"Evil of a Most Insidious Character:" Philosophical Anarchists, American Immigration Law, and National Identity in World War One by Evan Taparata A thesis submitted to the History Department Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey for Undergraduate Departmental Honors Advised by Professor Virginia Yans New Brunswick, New Jersey April 17, 2009 ii Copyright © 2009 by Evan Taparata All rights reserved iii To my parents, Frank and Elizabeth Taparata iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................v Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One The Alien and Sedition Acts—Precedents for Prejudice.....................20 Chapter Two “Insidious Interferences with Freedom of Opinion:” Nativism and Anti-radicalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries................47 Chapter Three “To Reach the Underlying Thought:” The Deportation Hearing of Schulim Melamed................................................................................89 Chapter Four “I Am Not Guilty of Doing Anything, Only to Think with My Own Brain:” Philosophical Anarchists, the Anarchist Act of 1918, and the Path to Mass Deportation...................................................................133 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................168 Bibliography....................................................................................................................173 v Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Virginia Yans, for all of the support she has offered me throughout an often stressful, though immeasurably rewarding, senior year at Rutgers. Professor Aldo Lauria Santiago, my second reader, offered invaluable comments on my research and advice regarding the next phase of my thesis and future study in history, generally. This work simply would not have been completed without the contribution of a generous grant from Dean Justine Hernandez- Levine and the Aresty Research Center. Professor Barry Qualls, Vice-President of Undergraduate Education at Rutgers, also offered support and endless encouragement. Marian Smith, Senior Historian in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the National Archives and Records Administration, was kind enough to correspond with me via email with tips on how to get the most out of my first trip to the National Archives in Washington DC. Dr. Tom Glynn of Rutgers’ Alexander Library met with me numerous times to discuss how to plumb the mass of government publications at Rutgers and beyond. Barry Moreno, librarian at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, made countless suggestions for the earliest stages of my work. I owe many thanks to George Tselos and the staff at the Ellis Island Oral History Project for their continued interest in my work and for making it possible for me to use the Ellis Island Library. For helping me get through some of the more stressful periods of these two semesters and always encouraging me, I have to thank Roseanne Alvarez. I’m very grateful for Professor James Masschaele and all of my fellow thesis writers; our weekly seminar always left me feeling excited about my work. Last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank all of my friends and family, particularly my parents, Frank and Elizabeth vi Taparata, and my sister, Karisa Taparata. I couldn’t have finished this thesis without their support, in all of its variations. 1 Introduction “The civil liberties movement in this country,” observes free speech historian Christopher M. Finan, “was born in the outrage over the abuses committed during World War One and the Red Scare.” Indeed, the conviction of thousands of Americans for publishing criticism of the country’s war effort and the “nationwide raids that rounded up thousands of suspected Communists who were guilty of nothing more than belonging to the wrong political party”1 was not taken lightly. The question of unjust deportation—an issue with which this thesis is concerned—became a particularly thorny problem. By 1926, the American Civil Liberties Union recognized immigration and deportation as one of its top ten issues.2 But were Red Scare deportations—which were widely reported in the media of the time and have been the subject of much historical discussion—the only violation of the rights of immigrants during this early period in the emergence of civil liberties as a national concern? Was it only after Attorney General Mitchell Palmer initiated so many falsely grounded deportations that lawyers began to take notice of immigrants being targeted by the Bureau of Immigration for radical social and political ideas? My original intent for this thesis was to write a history of detention at Ellis Island. The popular history and memory of Ellis Island is one that is indebted to the Island’s legacy of having been the busiest immigration center in the country. Inspired by the work of individuals such as the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Michael Ratner, who have 1 Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), x. 2 Nathaniel Hong, “The Origin of American Legislation to Exclude and Deport Aliens for Their Political Beliefs, and Its Initial Review by the Courts,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 18, no. 2 (1990): 31. 2 been leading the charge against the former Bush administration’s post-9/11 detention policy, I felt that it was high time that the less romantic side of Ellis Island’s history be investigated in further detail. But there was a deeper curiosity at the heart of my interest in detention. I hoped to reach a better understanding of the specific reasons why immigrants were excluded by researching the case files of detainees. Identifying such patterns of exclusion, I thought, would contribute to a more complete grasp of American national identity in the beginning of the twentieth century. Individuals who had been detained were suspect of violating at least one of the immigration law’s exclusionary provisions detailing who could and could not enter the country. The Bureau of Immigration’s detainees, therefore, could provide an ample subject of study for thinking about American identity not by inclusion—those individuals who enter the country and are assimilated into the American body politic—but rather by exclusion—those who are somehow deemed undesirable additions to the nation’s population. During my first trip to the National Archives in Washington DC, I noticed a number of individual case files of immigrants whom the Bureau of Immigration was attempting to deport during World War One. Conformity with the country’s break from isolationism and entry into the war was widely held as the utmost example of American patriotism at that time, and so it was not entirely surprising to learn that some aliens had been facing deportation for advocating “radical” political beliefs. Their testimony in hearings before the Bureau reveals that these individuals considered themselves “philosophical anarchists”–that is, that they believed in a society without government which could be attained not by violence, but by education. Having encountered little of this in my own reading of the period, the stories within these files immediately caught my 3 attention. Although the deportation of philosophical anarchists marked a departure from my interest in detention, the subject remained significant regarding exclusion and national identity. What does it mean, after all, when a settler nation that is often touted as a “nation of immigrants” restricts its foreign-born residents from expressing themselves freely? By focusing on these lesser known cases of philosophical anarchists, my work in this thesis marks the beginning of what I hope to turn into a prolonged inquiry about a group of radicals who have been overshadowed by the likes of Emma Goldman, Johann Most, and Alexander Berkman. Who were these philosophical anarchists, and why was the government attempting to deport them? Alien anarchists, whose alleged disregard for government and the rule of law were cast into national consciousness after the infamous Haymarket Affair of 1886, had been an object of scrutiny among Americans for decades before World War One. The historian Henry David has written that once Americans heard the news that a bomb had been detonated at a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, killing and wounding numerous civilians and police officers, “The term Anarchism became a verbal bludgeon with which anything disreputable or mad was attacked, and ‘anarchist’ became an epithet of defamation synonymous with ‘vermin,’ ‘rattlesnake,’ ‘cutthroat.’”3 It certainly did not help ease anyone’s suspicion of anarchy when France’s President Carnot, Prime Minister Canovas del Castillo of Spain, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and Italy’s King Humbert were all killed by anarchists at the end of the nineteenth century.4 Above all, however, President McKinley’s assassination at the hands of a self-confessed 3 Henry David, History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social- Revolutionary and Labor Movements (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 436-437. 4 Sidney Fine, “Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (July, 1955): 778-779. 4 (and native-born) anarchist further