How About a Little Anarchy

In 1901, an Italian by the name of Luigi Galleani arrived in the United States.  Though only forty years old, Galleani had already been kicked out of Italy, France, Switzerland, Egypt, and England for being an anarchist.  At the time, anarchists were basically communists/socialists who believed that all government and sources of authority should be completely abolished.  Pretty much the farthest left of what we today would call the far left.  Many of them were also into free love, but that isn't really important or relevant to this story.  Anyways, even amongst anarchists, Luigi was known as a radical due to his belief that the only way to bring about the dreamed of anarchist utopia was via violence.  How did such a man even get into the U.S. you might ask?  Well, nobody was really paying attention to things like that back then.  

By the start of the twentieth century, violence by radical anarchists had been going on for some time, mostly in the form of assassination attempts on various government officials and the aristocracy in Europe.  Such efforts claimed the lives of the czar of Russia, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, the empress of Austria, and the king of Italy.  The resulting crackdown led to many anarchists fleeing across the Atlantic to the United States, joining the millions of immigrants entering the country in hopes of finding a better life.  At the time, the U.S. was in many ways a tinderbox.  A combination of rapid industrialization and record immigration had resulted in a widening divide between rich and poor where the wealthy lived lives of luxury never before imagined and the poor just generally got shat on and treated like cogs in a giant machine.  Growing labor unions fought with hired company thugs and called for tighter controls on immigration, and socialist and communist groups sprouted up like mushrooms across the country.  Luigi fit right in, quickly becoming a leader in the growing American anarchist movement.  

The same year Luigi arrived, an anarchist assassinated President McKinley, which as one would expect, resulted in a less then positive public view of the movement.  Soon after, Luigi was shot in the face by police while calling for a general nationwide labor strike to overthrow the government.  For Luigi, this meant that it was time for the gloves to come off.  Moving to Vermont of all places, he began printing a newsletter calling for violence against government, business, and church leaders.  Though circulation was small, only about 5,000 people or so, most of them newly arrived immigrants, many of the recipients took his message quite seriously.

The start of World War I only kicked things up a notch.  From the anarchist point of view, the terrors of the war in Europe were a direct result of the evils of capitalism.  Believing the whole world order to be cracking under the strain, Luigi began including instructions on how to make bombs in his newsletters.  Things quickly got out of hand.  In 1914 and 1915, numerous bombings took place across New York City police stations, churches, and courthouses.  Several of Luigi's followers, known as Galleanists, were arrested; to which the group responded by adding prosecutors and policemen to their list of targets.  In 1916, bombings took place in Boston and San Francisco.  That same year, a Galleanist chef at a prominent Chicago hotel attempted to poison some 100 guests with arsenic.  In 1917 and 1918, further bombings occurred in New York City, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and Milwaukee.  Tiring of such shit, the U.S. government arrested Luigi in 1919, shutting down his newsletter and deporting his ass later that year.  The Galleanists didn't take it lying down.  

Soon after Luigi's arrest, a group of his followers prepared for their most audacious bombing yet.  Thirty-six dynamite filled packages were sent through the mail to prominent government officials across the country; including two governors, two U.S. Representatives, four U.S. Senators, the U.S. Attorney General, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Luckily, the Galleanists skimped on the postage, resulting in none of the packages being delivered, and the plot soon after being discovered.  A few months later, the Galleanists made up for this inept attempt by simultaneously detonating eight large bombs in eight different cities, killing two people, though none of their intended targets.  The U.S. government responded with what became known as the Palmer Raids, where 10,000 suspected anarchists were arrested, resulting in 3,500 being held in detention without trial and 556 getting deported.  In revenge, the Galleanists set off a bomb on Wall Street in New York City, killing 38 people and severely wounding 143.  At the time, it was the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history.  Many of the remaining Galleanists then fled to Europe and South America.  Those who remained, intermittently kept up the bombing campaign for another twelve years, the most prominent attacks occurring in 1927 and 1932.  As for Luigi, he lived out the rest of his life in Italy, a large part of it in prison or under police surveillance.  He died in 1931.     

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing#/media/File:Wallstreetbmb.jpg      

A Little Something About Pot

As your pothead buddy has likely told you, cannabis first arrived in the United States during the early colonial days as hemp.  However, before images of old Georgie Washington toking away fill your noggin, it should probably be said that it was just for ropes and other such fibrous products.  Trying to smoke hemp to get high would be pretty much like trying to drink mouthwash to get drunk.  The first actual cannabis product in the United States meant to get people actually high was hashish, a cannabis resin mostly used in patent medicines and by artists and other such creatives starting in the mid-nineteenth century.  Hashish originally came out of the Middle East, and then spread to Europe after Napoleon invaded Egypt, where it quickly became popular amongst the intellectual elite of the time; who much like people today liked to go on and on about the possible medical applications while getting high as shit.  However, hashish was expensive and hard to come by, so it really never became all that popular. 

Marijuana as we think about it today (i.e. roasting a fatty joint) wasn't really a thing in the U.S. until the early twentieth century, which is kind of weird considering its widespread use in Brazil and the Caribbean for centuries.  Marijuana was first brought to Brazil in the sixteenth century for use by slaves, to you know, help them be pretty chill about the fact that they were slaves and all.  By the late 1800's it was popular throughout most of Latin America as a working man’s way to relax after a long day of back breaking labor for shitty pay.  Around 1910, it began making its way into the United States via two main avenues.  The first and largest was via a surge in Mexican immigration brought about by a civil war in Mexico that mostly just involved the various sides killing as many random people as possible.  These immigrants brought their relaxant of choice with them, which rapidly began to spread amongst the existing Latin communities.  The second avenue of entry was via New Orleans, where it was brought in by Caribbean sailors.  Marijuana became popular in jazz clubs, which subsequently became popular throughout the south, spreading it widely across portions of the black community. 

It's probably at this point that your Cheech and Chong loving buddy starts going off about racism leading to whitey damning the magical herb, which though likely technically true, doesn't really tell the whole story.  The 1920's, for all of the glitz and glam, were not exactly the most accepting of time periods for people who looked or acted different than the majority.  Anti-immigrant groups most certainly found any way they could to push back against the Mexicans making their way north, including getting laws passed prohibiting the use of marijuana.  However, this was largely on the local and state level.  The federal government of the time mostly took the stance of as long as they got paid the vice taxes they were owed, they couldn't really give a damn.

The main strategy used by anti-immigration groups concerning marijuana was to claim that it caused erratic and violent behavior.  This was of course all complete bullshit; except it kind of wasn't given that a large number of well publicized and documented cases occurred in both the U.S. and Mexico at the time, to the point that Mexico made marijuana illegal in 1920.  This is where it gets complicated.  You see, we don't actually know much about the marijuana of the time.  Things like what were the popular varieties like, what were people lacing it with, how was it mostly consumed, and other such things have been mostly lost to history.  It might be easiest to look at a 1920’s report of a man smoking marijuana, going all nuts, and stabbing his buddy in the chest as made-up garbage, but reality has never been easy.  Perhaps the variety smoked had a penchant for causing high anxiety in some people, maybe it was laced with heroine as was somewhat common at the time, maybe the man was drunk on rotgut liquor, maybe he was mentally unstable.  The point is that things are complicated as shit.  Some of the stuff we like to laugh about today as pure fiction actually happened.  Was it widespread?  Probably not.  Was it just because of marijuana?  Doubtful.  Did it happen?  Yes.  

As has been a constant throughout American history, a few well publicized events can turn a couple of isolated incidents into a nationwide epidemic.  This is exactly what happened to marijuana.  The enactment of Prohibition in the 1920's led to a rapid increase in the use of pot as people looked for alternative ways to get their fix.  Marijuana went from just the drug of minorities to something the white guy down the street might be experimenting with.  This combined with media reports of crazed marijuana users and wildly inaccurate anti-pot propaganda (which totally didn't use sex to get people to pay attention to it, wink wink nod nod) led to a rising tide of panic.  In 1930, the Federal Narcotics Bureau was formed, but even then the feds refused to do much about marijuana, seeing it as being of little risk or concern compared to heroine and other hard drugs.  However, that all changed in 1933 when Prohibition ended.  Facing the possibility of a much smaller budget and the layoff of numerous agents, the Justice Department switched its stance on marijuana from "no worries man" to "that shit is going to make everyone violent hedonists if we don't do something about it".  In 1937, marijuana was made illegal in the U.S.  You know the rest of the story. 

Image: https://jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net/amp/media/reefer-madness-1936-2a3b93

A Little Something About the Klan

Following the Civil War, a group of former Confederate soldiers, not being happy with the end result of being forced to accept their former slaves as people just like them, formed an organization that became known as the Ku Klux Klan.  To put it bluntly, the Klan was a terrorist organization, targeting black voters and politicians, as well as anybody who supported them, via violence and murder.  The Klan remained active throughout the South until the 1870's, when political fenagling over who won a tight presidential race resulted in the southern states regaining the right to treat their black citizens like shit.  By the end of the decade, the southern states had passed numerous laws that effectively disenfranchised and segregated African-Americans.  The Klan, not having much of a purpose after that, just kind of disappeared.   

Fast forward to 1915, when famed director D.W. Griffith released the first full length motion picture, a three hour movie called The Birth of a Nation.  Though considered one of the great pioneering films of all time, it was also racist as shit, glorifying the founding of the Klan.  One of the people who saw the movie was a man by the name of William Simmons, who thought the whole thing was cool as shit.  He soon after founded his own Ku Klux Klan, which just like in the film, involved dressing up in bedsheets, burning crosses, and giving each other crazy titles like Grand Imperial Wizard Dragon.  It should probably be mentioned that the original Klan had none of these things.  Not being happy with just hating black people, Simmons expanded the list of folks and things the group was against to include Catholics, Jews, Italians, Slavs, drinking alcohol, abortions, labor unions, and slutty women.  Pretty much if you weren't a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant you could just go right ahead and fuck off.  Like its predecessor, the new Klan spent most of its time beating up, and in some cases even lynching, anybody they didn't like.

Strangely enough, even in the 1920's most Americans, even the racist ones, weren't really down with the idea of just straight up kicking in someone’s teeth.  Sure, they might think that some groups certainly had an ass beating coming, but that didn't mean they wanted to be part of the group doing it.  Due to this little factoid, membership in the Klan remained relatively small throughout its first five years, only amounting to about a thousand people in the Atlanta area.  This changed in 1920, when Simmons hired a couple of marketing wizards to improve the Klan's image.  While the whole "hey let’s just hate and fear anything different" vibe was kept intact, the focus of the group was shifted from random lynchings to more community advocacy and charitable giving.  With this new message in hand, the marketing wizards sent recruiters across the country who were paid a fee for every person they got to sign up.  By 1924, membership in the organization had ballooned to six million, most of them middle class people living in the rapidly growing cities across the country.  Especially large concentrations included Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Denver, and Portland.   

Despite all of the parades, picnics, charity auctions, and cute baby contests, the Klan at its heart remained an organization about hating anything divergent from what its members saw as the norm.  Though most members saw the existing political structure as being the best way to force their viewpoints on the rest of the world, few if any could honestly say they weren't aware of the more violent methods being used by some of their compatriots.  Such actions by more radical members were conveniently forgotten, an unpleasant side effect to the preservation of an imaginary ideal.  However, such issues couldn't be ignored forever.  By 1925, the group was already beginning to crumble.  From the beginning numerous politicians, including two presidents, denounced the group for its hate and vitriol and local chapters were often plagued by monetary fraud and infighting.  Numerous members were arrested for violence, culminating in the conviction of the top Klansman in the Midwest for rape and murder.  The idea of the Klan as just another fraternal organization collapsed and membership in the Klan collapsed with it.  By 1930, only 30,000 members remained, many of them the worst of the worst.        

The Ku Klux Klan never rose to such prominence again.  Labeled as a group of hateful extremists, it was banished to the edges of American society.  However, even in the fringe such things can be dangerous.  When the Civil Rights era began in the 1950's, the Klan launched a twenty year campaign of murders, bombings, and arson against the black population.  Though membership in the revitalized organization likely never topped 50,000, many people were more than happy to look the other way or even secretly provide support.  Many of those who carried out the violence weren't convicted until the 1990's or later.  Others were never even arrested.  Today the Ku Klux Klan is estimated to have around only 10,000 members spread across numerous independent chapters mostly based in the South and Midwest.   

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ku_Klux_Klan_parade7_crop.jpg