by Jeffory A. Clymer
University of North Carolina Press 296 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 5 illus., notes, bibl., index $45.00 cloth ISBN 0-8078-2792-4 $16.95 paper ISBN 0-8078-5460-3 Published: Fall 2003
Description
Although the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 shocked the world, America has confronted terrorism at home for well over a century. With the invention of dynamite in 1866, Americans began to worry about anonymous acts of mass violence in a way that differed from previous generations' fears of urban riots, slave uprisings, and mob violence. Focusing on the volatile period between the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1920 bombing outside J. P. Morgan's Wall Street office, Jeffory Clymer argues that economic and cultural displacements caused by the expansion of industrial capitalism directly influenced evolving ideas about terrorism.
In America's Culture of Terrorism, Clymer uncovers the roots of American terrorism and its impact on American identity by exploring the literary works of Henry James, Ida B. Wells, Jack London, Thomas Dixon, and Covington Hall, as well as trial transcripts, media reports, and the cultural rhetoric surrounding terrorist acts of the day. He demonstrates that the rise of mass media and the pressures of the industrial wage-labor economy both fueled the development of terrorism and shaped society's response to it. His analysis not only sheds new light on American literature and culture a century ago but also offers insights into the contemporary understanding of terrorism.
About the author Jeffory A. Clymer is assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University.
<http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-6881.html> *****
Jeffory A. Clymer: <http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/ENG/faculty/clymer.html>
***** Introduction Terrorism in the American Cultural Imagination
In the penultimate draft of The Rise of Silas Lapham's famous dinner party scene, William Dean Howells's patrician character Bromfield Corey gives vent to a shocking idea. "In some of my walks on the Hill and down on the Back Bay," Corey informs his startled guests, "nothing but the surveillance of the local policeman prevents me from applying dynamite to those long rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses."[1] Reading these words in 1885, Howells's editor, Richard Watson Gilder of the Century, quickly issued a panicked response to his renowned author. He warned Howells that "it is the very word, dynamite, that is now so dangerous, for any of us to use, except in condemnation." Gilder then worried that Howells's fiction might yoke Howells himself to "the crank who does the deed,"[2] as if writing about dynamite and throwing dynamite are two versions of the same action. Howells ultimately acquiesced to Gilder's anxieties and substituted "offering personal violence" for the much more sinister "applying dynamite" in the American and English book versions of his novel.[3]
Gilder's apprehensions about dynamite suddenly seemed prophetic the next year when a bomb exploded at an anarchist rally in Haymarket Square in America's volatile western metropolis of Chicago. The interpretation of the Haymarket bombing as a terrorist conspiracy is my subject in Chapter 1, but I should also note here that Howells's name was indeed closely tied to the political violence at Haymarket, albeit in a way that Gilder certainly did not anticipate. Howells emerged after the bombing as the only major American literary figure to publicly condemn the sham legal proceedings accorded the Haymarket anarchists.[4] However, Gilder and Howells's interaction in Lapham's editing bears significance for reasons far beyond its implications for Howells's biography. Gilder's case of editorial nerves offers one important barometer of American culture in the 1880s, which the famous editor apparently could imagine only as a besieged society subject to cataclysmic terrorist assaults at any moment. His almost visceral response to the massive power and indiscriminating slaughter made possible by dynamite prompted Howells to reach for the seemingly more manageable and smaller-scale notion of "personal violence." Gilder's surprising concern that Howells's mere fictional pondering of a dynamite attack (let alone the depiction of a bombing itself) could somehow tie the author to a terrorist "crank" who actually throws a bomb also exemplifies the frequent disappearance of the boundary between fact and fiction in discussions of terrorism. Additionally, Howells's otherwise inconsequential revision in his most famous novel holds substantial import because the vast difference between his revisionary and original words -- "offering personal violence" and "applying dynamite" -- is also a key measure of modern terrorism itself. And lastly, in coupling the then-new fear of dynamite with the development of modern capitalism, personified here in the form of industrial magnate and stock speculator Lapham's intrusion into the wealthy enclave of Boston's Back Bay, this scene highlights the concurrent and interrelated trajectories that emergent conceptions of terrorism and the development of modern, industrial capitalism traced out in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.
Nearly forty years after the editorial negotiation between Howells and Gilder, on 16 September 1920 a massive bomb drawn by a horse cart exploded in New York City. The blast took place directly in front of a United States Sub-Treasury building and across the street from J. P. Morgan's Wall Street offices. Thirty-eight persons were killed, hundreds were injured, and Morgan's offices were heavily damaged by the combined effect of the explosion and the hundreds of iron window weights that the bomb makers had included with the explosive material. Despite years of international sleuthing, and many accusations and admissions of guilt followed quickly by retractions, the person or persons responsible were never apprehended. Striking at the very nerve center of the American corporate economy, this grisly explosion made explicit the ties between the development of American capitalism and terrorism that were intimated in Howells's exchange with his editor. Not only did the bombing wreck Morgan's offices, but, in an eerily dramatic enactment of its symbolic destruction of capital, the explosion also destroyed thousands of dollars worth of paper bonds and stock securities that were in the possession of messengers victimized by the blast.[5]
Along with the (near) appearance of dynamite in the canonical Silas Lapham, the virtually forgotten terrorist attack on Wall Street in 1920 marks the temporal boundary of this study. The Wall Street bomb came in the midst of, and perhaps as a response to, the ongoing persecution of "subversives" led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer's own home had, in fact, been targeted as part of the round of bombings that occurred simultaneously in several different cities in 1919 (a latter-day version of the fictitious conspiratorial plot woven by Henry James's notorious terrorist, Diedrich Hoffendahl). In response to these bombings, the Justice Department launched surprise raids on the headquarters of radical organizations throughout the country in 1919 and 1920. With the absence of anything resembling due process, the "Palmer Raids" led to the roundup, detention, and eventual deportation of hundreds of leftists. Though the raids came under their own public scrutiny not long thereafter, they left American radicalism, organized labor, and any real alternatives to the consolidation of American corporate capitalism crippled and in disarray for years to come. . . .
As with any cultural movement, there is not a straightforward line connecting the discourse of bombings in Howells and Gilder's exchange with the terms used to make sense of the Wall Street bombing nearly forty years later. The coexistence of words such as "terrorization" and "terrorism" suggests that a vocabulary for seemingly indiscriminate, mass, and public violence was solidifying but still emerging and somewhat indefinite. Moreover, these figures of speech are embedded in the period's specific historical conditions. As scholars have long articulated, the American economy's volatility and the vast disparities in the class structure at the turn of the twentieth century provoked violence on the sides of both labor and capital. But the contradictions of capitalism and the instantiation of a permanent working class during this period went beyond a simple cause and effect relationship that resulted in dramatic outbursts of violence, such as the 1886 Haymarket bomb, the bomb that killed Idaho's former governor in 1905, or the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building. More particularly, the economy's contradictions and disparities provided the grounds for an emergent way of imagining, understanding, and narrating certain forms of violence as "terrorism" across a wide representational range, including, among other places, the mass media, highbrow literature, the labor press, best-selling novels, and poetry aimed at mobilizing America's working class.
One primary objective of this book is to uncover a genealogy of modern terrorism that is visible in literary and other cultural artifacts produced in the decades on either side of 1900, a genealogy firmly rooted in the political and economic upheavals specific to those years. Yet while I am tracing the historical and literary contingencies, contradictions, and ambiguities that constitute the late-nineteenth-century aspects of a form of violence usually assumed to have originated much later, I do not wish to bracket aside the radical confusion that exists among both scholars and politicians concerning how to define terrorism in the first place. As Alex P. Schmid has noted, the terms "terror" and "terrorism" appear to have emerged in the revolutionary France of Maximilien Robespierre during the 1790s, while of course the application of coercive force to threaten society or its political leaders has existed and been theorized for centuries.[8] But as the meaning of terrorism shifted in the latter half of the nineteenth century from what we would now identify as the state terror of revolutionary France to ideas about terrorism that resonate strongly with our contemporary notion of it as insurgent and often conspiratorial violence performed by substate actors, questions about which forms of such violence should be considered terrorism have become notoriously variable, contradictory, and conflicted within both academic and political spheres.[9] Indeed, the definitional problem is perceived as so crippling that important scholars occasionally dismiss the issue out of hand. Paul Wilkinson, for instance, refuses to "become bogged down in days of definitional debate," choosing instead to focus on establishing "culpability for specific attacks or for sponsoring or directing them."[10] While viewing terrorism as simply a self-evident problem to be solved may be appealingly straightforward, such an approach nonetheless begs more questions than it can answer about understanding both political violence and the way we talk about it.
As my opening anecdotes suggest, I argue that emergent means of narrating industrial capitalism and classed identity were deeply intertwined with the way modern terrorism was imagined as a form of violence in turn-of-the-century America. For some writers, the "terrorist" materialized in these decades as a blameworthy, violent figure onto which the disruptions and chaos of a rapidly capitalizing economy could be projected and displaced. Alternatively, for other authors and commentators, the invisible, shocking, and unpredictable nature of terrorist violence offered a material, symbolic, and fitting response to both the seemingly veiled workings of corporate capitalism and the ideological contradictions of a capitalist economy. And certainly, on the other side of the coin, workers themselves were regularly the victims of capitalist-sponsored assaults committed by the likes of Pinkerton agents, private armies, and even state officers. The aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket bombing, violence during the 1892 strike at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mills and throughout the 1890s in Idaho's silver mines, and the machine-gun massacre of striking miners housed in a temporary tent encampment at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 provide only the most notorious examples. Working-class victims and important writers, such as Jack London, vigorously protested these violent encounters, even using the word "terrorism" to describe the authorities' brutality. For example, a Chicago anarchist sheet decried the "legalized terrorism" of the Red Scare that followed the Haymarket bombing, and workers also drew upon this language during the Texas and Louisiana lumber wars after the turn of the century.[11] Yet the historical episodes in this book repeatedly underscore the ability of mainstream commentators, spokesmen of capital, and state officers grounded in legitimating institutions to convey a dominant idea that government violence effectively protected law and order against the truly conspiratorial and nihilistic violence of working-class terrorists.
In addition to this late-nineteenth-century ideological struggle over what constituted terrorism, the 1866 invention of dynamite prompted Americans to worry about anonymously committed mass violence in ways that were qualitatively different from earlier fears of slave uprisings, urban mobs, riots, or even, in a labor context, the rural revenge killings of the Molly Maguires. Invented by Alfred Nobel, and so tremulously referred to by Gilder in his 1885 communication with Howells, dynamite in large part precipitated the emergence of the kind of terrorist activity (and the widespread disquietude it incites) that is recognizable as such by citizens of the early twenty-first century.[12] Rendering the dagger or the pistol obsolete weapons of, to use Howells's term, "personal violence," dynamite exponentially increased the scale and magnitude of violence while also offering anonymity to the bomb thrower. Suddenly, social fear, rather than being focused on a highly visible mob or a spontaneous uprising, could coalesce around the notion of a dangerous and often indistinguishable individual, perhaps even, as with Howells's Bromfield Corey, someone who looked nothing like the usual image of an anarchist or outlaw. Representing a key development in the cultural and imaginative history of terror, a dynamite bomb's potential for extensive and targeted damage far outstripped earlier forms of assassination, regicide, and the relative unpredictability of arson. . . .
[The full text of the introduction is available at <http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/clymer_americas.html>.] *****
-- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>