On 7 August 1900, barely a week after Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto I of Italy, the American Consul at Naples, A. Hower Byington, dispatched a telegram warning the US Department of State that two anarchists were traveling from Italy and one of them was supposedly plotting to assassinate President William McKinley. Over subsequent days, Baron Saverio de Fava, the Italian minister to the United States, shared information about the suspected assassin's identity and criminal background forwarded from the Italian prefect in Naples. According to an anonymous letter received by the Neapolitan police, the anarchist Natale Maresca was crossing the Atlantic to “do a fine stroke” and, the letter advised, should be arrested immediately upon his arrival in the United States.Footnote ¹ Officials in both countries treated the plot with appropriate concern given the recent action by Bresci, who had immigrated to the United States roughly five years earlier only to return home to murder the king, and the breathless coverage in American newspapers of purported secret anarchist meetings where members drew lots to assassinate prominent heads of state.Footnote ² Consequently, when the transatlantic steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived in New York on 18 August, secret service agents detained Maresca and his traveling companion, Michele Guida, until the two could appear before local immigration officials. In a hearing, a Board of Special Inquiry determined that Maresca should be returned to Italy while Guida, who was initially excluded as a person likely to become a public charge, was admitted.Footnote ³

Using the experiences of Maresca and Guida as an opening to examine how anarchist exclusion emerged over time fits into a growing trend aimed at bridging the divide between scholars of immigration and of diplomacy.Footnote ⁴ William Preston Jr., whose research on the suppression of radicals remains critical to studies of anarchist exclusion, dismisses the significance of the anarchist movement in America after the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and argues that the Immigration Act of 1903 – colloquially known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act – was a consequence of “nativism lying latent during the good times of McKinley [that] responded quickly to the fears awakened by his death.”Footnote ⁵ More recent studies of the 1903 Act build on Preston's work and emphasize domestic issues of free speech or frame anarchist exclusion as a unilateral measure in contrast with multilateral efforts employed elsewhere.Footnote ⁶ Critically, however, as Mae Ngai states, “Immigration policy not only speaks to the nation's vision of itself, it also signals its position in the world and its relationships with other nation-states.”Footnote ⁷ Discussions of transnational immigration control became important features of both scholarly discourse and popular debate in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, and, as Erika Lee notes, “reflect the new global era of migration and migration policy.” While the current effort to internationalize immigration policy may indeed exemplify, as Lee argues, “the latest development in immigration law,” it is not unprecedented.Footnote ⁸ Similar discussions about immigration policy, security, and civil liberties also shaped debates between the mid-1880s and early 1900s, when an unprecedented wave of attacks against heads of state fed rumors of wide-ranging conspiracies, and reports of anarchist outrages in cities far and wide spread fear.

This article examines the debates around anarchist restriction that eventually resulted in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1903 (32 Stat. 1213) and argues that domestically oriented conceptions of national security are both challenged and constituted by transnational and international processes and currents. Over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, individuals in public forums, state governments, and the offices of the federal government considered immigration control as part of an interdependent web of other measures aimed at curtailing what they perceived to be the anarchist threat to society. As such, anarchist exclusion was more than a sudden nativist eruption sparked by Leon Czolgosz's assassination of President McKinley in 1901 and, further, it was intricately tied into the country's foreign relations. Anarchists, like any other group of immigrants, were fully enmeshed in a vibrant transnational network and those individuals advocating measures to restrain – and, ultimately, restrict – their activities were cognizant of how that reality complicated their efforts. Contemporaries understood that successfully restricting anarchists at the gates required cooperation beyond the country's borders, and exclusion, when it finally took shape, was the result of nearly twenty years of evolving debate. If the “master theme of immigration politics,” according to Roxanne Lynn Doty, is “the fear that we are losing control of our way of life,” then understanding how the fear of anarchist violence helped shape the contours of the domestic and diplomatic debates over anarchist restriction is critical as these old questions of transnational immigration control reemerge.Footnote ⁹

Broadening our understanding of security in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expands the scholarly discussion of national security beyond the predominant, post-1945 emphasis on formal institutional mechanisms used to coordinate military and political affairs.Footnote ¹⁰ In their recent examinations of the intellectual genealogy of national security, Andrew Preston points to Franklin D. Roosevelt's physical and normative framing of “home defense” as the birth of the modern national security complex, while Eli Jelly-Schapiro takes a broader view, writing, “Despite the reciprocal emergence of security thinking and the modern state, the absolute saturation of social and political discourse within security rhetoric is a twentieth-century phenomenon.”Footnote ¹¹ These views are rooted an understanding of the institutional weakness of nineteenth-century governments compared to their modern successors. As Michael Sherry notes in his magisterial study of American militarization, “A term like ‘national security,’ implying broad and continuous efforts to defend a country, as yet had no place” in the years prior to the lead-up to World War II, but this widely accepted position presumes a view of national security built on formal institutions and continuity, rather than a more fluid debate over what constitutes a security threat.Footnote ¹² Yet Melvyn Leffler's widely accepted definition of national security as encompassing “the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats” has no such institutional constraints; indeed, Leffler argues that national security was “an enduring element of the American diplomatic experience,” not just the result of the security realities of the atomic era.Footnote ¹³ In debating how to address the anarchist threat, public figures and private individuals weighed responses such as employing undercover agents, expanding federal power to punish attacks on officials, or restricting press freedoms – all hallmarks of modern national security policies – while others challenged such solutions on the grounds that they undermined perceived core values like freedom of speech, the right to judicial review, or equality before the law. Examining the emergence of anarchist restriction in this context highlights the fluid nature of “core values” and how shifting assessments of “threats” – both internal and external – can shape policy outcomes.

Superficially, the detention and subsequent exclusion of Maresca stands as a testament to what could be accomplished by the cooperation of governments dedicated to countering the threat posed by supposedly violent anarchists. Detaining Maresca and Guida depended on successfully sharing information across three countries – the United States, Italy, and France, where the American consul was when he first received word of the threat – in a mere eleven days, from 7 August to their arrival in New York on the eighteenth. The relevant information also had to cross several different branches of government: in Italy, the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs; in the United States, the Departments of State, Justice, and the Treasury, which oversaw both the Secret Service Division and the Office of the Commissioner of Immigration. For the prompt dissemination of information about Maresca, the Italian ministries relied upon the Neapolitan police, and officials in the Department of State relayed important intelligence to the offices of the governor of New York as well as the chiefs of police in both New York City and Washington, DC.Footnote ¹⁴ Once immigration officials had detained Maresca and Guida, they convened a board of inquiry that had the power to determine whether or not the two would be permitted to enter the country or be returned to Italy. While the detection, detention, and eventual deportation of Maresca appears at first glance to be a remarkable success, closer examination reveals the myriad ways in which the movements of anarchists posed serious challenges to the mechanisms of immigration control and the relationships between governments struggling to curtail the threat of violence.

By the time of Maresca's arrival at New York in August 1900, the US government had been working diligently for nearly two decades to establish the mechanisms to keep people like him out. The legislation passed since the 1880s, in addition to increasing the number of excluded classes, accelerated the process of consolidating power over immigration in the hands of the federal government, what Keith Fitzgerald referred to as a “national policy network for front-gate immigration.”Footnote ¹⁵ The Immigration Act of 1891 established the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration under the office to the Treasury Department and funded it through the collection of immigrants' head tax.Footnote ¹⁶ The Act also provided for the opening of federal immigration stations, with the first opened at Ellis Island in New York Harbor on 2 January 1892. At these stations, Immigrant Inspectors collected arrival manifests from incoming ships and also served on boards of special inquiry that oversaw exclusion cases. Reflecting a concern with the protection of American workers and wages, the Act of 14 February 1903 transferred the renamed Bureau of Immigration to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor.

The general intent of the legislation enacted over this period was to centralize control of immigration and to increase the amount of information about potential immigrants and travelers at the disposal of the new immigrant inspectors. Abroad, consular agents interviewed those who claimed American citizenship to ascertain the accuracy of their claims before providing passports for travel. The burden of determining the suitability of immigrants was shifted to the transport agencies, the shipping and railroad lines. Masters of vessels were required to deliver their manifests, which provided extensive details about the individuals on board: their full names and ages, marital status, occupation, literacy, and nationality, as well as information about who paid for their passage, how much money was in their possession, and more details about their intended destinations.Footnote ¹⁷ The collection of such information, done at penalty to the transport agency if they brought immigrants who would be ineligible or if they failed to supply the appropriate information, was essential to the processing of immigrants by the immigration agents.

Maresca's experience, however, reveals some of the many flaws inherent in such mechanisms. He was detained and ultimately deported not because he was a violent anarchist plotting to assassinate the President of the United States, but because he had a criminal record and was therefore excluded under the existing immigration laws.Footnote ¹⁸ The letter revealing his designs on McKinley's life was actually the second letter written in an attempt to stop his emigration from Italy. The person behind the warnings, a former newspaper reporter named Pedretti, had written an initial letter declaring that Maresca, a recent parolee with a history of violent assaults, was going abroad armed. When this failed to have the desired result, Pedretti wrote the second letter detailing Maresca's supposed intentions.Footnote ¹⁹ As the commissioner of immigration at New York, Thomas Fitchie, bitterly concluded when reporting a similar episode in 1901, “the Italian Government is anxious to be rid of an undesirable character and relies on our inability to ascertain the real facts, which, under ordinary circumstances we would be unable to do, being dependent on the immigrant's own admission.”Footnote ²⁰ More than a decade earlier, Edmund Stephenson, who was also then serving in the same post, advanced a similar argument when asked about an 1891 bill (H. R. 13175) to exclude anarchists: “Now, how can you tell, when there are three or four hundred people landing here, of their previous history in their own country?”Footnote ²¹ As numerous observers of immigration were quick to note, even the information supplied by a ship's master could be highly questionable: “Frequently, immigrants are thoroughly coached as to what answers they shall give to the questions before leaving the port of embarkation; and in other cases they are coached during the voyage.”Footnote ²² Ultimately, then, detecting and determining that Maresca's immigration to the United States was a potential threat entirely depended upon the receipt, by the Neapolitan police, of two anonymous letters or his own admission.

When the United States did exclude anarchists through the Immigration Act of 1903, the effort to determine whether or not someone was an anarchist continued to depend on the admission of the individual being questioned. Three years after the initial passage of the Act, the editors of The Nation highlighted the continuing problem, writing, “If anarchists were all of one race; if they looked alike and had a distinctive dress or loudly proclaimed their tenets and their plots, it would be easy enough to hold them in check. But murder in the heart cannot be read on the face.”Footnote ²³ Unless contradictory evidence was brought forward, all potential immigrants had to do to avoid being debarred as anarchists was to deny that they held those beliefs and did not believe in the violent overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any and all government.Footnote ²⁴

The responsibility for detecting and, it was hoped, preventing the immigration of undesirable aliens to the United States often fell upon consular officers who had to negotiate both the official bureaucracy and the vagaries of interviewing individual applicants. In the case of Italy, Maresca's identification and the timely transmittal of the relevant information was unusual; far more common were issues of mistaken identity, concerns over fraudulent naturalization papers, and the challenge of balancing thorough investigations with the realities of limited time and financial means.Footnote ²⁵ A great deal was known about Maresca's movements in time to effectively locate and identify him. The State Department sent word to the Secret Service of Maresca's probable departure locations and had the exact date, 3 August. By 11 August, the head of the service, John Wilkie, was able to forward to William Hazen, the agent in New York, that Maresca was a steward on the Kaiser Wilhelm II and, two days before his arrival, they had his physical description forwarded by Ambassador Fava.Footnote ²⁶ Without precise information about Maresca's travel, all authorities would have had was a general physical description: “twenty-nine years old; dark; heavily built; dark brown hair and eyes; height, one meter sixty-four centimeters; scar near ear.”Footnote ²⁷

The experience of Joseph Centanni, an Italian immigrant who was naturalized as an American in 1888, sheds light on the perils of mistaken identity. After living and working in Marseille for nearly two years, he was arrested in October 1896 by the French police, on behalf of Italian authorities, for the murder of an architect in Naples, Italy. By January, though Centanni had been brought to Italy and the issue of mistaken identity was cleared up, he was still confined because an Italian inspector refused to release him on the principle that Centanni was a “socialist.” By 1898, in response to Centanni's continued efforts to get an indemnity from the Italian government, the American consul at Naples, A. Hower Byington, reported back to the State Department on his efforts and detailed the limitations he faced: the consulate had no diplomatic status, so everything would have to go up the chain of authority to the ambassador before being sent to the Italian minister of justice; such cases were “a very common occurrence”; proof was difficult to acquire outside of hiring, at great cost, a private detective agency; and just in forwarding all the relevant materials to the local Italian prefect, the consulate had incurred expenditures totaling fifty dollars, a significant expense.Footnote ²⁸

Ultimately, the results highlight the poor performance of the mechanisms of front-gate immigration with regard to keeping out anarchists and criminals more generally. As the 1904 report of the commissioner-general of immigration revealed, of the 7,994 immigrants excluded at the seaports of the United States that year, only one was an anarchist and only thirty-five were classified as convicts – a microscopic percentage of the 812,870 alien arrivals that year.Footnote ²⁹ Even after the provisions against anarchists were strengthened by the Immigration Act of 1907 (34 Stat. 898), the results scarcely improved. Between 1904 and 1910, a mere ten anarchists had been debarred and deported, never more than five in a single year. The number of criminals, though it generally increased, was also relatively insignificant.Footnote ³⁰ Due to the fundamental challenges associated with identifying potential anarchists, the editors of The Nation were some of the many voices that anticipated the difficulties and dismissed the suggestion of their exclusion as “impossible,” “rubbish,” and “a pious wish.” “But how to find out if he [a potential immigrant] has those principles,” they asked, “By the very hypothesis, [an anarchist] is a man who will stop at no crime. He would kill every Government official cheerfully, and lay whole cities to ashes without the quiver of an eyelid; yet it is supposed that he will have scruples about lying or perjury!”Footnote ³¹

That Maresca, a “known” anarchist with a violent history, was even allowed to emigrate from Italy, a friendly government, highlights the fundamental challenge involved in excluding such “undesirable” persons. In a letter to Attorney General Philander Knox, Doctor N. G. Burnham identified what to do with anarchists as “the engrossing problem of modern time” and argued that the solution lay “with well organized concerted action at home and abroad,” because “the responsibility rests upon all nations and people alike.”Footnote ³² Yet the frequent newspaper notes of the deportations of anarchists from Europe were a near constant reminder that cooperation was elusive. Congressional inquiries and public commentary often highlighted the 1878 German antisocialist law, which aimed to curb the growth of the Social Democratic Party through various restrictive measures, because this law and others like it were often passed in the wake of violent incidents involving anarchists or other political radicals, who would then cross borders in an attempt to escape police pursuit or political persecution.Footnote ³³ In 1894, following the assassination of President Carnot, the French government passed a law targeting anarchist groups and newspapers. Between 1896 and 1898, 190 anarchists were expelled from France. Between 1893 and 1894, England, Germany, and Austria enacted laws targeting the criminal use of dynamite; France, Italy, Spain and Portugal subsequently passed similar acts. In Switzerland, previously a haven for European anarchists, a law was written that made it a crime to plot a murder or explosion either domestically or internationally.Footnote ³⁴ As the journalist Francis Nichols noted, to be an anarchist – particularly in Europe – was “equivalent to being a criminal punishable with imprisonment or exile. For a man who has been known to actually advocate law destruction there is really but one escape, and that is America.”Footnote ³⁵

The problem was an obvious one: anarchists were not evenly distributed and governments of countries that suffered a disproportionate number of bombings or attacks were understandably reluctant to keep those individuals at home or take them back after they had departed. For example, in 1892, having received word that the French government was preparing to expel suspect foreigners in the wake of a dynamite outrage in Paris, the Belgian government requested that only their own subjects be conducted to the Franco-Belgian border and that, in each case, the local authorities should receive timely notice. In spite of the request, however, two Italians and an Austrian had been sent across the border after French police provided them with third-class rail tickets. In response, the Belgian government returned the two Italians to France, but the Austrian was expelled to Luxembourg. In reporting these events back to the Marquis of Salisbury, the British representative in Brussels, Martin Gosselin, wrote,

The foreign ministries of multiple European countries would occasionally send – or were asked to send – the State Department lists of anarchists being deported to the United States, but as was also the case with information shared with the British Home and Foreign Offices, the information was frequently late and often incomplete.Footnote ³⁷

When it came to the issue of anarchist migration, there was often a deep disconnect between official offers of cooperation and how governments actually conducted their affairs. The US consul general in Vienna, Edmund Jüssen, reported back to Washington in the wake of the Haymarket bombings that he was “in a position to give your department the specific and particular assurance that the police authorities of Austria–Hungary have promised expressly to co-operate most willingly … and will give American consuls all the information required with reference to the character and antecedents of any subject of the monarchy.”Footnote ³⁸ Yet that same year, Jüssen also reported back to the Department of State, “It is quite natural that it [the Austrian government] feels no regret to get rid of the ultra-socialists and anarchists.”Footnote ³⁹ Richard Bartholdt, the editor of the St. Louis Tribune, testified before Congress three years later and confessed his own doubts about the feasibility of consular investigation into the anarchistic beliefs of migrants because “European governments will give certificates much more readily to men they want to get rid of than to those who are valuable to the country abroad.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Though he was opposed to anarchist restriction, Herman Raster, as part of that same testimony before Congress on H. R. 13175, had a telling response to Herman Stump's (D – Maryland) question whether it would be “a friendly act” to send a convicted anarchist to some other country. “Why ought we to be so over-generous and assume duties for other nations that they do not for us?” Raster asked.

With regard to immigration from Italy, the continued flow of excluded classes of immigrants was a larger problem than the occasional anarchist. The Italian Foreign Ministry and Baron Fava were deeply concerned with alleviating the immigration issues that were a persistent point of contention in otherwise tranquil relations with the United States.Footnote ⁴² In 1896, Stump, then serving as the commissioner-general of immigration, went on a specific mission to Italy, where he met with the prime minister, the minister of the interior, and the foreign minister in an effort to provide what Treasury Secretary John Carlisle called “the fullest possible explanation relating to the interpretation of the immigration laws of the United States.” The major point of the visit was to come to an explicit understanding that Carlisle's successor, Lyman Gage, summarized as explaining “that among others, persons who had been convicted of murder or other grave offenses should not be provided with passports to enable them to emigrate to the United States.”Footnote ⁴³

Despite such intentions, each country had grievances against the other for sending inadmissible immigrants. In the months after Maresca's arrival, Pellegrino Lepore, another Italian immigrant with a violent criminal background, went through the same immigration station at Ellis Island. Detained due to a case of pneumonia, he later gave “unsatisfactory” answers and was subsequently taken before the Board of Special Inquiry, where it came up that he had served eight years in prison for murder, had been granted a passport by Italian authorities who were fully aware of his past, and was sufficiently destitute that the passport charge of two lire – equivalent at the time to thirty-five cents – was remitted.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nor were US officials innocent of this practice. That same year, the Italian government inquired into the background of Alfredo Cabrino, who, when in Paterson, New Jersey, had been investigated as a possible murder suspect. In another, unrelated matter, Cabrino had been arrested and brought to court for assault and battery, and after being released on bail had fled the country. By way of finally informing both the governor of New Jersey and the Department of State as to Cabrino's past, Eugene Emley, the prosecutor of pleas for Passaic County, concluded by stating,

The last sentence was subsequently bracketed with a note saying, “omit.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Little more than a year after Bresci's assassination of Umberto, American fears of anarchist assassination were realized when the self-professed anarchist Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on 6 September 1901.Footnote ⁴⁶ In December of that year, newly installed President Theodore Roosevelt used part of his first annual message to Congress to outline an approach to counter the anarchist threat. Equating anarchism with “picking pockets or wife-beating” while also drawing a direct connection between the assassinations of Umberto and McKinley, Roosevelt forcefully suggested that Congress should “take into consideration the coming to this country of anarchists … They and those like them should be kept out of this country.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The President went on to lay out a multifaceted approach that incorporated the range of measures debated over the preceding two decades: immigration reforms should be exclusionary and also contain provisions to allow for deportation; federal rather than state courts should have jurisdiction over any individual who made an attempt, successful or not, on anyone in line of succession to the presidency and the punishments for such attacks should be correspondingly harsh; lastly, anarchy “should be made an offense against the law of nations … It should be so declared by treaties among all civilized powers.”Footnote ⁴⁸ That same month, the Spanish minister to the United States, a retired general, and a US district judge wrote a series of articles investigating these issues for the North American Review, the country's oldest literary magazine.Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite presidential endorsement of all of these measures, and an implicit understanding that they were complementary initiatives, only immigration restriction and deportation became codified into federal law.

When eventually signed into law, the Anarchist Exclusion Act represented the first federal law since the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) to authorize the exclusion or deportation of foreigners based on ideological beliefs and associations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet as part of a long-standing effort to address the problem of anarchist violence generally, and of assassination in particular, the Act was one of 122 individual legislative measures – including bills, resolutions, and joint resolutions – put forward between the Forty-Seventh and Sixtieth Congresses (1881–1909). These measures can be grouped into four broad categories of legislation: protective and punitive measures relating to attacks on officials; the order of presidential succession; immigration restriction and exclusion; and the study of criminals, paupers, and “defective” classes.Footnote ⁵¹ Though immigration legislation was one of the last kinds of measure to appear, the category represented nearly 24 percent of all legislation (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁵² While Republican members of Congress overwhelmingly authored these bills, members of different parties played central roles in the most important, hotly debated pieces of legislation. Further, the various authors came from ten different states and represented every region of the country.Footnote ⁵³ From the first mention of anarchists to the 1903 Act, only the Fifty-Sixth Congress did not introduce any legislation to specifically address the anarchist threat, from the standpoint of either immigration restriction or suppression and punishment. During the Fifty-Seventh Congress [1901–3] alone, there were nearly twenty individual bills that addressed the anarchist threat explicitly and a host of others that were implicitly connected to anarchist violence.Footnote ⁵⁴

Figure 1.

Legislative measures to address attacks on elected officials, 1881–1909.

That restriction emerged as a possible solution to the anarchist threat was not surprising given how popular attitudes toward immigration and the government's role in protecting or limiting it evolved as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The diplomatic tradition of the United States, enshrined in treaties of amity and commerce, emphasized the free movement of peoples and goods. For example, the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 (16 Stat. 739), which formalized friendly relations with China, proved a serious impediment to those advocating for Chinese exclusion because the contracting Chinese and American parties “recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of free migration and migration.”Footnote ⁵⁵ As proponents of increased restriction gained a following in the latter part of the century, they typically framed their arguments in the context of security and shifted the focus away from this older model of treaties and toward unilateral action. In endorsing the Scott Act of 1888, which imposed restrictions on the movements of Chinese laborers, President Grover Cleveland invoked “the admitted and paramount right and duty of every government” to protect “prosperity.” Other proponents of Chinese restriction stressed that the Chinese immigrants were “unassimilable” and represented a threat to the economic and, consequently, social well-being of American laborers – an argument later extended to other immigrant groups.Footnote ⁵⁶

While the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was, as Roger Daniels has stated, “the hinge upon which the ‘golden door’ of immigration began its swing to a nearly closed position,” restriction quickly grew to encompass other groups: criminals, paupers, and contract laborers soon followed.Footnote ⁵⁷ By the early 1890s, those suffering from a “loathsome or contagious disease,” the mentally disturbed, prostitutes, and polygamists were also among those groups who found themselves on the outside.Footnote ⁵⁸ At this point the established trend was to keep out those deemed deficient and socially threatening: “not to restrict immigration,” as one House Committee report read in 1891, “but to sift it, to separate the desirable from the undesirable immigrants and to permit only those to land on our shores who have certain physical and moral qualities.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Though it was contested by opponents of restriction and by those concerned about potential diplomatic, economic, and reputational consequences, the Supreme Court affirmed the right of the federal government to exclude potential immigrants in the cases Chae Chan Ping v. United States [130 US 581] in 1889 and Nashimura Ekin v. United States [142 US 651] in 1892. As the decision in the Ping case read, “The power of the government to exclude foreigners from the country whenever in its judgment the public interests require such exclusion has been asserted in repeated instances, and never denied by the executive or legislative departments.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The national debate over anarchist exclusion was grounded, in part, on an insistence that anarchists were “foreign.” An April 1881 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune discussing the “alliance against Nihilists and Communists” proposed by the Russian government highlighted the broad contours of the national debate. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, people argued that anarchists were being driven to the United States as a consequence of restrictive measures increasingly being passed across Europe. “Looking into the future,” the article's author posited, “when Europe has emptied her discontents … in sufficient numbers upon our shores, there may be an explosion similar to that of the Communists in Paris.” Until that point arrived, however, the author argued that while anarchists could “poison the minds of foreigners,” the native-born citizens and property owners formed a solid bulwark against unrest and, should an explosion of violence happen in the United States, the conservative population would rise and “put it down in blood.”Footnote ⁶¹ This article, and others like it, ignored the long-established tradition of individualist anarchism in the United States – which drew upon the writings and speeches of William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Josiah Warren, and Benjamin Tucker, among others – and instead focussed on social anarchism more closely tied into the arrival of German radicals escaping the 1878 antisocialist law introduced by Otto von Bismarck.Footnote ⁶²

Though the ardent belief that anarchists were foreign went largely uncontested, there was more ambiguity when contemporaries debated the degree to which anarchists could do substantive harm to American society and institutions. Anarchists were a relatively minor subset of the new immigrants and many public commentators had more faith in what the author of an article in a religious journal identified as “our institutions, and the opportunities of such a country.”Footnote ⁶³ While many lamented the social threat posed by anarchists, others countered with the argument that the process of coming to America and becoming steeped in its values had a potentially transformative effect on anarchists and other social malcontents. Though never the uncontested narrative, this logic could nonetheless be easily, and consistently, traced back to the early 1880s. “There is patriotism, conservatism, and vitality enough in this country to take good care of its Government and its institutions,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared in that 1881 article. Moreover, the author maintained that equally fundamental principles were at stake by admitting such potential discontents: “it is a chance that must be taken because the right of asylum for political offenses cannot be denied.”Footnote ⁶⁴ As Paul Wolff, the correspondent for the New York Staats-Zeitung, later discussed in his observations to Congress, the key was “good institutions,” noting,

In 1894, the same year that Gaetano Bresci came to the United States, a Congressional debate over free trade concluded that anarchism would not gain a foothold in the United States because “socialism and anarchism had their origin in the industrial parts of Europe and the cause of it can easily be traced to the miserable condition of the working people.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The same kinds of argument, over the potential danger of anarchists weighed against traditional American values and institutions, that played out in newspapers, sermons, and other forums also appeared in Congressional investigations on the subject. In 1889, a bill “to provide for the removal of dangerous aliens” was the focus of an extensive series of hearings by a select committee from the House of Representatives.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the outset, the authors of the Congressional report cited the German antisocialist law as well as the Haymarket bombing to identify anarchists as principally Germans who had fled to England to avoid prosecution until “officials there made it so uncomfortable for them that they came to the United States. Here they have proven a lawless, turbulent class, and the whole country is familiar with their recent acts of violence.”Footnote ⁶⁸ As part of the proceedings, the committee heard the testimony of Johann Most, the noted German anarchist printer, to whom they directed pointed questions about the relationship between legal restrictions and anarchist migration, the size of the anarchist and socialist populations around the world, and his definition of anarchism.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet the bill gained little traction. Two years later another select committee held similar hearings pertaining to a bill (H. R. 13175) introduced by William Owen (R – Indiana) to restrict immigration, and the prospect of exclusion was criticized for how it included anarchists. In addition to highlighting the problems of identifying someone who was an anarchist, opponents dismissed the bill on grounds that recalled the Chicago Daily Tribune's commentary nearly a decade earlier. While some individuals brought before the committee approved of the exclusion of anarchists and socialists because they represented a “permanent danger,” others dismissed as un-American the notion that any man should be “debarred on account of his opinions.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Richard Michaelis, a German American writer from Chicago, testified against restriction, despite knowing that he had been the target of a bomb plot. “Don't ask them if they are anarchists, or socialists, or republicans … but as soon as they commit an act against the laws of the United States, that is a different thing,” he argued. When asked if “an ounce of prevention” was “worth a pound of cure,” he responded “where would you draw the line?”Footnote ⁷¹

As the spate of anarchist violence increased between 1894 and 1901 and blossomed into what contemporaries perceived to be a social crisis, people began to focus more on security than on the power of American institutions to assimilate dangerous anarchists. Observers were quick to note that four of the six self-professed anarchists who made assassination attempts over that period were Italian – a fact that drew national attention to the social and economic plight of this new wave of immigrants and imparted a sense of urgency to discussions of the anarchist threat.Footnote ⁷² A frequent contributor to the North American Review, Felix L. Oswald, wrote, “The suggestive fact that the assassins were natives of the country where contrasts of wealth and poverty had reached their most cruel extreme” was central; Umberto I, Carnot, Cánovas and Elizabeth were “representative”; their only crime was that they had “contrived to accumulate a little bric-a-brac, while so many of [their] countrymen had to sell their furniture for bread.”Footnote ⁷³ Francis Nichols, writing in Outlook, echoed the sentiment, arguing that the danger was that anarchist justifications for Umberto I's death “made positive converts of doubting Italians, and attracted the attention of hundreds who believed that the ‘times are out of joint’ but had heretofore seen no cure in Anarchy.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Government officials echoed these concerns when, in the wake of McKinley's assassination, the US Attorney General's office drafted a letter to various US attorneys in reference to alleged anarchists and their correspondence. The letter, seventeen pages in total, contained lists of Italians in the various districts “said to be correspondents of the ‘Communist’ and ‘Individualist’ groups of so-called anarchists of Paterson, New Jersey” and asked the recipients of these letters to investigate “the antecedents and character of these men.” The letter also called particular attention to the non-Italian names on the list, indicated by checkmarks, and concluded, “the reasons for the association of this man with the Italians may be especially important to learn.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Whereas for much of the preceding twenty years, the risk that undesirable immigrants posed to society was counterbalanced by arguments about the stabilizing and ameliorating effects of American values and traditions, the seemingly escalating violence intensified the rhetoric expressing the need for greater security.

The tendency is to see the 1903 Act as the culmination of earlier efforts to restrict and exclude anarchists. In particular, it is compared to the “Hill Bill [S. 2314]” of 1894 – one of the bills on anarchism that came the closest to passing. Sponsored by Senator David Hill (D – New York), then chairman of the Senate Committee on Immigration, the bill came up for debate in the wake of President Carnot's assassination. Explicitly raising the issue of security, the bill justified the exclusion of anarchists on the grounds that their presence would “be a menace to the Government or to the peace and well-being of society in general.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Senator John Sherman (R – Ohio) offered a mild objection after the bill was introduced that the proposed legislation did not go far enough and suggested that anarchists should be deported even after they had become citizens. However, the bill died in the House of Representatives on 21 August after a heated debate in which John Warner – who, like Senator Hill, was a Democrat from New York – denounced it as “a bad bill” that was “more likely to make anarchists than punish them” because in drafting the bill no suitable definition of anarchism had been put forward.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the wake of McKinley's death in 1901, Senator J. C. Burrows played up the notion that an opportunity had been lost, bitterly lamenting, “The anarchist nests at Paterson, New Jersey, at Chicago and elsewhere would have been broken up, and we would not find ourselves to-day in the position of locking the stable door after the horse is stolen.”Footnote ⁷⁸

When passed by Congress, the 1903 Immigration Act inserted anarchists “or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all government or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials” between polygamists and prostitutes as excluded classes.Footnote ⁷⁹ In addition to defining (Section 38) and excluding anarchists, the bill also prevented their naturalization (Section 39) and fined those who aided such individuals to enter, or be naturalized in, the United States.Footnote ⁸⁰ By defining anarchists solely in terms of their advocacy of violence and antigovernmental stance, the 1903 bill's supporters disregarded years of discussion on the merits and adverse consequences of exclusion based on ideological beliefs. A decade earlier, at the same time the Hill Bill was under consideration, a completely revised version of the Stone Bill (H. R. 5246) also failed to sway enough members of Congress. Originally written to provide for the consular inspection of immigrants in an attempt to prevent the continued emigration of criminals and paupers, the original text was completely replaced by a detailed anarchist exclusion law written by the Secretary of the Treasury. In voicing his opposition to the amended bill, Senator William Peffer (P – Kansas) clearly articulated a familiar problem, stating,

Senator George Hoar ventured even further, questioning the objectivity and legality of the method proposed, arguing,

In voicing their objections, Peffer, Hoar, and others reiterated the argument that exclusion based on ideological beliefs – and poorly defined ones at that – was just as potentially threatening to society as the belief – anarchism – being excluded.Footnote ⁸³

A further departure from other anti-anarchist legislation is evident when examining the deportation provisions of the 1903 Immigration Act in light of Congressional reluctance to include such measures in other bills pertaining to anarchists.Footnote ⁸⁴ In their report evaluating a bill introduced for the protection of the President, Congressman George Ray (R – New York) wrote on behalf of the Judiciary Committee,

Acts that contained such provisions, such as the Ray Bill of 1903, rejected any articles that dealt with the deportation of aliens who had been permitted to land in the country. “What,” Ray and his coauthors asked, “must be the answer of the United States to such a proposition coming from some other country? Better make no law than an ineffective one or one that might lead to unnecessary foreign complications.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Prioritizing security and including such major policy departures signified a dramatic shift in the nature of the debate over anarchist exclusion. The Anarchist Exclusion Act trumped the diplomatic and social concerns that were central to the discussions concerning prior legislative attempts to address the issue of anarchist violence, siding instead with the counterargument that the immigration of such undesirables was a social threat necessitating a strong response.