so show them. The bomb was a message that needed a newspaper to deliver it, and in the 1890s the newspapers obliged. What has changed is that the attacker no longer needs the newspaper. He can publish the message himself, before, during, and after, and the platforms will carry it further than Le Petit Parisien ever could.

The template is Christchurch. On March 15, 2019, an Australian white supremacist posted a manifesto full of memes and in-jokes, emailed it to politicians and newsrooms, and then livestreamed himself on Facebook as he began murdering worshippers at the Al Noor mosque. He went on to the Linwood Islamic Centre. By the time police arrested him, he had killed forty-nine people, and two more died of their wounds later. Copies of the video spread faster than the platforms could delete them. Six weeks later, a gunman who attacked the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, posted his own manifesto naming Christchurch as his inspiration. In August, the gunman who killed twenty-three people at a Walmart in El Paso opened his manifesto by endorsing the Christchurch shooter. Researchers have counted at least one copycat attack inspired by Christchurch in every year since.[50] The deed and the propaganda had become one file.

Here is the mechanical part, which people who have never run a system tend to miss. Facebook said it removed about 1.5 million copies of the Christchurch video in the first twenty-four hours, most of them blocked at upload.[51] The copies kept coming anyway, because the people spreading them cropped, mirrored, re-filmed, and re-encoded the file, and every alteration produces a file the filter has never seen. Blocking a known file is easy. Blocking every file that shows the same thing is a different and much harder problem, and the uploaders understood that better than the platforms did. Meanwhile the ranking systems deciding what people saw had been built to reward whatever held attention, and nothing holds attention like a killing. Nobody at those companies designed a machine to distribute atrocity. They designed a machine to distribute engagement and never taught it the difference.

The message now rides on the ammunition itself. When UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk on December 4, 2024, police found shell casings reportedly inscribed “delay,” “deny,” and “depose,” an echo of a phrase critics use for how insurers avoid paying claims. The man charged, Luigi Mangione, was turned into a folk hero by a noisy part of the internet within days; people wore “Free Luigi” shirts to his hearings. A New York judge threw out the state terrorism counts in September 2025, finding them legally insufficient, and Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the remaining charges.[52] On September 10, 2025, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. The rifle recovered nearby came with casings engraved with video game and meme references and the line “Hey fascist! Catch!” Utah’s governor said the man charged, Tyler Robinson, had gone deep into the darker corners of the internet. Robinson has pleaded not guilty.[53]

Neither man has been shown to be an anarchist, and neither case belongs to the movement this essay is about. They belong to its history anyway, because they run on the exact logic Brousse wrote down: the act is the message, and the audience is the point. The engraved casing is a caption. The livestream is the front page. The copycat is the reader who took the lesson.

Words are sometimes the first stage of the deed. Henry’s claim that the bourgeois had no innocents among them did its work before he built anything, because it turned a café full of strangers into a legitimate target in his own head. The same sorting happens at scale every day in comment sections that divide neighbors into categories that deserve what they get. My argument is that a post celebrating a killing gives the next person looking for permission a reason to think it is available, and tells everyone in the category that they are fair game. I cannot prove that chain, and no poll in this essay measures it. It is an argument, and it rests on how the 1890s went.

Malatesta watched this happen to his own movement in the 1890s. He wrote that admiration for the courage of the bomb-throwers, the way they faced the guillotine, was enough to make many anarchists forget their own program.[54] Swap the guillotine for a perp walk and the program for a hashtag, and that is the modern feed. Anarchists who share the memes are doing the newspapers’ old job for free. The bomb-thrower cartoon was drawn by enemies. The new one is being drawn, one repost at a time, by people who think they are on the other side.

The Case for the Other Side

The strongest objection to everything above does not come from the police. It comes from people who have read the same history and drawn a different conclusion, and they are owed their best case.

The first argument is about property. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm argues that the climate movement’s commitment to absolute nonviolence has hardened into a fetish, and that targeted sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure is justified by the scale of the harm it would prevent. He insists that breaking a machine is different in kind from violence that hits a human being, and he argues that movements usually remembered as nonviolent, from the suffragettes to the fight against apartheid, had militant flanks that broke things. Among his models are Reznicek and Montoya, the Catholic Workers who damaged the Dakota Access Pipeline. Anarchists and syndicalists have made versions of that argument for a century. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who organized on the Mesabi Range in 1916, wrote a whole pamphlet defending sabotage.[55] The line this essay draws, persons and not property, is one Malm would sign.

The trouble is that property destruction does not stay where its theorists put it, and Minnesota has the example. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died, on camera, in front of people begging him to stop. Chauvin was convicted of murder the following April. Three nights after Floyd’s death, on May 28, the department evacuated its Third Precinct station as a crowd broke through the fence around it, and the building burned while people cheered. It was the defining image of that summer, and it was aimed at a building. But the ATF tracked more than 160 fires across the Twin Cities in the days that followed. A Texas man, Ivan Hunter, reportedly identified with the anti-government Boogaloo movement, was federally charged with riot after allegedly firing thirteen rounds from a rifle inside the burning precinct. And the same night, a pawn shop on Lake Street burned. Nearly two months later, investigators found the body of Oscar Lee Stewart Jr. in the ruins, and the medical examiner found he had died of smoke inhalation and burns. The man who set that fire, Montez Lee, was sentenced to ten years for arson. He was not prosecuted for Stewart’s death, and he said he did not know anyone was inside.[56] The theory had a line between property and persons. The fire did not.

The second argument is historical, and it is right about the history. Armed self-defense did real work in the American freedom struggle, and pretending otherwise flatters the story. In 1964, Black men in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, many of them veterans, organized the Deacons for Defense and Justice to guard civil rights workers from the Klan. In February 1965 they helped start a chapter in Bogalusa. When James Farmer, national director of the nonviolent Congress of Racial Equality, was warned that the Klan meant to kill him on a trip to Louisiana, four armed Deacons met him at the New Orleans airport and drove him the sixty-five miles to Bogalusa. Farmer is reported to have said afterward that CORE was nonviolent, but it had no right to tell Black people they could not defend their homes.[57] That is Malik Rahim’s porch, forty years early. The Deacons guarded and did not bomb. The distinction the argument needs was already being made by the people who lived it. Labor’s record points the same way: historians commonly hold that the eight-hour movement was set back by the Haymarket bomb, and the eight-hour day arrived through strikes, organizing, and eventually federal law.[58]

The third argument is the one insurrectionary anarchists still make, and it has a living advocate. On May 7, 2012, in Genoa, Alfredo Cospito and a comrade shot Roberto Adinolfi, an executive of the nuclear company Ansaldo Nucleare, in the leg. The attack was claimed by a cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation. Cospito was later convicted over two parcel bombs left outside a Carabinieri cadet school in Fossano, in Piedmont, in 2006, which hurt no one. Italy’s highest court treated that as a massacre against the security of the state, a charge that does not require any dead, and it brought a life sentence, later reduced to twenty-three years. In 2022 Italy moved him into the 41-bis isolation regime built for Mafia bosses, reportedly the first anarchist held under it, and he went on hunger strike for 180 days and lost about fifty kilograms.[59] Plenty of anarchists who reject his tactics marched for him anyway, because 41-bis fails any honest test of humane treatment. On that point they were right.

On the bullet, they were wrong. Adinolfi survived. The shooting changed nothing about Italian nuclear policy, which Italian voters had already rejected by referendum in 2011, a year before. What it changed was Cospito’s prison file and the Italian state’s case for its harshest regime. The act sent a message, the message was received, and what came back was what came back in 1894: laws, cells, and a picture of an anarchist with a gun. A movement that cannot hold both of those at once has lost the argument Malatesta spent his life making.

The Arithmetic Changed

In July 1892, Alexander Berkman walked into Henry Clay Frick’s office with a revolver and a sharpened file, shot him twice, stabbed him, and failed to kill him. In 1894, Émile Henry’s café bomb, the most notorious anarchist attack of the decade, killed one person. Czolgosz had to get close enough to McKinley to shake his hand. The violence of the classic era was intimate, clumsy, and usually limited to one or two victims, which is part of why the anarchists could argue about it for decades. A mistake cost a life. A terrible thing, but a countable one.

That world is gone, and nowhere more completely than in the United States. In 2023 the CDC counted 46,728 firearm deaths in the country. Most of them, 27,300, were suicides. The other 17,927 were homicides, the fifth-highest total ever recorded.[60] Christchurch showed what one man with semi-automatic rifles can do in a few minutes. Minnesota showed what one man with a list can do in a few hours. In the early morning of June 14, 2025, Vance Boelter, dressed as a police officer and driving an SUV fitted with police lights, went to the home of State Senator John Hoffman in Champlin and shot him nine times and his wife, Yvette, eight times. Both survived. He then drove to Brooklyn Park, knocked on the door of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman, and killed her and her husband, Mark. In his car, investigators found notebooks listing about seventy names, Democratic officials and abortion providers, with home addresses. He pleaded guilty in federal court in June 2026 and on July 23 was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus forty years.[61] The list was words. The words took two people, and nearly took two more, before breakfast.

That is the problem with every old anarchist argument about violence, including the good ones. Malatesta’s position, violence only in defense of ourselves and others against oppression, was built for a world where a misjudgment killed one person and the state could be counted on to overreact slowly. It still sets the right boundary. But in a country with this many guns in private hands, there is no such thing as a small escalation. Every confrontation happens in the presence of weapons that make the first mistake the last one, and the other side is armed too. The 1890s question was whether a bomb could be justified. The American question is whether anyone can start a fight they are certain to be able to stop.

The polling suggests many people have not thought it through. In a nationally representative survey led by Garen Wintemute at UC Davis, 35.6 percent of Americans in 2025 said political violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one of twenty political objectives, up modestly from 32.3 percent the year before. But when asked whether they would personally shoot someone in a situation they considered justified, fewer than 2 percent of either strong Democrats or MAGA Republicans said they were very or extremely likely to.[62] Most of the endorsement is talk. With rifles in the closet, even 1 or 2 percent of a country is an army.

Anarchism was never pacifist. De Cleyre went out of her way to say that direct action does not mean non-resistance. Common Ground stood on a porch with rifles because white men in trucks were shooting Black neighbors, and it would be dishonest to pretend the rifles did no work. But look at what the rifles were for. They defended a specific house, from a specific threat, in the moment the threat existed, and by crow’s account the trucks drove on. They were not sending a message. They were keeping a clinic’s founder alive long enough to open the clinic.

That is the line that holds up under modern conditions, and it is narrow on purpose. Defense of a person from an attack that is happening now is one thing. Violence meant to be seen, meant to teach, meant to inspire, meant to go viral, is propaganda by the deed under a new name, and the history of propaganda by the deed is not ambiguous. It produced the lois scélérates, Montjuïc, the 1903 immigration law, and a cartoon that has outlived everyone in it. The co-ops, the clinics, and the soup lines came from the other tradition. In 1894 the price of getting that wrong was a café. In America now, it is a room, a street, a legislature, and the trust of every neighbor who was watching.

The Cartoon and the Clinic

The bomb-thrower outlived the bombing era because he was visible and the alternative was not. A bomb in a café has a date, a body, and a drawing. A wholesale that moved 325,000 pounds of coffee is a ledger. French daily newspapers went from 1.5 million copies to 12.5 million in the same decades the anarchists were supposedly taking over, and every one of those papers needed a villain by morning.

He was also useful to the people with the most power to repeat him. Andrieux funded an anarchist paper so he could listen in. France outlawed anarchist propaganda. The United States barred anarchist belief at the border. Minnesota went further. In April 1917 the legislature created a Commission of Public Safety with near-dictatorial wartime powers; its Home Guard, recruited heavily from business and professional men, broke the Twin Cities streetcar strike that December while the commission watched immigrants, unions, and dissenters across the state.[63] The same year the state passed a criminal syndicalism law aimed at the IWW. Joseph Conrad saw the arrangement clearly enough to build The Secret Agent (1907) around the Greenwich bomb of February 1894, which killed only the French anarchist carrying it and which London’s anarchists suspected a police informer of arranging. The villains of Conrad’s novel are an embassy, an informer, and the police. Readers remembered the bomb.[64] Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 after a trial in which the word anarchist did much of the prosecution’s work; fifty years later the governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the trial unfair.[65] In September 2020, months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis set off protests across the country, the Justice Department named New York, Portland, and Seattle “anarchist jurisdictions” in an attempt to cut their federal funds. All three had Democratic mayors. The designation was withdrawn five months later.[66] The word was doing what it had done since 1894.

Anarchists supplied some of the picture themselves. Henry, Galleani, the Diana Theatre bombers, Cospito, and the men in Jensen’s count were real, and they chose the label. A movement cannot disown its own archive by pointing at the police. What it can do is get the proportions right and take the lesson.

The proportions come out like this. The cartoon is wrong about the movement: fewer than two hundred dead outside Russia across thirty-four years, set against generations of co-ops, unions, collectives, clinics, and soup lines, and a steady stream of anarchists saying in print, at the time, that the bombers were wrong. But the deed exists, and it has outlived the people who named it. The attack built to be seen now arrives with its own livestream and its own engraved captions, in a country where one man with a rifle and a list can kill before breakfast. The answer anarchism already had is the one that holds: defend the person in front of you from the attack happening now, and refuse every act of violence meant to send a message. The state does not deserve a monopoly on force. The reason is simpler. The network does not survive the other thing, and nobody runs a clinic, a co-op, or a soup line with neighbors they have taught to be afraid of them.

Here is what that looks like when I have done it. I have filmed police as an act of accountability, and I have fed parking meters for strangers so they would not come back to a ticket. I have also stood in front of a group of cops and yelled at them to stop letting a contractor take homeless people’s belongings out of their tents. When I moved to take the things back, I was told I would be arrested if I tried. I did not try. I yelled, because yelling was what the moment allowed, and the contractor kept working. None of it made a headline, and nobody drew any of it as a cartoon. It is the ordinary shape of the defense I am describing, and it does not always win.

Watching authority abuse people who are already in a bad way does something to you. The wish for revenge, assaultive and anti-bully, does not stay politely in the background. It swells, and each time it does I ask myself why I am not the bomb-thrower after all. The question comes up most when people use violence on me and I answer with a deliberately practiced nonviolence.

The answer I keep arriving at is the one this essay argues: I will stand between a person and the harm in front of us, and I will not hurt anyone to make a point.

In Park Hill Cemetery in Duluth, Olli Kinkkonen lies a few rows from Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. None of the four was killed by an anarchist. The men who killed Kinkkonen had a uniform, a letter to the newspapers, and a name that sounded like a cause. The crowd that killed the other three had a light pole and a postcard. Nobody drew either of them as a cartoon.

Notes

Author’s note: I wrote this as a tired father of a newborn. A (hobbyist?…heh…) essay of this length is bound to lose some integrity somewhere, and I have sourced it as carefully as I could. Where I got something wrong, be generous and forgiving, and don’t tell me. lol. Or whatever. -Joe

Sources

Books and journal articles

Ackelsberg, Martha A. Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women. AK Press, 2005.
Aldrich, Daniel P. Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Aldrich, Daniel P., and Michelle A. Meyer. “Social Capital and Community Resilience.” American Behavioral Scientist (2015).
Altenbaugh, Richard, and Rolland Paulston. Work People’s College: A Finnish Folk High School in the American Labor College Movement. 1977.
Andrieux, Louis. Souvenirs d’un préfet de police. 1885.
Avrich, Paul. An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre. Princeton University Press, 1978.
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton University Press, 1984.
Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. Princeton University Press, 1991.
Avrich, Paul, and Karen Avrich. Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Bolloten, Burnett. The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Casanova, Julián. The Spanish Republic and Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Chrislock, Carl H. Watchdog of Loyalty: The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety during World War I. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1991.
crow, scott. Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective. PM Press, 2011.
de Cleyre, Voltairine. Direct Action. Mother Earth, 1912.
Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives. Free Life Editions, 1974.
Durgan, Andy. “Revolutionary Anarchism in Spain: The CNT 1911–1937.” International Socialism (Winter 1981).
Fabbri, Luigi. Life of Malatesta.
Fedo, Michael. The Lynchings in Duluth. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000.
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency. IWW, 1916.
Gage, Beverly. The Day Wall Street Exploded. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Geifman, Anna. Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917. Princeton University Press, 1993.
Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. Mother Earth, 1910.
Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. Knopf, 1931.
Graham, Robert, ed. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Vol. 1. Black Rose Books, 2005.
Green, James. Death in the Haymarket. Pantheon, 2006.
Hill, Lance. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Jensen, Richard Bach. The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Jensen, Richard Bach. “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe.” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (2004).
Jensen, Richard Bach. “The International Campaign against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880–1930s.” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 1 (2009).
Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. 1902.
Kropotkin, Peter. Words of a Rebel. Introduction by Iain McKay. AK Press, 2022.
Malatesta, Errico. “Anarchy and Violence.” Liberty (London), 1894.
Malatesta, Errico. “Violence as a Social Factor.”
Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Verso, 2021.
Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. PM Press, 2010.
Merriman, John. The Dynamite Club. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
Montero Moreno, Antonio. Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936–1939. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1961.
Mulry, David. “Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing and Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Rocky Mountain Review 54, no. 2 (2000).
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell. Viking, 2009.
Stek. “Militant Mothers: Women and the Minnesota Iron Range Strike of 1916.” Mining History Journal 22 (2015).
Tarrida del Mármol, Fernando. Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne. 1897.
Tombs, Robert. The War against Paris, 1871. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Tombs, Robert. “How Bloody Was la Semaine Sanglante of 1871? A Revision.” Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012).
Wen. “Hurricane Katrina’s Folk Devils.” NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 27, no. 2.
Wintemute, Garen J., et al. “Views on Democracy and Political Violence in the United States in 2025.” Injury Epidemiology 13, art. 43 (2026).

Archives, reports, and press

Austin Chronicle, on Brandon Darby and the McKay and Crowder cases.
CBC/AP, 28–29 May 2020, on the Third Precinct fire.
CDC National Center for Health Statistics, Data Brief 526.
CNN, 21 July 2020; 11 December 2025.
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, “The Christchurch Attacks.”
Common Ground Relief, “History”; Common Ground Health Clinic.
Courthouse News, January 2023; on McKay’s 2009 allocution.
Democracy Now!, 6 January 2009.
Duluth News Tribune, on Kinkkonen, Loaves and Fishes, and Dorothy Day.
Equal Justice Initiative, on the Duluth lynchings.
Facebook statement on the Christchurch video, 17 March 2019.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Wall Street Bombing 1920.”
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Gun Violence in the United States 2023 (2025).
Minnesota Historical Society, Duluth Lynchings Online Resource; MNopedia entries cited above.
Minnesota Reformer, 27 May 2021; March 2026.
MPR News, “Postcard from a Lynching” (2001).
National Safety Council, Injury Facts.
NBC News and ABC News, June and July 2026, on Vance Boelter.
Royal Museums Greenwich, “Greenwich Outrage.”
Star Tribune, on the Max It Pawn fire and Calvin Horton Jr.
Superior Telegram, 30 August 2023.
Texas Tribune, 7 April 2011.
U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, press releases on the Third Precinct fire.
University of Minnesota Archives, Central Cooperative Wholesale records; Immigration History Research Center Archives.
Zinn Education Project, “Aug. 15, 1988.”

[1] John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), the standard account. Sources give 17 or about 20 wounded. Some popular accounts say Henry first meant to strike Carnot; Merriman treats the choice of the café as deliberate and the point remains disputed among historians, so the essay does not rest on it.

[2] Émile Henry, defense statement, Gazette des Tribunaux, 27–28 April 1894, trans. George Woodcock, in The Anarchist Reader and online at The Anarchist Library and the Marxists Internet Archive; Merriman, The Dynamite Club, on the Carmaux and rue des Bons-Enfants bombing of November 1892. The essay paraphrases Henry’s argument and does not quote it.

[3] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (PM Press, 2010; first ed. 1992), on the Malatesta and Cafiero formulation of 1876 and the Jura Federation.

[4] Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, August 1877, in Robert Graham, ed., Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, vol. 1 (Black Rose Books, 2005). An online posting misdates the article 1887. On Brousse’s retreat from anarchism, see Marshall.

[5] Louis Andrieux, Souvenirs d’un préfet de police (1885); on La Révolution sociale, Serreaux, and the funding, see also Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The detail of the Thiers statue bombing at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on June 15, 1881, comes through secondary summaries of Andrieux, and the essay treats it as his claim.

[6] Kropotkin’s recollection of Serreaux and the 1881 London congress is quoted in editions and introductions to The Spirit of Revolt (Anarchist Library).

[7] Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 1984); James Green, Death in the Haymarket (Pantheon, 2006); Illinois Labor History Society.

[8] Merriman, The Dynamite Club; Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism, on Ravachol, Vaillant, the lois scélérates, and the Trial of the Thirty (August 1894).

[9] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (Knopf, 1931); Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Harvard University Press, 2012).

[10] Fernando Tarrida del Mármol, Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne: Montjuich, Cuba, Philippines (Paris, 1897). Casualty figures for the Corpus Christi bombing of June 7, 1896 differ by source.

[11] Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism, on the assassination of Cánovas at the spa of Santa Águeda, Gipuzkoa, on August 8, 1897, and Angiolillo’s execution twelve days later.

[12] Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism, on the International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense against Anarchists, November 24 to December 21, 1898.

[13] Immigration Act of March 3, 1903; Jensen’s work on the American response, including the H-Diplo review discussion; Roosevelt’s first annual message, December 3, 1901.

[14] Richard Bach Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (2004); Jensen, “The International Campaign against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880–1930s,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 1 (2009).

[15] Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton University Press, 1993), which counts more than 17,000 killed or wounded and devotes a chapter to the anarchists and other extremist groups. Jensen summarizes her work in his own.

[16] Robert Tombs, The War against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Tombs, “How Bloody Was la Semaine Sanglante of 1871? A Revision,” Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012). Scholarly estimates of the dead run from several thousand upward.

[17] Jensen (2004), n. 118, on French press circulation.

[18] Kropotkin, quoted in Iain McKay’s introduction to Words of a Rebel (AK Press, 2022) and in the editor’s introduction to Modern Science and Anarchy (AK Press, 2018); translations of the line vary slightly. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was published in 1902.

[19] Malatesta in L’En Dehors, 21 August 1892, cited in Jensen (2004) via Jean Maitron; Errico Malatesta, “Anarchy and Violence,” Liberty (London), September and October 1894; Malatesta, “Violence as a Social Factor,” Anarchist Library.

[20] Massimo Ortalli, “The Diana Theatre Bombing,” Kate Sharpley Library, which gives 21 dead and over 150 injured; Luigi Fabbri, Life of Malatesta, on the hunger strike that began March 18, 1921 and the bombing of March 23. Injury counts vary by source.

[21] Emma Goldman, “The Psychology of Political Violence,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910). On Czolgosz as a self-proclaimed anarchist, see PBS American Experience, “Emma Goldman,” and the biographical literature.

[22] Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton University Press, 1978).

[23] Avrich, An American Anarchist, on the aftermath of the shooting, Helcher’s conviction, and de Cleyre’s refusal to identify him; her words on care rather than a cell are known through her biographers and should be checked against Avrich before quoting.

[24] Voltairine de Cleyre, Direct Action (Mother Earth, 1912), in the Anarchist Library.

[25] Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Wall Street Bombing 1920”; Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2009).

[26] Andy Durgan, “Revolutionary Anarchism in Spain: The CNT 1911–1937,” International Socialism (Winter 1981), Marxists Internet Archive. Founding and membership figures for the CNT differ across sources.

[27] Durgan (1981) for the figure of 1,865 collectives; “Collectivisations in Catalonia and the Region of Valencia during the Spanish Civil War,” Catalan Historical Review, for the corrective; Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives (Free Life Editions, 1974); Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

[28] Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (AK Press, 2005; first ed. 1991).

[29] Antonio Montero Moreno, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936–1939 (Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1961); Julián Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Casanova and others treat the anarchist role in anticlerical killings alongside that of other left organizations.

[30] Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War, on the Barcelona fighting of May 1937 and the dissolution of the Council of Aragon that August.

[31] “Mesabi Iron Range Strike, 1916,” MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society; Gary Kaunonen, Zócalo Public Square. Sources differ on the start date (June 2 or 3) and on the number of strikers, hence the range.

[32] Minnesota Historical Society Library guide, “Iron Range Miners’ Strikes of 1907 and 1916”; the 1916–1917 northern Minnesota lumber strike and the criminal syndicalism law of 1917.

[33] University of Minnesota Archives, Central Cooperative Wholesale records; Arnold Alanen, “The Development and Distribution of Finnish Consumers’ Cooperatives in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, 1903–1973,” Wisconsin Labor History Society. Sources give both July 30 and August 30, 1917 as the founding date of the Co-operative Central Exchange.

[34] Superior Telegram, 30 August 2023.

[35] University of Minnesota Archives, Central Cooperative Wholesale records, on Ronn, Halonen, and the vote; Kansas State News, 14 November 1924, on Ronn at the Fourth Co-operative Congress; Superior Telegram, 30 August 2023, on the split, the rival’s end in 1939, and the later mergers into Midland Cooperatives and Land O’Lakes. Sources disagree on whether the split came in 1930 or 1931.

[36] Jon Bekken, “Work People’s College,” Anarchist Library; Richard Altenbaugh and Rolland Paulston, Work People’s College: A Finnish Folk High School in the American Labor College Movement (1977); Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota, Jussi K. and Olga S. Kangas papers. Dates for the founding and IWW affiliation vary across sources.

[37] Food Not Bombs, “The Food Not Bombs Story” and FAQ.

[38] Zinn Education Project, “Aug. 15, 1988: Food Not Bombs Volunteers Arrested.”

[39] Loaves and Fishes Duluth, “About”; Catholic Worker directory; Duluth News Tribune on Loaves and Fishes and Dorothy Day. On Reznicek and Montoya: Malm’s account and Society and Space review.

[40] Common Ground Relief, “History”; Common Ground Health Clinic; scott crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (PM Press, 2011).

[41] Darby’s open letter of December 29, 2008, and its aftermath: Austin Chronicle, “Activists Raise Concerns about FBI Informant”; Democracy Now!, 6 January 2009; Texas Tribune, “Radical, FBI Informant, Conservative Hero,” 7 April 2011; Austin Chronicle on McKay’s mistrial and retrial; Courthouse News on McKay’s 2009 allocution; crow, Black Flags and Windmills.

[42] Daniel P. Aldrich, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Aldrich and Michelle Meyer, “Social Capital and Community Resilience,” American Behavioral Scientist (2015), on the Kobe rescues; LSE Review of Books on the Village de L’Est comparison with the Lower Ninth Ward.

[43] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009); Solnit, “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm,” The Nation.

[44] Facing South, “New Clues Emerge in Post-Katrina Vigilante Shooting at Algiers Point”; “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm,” The Nation; Wen, “Hurricane Katrina’s Folk Devils,” NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 27, no. 2.

[45] scott crow, “White Vigilantes and the Battle of Algiers”; crow, Black Flags and Windmills. The porch confrontation is crow’s first-person account, which is why the essay says only that the trucks drove on.

[46] Michael Fedo, The Lynchings in Duluth (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000); MNopedia on the June 15, 1920 lynching; Minnesota Historical Society, Duluth Lynchings Online Resource; Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial marker text; Equal Justice Initiative. Estimates of the crowd run from 5,000 to 10,000.

[47] MPR News, “Postcard from a Lynching: The Other Lynching in Duluth” (2001); Duluth News Tribune, “Finnish Immigrant Was ‘Victim of Warmongers’ 100 Years Ago in Duluth,” and “In 1918, a Duluth Vigilante Group Confessed Its Crimes in Local Papers.” Accounts differ on Kinkkonen’s birth year and on which park his body was found in.

[48] Malatesta, “Violence as a Social Factor,” Anarchist Library.

[49] Stek, “Militant Mothers: Women and the Minnesota Iron Range Strike of 1916,” Mining History Journal 22 (2015).

[50] Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, “The Christchurch Attacks: Livestream Terror in the Viral Video Age”; Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “Five Years On from Christchurch”; Georgetown Bridge Initiative.

[51] Facebook statement on the Christchurch video, 17 March 2019.

[52] NBC News and Global News, 16 September 2025; Euronews, on the casing inscriptions as reported by police. Some outlets print “deny, defend, depose.”

[53] PBS NewsHour interview with Gov. Spencer Cox; NBC News on the inscriptions; CNN, 11 December 2025.

[54] Malatesta, “Violence as a Social Factor,” Anarchist Library.

[55] Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso, 2021); Los Angeles Review of Books review; Jacobin, July 2023, for a critique; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency (IWW, 1916).

[56] Minnesota Reformer, “One Year Later, Few Charges for the Arson and Destruction,” 27 May 2021, for the ATF count and the charge against Ivan Hunter; CNN, 21 July 2020, and Star Tribune, “Body Found in Wreckage of Pawnshop Burned during George Floyd Unrest”; Firehouse.com on Montez Lee’s sentence and the medical examiner’s finding; U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, press releases on the Third Precinct indictments; CBC/AP, 28–29 May 2020.

[57] Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); 64 Parishes, “Deacons for Defense and Justice.” The Farmer remark is paraphrased from a secondary account.

[58] Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy; Green, Death in the Haymarket.

[59] Al Jazeera, 21 March 2023; Courthouse News, January 2023; Fifth Estate no. 413 (Spring 2023); Antigone, “The Case of Alfredo Cospito.” Italy’s 2011 nuclear referendum followed Fukushima by three months.

[60] Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Gun Violence in the United States 2023: Examining the Gun Suicide Epidemic (June 2025), from CDC WONDER data; CDC National Center for Health Statistics, Data Brief 526. For 2024, the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts, from CDC data, reports 44,447 firearm deaths.

[61] ABC News, 15 June 2025, and Wisconsin Examiner, 15 June 2025, on the attacks; NBC News and ABC News, 23 July 2026, on the sentence, which followed a federal guilty plea on June 11, 2026. Boelter also faces state charges.

[62] Garen J. Wintemute et al., “Views on Democracy and Political Violence in the United States in 2025,” Injury Epidemiology 13, art. 43 (2026); UC Davis summary.

[63] MNopedia, “Minnesota Home Guard”; Minnesota Reformer, “That Time We Had Authoritarianism in Minnesota during World War I” (March 2026); MPR News (2017); Carl H. Chrislock, Watchdog of Loyalty: The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety during World War I (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1991).

[64] Royal Museums Greenwich, “Greenwich Outrage”; Sarah Wise, “Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent,” London Fictions; David Mulry, “Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing and Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Rocky Mountain Review 54, no. 2 (2000). That the anarchist Bourdin’s brother-in-law was a suspected informer rests on secondary sources, which is why the essay says only that London’s anarchists suspected one.

[65] Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1991); Michael Dukakis, proclamation of 23 August 1977.

[66] ABC7 New York, 21 September 2020; New York City Council Resolution 1486-2020; Department of Justice withdrawal memorandum, 25 February 2021.