IV

The war-time anti-Hun propaganda is now directed against the

“Bolshevik,” “the radical,” and particularly against the Slav or

anything resembling him. The man or woman of Russian birth or

nationality is made the especial target. The press, the pulpit, all the

servile tools of capitalism and imperialism combine to paint Russia,

Soviet Russia, in colors of blood and infamy. No misrepresentation, no

lie too base to be flung at Russia. Falsehood and forgery the weapons

where guns and bayonets have failed. The direct result of this poison

propaganda is now culminating in American pogroms against Russians,

Bolsheviki, communists, radicals, and progressives in general.

The United States has fortunately always been free from the vicious

spirit of race hatred and persecution of the foreigner. The native negro

excepted, this country has known no race problem. The American people

were never guilty of harboring bitterness or deep-seated prejudice

against members of other nationalities. In truth, the great majority of

them are themselves of foreign birth or descent, the only true native

being the American Indian. Whatever racial differences there may exist

between the various nationalities or stocks, they have never assumed the

form of active strife. On the contrary, they have always been of a

superficial nature, due to misunderstanding or other temporary causes,

and have never manifested themselves in anything save light,

good-humored banter. Even the much-advertised antagonism of the West

toward the Chinese and Japanese is not due to any inherent hatred, but

rather to very definite commercial and industrial factors. In the case

of the Russians especially, as well as in regard to members of the

various branches of the Slavic race, the people of America have always

been particularly friendly and well-disposed. But suddenly all the

war-time hatred toward the “Hun enemy,” the blindest intolerance and

persecution are poured upon the head of the Russian, the Slav. Great

indeed is the power of propaganda! Great is the power of the American

thought controller—the capitalist press. The Russian has become the

victim of American pogroms!

Often and again in the past have we Anarchists pointed out that the

feudal lords of this land would follow, in their march to imperialism,

in the footsteps of the Czars of old Russia, and even outdo their

preceptors. Our liberal friends denounced us as fanatics, alarmists, and

pessimists. Yet now we are confronted with a state of affairs in

democratic America which, in point of brutality and utter repudiation of

every fundamental libertarian principle, surpasses the worst autocratic

methods the Czars of Russia ever dared apply against political

dissenters.

The world is familiar with the story of the pogrom horrors practiced

upon the Jews of Czarist Russia. But what the world, especially the

American world, does not know is that every pogrom in Russia was

directly incited, financed, and prepared by the Government as a means of

distracting the attention of the Russian people from the corrupt

despotic regime under which they suffered—a deliberate method of

confusing and checking the fast growing discontent and holding back the

rising tide of revolutionary upheaval.

But thoughtful people in Russia were not long deceived by this hellish

stratagem. That is why Russians of character and intelligence never lent

themselves to the practice of Jew-baiting and persecution. The

authorities frequently had to resort to importing the human dregs of

distant communities, fill them with vodka, and then turn them loose on

the defenceless Jews. These Black Hundreds and hooligans of Czarist

Russia were the infamous regime now forever cast into the abyss of

oblivion by the awakened and regenerated spirit of New Russia. There

have been no pogroms in Soviet Russia.

But the Black Hundreds and the hooligans have now come to life again—in

democratic America. Here they are more mad and pernicious than their

Russian colleagues in crime had ever been. Their wild orgies of assault

and destruction are directed, not against the Jew, but against the more

comprehensive scape-goat of Capitalism, “the alien,” the “radical.”

These are being made the lightning rod upon which is to be drawn all the

fury of the storm that is menacing the American plutocracy. As the Czars

pointed at the Jew as the sole source and cause of the Russian people’s

poverty and servitude, so the feudal lords of America have chosen the

“foreign radical,” “the Bolshevik” as the vicarious victim for the sins

of the capitalist order. But while no intelligent and self-respecting

Russian ever degraded himself with the Czar’s bloody work, we see in our

democracy so-called cultured people, professional men and women, “good

Americans,” inspired and aided by the “respectable, reputable” press,

turn into bestial mobs. We see high Government officials, State and

Federal, play the part of the hooligans, encouraging and aiding the

American Black Hundred of legionaries, in a frenzied crusade against the

“foreigner,” whose sole crime consists in taking seriously the American

guarantees of free speech, free press, and free assembly.

The war hate against everything German was vicious enough, though the

people of America were repeatedly assured that we were not making war

against the German people. One can understand also, though not

countenance, the vulgar clamor against the best and finest expressions

of German culture, the stupid prohibition of the language of Goethe and

Schiller, of the revolutionary music of Wagner and Beethoven, the poetry

of Heine, the writings of Nietzsche, and all the other great creative

works of Teuton genius. But what possible reason is there for the

post-war hatred toward aliens in general and Russians in particular? The

outrages and cruelties perpetrated upon Germans in America during the

war pale almost into insignificance compared with the horrible treatment

the Russians in the United States are now subjected to. In fact, the

Czarist pogroms, barring a few exceptions, never rivaled the fearful

excesses now happening almost daily in various American cities, their

victims, men and women, guilty only of being Russians.

This state of affairs is the more significant because Russians, and the

Slavic people in general, were hitherto always welcomed to these shores

as the best offering Europe contributed to the Moloch of American

industry. The Slav was so good natured, and docile, such a patient

slave, so appreciative of the liberties he enjoyed in the new

land—“liberties” which the socially conscious American had long since

learned to see as a delusion and a snare. But to the unsophisticated

Russian peasant, always half-starved and browbeaten, they seemed real

and resplendant, the symbol of paradise found. By the thousands he

flocked to the promised land, swarmed into the centers of industry to

build our railroads, forge iron, dig coal, till the soil, weave cloth,

and toil at scores of other useful occupations, his reward a mere

pittance.

Nor was it only the workers in fields and factories who were welcomed

here from Russia. Russian culture was an honored guest in America. The

great literature of the Slav, his music, his dancing—all found the most

generous reception and fullest appreciation. Above all, the Russian

_intelligentzia_, the political refugees, exiles, and active

revolutionists that came to America, and came—most of them—not merely to

express their opinions but rather to plot the forcible overthrow of the

Russian autocracy, all found sympathetic hearing and generous purses in

this country, aye, even at the seat of Government.

And now? Now it is considered the most heinous crime to have been born

in Russia.

What has caused this peculiar change? What is back of this sudden

reversal of feeling?

_It is the Russian Revolution_. Not, of course, the Miliukov-Kerensky

revolution, but the real revolution that gave birth to Soviet Russia.

The submissive, enslaved, long-suffering Russian people unexpectedly

transformed into a free, daring Giant breaking a new path for the

progress of mankind—that is the reason for the changed attitude of the

capitalistic world. It is one thing to help Russian revolutionists to

overthrow the Czar and to put in his place a “democratic” form of

government which has proven such a boon to our own Czars of commerce and

industry. But it is quite a different thing to see the Prometheus of

labor rise in his might, strike off his chains, and with the full

consciousness of his complete economic power bring to life the dreams

and aspirations of a thousand years,—the economic, political, and

spiritual emancipation of the masses of the world. This pioneer social

experiment now being tried in Russia—the greatest and most fundamental

ever witnessed in all history—is the guiding star to all the oppressed

and disinherited of the world. Already its magic light is spreading over

the whole European horizon, the harbinger of the approaching Dawn of

Man. What if it should traverse the ocean and embrace our own shores

within its orbit? The whole social order of the financial Czars,

industrial Kaisers, and land Barons of America is at stake: the “order”

maintained by club and gun, by jail and lynch law in and out of court;

the “order” founded on robbery and violence, built upon sham and

unreason, artificiality and insanity, and supported by misery and

starvation, by the water-cure, the dungeon and straitjacket; an “order”

that transcends all chaos and daily makes confusion worse confounded.

Such social “order” is doomed. It bears within itself the virus of

disintegration. Already the conscience of America is awakening. The war

marked the crisis. Already American men have chosen imprisonment,

torture, and death, rather than become participants in an unholy war.

Already American men and women are beginning to realize the anti-social

destructive character and purpose of authority and government by

violence, force, and fraud. Already the workers of America are

outgrowing the vicious circle of craft-unionism, learning the lesson and

the power of solidarity of the international proletariat, and gaining

confidence in their own initiative and judgment, to the confusion and

terror of their antiquated, spineless leadership. Already they are

seeing through the sham of “equality before the law,” and are in open

rebellion to government by injunction.

A spark from the glowing flame of Soviet Russia, and the purse-proud

autocracy of America may be swept away by the social conflagration.

Wherefore the united chorus of all Czars and Kaisers, “Death to the

Bolsheviki, the aliens, the I. W. Ws., the Communists, the Anarchists!”

V

Whatever might be said of the American plutocracy and the Government, no

one can accuse them of originality. The methods used by them to confuse

and confound the people are but cheap imitations of the old tactics long

resorted to by the despotic rulers of Europe. Even before the world war

Washington had borrowed many a trick from London. And all through the

war American militarism, with its conscription, espionage, torture of

conscientious objectors, and suppressive legislation, was but

aping—stupidly and destructively—the _modus operandi_ of the bankrupt

imperialism of the Old World. For lack of originality and ideas,

American officialdom was content to be the echo of the military and

court circles of London and Paris. And now again we witness Washington

following in the exact footsteps of the worst autocracy of modern times.

For the hue and cry against the “alien” is a faithful replica of the

persecution of the Jews by the Czars of Russia, and the American pogroms

against radicals are the exaggerated picture of Russian Jew-baiting.

And, finally, the most infamous and most inhuman method of Czarist

Russia, the method that sacrificed hundreds of thousands of the finest

and bravest men and women of Russia, and systematically robbed the

country of the very flower of its youth, is now being transplanted on

American soil, in these great United States, the freest democracy on

earth. The dreaded Russian _administrative process_ the newest American

institutions! Sudden seizure, anonymous denunciation, star chamber

proceedings, the third degree, secret deportation and banishment to

unknown lands. O shades of Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry!

That you must witness the bloodiest weapon of Czarism rescued from the

ruins of defunct absolutism and introduced into the country for whose

freedom you had fought so heroically!

What means the administrative process?

It means the suppression and elimination of the political protestant and

social rebel. It is the practice of picking men upon the street, on the

merest suspicion of “political untrustworthiness,” of arresting them in

their club rooms or homes, tearing them away from their families,

locking them up in jails or detention pens, holding them _incommunicado_

for weeks and months, depriving them of a hearing in open court, denying

them trial by jury, and finally deporting them or banishing them to

unknown shores. All this, not for any crime committed or even any

punishable act charged, but merely on the denunciation of an enemy or

the irresponsible accusation by a Secret Service man that the “suspect”

holds certain unpopular or “forbidden” opinions.

Lest the truth or accuracy of this statement be called in question, let

it be stated that at this very moment there are one hundred such

“political suspects” held at Ellis Island, with several hundred more in

the various Immigration Detention jails, every one of them a victim of

the administrative process described above. Not one of them is charged

with any specific crime; one and all are accused of entertaining

“illegal” views on political or Social questions. Nearly all of them

have been seized on the street or arrested in their homes or

reading-rooms while engaged in the dangerous pursuit of studying the

English language, mathematics, or American history. (The latter seems

lately to be regarded by the authorities as a particularly dangerous

occupation, and those guilty of it a _prima facie_ menace to our

American institutions.) Others were arrested in the factory, at their

work bench, or in the numerous recent raids of homes and peaceful

meetings. Many of them were beaten and clubbed most brutally, the wounds

of some necessitating hospital treatment. In the police stations they

were subjected to the third degree, threatened, tortured, and finally

thrust into the bull pens of Ellis Island. Here they are treated as

dangerous felons, kept all the time under lock and key, and allowed to

see their wives and families only once a week, with a screen between

them and malicious guards constantly at their side. Here their mail is

subjected to the most stringent censorship, and their letters delivered

or not, according to the whims of the petty officials in charge. Here

some of them, because they dared protest against their isolation and the

putrid food, were placed in the insane asylum. Here it was that the

brutal treatment and unbearable conditions of existence drove men and

women, the politicals awaiting deportation, to the desperate extremity

of a hunger strike, the last resort of defenseless beings, the

paradoxical self-defense of despair. For weeks and months these men have

now been kept prisoners at Ellis Island, tortured by the thought of

their wives and children whom the Government has ruthlessly deprived of

support, and living in constant uncertainty of the fate that is awaiting

them, for the good American Government, refinedly cruel, is keeping

their destination secret, and certain death may be the goal of the

deportees when the hour of departure finally strikes.

Such is the treatment and the fate of the first group of Russian

refugees from American “democracy.” Such is the process known as the

administrative methods, penalizing governmentally unapproved Thought,

suppressing _disbelief_ in the omniscience of the powers that be.

In enlightened, free America. Not in Darkest Russia.

When the terrible significance of the administrative process practiced

in Russia became known in Europe, civilization stood aghast. It caused a

storm of protest in the British Parliament, and called forth violent

interpellations in the Italian Diet and the French Chamber. Even the

German Reichstag, in the days of the omnipotent Kaiser, ventured a

heated debate of the barbaric administrative process which doomed

thousands of innocents to underground dungeons and the frozen _taigas_

of Siberia.

Are the Czar’s methods, the Third Section, the secret political spy

organizations, anonymous denunciations, star chamber proceedings,

deprivation of trial, wholesale deportations and banishment, to become

an established American institution? Let the people speak.

The full significance of the principle of deportation is becoming daily

more apparent. The field of its menace is progressively broadening. Not

only the alien social rebel is to be crushed by the new White Terror.

Its hand is already reaching out far for the naturalized American whose

social views are frowned upon by the Government. And yet deeper it

strikes. One hundred per cent Americanism is to root out the last

vestige, the very memory, of traditional American freedom. Not alone

foreigners, but the naturalized citizen and the native-born are to be

mentally fumigated, made politically “reliable” and governmentally

_kosher_, by eliminating the social critics and industrial protestants,

by denaturalization and banishment, by exile to the Island of Guam or to

Alaska, the future Siberia of the United States.

Following the “alien radical,” the naturalized American is the first

victim of the Czarification of America. Patriotic profiteers and

political hooligans are united in the cry for the “Americanization” of

the foreigner in the United States. He is to be “naturalized,”

intellectually sterilized and immunized to Bolshevism, so that he may

properly appreciate the glorious spirit of American democracy.

Simultaneously, however, the Federal Government is introducing the new

policy of summarily depriving the naturalized American of his

citizenship, in order to bring him when so desired, within the scope of

the administrative process which subjects the victim to deportation

without trial.

A most important precedent had already been set. The case of Emma

Goldman affords significant proof to what lengths the Government will go

to rid itself of a disquieting social rebel, though he be a citizen for

a quarter of a century.

The story is interesting and enlightening. More than eight years ago

Secret Service men of the Federal Government were ordered to gather

“material” in Rochester, N. Y., or elsewhere, that would enable the

authorities to disfranchise a certain Rochester citizen. The man in

question was of no concern whatever to Washington, as subsequent events

proved. He was an ordinary citizen, a quiet working man, without any

interest in social or political questions. He was never known to

entertain any unpopular views or opinions. As a matter of fact, the man

had long been considered dead by his local friends and acquaintances;

since he had disappeared from his home years previously and no clue to

his whereabouts or any sign that he was still among the living could be

found; indeed, has not been found till this day, notwithstanding the

best efforts. At great expense, and with considerable winking at its own

rules and regulations in such matters, the United States Government

finally disfranchised the man—the corpse, perhaps, for anything known to

the contrary. The proceeding necessitated a good deal of secrecy and

subterfuge, for even the wife of the man in question, whose status as

citizen by right of her marriage was involved, was not apprised by the

Government of its intended action. On the pretext that the man was not

fully of legal age at the time of his naturalization—about 20 years

before—the mighty Republic of America declared the citizenship of the

man of unknown whereabouts and against whom no crime or offence of any

kind was ever charged, as null and void.

Ten years passed. The disfranchised citizen, so far as humanly known,

was still as dead as at the time of his denaturalization. No trace of

him could be found, and nothing more was heard of the motives and

purposes of the Government in depriving of citizenship a man who had

apparently been dead for years. Dark and peculiar are the ways of

Government.

More time passed. Then it became known that the United States Government

intended to deport Emma Goldman. But Emma Goldman had acquired

citizenship by marriage 30 years before, and, as a citizen, she could

not be deported under the present laws of the United States. But lo and

behold! The Government suddenly announced that Emma Goldman was a

citizen no more, because her husband had been disfranchised ten years

ago!

Dark and peculiar indeed are the ways of government. But there is method

in its madness.

What a striking comment this case affords on the true character of

government, and the chicanery and subterfuge it resorts to when legal

means fail to achieve its purposes. Long did the United States

Government bide its time. The moment was not propitious to get rid of

Emma Goldman. But she must be gotten rid of, by fair means or foul. Yet

public sentiment was not ready for such things as deportation and

banishment. Patience! The hour of a great popular hysteria will come,

will be made, if necessary, and then we shall deport this _bete noir_ of

government.

The moment has now come. It is here. The national hysteria against

radicals, inspired and fed by the bourgeois press, pulpit, and

politicians, has created the atmosphere needed to introduce in America

the principle and practice of banishment. At last the Government may

deport Emma Goldman, for through the width and breadth of the country

there is not a Judge—and possibly not even a jury—with enough integrity

and courage to give this _enfant terrible_ a fair hearing and an

unprejudiced examination of her claim to citizenship.

Therefore Emma Goldman is to be deported.

But her case sets a precedent, and American life is ruled by legal

precedents. Henceforth the naturalized citizen may be disfranchised, on

one pretext or another, and deported because of his or her social views

and opinions. Already Congress is preparing to embody this worthy

precedent in our national legislation by passing special laws providing

for the disenfranchisement of naturalized Americans for reasons

satisfactory to our autocratic regime.

Thus another link is forged to chain the great American people. For it

is against the liberties and welfare of the people at large that these

new methods are fundamentally directed. Not merely against Emma Goldman,

the Anarchists, the I. W. Ws., Communists, and other revolutionists.

These are but the primary victims, the prologue which introduces and

shadows forth the tragedy about to be enacted.

The ultimate blow of the imperialist plutocracy of America is aimed at

Labor, at the increasing discontent of the masses, their growing

class-consciousness, and their progressive aspiration for more joy and

life and beauty. The fate of America is in the balance.

That is the true meaning and the real menace of the principle of

deportation, banishment, and exile, now being introduced in the life of

the United States. That is the purpose of the State and Federal

Anti-Anarchist laws, criminal-syndicalist-legislation, and all similar

weapons that the master class is forging for the defeat of the awakening

proletariat of America.

Shall the United States, once the land of opportunity, the refuge of all

the oppressed, be Prussianized, Czarified? Shall the melting pot of the

world be turned into a fiery caldron brewing strife and slaughter,

spitting tyranny and assassination? Shall we here, on this soil baptized

with the sacred blood of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War,

engage in the sanguinary struggle of brother against brother? Shall we

re-enact in this land the frightful nightmare of Darkest Russia? Shall

this land re-echo the horrible tramp, tramp of a thousand feet, on their

way to an American Siberia? Tortured bodies, manacled hands, clanking

chains, in weary, endless procession—shall that be the heritage of our

youth? Shall the songs of mothers be turned into a dirge, and little

babies be suckled with the teat of hate?

No, it shall not be. There is yet time to pause, to turn back. High

time, high time for the voice of every true man and woman, of every

lover of liberty, to thunder forth such a mighty collective protest that

shall reverberate from North to South, and East to West, and rouse the

awakened manhood of America to a heroic stand for Liberty and Justice.

But if not,—if our warning prediction unhappily come true and the

fearful tragedy be played to its end, yet shall we not despair, nor

misdoubt the _finale_.

Hateful is the Dream of Oppression. And as vain. Where the man who could

name the judges that doomed Socrates? Where the persecutors of the

Gracchi, the banishers of Aristides, the excommunicators of Spinoza and

Tolstoy? Their very memory is obliterated by the footsteps of Progress.

Unceasingly it marches, forward and upward, all obstacles

notwithstanding, keeping time with the heart beats of Humanity. Vain the

efforts to halt it, to banish ideas, to strangle thought. Vain the

frenzied struggle to turn back the hands of Time. The mightiest Goliath

of Reaction has fought his last fight—his final gesture, Old Russia, a

hopeless surrender. Too late to revive this corpse. It is beyond

resurrection. Attempts there may be, aye, will be, for the Bourbons

never learn,—and the people are long suffering. But attempts useless,

destructive, utterly fatal to their purpose. The Dream of Reaction ends

in abysmal nightmare.

It is darkest before dawn, in history as in nature. But the dawn has

begun. In Russia. Its light is a promise and the hope of the world.