VTHE OUTLAW CREED
But what is this criminal garlic-smelling creed that the people of Massachusetts will not face openly?
For half a century Anarchy has been the bogy of American schoolmasters, policemen, old maids, and small town mayors. About the time of the assassination of McKinley a picture was formed in the public mind of the anarchist; red-handed, unwashed foreigner whom nobody could understand, sticks of dynamite in his pocket and bomb in the paper parcel under his arm, redeyed housewrecker waiting only for the opportunity to bite the hand that fed him. Since the Russian Revolution the picture has merged a little with that of the sneaking, slinking, communist Jew, enviously undermining Prosperity and Decency through secret organizations ruled from Moscow.
Gradually among liberals and intelligent people generally certain phases of anarchism have meanwhile been reluctantly admitted into respectable conversation under the phrase ‘philosophical anarchist’, which means an anarchist who shaves daily, has good manners and is guaranteed not to act on his beliefs. Certain people of the best society, such as Kropotkin and Tolstoy, princes both, having through their anarchy made themselves important figures in European thought and literature, it was impossible to exclude them longer from the pale of decency.
What is this outlaw creed?
When Christianity flourished in the Mediterranean basin, slave and emperor had the hope of the immediate coming of Christ’s kingdom, the golden Jerusalem that would appear on earth to put an end to the tears and aches of the faithful. After the first millennium, the City of God, despaired of on earth, took its permanent place in the cloudy firmament with the Virgin Mary at the apex of the feudal pyramid. With the decay of feudalism and the coming of the kingdoms of this world the church became more and more the instrument of the governing orders. Undermined by the eighteenth century, overthrown bythe French revolution, the church was restored by the great reaction as the strongest bulwark of Privilege. But in the tough memories of peasants and fishermen—their sons worked in factories—there remained a faint trace of the vanished brightness of the City of God. All our citydwelling instinct and culture has been handed down to us from these countless urban generations, Cretans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Latins of the Mediterranean basin, Italians of the hilltowns. It is natural that the dwellers on those scraggy hills in sight of that always blue sea should have kept alight in their hearts the perfect city, where the strong did not oppress the weak, where every man lived by his own work at peace with his neighbors, the white Commune where man could reach his full height free from the old snarling obsessions of god and master.
It is this inner picture that is the core of feeling behind all anarchist theory and doctrine. Many Italians planted the perfect city of their imagination in America. When they came to this country they either killed the perfect city in their hearts and submitted to the system of dawg eat dawg or else they found themselves anarchists. There have been terrorists among them, as in every other oppressed and despised sect since the world began. Good people generally have contended that anarchism and terrorism were the same thing, a silly and usually malicious error much fostered by private detectives and the police bomb-squads.
An anarchist workman who works for the organization of his fellow workmen is a man who costs the factory owners money; thereby he is a bomb-thrower and possible murderer in the minds of the majority of American employers.
In his charge to the jury in the Plymouth trial Judge Thayer definitely said that the crime of highway robbery was consistent with Vanzetti’s ideals as a radical.
Yet under the conflict between employer and workman, and the racial misunderstanding, in themselves material enough for the creation of a frameup, might there not be a deeper bitterness? The people of Massachusetts centuries ago suffered and hoped terribly for the City of God. This little white courthouse town of Dedham, neat and exquisite under its elms, is the symbol ofa withered hope, mortgaged at six per cent to the kingdoms of this world. It is natural that New Englanders, who feel in themselves a lingering of the passionate barbed desire of perfection of their ancestors, should hate with particular bitterness, anarchists, votaries of the Perfect Commune on earth. The irrational features of this case of attempted communal murder can only be explained by a bitterness so deep that it has been forgotten by the very people it moves most fervidly.