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Larabee

21

A Brief History of Terrorism

in the United States
Ann Larabee
Three seasoned radicals sit down in a dingy New York hotel room to decide
what to do about a cash offer they cant refuse. The donor intends the money
as the start-up for a fund-raising campaign that will eventually be used to train
and arm missioners for a terrorist holy war against an evil empire that exploits their impoverished homeland. The three men debate how the money
should be spent. Should they use the latest weapons to blow up the enemys
warships? Should they seize the jails where their political prisoners are kept?
Or should they dare to imagine the greatest feat of all: to simultaneously set off
fifty state-of-the-art bombs in their enemys city and reduce its financial center
to ashes.
The time: 1876. The men: Irish nationalists who see it as their sacred duty to
free their homeland from English rule using high explosives, the cutting-edge
weapons of their day. The outcome: A series of bombing attacks on London
that terrorize its inhabitants, leaving more than 100 people injured and six
dead.
Despite popular misconceptions, terrorism is not a recent phenomenon in
American life. Nor does terrorism consist solely of foreign attacks or domestic
eruptions of isolated, pathological rage. Rather, terrorism is a current of violence, in a violent culture, on the shadowy side of militarism. As the nineteenth-century anarchist and pacifist Auberon Herbert once wrote of the
revolutionary terrorists of his day, Dynamite is not opposed to government; it
is, on the contrary, government [by force] in its most intensified and concentrated form.1 The September 11th attacks, though unprecedented in scale, are
not unprecedented in motivation or design. The Al Qaeda terrorists are not the
first to operate in the United States through secret cells, attempt to destroy an
Ann Larabee teaches American Studies at Michigan State University. She is the author of Decade of
Disaster (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and numerous essays that explore the ways in which U.S.
society has made meaning of technological disaster. She is currently working on a biography of nineteenth-century bomber William King Thomas and a full-length history of technology and terrorism in the
United States. She can be reached at <larabee@msu.edu>.
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Spring 2003, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 21-38.

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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2003

economic center, target a transportation system, organize significant funds,

plan for mass death, run training schools, produce weapons manuals, and master
new weapons technologies. Fantasies of stealing high technologies and using
them to destroy a larger, more powerful enemy are as old as the nation itself.
Violent radical groups are often at odds with each other, and even internally
divided over political ideas, but they are astonishingly consistent in their technological enthusiasms. They dream of being able to cook up powerful weapons at home, translating complicated technical information into a common
language that can be easily understood by amateurs. And they have sometimes succeeded. In the United States, where technological development has
long been valued as the very spirit of republican liberty and independence,
military technologies have not been protected from this strong democratic
impulse. Throughout the nations history, radical individuals and groups
have claimed a right to information about even the most dangerous weapons so that power is not concentrated in the hands of a few. And the official domains of military research and development have rarely been able
to keep secrets. Information eventually leaks from these domains and circulates through an underground of amateurs and enthusiasts, including political extremists. When a group organizes to carry out such technological projects,
it becomes militarized in other ways. Military technologies come with a price:
a group must reorganize into a secret military research unit and harden itself to
violence.
For the purposes of this essay, I am limiting my investigation of terrorism to
organized groups that use technological means to violently confront a ruling
power. Four kinds of terrorist groups have operated in the United States. Domestic terrorists, like Tim McVeigh and his collaborators, have used violence
to bring attention to their grievances against the state. Covert military branches,
like the Confederate Torpedo Bureau, have supplemented regular military operations with attacks on civilians. migr nationalist groups, like the nineteenth-century Fenians, have used the United States as a base for organizing
terrorist acts in their homelands. And most recently, international terrorist groups
like Al Qaeda have organized small cells for purposes of waging asymmetric
war against the United States. A more expansive view of terrorism in the United
States might fruitfully cover acts of state terror, such as the massacre at My Lai;
insurrections and rebellions, such as John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry; and
racist acts of violence against neighbors. These uses of terror raise different
issues about the relationship between the state and its citizens. I have also
focused especially on the development of modern terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, driven by a particular combination of new
weapons technology, revolutionary philosophy, expansion of state power, rise
of the international print media, migration of people and ideas, and widespread
education. Almost all the features of todays terrorism, including its ruthless
visions and technological fascinations, can be found here, though this history
is not widely known.
Most members of radical groups do not turn to direct violence, though they
may help create political contexts for violence. And because most radical groups
see themselves as part of an historical process, they wish to preserve an image

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23

of themselves as the subjects, rather than agents, of violence. There are shifting
claims in the historical reputation of these groups, as some rise to the level of
patriotic freedom fighters while others sink into obscurity, of interest only to
specialists. Therefore, the technological history of terrorism has been subordinated to competing political histories, where reputations are made or lost. Furthermore, the United States has at various times struggled with the tension
between civil liberties and the violence of political groups in an ideally free
society. The government and the national press have often inflated the power
and numbers of such groups, a situation that encourages public violence while
justifying severe, unjust repression that extends well beyond violent participants. Therefore, it is difficult to discuss a history of terrorism without fueling
exaggeration. My aim, however, is to demystify these activities by placing
them in a continuity of technological fantasies and failed ideas, within a culture that believes in the power of technology, almost as a religious faith. Technological history reveals quite a different set of continuities in radical history,
as groups share weapons ideas across divergent political lines.
In looking at these groups together and setting aside political advocacy,
three significant trends emerge in their use of technology. First, there has been
an incremental loss of ethical sanctions against targeting civilians. In the past,
U.S. terrorist groups often imagined their attacks resulting in mass deaths but,
for various reasons, very few casualties ever resulted and were never the principle object. Now, a spectacular loss of life has become the apotheosis of political violence. Remote technologies that remove the terrorist from the scene
of violence have helped foster this ruthlessness, though the suicide terrorist
erases the classic use of technology as a prosthetic. Second, terrorist groups
have never been able to successfully deploy state-of-the-art weapons, though
they have tried mightily. However, with greater technological proficiency, which
requires a high degree of knowledge and organization, terrorists may more
effectively deploy advanced weapons in the near future. And third, terrorist
groups used to worry much more about their public reputation as they drew
the attention of an expanding print media. The presss condemnation of terrorism often led groups to desist from violence. Now, terrorists exploit the
powerful, global, visual power of mass media, which makes violence seem
cinematic and emphasizes its dramatic symbolism. Technological developments have helped foster these changes.
The development and deployment of disguised, remote technologies, through
which an insurgent group could surprise and damage a much greater military
power, is already evident in early national history. During the Revolutionary
War, David Bushnell invented not only one of the first submarines, but also
clockwork bombs, disguised in ordinary wooden casks, to be floated down
the Delaware towards British-occupied Philadelphia. The absurd outcome of
this plan became known as the Battle of the Kegs. According to an article in
a patriot newspaper, written by Francis Hopkinson who probably participated
in the scheme, the floating kegs caused considerable alarm in the citys inhabitants who wildly speculated that they were anything from a species of Trojan
horse to a variation of Greek fire that would set the whole river on fire. According to Hopkinson, some inhabitants believed that the kegs were kindled

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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2003

by secret machinery, constructed through art magic, and would of themselves

ascend the wharves in the night time, and roll all flaming through the streets,
destroying everything in their way.2 In a satirical song that became a favorite
of Washingtons army, Hopkinson portrayed British soldiers as ridiculously
firing on any flotsam in the river. The only casualties seem to have been two
unfortunate boys who rowed out to investigate one of the mysterious objects
and tripped the detonator.
The Battle of the Kegs contained all the elements of what we now consider
modern terrorist action. Becoming a lasting hero of freedom fighting and republican technology, Bushnell and his collaborators, all Yale students and
alumni, put their faith in science and invention to overcome a much more
powerful oppressor, targeting British warships as the most visible representation of that power. They hoped that wits would outdo force. Although Bushnell
clearly hoped to destroy ships in the Philadelphia harbor, the psychological
impact of new, unexpected, remotely deployed weapons came to outweigh
any substantial damage to life and property. Disrupting an entire city, terror
entered the scene as a pleasing goal in itself, revealing the psychological weaknesses of the enemy. The mystery surrounding the kegs briefly struck fear of
the hidden attackers, inflating their power. The publicity surrounding the event
had more impact than the actual success of the weapons technology. And the
dead victims were inconsequential to the outcome and even blamed for their
own destruction. In his account of events, written more than ten years later,
Bushnell mentions only that one of the [bombs] blew up a boat, with several
persons in it who imprudently handled it too freely.3
While Bushnell did not deliberately aim for the boys, the targeting of innocent civilians would become an accepted strategy of covert action in the midnineteenth century. One of the first terrorist acts aimed at passenger vessels
was organized in 1850 by a group of farmers near Jackson, Michigan. They
were enraged at the new fifteen-mile-per-hour rail run by the Michigan Central
Railroad, because trains were slamming into their wandering sheep and cows.
Resenting the railroad company because it refused to compensate them for
their losses, the farmers, led by Abel Fitch, plotted to blow up tracks with
powder kegs and percussion caps and carry out other acts of sabotage, including train derailments. The violence escalated as the railroad company continued to refuse to pay the farmers for their losses. Filled with vengeful
righteousness against these incursions on their land, they finally resorted to
scientific arson, using an ingeniously made timed match, developed for the
conspirators by a local dentist. With this invention, they planned to burn down
the Michigan Central Railroads freight depot in Detroit. Thirty-seven men
were tried in Detroit for the crime; twelve were convicted and Fitch died in
prison during the trial. At one point, the group planned to kill 100-150 passengers arriving for the State Fair in Ann Arbor, and warned their friends to avoid
the trains. At the trial, a witness said that he had asked one of the conspirators
how he could target innocent people. The conspirator explained, Damn em
they need not ride over the rail if they dont want to be killed. 4 Still, the
plotters appear to have lost the stomach for mass murder, or were caught before they could succeed.

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25

Although rural riots and rebellions against governmental authority were

common in American life, 5 the Great Railroad Conspiracy, as it came to be
known, had some unusual features. The conspirators, many of them prosperous
farmers and town founders, were interested in developing sophisticated technological means for remotely carrying out their violence, ensuring success
while remaining far from the crime. They not only hired known criminals to
carry out the attack, but also provided relatively safe means. The arsonists
could set the match, timed with a cotton wick, and leave the scene. This violence by design would become a common feature of terrorist activities, and would
eventually allow more ruthless attacks on innocent people who happened to gather
at public monuments and institutions, the usual targets of political violence. Furthermore, the conspirators were theoretically willing to include their white neighbors, including women and children, among their planned targets. Although
violence against blacks, Indians, Chinese, and other non-whites was accepted and
even encouraged in many parts of the country, violence against white women and
children was considered cowardly, unmanly, and uncivilized. That the conspirators even discussed such measures suggests a rage that took them well beyond
any accepted rituals of violence, as the target expanded from the Michigan Central Railroad to encompass anyone who rode on it.
The Fitch conspirators operated locally and their activities were limited. But
Confederate operations in the Civil War overcame many cultural sanctions
against terrorist action and its technologies. New disguised weapons, such as
the landmine and the clockwork bomb, violated the ideal code of honorable,
manly battle. However, they were quickly accepted in the field and later inspired imitation by many small insurgent groups without the means for largescale military development. The South achieved some spectacular successes
with covert weapons. One Confederate operative, John Maxwell, delivered a
clockwork bomb disguised as a candle box to an ammunitions barge at Union
headquarters in City Point, Virginia. The resulting explosion resulted in over
300 casualties. Bombs disguised as lumps of coal were placed in the fuel bins
of steamboats, leading to the loss of about eighty of those craft on the Mississippi River. Perhaps most memorable was the introduction of the landmine
and the booby-trap bomb during the war. Union soldiers recorded in their
letters, diaries, and reminiscences their alarming, and occasionally deadly,
encounters with these bombs as they entered a city abandoned by the Confederate army in retreat. One wrote, You could not tip over a barrel, or anything
else, but what had a string attached to a big shell, or some kind of torpedoes,
that would kill five or six men every time they did anything or moved anything. 6 A lieutenant recorded that when he and his men entered a house to
gather trophies, they found that attractive objects, including guns and a coffeepot which most persons would seize as soon as they saw it, were boobytrapped with trip wires and shells.7 In the midst of the unprecedented violence
of the Civil War, the graphically burning and dismembering power of these
bombs were branded into the minds of their witnesses. As Federal officers
ruminated on their encounters with landmines, they concluded that they operate in all cases as much by their moral effect as by actual destruction of
life.8 The promise of the hidden bomb was that it might kill only a few, but

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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2003

psychologically paralyze a great many more. And with little investment of

time, materials, or money, any group with limited means could deploy bombs
for the same psychic impact.
Portable and easy to disguise, these small bombs were taken up by loosely
organized groups of Southern sympathizers and agents, some of whom had
little compunction about killing civilians. It was thus debated in the Confederate government whether guerrilla and terrorist warfare should be reined in and
organized to avoid simple bloodlust. A pamphlet written in 1863 by Bernard
Janin Sage, an advisor to Confederate military officers, laid out a plan for the
organization of a band of destructionists who would design, manufacture,
and deploy bombs for sabotage. Sage imagined that these men of genius and
enterprise would blow up Union ships and railroads. Imagining two scenarios
for terrorism, Sage wrote, one blows up the first train, doing no more damage
than can be repaired in a few hours, or perhaps, killing women, children, and
non-combatants, while the other, infinitely preferable, blows up given trains
for great strategic purpose.9 Various military units, including a Torpedo Bureau, were formed to carry out this second purpose. Thus, despite Sages
slight ethical caution, the Confederate government nurtured a culture of terrorist violence and technological development that would lead to infamous schemes
to kill non-combatants and influence insurgent groups during and after the
war.
Toward the end of the Civil War, as ethical niceties further eroded, desperate
plans to attack civilians were conceived by loosely organized Confederate
saboteurs and secret agents, motivated by revenge and the desire to demoralize their enemy. Confederate agents experimented with the means for mass
destruction, such as using the chemical agent Greek fire in an attempt to
burn down New York City. 10 Since Greek fire took time to combust when
exposed to air, the conspirators were supposed to open their vials near flammable materials in twelve hotels and escape before fires broke out. However,
they had no experience with the chemical, and the fires were relatively small
and easily extinguished. Another plot to infect several northern cities with
yellow fever was organized by Dr. Luke Blackburn, who would become governor of Kentucky. Posing as a philanthropist physician in Bermuda, Blackburn
collected bed linens and shirts soiled with vomit and other excretions from his
yellow fever patients, garbing them in heavy sweaters and piling them with
blankets to promote more perspiration. He then hired men to carry this presumably toxic cargo to Halifax, a center of Confederate secret service activity,
where agents would be sent to distribute the garments in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Norfolk, and other cities. According to an informant, contaminated silk shirts were to be delivered to Lincoln. Blackburn was
tried in Canada for violating its neutrality laws, but was acquitted because it
could not be proven that any trunks arrived there.11
Once again, the intended terrorist action was carried out through a weapon
by design, a deliberate production and collection of a contagious agent. However, the weapon was based on faulty science. Yellow fever is transmitted by
mosquito, not by contagion, as was the common belief at the time. Though
Blackburns attempt was shocking and sensational, biological warfare was not

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27

unknown in military history. In 1763, during Pontiacs Rebellion, British soldiers at Fort Pitt gave smallpox-infected blankets to two representatives of the
Delawares during negotiations, and oral history suggest that there were other
incidents of biological warfare waged against Indians. There were rumors,
too, that the British were spreading smallpox to American soldiers during the
Revolutionary War, a weapon made possible by the new science of inoculation.12 What distinguishes the yellow fever plot is the degree of international
organization by a conspiratorial group, the deliberateness in the development
of a biological agent, and the choice of concentrated urban populations as
targets.
Developed during the Civil War, covert technologies, such as new bomb
designs, encouraged the rise of violence against public targets. With postwar
development of high explosives, such as dynamite, nitroglycerine, and guncotton, the potential for such weapons escalated dramatically. Dynamite and
other high explosives, combined with the innovative bomb designs of the Civil
War, allowed for greater concealment of weapons and increased potential for
destruction. Deployed from a distance, disguised as an ordinary object, the
covert dynamite bomb had an aura of much greater force than the group actually possessed in weapons or numbers. Sold for their massive force and easy
portability, high explosives were the eras widely promoted weapons of mass
destruction. Like today, many feared they might get into the wrong hands. As
Josiah Cooke, a chemistry professor at Harvard, explained: Great power in
the hands of ignorant or careless men implies great danger. Sleepless vigilance
is the condition under which we wield all the great powers of civilization, and
we cannot except that the power of nitro-glycerine will be any exception to the
general rule.13 Unlike gunpowder, which required a mill for production, nitro
and chlorate explosives could be made at home with materials freely available.
Therefore, high explosives had a twofold attraction instantly recognized by
revolutionary groups: they represented an expanding industrial power and an
extraordinarily democratic weapon. Dynamite represented a power that could
be stolen, shifting the balance to the side of the oppressed. Promoting terrorist
uses of dynamite, Irish-American revolutionary leader Jeremiah ODonovan
Rossa evoked both science and religion for his Irish Catholic audience: I
regard these discoveries in powerful explosives as the result of the working of
that eternal justice that is an active agent in the government of the universe. It
is a revelation of God to the oppressed nations of the earth.14 In his famous
letter to the anarchist paper Alarm, Gerhard Lizius called dynamite the sublime stuff: In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe,
science has done its best work. 15 As historian Carl Smith writes, anarchist
bomb-talking was a confidence builder that made anarchists [and plenty of
their enemies] believe that they were a force to contend with, and that their
social vision was possible, practical, and real.16
But behind these broad imaginative dimensions were focused technological practices. Making weapons represented technical mastery, an ability to
order group identity around a technical project. These activities raised workers craft knowledge and skill to a higher status, since making bombs and high

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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2003

explosives was associated with a high tech professional activity. Entranced

with science and technology as liberatory agents, nineteenth-century revolutionaries sponsored bomb-making schools and circulated weapons instructions, a
history that has been largely overlooked. Dynamite lectures, classes, and even
schools operated throughout the country to train Cuban, Irish, and socialistanarchist revolutionaries. Instructions and instructors crossed over from one
group to another, as information was shared across political lines. The dynamite instructors were able to master explosives chemistry from a widely available scientific literature and purvey this to students without much formal
education.
The revolutionaries most successful in this education were the Fenians: Irish
nationalists living in the United States, who organized terror campaigns against
England between 1880 and 1886. Some of the leaders of this campaign had
fought in the Civil War on either the Union or Confederate side, and were
aware of new covert bomb-making technologies and ways of deployment.
Like many who came after them, the Fenians promoted themselves as the
inheritors of the American Revolution, when people learned to make gunpowder domestically to fight the British. For example, the Fenians imagined that
they were like the peasants of America in 76, who studied the chemistry of
saltpeter and gunpowder to win their war, just as Irish revolutionaries would
back up their threats with hard substances.17 The resources of civilization,
as Irish nationalists called advanced weapons, were concentrated in the hands
of imperial governments who suppressed nationalist struggles and liberation
movements. To steal these resources of civilization, to adapt their manufacture
to household arts, was to dismantle hierarchies of knowledge and control.
In 1876, the nations centennial year, a small group of Irish nationalists
gathered in New York City to set out a new terrorist strategy for seizing the
resources of civilization and defeating English rule in their homeland. The
instigator was Patrick Crowe, who sent $50 to Patrick Ford, bellicose editor of
the Irish World, a paper devoted to the cause of Irish nationalism. Crowes
donation was intended as seed money to support terrorist acts against England, and Ford, with a few like-minded patriots, agreed to advertise for more
contributions, printing $300 worth of circulars to generate public interest.
Jeremiah ODonovan Rossa, a charismatic and bombastic revolutionary who
had immigrated to the United States after surviving two harsh political imprisonments in Ireland, stepped in as secretary of the Skirmishing Fund. Working with two other trustees, including Fords brother, Rossa had a modest plan
to rescue other political prisoners in Ireland, or at most to attack British shipping. But one of the other trustees had a more sweeping violence in mind: to
give London to flames and reduce Liverpool to disaster.18
Convinced of the efficacy of urban terror, the Skirmishing Funds trustees
began to seriously plan formation of small groups of men, ten to twelve at
most, who would not know each other but who would answer to a central
captain. Able to easily infiltrate the enemy because of their language, skincolor, dress [and] general manners,19 these groups would attempt a simultaneous terrorist action, setting fire to London in fifty different places using
incendiaries and explosives. The resulting chaos would destroy Londons

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financial center. The plotters imagined the scene: The centre of trade is demoralized; securities tumble down to zero; the Bulls and Bears of the Stock
Exchange are in inextricable confusion; confidence is fled; and speculation is
at an end.20 The prospect of killing many people in these attacks was rationalized as a necessity of war, comparatively light, the potential losses not onetenth that recorded in the least of the smallest battles between the North and
South.21 Once the skirmishers had struck their enemys economic base, they
could step back and coolly watch the terror and blind, impotent rage of the
financially ruined landlords and monarchs. Then the land would return to both
the English and Irish people who, on this leveled ground, would make peace
with each other.
Although the full scale of this violent program was never realized, over the
next decade the Fenian skirmishers under two competing organizations the
United Irishmen and the Clan na Gael managed to carry out a number of
sporadic dynamite attacks on British monuments, government buildings, and
train stations. Like the Civil Wars covert bombers, their primary aim was to
exhaust and demoralize rather than kill the enemy, though indiscriminate killing was a possibility that would not be shirked. In all, approximately eighty
people were injured in these attacks and four died, three of them dynamiters
attempting to blow up London Bridge. However, the potential for much greater
loss of life was clearly present in daytime and early evening attacks on city
trains and train stations, the Tower of London, London Bridge, and Trafalgar
Square. Because of police vigilance, inept bomb making, and lack of coordination, these attempts mostly failed but, for several years, the skirmishers caused
considerable anxiety in Englands government and its urban populations. They
also struck fear in the United States, since they placed high explosive bombs
on transatlantic passenger ships and at tourist sites where Americans might be
injured or killed.
The United Irishmen and the Clan na Gael ran dynamite schools and training sessions across the country to prepare their skirmishers for these terrorist
attacks. Thomas Gallagher, who had learned medicine while working at an
iron foundry, taught chemistry for the Clan na Gael, and then went to England
in 1883 to set up an explosives laboratory in a kitchen in Birmingham. At least
three other men, trained in the dynamite schools, joined him there. In London
cabs and trains, they transported hundreds of pounds of the hand-mixed explosives, placed in rubber medical bags and fishing waders. The plot was foiled
by the Birmingham police and Scotland Yard, who captured six men and 500
pounds of nitroglycerine, enough to blow up every house and street in London, from one end to the other.22 Taking Gallaghers place as dynamite instructor was Joe Ryan, a bartender, who was also a proficient chemist. Ryan
was reported to have developed a chemical weapon that he tested in a Cincinnati stockyard, killing three dogs and two cats.23
But the most well known dynamite instructor was Professor Mezzeroff, who
may have provided the model for Joseph Conrads detonator-obsessed Professor in his novel The Secret Agent.24 Mezzeroff gave frequent public lectures
extolling dynamite, and traveled across the country teaching and inspiring
would-be revolutionaries. Witnessing one of Mezzeroffs lectures at Cooper

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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2003

Union, a correspondent for The New York Times called him the dynamite
chemist, a chaplain in a parish of pirates. 25 Sporting a brown wig and a
waxed black mustache, Mezzeroff, told his audience that he could teach young
revolutionists to make dynamite from their old hats and boots. Waving his
handkerchief, he explained that he could transform it into dynamite in twenty
minutes. In the Chicago anarchist paper Alarm, Mezzeroff claimed, I can take
tea and similar articles of food from the family table and make explosives with
them more powerful than Italian gunpowder, the strongest gunpowder there
is. 26 Despite the theatrical exaggerations and public appeal to thrill, these
claims that ordinary household items could be transformed into explosives
had some truth. And Mezzeroff put his boasts into practice, teaching his students how to make nitroglycerine, Greek fire, and other explosives, and writing his own informally-circulated textbook, Prescriptions to Students, containing
laboratory instructions. In 1884, the nervous Spanish consul in Washington,
Juan Valera, complained to Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen that
Mezzeroff was teaching scientific warfare to Cuban revolutionaries in the United
States: They, in their turn, feeling grateful for his services, regard him as a
public benefactor, and place him in the same category with Gutenberg and
Washington. They say that a single Cuban revolutionist, having been properly
instructed by the learned Russian, can blow up one or two thousand Spanish
soldiers quite conveniently and cheaply, and almost without danger.27
Because of lenient weapons laws, a free press, and the absence of effective
federal law enforcement, the U.S. government mostly overlooked these activities, and harbored various violent groups planning attacks on their homelands.
However, with the spread of propaganda of the deed and scientific warfare to anarchist and socialist groups in the United States, revolutionary violence became a domestic problem, aimed at the robber barons of an expanding
economy. A culture of terrorist violence was already present in the aftermath
of the Civil War, its ideas and technologies dispersed through print media and
informal exchange among weapons makers and political radicals, especially
in urban areas. The arrival of new revolutionary ideas from Europe gave this
activity a new vision and direction, as a way for struggling workers to counter
violent suppression of labor actions and strikes. European revolutionaries developed war science to assassinate rulers, and Narodnaya Volyas successful
bombing attempt on Czar Alexander IIs life in 1881 was inspiring for many.
However, over the course of the next fifty years, the definition of the target
expanded so that not just single rulers, but a ruling class, became the object of
attacks. This was a fuzzy set, and could be contracted and expanded to encompass various populations, including whole cities where the revolution was
expected to unfold.
Edward Nathan-Ganzs The An-archist Socialistic-Revolutionary Review,
printed in Boston in 1881, included in its first issue an article calling for a
holy war against capitalists using Revolutionary War Science. The piece
discussed the Paris Communes tactical failures, and suggested that the progress
of chemical science would play a decisive part in winning the revolution. It
laid out plans for transforming urban gas and sewer pipes into underground
bombs, subjecting the enemy to a terrible fate at the will of the engineer.28

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Sewer lines could be mined with dynamite and set off with a single detonator.
Intermitters could be used to cordon off sections of gas line that would then be
pumped with atmospheric air, creating a terrible store of fire damp that would
set the city alight.29 Or, highly toxic arsenic could be introduced into the pipes,
poisoning the city. Such visions exploited fears of the new public utility networks that were transforming cities into clean, well-lighted places, but also
subjecting them to new threats of accidental fire, shock, and poison.30 The
next issue of An-archist was to run a second part of Revolutionary War Science on explosives, but the police arrested Nathan-Ganz on charges of running a phony mail-order company selling watches overseas.31
One of Nathan-Ganzs collaborators was Johann Most.32 Most is frequently
credited with bringing propaganda of the deed to the United States. Born in
Bavaria in 1846, and a bookbinder by trade, Most rose in the European socialist movement as a passionate speaker, known for his satire and wit. Through
the course of his life, he was imprisoned several times for inciting violence,
especially regicide, in his writings and speeches, and under government persecution moved to England and finally to the United States. An organization
Most helped found in the United States, the International Working Peoples
Association (IWPA), set upon a course of violence to overthrow the capitalist
state by creating a network of destructive agencies of a modern military character that will defy any and all attempts of suppression.33 While Most presented a vision of bombing the rich at their opulent banquets, the IWPA extolled
making bombs for urban street fighting against police and private security
forces. The Chicago IWPAs violent rhetoric and confrontations with a factory
owner and city police finally culminated during a peaceful anarchist gathering
in Haymarket Square. When a phalanx of police confronted the crowd, someone, probably an anarchist, threw a bomb, killing eight officers. During the
public hysteria that followed, four men were hung for the crime, deemed guilty
solely because of their public advocacy of violence, including the circulation
of weapons instructions. While evidence existed that one of the alleged conspirators, Louis Lingg, was actually making bombs, no direct link was found
between these activities and the bomb thrown at Haymarket.
However limited its application, bomb making was taking place among anarchists. To stimulate this activity, advocates of scientific warfare, including
Most, reached a much wider audience by circulating technical weapons manuals. When Most arrived in New York in 1882, at the invitation of the Socialist
Revolutionary Club, small bomb-making collectives were already active, emulating the Irish nationalists. Most stimulated this trade by publishing instructions for making bombs and explosives in his newspaper, Freiheit, which were
later compiled in his well-known compendium, Science of Revolutionary Warfare, widely distributed at anarchist gatherings and picnics.34 Science of Revolutionary Warfare adapted technical processes to ordinary household tools,
materials, and activities. Iron pots, porcelain vessels, wooden ladles, clotheslines, lemon squeezers, coffeepots, cleaning fluids, and the like were enlisted
in Mosts instructions to make Greek fire, dynamite, gun cotton, nitroglycerine, and mercury and silver fulminates. Most explained that the complicated
apparatus and obscure scientific language used by explosives manufacturers

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mystified these processes and made them seem more dangerous than they
were. With its use of common implements and its easily understood activities of
stirring, kneading, squeezing, and drying, the kitchen recipe delivered military
knowledge into the hands of revolutionaries for their own experimentation,
development, and use.
Anarchist publications like Mosts Science of Revolutionary Warfare and
Luigi Galleanis La Salute in Voi! (Health Is in You) were the first terrorist
manuals, establishing a genre that would continue through William Powells
Anarchist Cookbook of 1972 and a host of other Loompanics and Paladin
Press how-to bombs and explosives books, some of which were introduced at
the trial of Tim McVeigh. Works circulated through the Internet have included
white supremacist Larry Wayne Harriss handbook on bacteriological warfare,
Columbine shooter Ed Harriss short anarchist cookbook, and the Army of
Gods manual for sabotaging abortion clinics. From its earliest days, under the
banners of republican technology and free speech, paramilitary weapons handbooks have translated complicated technical and scientific information into a
household vernacular: Make gunpowder from maple syrup and plastique from
aspirin! They have also featured an alternative history of covert weapons
design, from exploding canes and cigars, incendiary letters, and poison daggers to hand grenades and package bombs. Writing and reading such texts
were, from the beginning, radical acts, as the very theft of information from
official knowledge domains threatened paternalistic corporate and government
secrecy. But in all of these handbooks, the harm to persons is barely mentioned, subordinated to the enthusiasms of technical know-how.
Fortunately, while terrorist instruction manuals have been feared and suppressed, they have always promised much more than they could deliver. As
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century revolutionaries discovered,
mastering the art of making and deploying bomb was more challenging than
they imagined. High explosives and hidden, automatically detonated devices
have unpredictable consequences. And the more complex the device, the more
unpredictable it is. Even if bombs are directly mailed to potential victims, they
are often opened by the wrong people: maids, secretaries, wives, or postal
workers. And bombers often destroy themselves when making and delivering
their devices. There is no guarantee that bombs will go off as planned, since
timers often malfunction. When followers of the militant anarchist Luigi Galleani
carried out an extensive series of bombings against police stations, churches,
federal courthouses, and other institutions between 1914 and 1920, they often
destroyed themselves and victimized people unrelated to their fight against the
state. During their mail bomb campaign, which targeted thirty prominent men, the
only victim was a maid. When they attempted to deliver packages to the doors of
their victims, they ended up killing an elderly security guard and injuring a small
child. And one of the bombers, Carlo Valdinoci, blew himself to pieces when he
delivered twenty pounds of dynamite to the Attorney Generals door.35
If the unpredictability of a dynamite campaign threatened women and children, the emotional response always defeated any political message. With their
callous cost-benefit analysis of possible casualties, the Clan na Gael was willing, in 1885, to bomb the Tower of London while a large number of women

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and children were taking advantage of free admission day. The Philadelphia
Record reported, Many of these little ones had their faces and hands very
badly torn by the broken glass and flying splinters. The most piteous sight . . .was
afforded by these little ones, with their pale faces and bleeding heads. Yells are
heard on every side to Lynch the villains! Roast the fiends!36 Newspaper
editors across the country responded immediately with strong condemnations
of the dynamiters, calling them human fiends, malignant and brutal idiots,
warped and exaggerated monomaniacs, and wretches incapable of conceiving what manhood means. That was the last bombing carried out by the
Clan na Gael, as the group imploded from internal tensions and other Irish
nationalists turned away from these self-defeating spectacles of violence to
work through other political channels.
However, the idea of targeting public institutions and tourist sites with hidden bombs has remained a feature of political attacks, escalating throughout
the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In 1920, a horse and cart holding a dynamite bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing thirty people and injuring around 200 more. Circulars were found near the scene from the American
Anarchist Fighters that read, remember / we will not tolerate / any longer /
free the political prisoners/ or it will be / sure death for all of you.37 A pipe
bomb in a backpack exploded at the 1997 Olympic games in Atlanta, killing
one person and injuring more than a hundred more. And the Oklahoma City
bomb, delivered in an ordinary Ryder truck, took the lives of 168 people. The
problems and dangers of acquiring and making explosives, assembling bombs,
gingerly transporting them, and deploying them without detection have been
outweighed by the spectacular possibilities of a vast, public show of power.
Publicity is both the greatest weapon and the greatest liability of groups
planning terrorist attacks. Modern terrorism is, by and large, a creature of publicity, since it depends on the heavily symbolic act, a fusion, as Jean Baudrillard
writes, of the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism.38
Since only a limited number of people experience the direct effects of a bomb
in a cafe, or even the destruction of a tall building, panic is generated through
the vicarious experience of the event, the spread of its image through media.
Without spectacle, without attribution, the event fades into mystery and obscurity. Unquestionably, the lethal violence of terrorism has expanded in tandem
with global media. The technological means for bringing about mass death
have been available for centuries. For example, the explosive mix of fertilizer
and fuel oil used in Tim McVeighs attack in Oklahoma City was widely known
from the late nineteenth century. However, before global television, terrorists
may have dreamed of mass murder but they were psychologically restrained
in carrying it out. Now the desire for spectacle has outweighed any restraint.
Two waves of global communications expansion have propelled this union
between media and terrorism. In the late nineteenth century, an expanding
international news media sensationalized attempted assassinations of European rulers and police officials, and anarchist bombings of theaters, cafes,
banks, police stations, and government offices. Anti-imperial, anti-colonial,
and anti-capitalist movements often heard about each other from the news. But
perhaps more importantly, radicals were able to produce their own newspapers

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and pamphlets and circulate them to an international audience. An increasing ocean traffic between continents facilitated distribution, as texts freely
prepared in the United States were smuggled into more repressive nations
overseas. Similarly, in recent times, the introduction of the Internet and global
communications networks have allowed for a massive exchange of images
that allows an unprecedented dissemination of information and event.
However, a tension lies between a violent groups desire to publicize its
abilities and goals and the need to protect it from surveillance, arrest, and
violent retaliation. Different audiences must be reached: a group membership
must be trained and inspired, a public must be terrified and persuaded, a police
force must be deflected. Exploiting news organs, political rhetoric must be
both dissembling and authentic, and thus becomes heavily coded with signs
recognizable to insiders but opaque to outside observers. A relationship also
exists between radical groups who promote violence in a very theatrical way
and those who are secretively engaged in actual weapons making and deployment. The former provides a violent rhetorical context and public excitement
that the latter can exploit to give meaning to their actions. Thus, in his newspaper United Irishmen, Jeremiah ODonovan Rossa could openly threaten absurd violence and tweak the British for their paranoia, while clandestine
associates carried out bombings that seemed to realize these very threats. During the countercultural guerrilla theater activities of the 1960s and 1970s, violence was often a subtext, playing on mainstream perceptions of uncontrolled,
riotous youth. For example, when Abbie Hoffman carried out his brilliant death
of money on Wall Street, throwing dollar bills down into the pit and causing
a greedy scramble, he called himself George Metesky. 39 Metesky, also known
as the Mad Bomber, had carried out a series of vengeful bombings in New
York City during the 1940s and 1950s. He was an anti-hero of the counterculture, as was Marion Delgado, a small boy who derailed a freight train in Italy
with a brick. 40 Meanwhile, members of the Weathermen and other groups
were reading explosives manuals and building bombs, some with grand plans
of razing the Pentagon, IBM, and Boeing, transforming theatrical satire into
apocalyptic vision.
In the United States, efforts to suppress radical groups sharing of information and exploitation of mass media began in the 1880s. The first laws passed
to control homemade weapons making were the dynamite laws of 1885, aimed
at curbing bomb manufacturing among Irish-American and anarchist revolutionaries. Passed by seven state legislatures, these laws not only prohibited the
manufacture of nitroglycerine and dynamite for use against persons and property anywhere in the world, but also included clauses against assisting such
manufacture by skill or labor. In 1886, Mosts Science of Revolutionary
Warfare was implicitly condemned at the Haymarket trial, where it was introduced as damning evidence against the anarchists. One of the doomed defendants, Albert Parsons, in his speech to the court, rightly suggested that bomb
making information could be readily found in the Chicago daily newspapers. And, arguing from his jail cell where he had been imprisoned for
incendiary speech, Most himself argued that Science of Revolutionary Warfare had been transformed into a literary satan [sic] that scared juries and

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judges alike into the most barbaric convictions.41 Sentenced to a year in prison
for disturbing the peace because of incendiary articles in his magazine Freiheit,
Most publicly appealed to fair play: if governments could publish and circulate
weapons information, so could anarchists. In 1918, weapons-making instructions were swept up in the suppression of radical literature under the Sedition
Act that prohibited any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language or
any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United
States. Similarly, the Alien Registration Act of 1940 targeted written or printed
matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or
propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States
by force or violence. Recent efforts to suppress violent, seditious literature
have been focused on the Internet. 42 Just as the nineteenth-century international print media made circulation of weapons instructions widely available
and inspired revolutionaries across the world, so have networked computers.
And the recent USA Patriot Act and changes to the Attorney General Guidelines allow surveillance of library records, so that anarchist cookbooks and the
like may flag subversive activity. The appearance of terrorist groups has historically challenged U.S. citizens to rethink democracy, to ask to what extent a
free society can tolerate violent, dissenting members. Often, freedom of speech
and freedom of association are the grounds for this debate. Discussions of
suppressing violent speech have historically focused on often theatrical radical diatribes rather than on the perfectly legitimate texts that actually make
bomb-making possible, such as official military manuals, chemistry textbooks,
and explosives industry handbooks. When the U.S. government attempted to
suppress the publication of H-bomb plans in the Progressive, it had to withdraw its case when the court discovered that such plans were already publicly
available. Efforts to suppress speech have never been particularly effective in
stopping violence, and these symptoms of public hysteria are often short-lived,
leaving long resentments.
Even as he recognized that the callous, technically-obsessed dynamiter could
damage any effective social justice movement, the nineteenth-century anarchist Auberon Herbert spoke against the use of force machinery, such as
increased state restrictions on public meetings and the press. He argued instead that we have morally made the dynamiter; we must now morally unmake him. 43 Herberts charge was to other nonviolent anarchists within the
political movement to speak against the use of force. And it may be that this
use of the press is the most effective: members of political movements must
speak openly against violent tactics. Karl Marxs critique of violent revolution
is still one of the most compelling. He wrote of secret revolutionary societies,
whom he called the alchemists of the revolution:
They go eagerly for invented devices to achieve the revolutionary miracle: incendiary
bombs, explosive contraptions with magical powers, riots, whose effects are sure to be
all the more miraculous and awesome the less they have any rational basis. Busy with
such plot-mongering, they have no other aim than the next overthrow of the existing
government, and look with deepest disdain on a more theoretical clarification of the
workers as to their class interests.44

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Marx understood that when a radical group turns its attention to violent
technical practices like bomb making, it also shifts its identity, becomes closed
and arrogant, and loses its political worthiness. The new millenniums global
terrorists, evolved from the legacies of modern terrorism, are open to a similar
critique as they attempt to force revolutionary process through spectacles of
technological violence and great human pain.
Notes

2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.

Auberon Hebert, The Ethics of Dynamite, in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State,
and Other Essays, ed. Eric Mack (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978): 192.
Account of the Unparalleled Prowess of his Britannic Majestys Troops in an Attack Upon a
Formidable Body of Kegs in the River Delaware, American Museum 1 (1787): 55-56.
David Bushnell, General Principles and Construction of a Submarine Vessel, Transactions of
the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 303.
Report of the Great Conspiracy Case: The People of the State of Michigan Versus Alfred F. Fitch
and Others, Commonly Known as the Railroad Conspirators (Detroit: Advocate and Free
Press,1851): 98.
Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1996).
Peleg W. Blake, Letter, 5 May 1862, History of the Fifth Massachusetts Battery (Boston: Cowles,
1902): 244.
Lieut. Philips, Letter, 6 May 1862, Fifth Massachusetts Battery, 248.
William Ludlow, Bvt. Major U.S. Engineers, to Richard Delafield, Chief of Engineers, 1 Sept.
1865, in W. R. King, Torpedoes: Their Invention and Use (Washington, 1866): 3.
Bernard Janin Sage, Organization of Private Warfare, c. 1864, rpt. in William A. Tidwell, April
65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1995): 205212.
Nat Brandt, The Man Who Tried to Burn New York (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986).
Edward Steers, Jr., Risking the Wrath of God, North & South, 3.7 (2000): 59-70; Nancy Disher
Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn: Physician, Governor, Reformer (Lexington: U P of Kentucky,
1979): 34-35; The Yellow Fever Plot, New York Times, 16 May 1865: 1; J. D. Haines, Did a
Confederate Doctor Engage in a Primitive Form of Biological Warfare? Americas Civil War 12:
4 (1999): 12-14.
Elizabeth Fenn, Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffrey Amherst,
Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1552-1580; Fenn, Pax Americana: The Great Smallpox
Epidemic of 1775-83 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
Josiah P. Cooke, The New Chemistry (New York: Appleton, 1876): 224-225.
Extract, United Irishmen 25 March 1882, in Fenian Brotherhood: Incitements to Outrage in the
Fenian Press in the United States 1881-1883. Public Records Office, London, FO 5, p. 70.
T. Lizius, Dynamite, Alarm, 21 Feb. 1885: 3.
Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket
Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995): 188.
A Sacred Trust, Irish World, 30 Dec. 1876: 8. K.R.M. Shorts The Dynamite War: IrishAmerican Bombers in Victorian Britain (New York: Gill and Macmillan, 1979) gives the most
complete picture of the ODonovan Rossa and Clan na Gael campaigns, but it is mostly told from
the point of view of British law enforcement. Firsthand accounts can be found in John Devoy,
Recollections of an Irish Rebel (Shannon: Irish UP, 1929); Devoy, Devoys Post Bag, 1871-1928,
eds. William OBrien and Desmond Ryan, 2 vols. (Dublin: Fallon, 1953); Henry Le Caron,
Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: The Recollections of a Spy (Yorkshire, England: EP, 1974);
Robert Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement (London: Murray, 1906). The Fenian
Papers in the Public Records office in London not only hold correspondence with the British
consulates and representatives of the U.S. government but also copies of the United Irishman

1.

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19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

25.
26.

27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.

35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.

before 1885, dynamite pamphlets, and relevant stories from the U.S. newspapers. For other histories that touch significantly on the dynamite war see Desmond Ryan, The Phoenix Flame: A Study
of Fenianism and John Devoy (London: Arthur Barker, 1937); Terry Golway, Irish Rebel: John
Devoy and Americas Fight for Irelands Freedom (New York: St. Martins, 1998); J. A. Cole,
Prince of Spies: Henry Le Caron (1869; London: Faber and Faber, 1984): 388-389.
The Hostiles, Irish World, 28 May 1881: 5; The Skirmishing Fund, Irish World, 16 April
1881: 1.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
La Caron, 238.
Charles Clipperton to Earl Granville, 23 Sept. 1884, PRO, FO 5 1930; Clipperton to Granville, 15
Jan. 1884, PRO, FO 5 1928.
Paul Avrich, Conrads Anarchist Professor: An Undiscovered Source, Labor History, XVIII
(Summer 1977), 397-402. Avrich suggests that Conrad must have been familiar with the anarchist
press to know of Mezzeroff, but the chemist was also represented in major British newspapers such
as The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette, certainly more familiar to Conrad.
What Mezzeroff Can Do, New York Times, 22 Sept. 1887: 5. For other descriptions of Mezzeroffs
lecture style and substance, see The Burning of London, New York Sun, 20 March 1882: 1;
Dynamite as a Liberator, Philadelphia Record, 12 December 1882, 1.
Living in Williamsburg in 1885, after being released from ODonovan Rossas service, Mezzeroff
was the subject of a brutal attack by one of his students whom he could identify only as Smylie.
Right before the attack, Mezzeroff published his statement about the forty-two recipes, suggesting
that he might have been aware of impending harm. Dynamite: Professor Mezzeroff Talks About It
and Other Explosives, Alarm, 13 Jan. 1885: 4l; Mezzeroff, Chicago Tribune, 2 Feb. 1885: 2;
Prof. Mezzeroff, Chicago Tribune, 3 Feb. 1885: 2.
Juan Valera to Frederick Frelinghuysen, 17 March 1884, NA, Dept. of State, Notes from the
Spanish Legation in the U.S., 1790-1906, Micro. 59, Roll 25. Valera knew of Mezzeroffs activities
through the Cuban separatist publication La Voz de Hatuey, 1 Dec. 1884, 3.
Col. N. . . .z, Revolutionary War Science, An-archist, January 1881: 14.
Ibid.
David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1998): 95-96.
Rodanow? An Extraordinary Romance, Boston Globe, late. ed., 24 Jan. 1881: 1.
Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984): 57.
The Right to Bear Arms, Alarm, 9 Jan. 1985: 2.
The Chicago Historical Society holds an English translation, introduced as evidence at the Haymarket
trial, of Mosts Revolutionre Kriegswissenschaft: Ein Handbchlein zur Anleitung betreffend
Gebrauches und Herstellung von Nitro-Glycerin, Dynamit, Schiessbaumwolle, Knallquecksilber,
Bomben, Brandstzen, Giften u.s.w., u.s.w. (Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Manual in the
Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs,
Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc.), originally published in 1885.
Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991): 137162.
Dynamite: The Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London Badly Shattered, Philadelphia
Record, 25 Jan. 1885, 1.
Qtd. in Avrich, 206. See also Nathan Ward, The Lessons of September 11: The Fire Last Time,
American Heritage, Nov./Dec. 2001, p. 49.
Jean Baudrillard, LEsprit du Terrorisme, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002) 413.
Michael William Doyle, Staging the Revolution: Guerilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice,
1965-1968, in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, ed. Peter
Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002): 71-98.
Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days (Boston: Beacon, 2001): 144.
Mosts Manual of War, An Interview with the Arch-Heretic Concerning Its True Authorship,
Alarm, 17 Dec. 87: 1.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Report on the Availability of Bomb Making Information, April

18.

37

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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2003

1997, available electronically at <www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/bombmakinginfo.html> (27

Oct. 2002).
43. Herbert, 226.
44. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Review of A. Chenu, Les Conspirateurs and L. de la Hodde, La
Naissance de la Rpublique en fvrier, 1848, in Collected Works, Vol.10 (London : Lawrence and
Wishart, 1979): 318.