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Spider Web
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Nick Fischer
Spider
Web
The Birth of
American
Anticommunism
University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
Publication of this book is supported by grants from
the Australian Academy of the Humanities and
from Monash University.
© 2016 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fischer, Nick.
Title: Spider web : the birth of American anticommunism /
Nick Fischer.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003063| ISBN 9780252040023 (hardcover :
acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780252081514 (paperback : acid-free
paper) | ISBN 9780252098222 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Anti-communist movements—United States—
History—20th century. | Conservatism—United States—History—
20th century. | Myth—Political aspects—United States—History—
20th century. | Propaganda—United States—History—20th
century. | United States—Politics and government—1919–1933.
| United States—Politics and government—1933–1945. | BISAC:
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism &
Socialism. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | POLITICAL
SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations.
Classification: LCC E743.5 .F476 2016 | DDC 324.1/309730904—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003063
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
Chapter 1. The Origins of American Anticommunism,

ca. 1860–1917 1
Chapter 2. The First World War and the Origins of the Red Scare 26
Chapter 3. Here Come the Bolsheviks! The Russian Revolution
and the Red Scare 51
Chapter 4. The Spider Web Chart 71
Chapter 5. Mapping a Political Network: The Anticommunist
Spider Web 80
Chapter 6. John Bond Trevor, Radicals, Eugenics,
and Immigration 95
Chapter 7. Jacob Spolansky: The Rise of the Career
Anticommunist Spook 128
Chapter 8. The Better America Federation and Big Business’s
War on Labor 144
Chapter 9. Political Repression and Culture War 176
Chapter 10. Anticommunism and Political Terror 205
Chapter 11. The Mythology of Anticommunism 220
Chapter 12. Antidemocracy and Authoritarianism 244
Conclusion Legacies of the Spider Web 256
Afterword 279
Notes 283
Bibliography 315
Index 329
Illustrations
1. Wanted notices for Arnold Henkel and Jacob Breuer,

Supplement to the Spy Glass, ca. 1918. 43
2. Committee on Public Information propaganda,
Literary Digest, 10 August 1918 49
3. Lucia Maxwell’s Spider Web Chart, May 1923 75
4. John B. Trevor and the Spider Web 87
5. Jacob Spolansky and the Spider Web 88
6. Better America Federation Spider Web 89
7. Interlocking directorates of the Spider Web 91
8. John B. Trevor, Throttled!, ca. 1919 97
9. “Some Employers’ Idea of ‘Normalcy,’” cartoon, ca. 1920 151
10. Better America Federation letterhead, June 1920 157
11. The Better America Federation’s industrial propaganda
sheet, The Straight Shooter, ca. 1922 164
12. Representative Horace Mann Towner’s bills mentioned
on the cover of the Woman Patriot, March 1921 193
13. Sacco and Vanzetti cartoon, Detroit Saturday Night,
31 July 1927 213
14. Frontispiece to Richard Whitney’s Reds in America, 1924 231
Acknowledgments
S pider Web represents the culmination of many years of work. The staff of
University of Illinois Press and many mentors, friends, and relations have
helped me greatly during this time and deserve my formal thanks in these pages.
I first thank the staff, faculty board, readers, and copyeditors who work at UIP
or were engaged by the Press to work on the book. In particular, I thank Laurie
Matheson for seeing potential in the book and in me, and for persevering with
both. Jennifer Comeau has been a helpful production editor. Jennifer Holzner de-
signed two tremendous covers, presenting me with a wonderful dilemma, which
I think we got right. The design staff created a very attractive and easy-to-read
manuscript. Rosemary Feurer of the Northern Illinois University contributed
invaluable observations and generous advice at critical stages during the book’s
development, and I thank her and the Press’s anonymous reader, an expert on the
Industrial Workers of the World. Ellen Goldlust’s eagle eye improved the syntax
of the book and helped us both discover terms that have not crossed the Pacific
Ocean. And Sheila Bodell created the useful and insightful index.
I conducted considerable research for this book in various archives, where I
received valuable guidance and assistance, including at the Hoover Institution
(especially from Remy Squires), the Newberry Library in Chicago, Loyola Uni-
versity of Chicago (especially from the late Brother Michael Grace), the Library
of Congress, and the US National Archives and Records Administration. I also
found valuable material in the National Library of Australia and the State Library
of Victoria, and I thank manuscript staff at those institutions.
Much of my research was also conducted through interlibrary loans and
the assistance of the document delivery librarians at Monash University, who
promptly furnished me with every item I requested.
x • Acknowledgments
The School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash

University, where I am an Adjunct Research Associate, has supported my schol-
arship for several years, and I particularly want to thank Clare Corbould and An-
drew Markus for providing valuable advice and for arranging generous financial
support for the book’s publication. I also thank the Australian Academy of the
Humanities for its generous financial support of the book.
Mark Peel has been a wonderful supporter, offering me advice and assistance
whenever I have asked, notwithstanding the many claims on his time and his
more recent physical distance.
A number of experienced scholars read chapters of the book and helped im-
prove it. They include David Goodman of the University of Melbourne, Lois
Foster, and Phillip Deery of Victoria University. Deery has also assisted me with
various references, recommendations, and publishing opportunities, for which
I am very grateful. I thank both him and Robert Goldstein, whose Political Re-
pression in Modern America was an important reference for me, for their generous
endorsements of the book.
Jacqueline Kent read a draft of the book, and Antony Williams read chapters
and helped me plan to complete the book in the most insightful and practical
way. I greatly appreciate their assistance and astute suggestions. Peter Elliot did
his best to keep me healthy and productive.
Mary Cunnane provided indispensable advice about writing book proposals
and communicating with publishers, and she also suggested the book’s title.
A number of close friends read chapters of the book and gave me consistent
encouragement. I particularly thank Sean Coley for his reading and great sup-
port and friendship, and I also thank Isabel Ashton, Jon Cina, John Rutherford,
Paul Sendziuk, Joseph Fonte, Paul Brownrigg, Nadine Davidoff, Daniel Tofler,
and Jerome Carslake.
Many members of my family have keenly followed my progress and welfare.
I thank Shirley Hall, John Gomo, and especially Joshua, John, and Suzanne Wolf
for reading substantial sections of the book and for their enthusiastic and caring
support. My thanks go also to Daniel Fischer and Adrienne Garneau for their
support and excitement about the book.
I am tempted to purloin a line from the noted historian of anticommunism
Ellen Schrecker and describe my children Leo and Saskia as late-onset victims
of McCarthyism, on account of the amount of time I have spent working on Spi-
der Web, but in some respects this is not fair. When I wrote the first draft of the
book at home I was able to spend a great deal of time with them, so we all have
Spider Web to thank as well as to curse. They have been so excited for me, in the
sweetest ways, and I am very grateful for their enthusiasm and love.
My mother, Sandra Fischer, has been a great support to me throughout the
Acknowledgments • xi
development of the book, and I thank her for her unconditional love and confi-
dence in me and this project, as well as for studiously reading great chunks of
the book and for putting things in the right perspective, so many times.
Inevitably I have not been able to produce this book as quickly as I had hoped,
and as a result some people very dear to me will never have the chance to read
it. I particularly wish that my late grandmother Marta Fischer had been able to.
She led a remarkable life (1910–2009) through many of the events described in
this book. Whereas her brother and his German-born wife settled in the United
States, the Fischer clan has John B. Trevor (see chapter 6) to thank, in part, for
having been born and raised in Australia. Marta had more horse sense than any-
one I have ever met, and both she and my grandfather Bela were great influences
on me, morally and intellectually.
My penultimate thanks go to Gabrielle Wolf. Her support has been crucial.
She has taken joy in all my successes, shepherded me through disappointments,
and made so many sacrifices, particularly to care for our children for extended
periods, to enable me to write. A marriage is about so much more than achieve-
ments, trials, and single events, and I am very grateful to have Gabrielle’s love
and support, at all times.
Finally I thank my father, John Fischer, who has read the book more times
than anyone but me. I know he is as excited as I am to finally see it in print. I am
more grateful than he can know for the myriad ways in which he has helped me
complete the book, including, above all, in introducing me to many wonderful
historians and books, and in teaching me how to think as a scholar should.
Introduction
A great paradox lies at the heart of America’s understanding of its anticom-

munist past. On the one hand, the man who stood at the head of the an-
ticommunist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wisconsin senator
Joseph P. McCarthy, is a household name the world over. For many, his career is
synonymous with ruthless political opportunism and repression.
Yet McCarthy’s own notoriety and that of the period of the Cold War to which
he gave his name have distorted understanding of the origins and nature of
American anticommunism. Anticommunism was not the product of this postwar
environment. Rather, anticommunism originated much earlier and was created
to a significant extent by an informal network of activists who strove to entrench
their views in the core of American politics and society. Since Reconstruction,
anticommunism has linked an antilabor and laissez-faire agenda with fears of
subversion, influencing not only the evolution of conservative politics but even
the bounds within which twentieth-century politics came to be practiced.
McCarthyism’s prominence in the public mind has obscured an understanding
of the lengthy genesis of American anticommunism in three crucial ways. First,
it has focused too much attention on the activities of a handful of prominent men
who abused their positions in the US government to restrict the constitutional
liberties of thousands of American citizens. In fact, many organizations and
individuals across government, the military, the intelligence services, the police,
diverse industries, and civil society were complicit in anticommunist repression.
Second, the focus on McCarthyism has overstated the significance of the US-
USSR rivalry and the battle to protect US “national security” as determinative
influences on the development of anticommunist theory and activity.1 Third, the
preoccupation with McCarthyism has narrowed the time frame through which
xiv • Introduction
the political events of the mid-twentieth century are generally understood and
consequently has encouraged episodic interpretations of the significance of
anticommunism. As a result, the significance of the doctrine and its hold on
American politics has sometimes been understated, quarantined to particular
and short periods of time, and explained as an aberration from a more durable
political norm.
However, scholars recently have developed a more sophisticated under-
standing of the long and complex history of American anticommunism. Ellen
Schrecker, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Ira Katznelson have shown that a broad range
of organizations and individuals were involved in anticommunist repression.
They have also explored the importance of depression-era developments to
the emergence not only of Cold War anticommunism but also of the modern
conservative movement more broadly.2 This book builds on this scholarship by
exploring the significance of the period immediately following the First World
War to the emergence of anticommunism as a significant influence in US poli-
tics and culture. In particular, the volume focuses on the linkages, beliefs, and
actions of a network of anticommunists that emerged at this time, particularly
in response to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. With sup-
porters in every field of government and industry, this network stretched from the
highest echelons of power down to the smallest towns and farming communi-
ties. Seizing on the call for transnational socialist revolution issued by Russia’s
new communist government, the anticommunist movement devised the perfect
metaphor both for describing the international communist threat and for spread-
ing its counterrevolutionary message: the spider web. No image could better
represent how the disparate strands of international radicalism—anarchists,
socialists, Bolsheviks, labor unions, peace and civil liberties groups, feminists,
liberals, aliens, and Jews—intertwined and terminated at one source: the Com-
munist International in Russia.
Yet ironically, the image of the spider web perhaps most accurately describes
the interwar anticommunist movement itself. Indeed, the anticommunist spider
web was arguably a more powerful and influential “conspiracy” against Ameri-
can democracy. During the Red Scare of 1919 and then in the 1920s and 1930s,
anticommunists fought organized labor, radical political parties, and numerous
progressive causes, insisting for both sincere and opportunistic reasons that
those movements formed part of a hideous Bolshevik and anti-Christian web.
This inflammatory rationalization helped to justify anticommunists’ extreme
actions, which included murder, assault, political terror, the suppression of free
speech and industrial action, interference with educational institutions, forced
patriotism, immigration restriction, deportation, and the annulment of landmark
social legislation.
Introduction • xv
To prosecute this war, anticommunists marshaled supporters in government,

the judiciary, the intelligence community, police forces, the armed services, in-
dustry, the media, and what would now be described as society’s conservative
base. The “hard” power of the state, wielded to expel, imprison, and execute
political “radicals,” to destroy “militant” industrial unions, and to suppress un-
orthodox political and economic doctrines, was augmented and justified by the
Anticommunist Spider Web’s “soft” legacies: the ideology and mythology of
anticommunism and, just as important, the personal contacts and data files
from which McCarthy and other Cold War anticommunists so heavily drew.
This book’s focus on the interwar years (roughly 1919–41) further expands
the temporal understanding of American anticommunism as well as knowledge
about its organizational origins. In particular, the volume broadens the time
frame for examining the public-private and state-society networks that did so
much to develop and spread anticommunism. Further, it demonstrates that the
collaboration of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the American Legion
should be regarded as a prominent example of cooperative countersubversion
pursued by a broad network of state and civic organizations as well as individu-
als. This book thus follows the lead of Alfred McCoy, Schrecker, and Roy Talbert,
expanding knowledge of the scope of these networks by tracing the ways in which
myriad interwar groups and individuals were interconnected and collaborated in
the production and dissemination of anticommunism. It also extends the recent
work of Phillips-Fein, Katznelson, and Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy
Shermer, tracing the origins of these networks beyond the hostile reaction to the
New Deal into the first Red Scare and the Roaring Twenties.3
This volume also identifies the individuals and organizations that contributed
to the conception and/or promulgation of anticommunism. Anticommunism
was more elite-driven, or top-down, than has often been supposed, including
in Richard Hofstadter’s influential estimation and in other leading accounts of
the Red Scare that attribute too much agency to a never-defined and amorphous
“American people.”4 Specifically, international communism must be treated with
great caution as an explanation for the rise of American anticommunism. While
fear and loathing of communism was an important factor, many organizations
and individuals deliberately coordinated this opposition to achieve diverse po-
litical, economic, and social objectives. Members of the Anticommunist Spider
Web played a role in orchestrating the fear of communism even as many of them
succumbed to it.
While the interwar Anticommunist Spider Web is significant enough to war-
rant dedicated study, the Web also illuminates several broader historical issues.
Far from being an episodic phenomenon, anticommunism became a significant
influence in American politics shortly after the Civil War. The doctrine of anti-
xvi • Introduction
communism was deployed, more or less unceasingly from 1871, in the service
of laissez-faire economics and the suppression of labor organization as well as
other forms of social, political, and economic activity that undermined domi-
nant business and political interests. This deployment has important implica-
tions for historical debate about the origins of American anticommunism as a
response both to hostile foreign influence and to domestic political, economic,
and social conditions. Opposition to radical left-wing doctrines and organiza-
tions originating in Europe certainly provided one motive for antiradicalism.
However, anticommunism became an important factor in American politics
long before the socialist revolutions that empowered the international com-
munist movement. The two were fully compatible and eventually melded, but
anticommunism had emerged much earlier, primarily in response to domestic
tensions that grew in significance as the US economy rapidly industrialized in
the late nineteenth century.
These tensions played an important role in the emergence and sustenance of
anticommunism because the same rhetoric and actions were used to suppress
indigenous radical organizations and the anarchist and later communist parties
that were more cosmopolitan in orientation and membership. These radical
organizations and movements were maligned and attacked indiscriminately
until the emergence of the USSR subsumed other strands of the Radical Left
and simplified the crusade against the Left into a fight against (international)
communism. The story of why and how the Anticommunist Spider Web of the
interwar period advanced this crusade forms the core of this book.
The rise of American anticommunism also imparts important lessons about
how politics in America has worked since the Civil War. Organized groups in the
American polity have harnessed political and economic doctrines in the service of
specific sectional goals. Anticommunism was the product of a marriage of private
and state instruments, techniques, and philosophy used to promote laissez-faire
and the antilabor “open shop.” Anticommunism was applied with particular in-
tensity during the McCarthy era and the Red Scare, but these periods have been
emphasized only because anticommunist repression then spread beyond the
labor movement and the Radical Left into broader society. Nevertheless, those
two eras were thoroughly grounded in the politics of the preceding decades.
The evolution of anticommunism was an important element in the construc-
tion of the modern American state and corresponds with profound changes in
state, social, and corporate methods of dealing with conflict, especially economic
conflict. Over time, a reliance on brutal, physical repression of targeted individu-
als and organizations gave way to more sophisticated forms of repression and
control.5 What began with antistrike injunctions and the fatal beating of striking
workers evolved into a political ideology that eventually claimed a greater hold
on the concept of Americanism than any other competing force or notion.6
Introduction • xvii
Army and intelligence personnel also were instrumental in developing and

repatriating techniques and weapons of countersubversion that were first de-
ployed in the Philippines. These personnel, together with other members of the
Spider Web, played a crucial role in creating the public-private networks of po-
litical surveillance that spread across the country during the interwar decades.
In describing these developments, this book enlarges observations made by re-
searchers such as McCoy, Goldstein, and Schrecker, confirming the Philippine
conquest and the First World War as crucial moments when government assumed
principal responsibility for policing industrial relations and political subversives.7
This history extends recent scholarly arguments that since the Second World
War, the Right has maintained a primary focus on economic power, particularly
on regaining the power lost during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Nev-
ertheless, many of these anticommunists were also caught up in or deliberately
appealed to what Michael Rogin has termed the “countersubversive tradition.”
The lifeblood of their propaganda was conspiracy theory consistent with the “par-
anoid style of politics,” which tended almost invariably to envision authoritarian
and other radical means of restricting the franchise in America. Accordingly, this
book emphasizes the economic motives for anticommunism but also examines
its mythology and the antidemocratic dreams of many of its purveyors.8
Spider Web members such as Military Intelligence captain John Bond Trevor
and Representative Albert Johnson, a Republican from Washington State, con-
nected eugenics, immigration restriction, and anticommunist movements, seam-
lessly weaving ethnoracial and political objectives into doctrine and policy.9 The
Spider Web also melded anticommunism and evangelical Christianity, seed-
ing the modern Religious Right. And elements of the Spider Web helped found
the American Nazi movement and perpetuate racist eugenics research into the
twenty-first century.
But perhaps the greatest achievement of the interwar anticommunist move-
ment was to keep the fires of right-wing countersubversion burning during the
discouraging years of the Great Depression and the first half of Franklin Roos-
evelt’s presidency.10 The commitment and in many instances fanatical passion of
Web members helped to ensure that the forces of the Right were ready and able
to reassert their political agenda from the late 1930s, especially in the favorable
climate of the Cold War. Their knowledge, personal contacts, and countersub-
versive files made possible the rise of federal and state legislative committees
investigating “un-American activities” and boosted the careers of such Cold
Warriors as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.11 While Phillips-Fein and other
scholars have focused on the role networks of businessmen played in undermin-
ing the New Deal and seeding the modern conservative movement, this book
shows that these and other networks built on the activity and ideology of earlier
campaigners, especially those in the Anticommunist Spider Web.
xviii • Introduction
This book revives several important historical voices, including those of

Trevor, a leading nativist; Jacob Spolansky, an immigrant from the Russian empire
who enjoyed a thirty-year career in anticommunist espionage; and the founder
of the US Army Chemical Warfare Service, Major General Amos A. Fries, who
commissioned the original Spider Web Chart depicting the “interlocking direc-
torates” of the communist movement. Although anticommunism became an
expression of the “common culture” of the United States, activists continually
shaped the doctrine to pursue diverse objectives.12 The Spider Web demonstrates
that even in the largest democratic societies, effective political crusades can be
waged by very small numbers of people.
This book also disputes the distinction some scholars have drawn between
right-wing, reactionary, authoritarian, and dilettante (or armchair) anticommu-
nism on the one hand and its supposedly responsible, liberal, and commonsense
respectable relation.13 By distinguishing responsibility for the conception as op-
posed to the promulgation of anticommunism, this volume argues that while nu-
merous liberals and conservative, craft-based trade unions were significant pur-
veyors of anticommunism and anticommunist repression, it is far from clear that
they contributed anything distinctive to anticommunist doctrine.14 Similarly, while
principled liberal opposition was an important element of American anticommu-
nism, the values of social democracy were subsumed in the din of the immoderate
antilabor and conformist precepts of Red Scare and Cold War anticommunism.
Finally, this book does not tell the story of the American Left. This broad
heading encompasses many different ideological strands, but the members of the
Anticommunist Spider Web did not distinguish among these strands. Instead,
those in the Web sought to destroy all of these strands, primarily through the
ideology and the label of anticommunism. Therefore, the book does not discuss
at length the disputes that divided left-wing and labor organizations. Similarly,
a comprehensive analysis and comparison of the relative defects of American
and Soviet societies is beyond the scope of this volume. In addition, the book
does not treat anachronistically criticism of the USSR and of American citizens
who sympathized with it. Arnold Beichman, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr,
and other scholars have criticized Americans who kept faith with the Communist
Party after the horrors of collectivization, Stalin’s Great Terror, the 1939 Nazi-
Soviet nonaggression pact, and the subjugation of Eastern Europe after World
War II. Yet for much of the 1920s and even into the 1930s, knowledge about events
in the USSR was patchy and, for many on the left, mediated by untrustworthy
sources. Further, the members of the Anticommunist Spider Web typically had
little information about or understanding of these events, and such knowledge
was generally incidental to their anticommunism. This book tells a different story,
examining how anticommunism mediated governments’ and society’s capacity
to abide by the principles that inspired the foundation of the United States.
Spider Web
Chapter 1
The Origins of American

Anticommunism, ca. 1860–1917
Though the people support the Government,
the Government should not support the people.
—Grover Cleveland
A nticommunism was a response to the failure of US political institutions and

traditions to resolve the fundamental challenges of the latter nineteenth cen-
tury. Anticommunism emerged from an edifice of economic and social inequal-
ity and stratification and from the ways in which different social, economic, and
political interests sought either to explain and preserve or, alternatively, to reform
the structure of American society.
At the most basic level, anticommunism helped justify long-standing prac-
tices of labor exploitation and the suppression of labor organization. But the
doctrine was innovative in that it justified this exploitation and suppression by
blaming foreign ideas and people for American economic and social tensions.
These tensions began to emerge immediately after the Civil War, which had been
fought not just to abolish Afro-American slavery but also to extinguish the threat
the spread of slavery posed to the prospects of free white people throughout
the Union. Apart from its moral wrongs, a slave society would destroy a grow-
ing nation’s capacity to guarantee its citizens an independent living. Yet Union
victory neither resolved the increasing incompatibility of republican ideology
and America’s political economy nor dislodged or revised the Jacksonian reform
tradition that sought to deliver “equal freedom” rather than equality to citizens,
and offered little remedy to the period’s defining trends.1
In the decades following the Civil War, increasing numbers of Americans
struggled to meet their basic needs. They did not make a living wage or work in a
2 • Chapter 1
safe environment, and they had no safety net to sustain them when they became
sick or disabled. The principle of forcing people to labor in intolerable conditions
or for intolerable terms survived slavery to become a basic feature of working life.
For millions of industrial and agricultural laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant
farmers, life was defined by cruel patterns. They worked in dangerous jobs for
subsistence wages, in constant fear of poverty and loss of livelihood. Booms and
busts shook the economy periodically, and “average” workers bore the brunt of
prolonged recession. Their every attempt to organize into cooperative or indus-
trial associations was met with heavy opposition, penalties, and condescension.
Simultaneously, the economic dominance of corporations and the institu-
tionalization of political corruption as the price of economic development in-
creased with each passing decade. Many employers and magnates refused to
negotiate with labor unions, and the state generally rose to the defense of prop-
erty. As corruption closed off one reform after another, the historical practices
of “criminaliz[ing] political differences” and stigmatizing “dissenters as social
pariahs” became ever more important devices for marginalizing “those going
under in the new America.”2 A rising tide of protest and civil, industrial, and
political violence was blamed on the unprecedented numbers of aliens arriving
on America’s shores, allegedly bringing with them polluting notions of class
warfare. This cycle of widespread and prolonged distress gave rise to competing
responses. While some citizens acknowledged that the nation’s political system
and economy required reform, a corresponding conviction that distress did not
warrant and should on no account receive any systemic redress emerged. And
this conviction resulted in a distinctive and in some respects exceptional Ameri-
can form of anticommunism.
With astonishing speed, anticommunism became an effective and influential
political doctrine and strategy. It was woven, sometimes uncritically but often
with great craft and persistence, into America’s “countersubversive” tradition of
politics, in which fear of disorder, conspiracy, and tribal bonds give rise to violent
and exclusionary rhetoric and action. As a form of countersubversive politics,
anticommunism was prosecuted by a blend of corporate, government, and social
entities comprising public-private or state-society partnerships of great power
that were in many respects particular to the United States.
Capital and Corruption

The economic and social tensions that defined Gilded Age America were rooted
in the fundamental direction in which the American economy had developed
since the early nineteenth century. This direction was defined above all by the
transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy dominated by corporations.
Origins of American Anticommunism • 3
Although the United States initially relied on a partnership between capital

and the state to finance and coordinate economic development, private corpo-
rations emerged as the principal engine of the American economy by the close
of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. After the Civil War, they also became the great
political power. The rising power and concentration of capital resulted from
numerous factors. Technology was an important spur, as was US integration
into the global economy. Industrialization in agriculture revolutionized not only
farming but also the demographic patterns of national life. As farming mecha-
nized, it became a mass-production business where yields grew exponentially
and unit prices fell dramatically. Farming businesses rationalized and sold huge
volumes of stock, becoming major exporters. American agribusiness realized
economies of scale that only Russia could rival. Independent farmers in both
the United States and Europe were driven off the land, triggering mass migra-
tions from the American heartland and from Europe to US industrial centers,
placing unprecedented stress on the labor market, civil infrastructure, and social
cohesion. From 1860 to 1890, the metropolitan population ballooned while rural
centers declined.3
The postwar economy was dominated by industrialists and finance magnates.
In the thirty-five years that separated the Civil War and the twentieth century,
the wealth amassed by the great capitalists or “robber barons” gave them “such
incommensurate power” that in the judgment of H. W. Brands, “the imperatives
of capitalism mattered more to the daily existence of most Americans than the
principles of democracy.” Whereas more than half the nation’s wealth had been
held by the richest 29 percent of the population before the Civil War, just 1 per-
cent owned the same amount a generation later.4
The barons amassed such enormous wealth as a consequence of the structural
opportunities provided by the absence of a strong and centralized government
(whose priorities might have differed from those of business) and a comparable
absence of powerful social classes (particularly a hereditary landed aristoc-
racy) whose interests might also have clashed with capital. American capital
benefited, too, from the availability of vast tracts of fertile and accessible land
that had been seized from its traditional owners. And the great capitalists also
gained from government assistance in the form of land grants, tax concessions,
and forcible resolution of its labor-management problems. American capital-
ists thus profited from many freedoms denied to industrialists and merchants
in Europe and elsewhere in the New World: in global terms, these barons were
uniquely fortunate and powerful.
Although American capital benefited from unparalleled freedom, the politi-
cal economy of nineteenth-century America was characterized more by state
capitalism than by free enterprise. In this system, governments doled out huge
4 • Chapter 1
concessions to corporations and underwrote the costs of their expansion. Be-

tween 1850 and 1870, railroads received roughly two hundred million acres of
land, “a gratuity equivalent to the size of France” and several times the acreage
handed out for small-scale farming under the Homestead Act of 1862. Govern-
ment attitudes toward the disbursement of public monies were epitomized by
President Grover Cleveland, who in 1892 agreed to lower interest rate charges on
a twenty-six-million-dollar government loan to the Union and Pacific Railroad
but vetoed a ten-thousand-dollar appropriation for Texas farmers in need of
drought relief. Citizens, the president said, had to understand that “though the
people support the Government the Government should not support the people.”5
Governments regarded subsidization of business as a necessary price for
developing their jurisdictions. In the rush to develop competing regions, cor-
porations could play towns, cities, and states as well as both the major politi-
cal parties against each other, giving themselves over entirely to the service of
capital. Legislators accepted bribes paid by railroad and finance tycoons, which
fell “like snowflakes and dissolved like dew.” And two-thirds of the holders of
cabinet posts during the Gilded Age had rail clients, sat on railroad management
boards, lobbied for railroads, or had relatives in the railroad business.6
Having embedded the major political parties within their corporate structure,
plutocrats refused to brook any interference in their business, whether from
government, consumers, or an increasingly desperate and growing labor move-
ment. Whatever political measures governments instituted to arrest the death
of free labor, the barons straightforwardly subverted. Thus, around 1900, the
United States had been wholly transformed “from a nation of freely competing,
individually owned enterprises into a nation dominated by a small number of
giant corporations.”7
Labor in the Gilded Age

The power the robber barons wielded over their workforces was multifaceted,
structural, and opportunistic. The same geopolitical, technological, and mar-
ket forces that drove the growth and concentration of capital entrapped many
Americans in wage slavery and poverty. The industrialization of agriculture, the
formation of a US national labor market (one of the Civil War’s most important
consequences), and the mass migration of European peasants created a glut in
the labor market to the detriment of independent farmers and artisans as well as
unskilled laborers. And while immigration and emancipation made labor cheap,
technological advances devalued manual skills and knowledge. New migrants,
both native (typically from the Deep South) and foreign-born, struggled to find
decent and consistently remunerated work. They discovered that contrary to

American mythology, they were locked into the working classes. Society was
now stratified; upward mobility was exceedingly rare.8
Although the economic changes sweeping America need not necessarily have
so harmed the prospects and condition of so many manual workers, customary
and prejudicial practices and attitudes toward labor relations were determinedly
and successfully pursued by capital and by its allies and servants after the Civil
War. Important legacies of southern slavery and antebellum industrial rela-
tions practices in the North remained influential. During the war, while union
ranks were depleted, industrialists formed employers’ organizations, maintained
blacklists of unionists, and pressured government for antilabor laws. Several
states passed legislation outlawing not only strikes but also unions as “conspira-
cies to restrain trade.” State and federal troops crushed strikes under martial law.
The federal government also provided northern industrialists with scab labor,
including freed slaves, while permitting employers to import and indenture Eu-
ropean laborers, keeping native-born workers out of employment.9
Throughout the postwar period, fetters on free labor and labor organization
became more prevalent and confining. Freed slaves were quickly entrapped by
Black Codes that threatened the homeless with imprisonment if they refused to
toil for planters. When the codes were outlawed, African Americans (and most
white farmers) in the South had little option but to become tenant farmers and
sharecroppers, a state “not far removed from slavery.”10
In the North, the prevalence and severity of wage slavery also deepened. At
the end of the war, workers had no minimum wage laws, but their living expenses
had grown by about 70 percent. They owed their homes to the companies for
whom they drudged. They were forced to pay inflated prices for life’s necessi-
ties at company stores. They could appeal to no law to compensate them or their
families for injuries or death suffered in the workplace. And the principal avail-
able jobs were perilous; working conditions for miners and steel mill, railroad,
and textile workers were unhealthy, injurious, and too often deadly.
While working conditions produced great suffering, that suffering was magni-
fied by the disproportionate burdens laborers bore during the prolonged, severe
economic downturns that plagued Gilded Age America. The profound disrup-
tion to traditional economy and society meant that workers had little choice but
to seek employment wherever it might be available. The itinerant nature of the
workforce helped preclude the formation of labor unions and the establishment
by unions of broad, local connections. Thus, as writer Jack London observed,
capital could always call on “a large surplus army of laborers” that could easily
be mobilized against anyone who refused to work under the terms offered.11
6 • Chapter 1
The Birth of Anticommunism

Such huge and growing disparities in wealth, health, and opportunity did not go
unchallenged. Desperation and anger repeatedly led to major industrial conflicts
that spread across vast regions and industries. Trade unions as well as farmer
and farmer-labor alliances sought to redress economic inequities, with vary-
ing degrees of success. But the plight of the working classes also fueled fears of
their latent, malevolent power as well as a powerful sense of resentment among
some prosperous citizens, who concluded that their economic inferiors posed
a revolutionary threat with which the state was ill-equipped to cope. With this
resentment came with a trenchant denial that inequality was rooted in the fun-
damental conditions and relations of society; acknowledging the structural bases
of poverty and inequality risked reinforcing an unwelcome “sense of the contin-
gency and fragility of the American dream.”12
This combination of fear, resentment, and denial culminated in the birth
and support of a doctrine that styled labor organization, industrial action, and
unemployment relief as illegitimate and even subversive threats to American
civilization. This doctrine provided vital and effective political cover for a cam-
paign of repression that was unleashed not only to suppress the working classes’
industrial organizations and aspirations but also to altogether discredit the poli-
tics of class.
Although the characterization of labor organization as an expression of “com-
munism” began before the Civil War, the rapid rise and fall between March and
May 1871 of the Paris Commune (or city council), a socialist government that
was ejected by the French regular army, first raised the serious prospect, in at
least some Americans’ minds, of a local workers’ revolution. The reign of the
Paris Commune had barely ended before a professor at the Union Theological
Seminary in New York shuddered, “Today there is not in our language . . . a more
hateful word than communism.”13 This “hateful word” came quickly to encompass
an apparent breakdown of social order signified by the formation of labor unions;
the widespread presence of indigent, unemployed men; and the congregation of
recently arrived and ethnically exotic migrants in urban districts and industries.
All these groups were rapidly and indelibly associated with foul terminology and
rhetorically and physically attacked for their supposed inability and unwilling-
ness to assimilate into decent society.
Communal Loyalty and Conspiracies

The hostile response of various elements of American society to economic disad-
vantage and social disorder had complex origins. It did not simply express anxiety
about contemporary conditions and prospects. It also reflected the influence of

venerable political narratives and practices that encouraged the demonization
of marginalized groups.
The fear of disorder as a “distinctive American political tradition” first devel-
oped in the white majority’s relations with people of color. This tradition defined
itself against alien threats and sanctioned violent and exclusionary responses
to them. Native Americans were the original emblems of this threat, and their
conquest legitimized the violent subjugation of other alien groups. Aside from
being represented as (noble or ignoble) savages, Native Americans also sym-
bolized tribalism, which was thought to pose a menace to “private property and
the family.” Their subjugation was thus predicated on the need to undermine
“communal loyalties as sources of political resistance.” After the Civil War, “the
group ties of workers and immigrants were [similarly] assaulted in the name of
individual freedom.”14
American political tradition was also intolerant of faction within the polity.
The Founders’ political theory did not accommodate “institutionalized opposi-
tion to popularly based government.” This attitude later fed into middle-class
distaste for labor unions, but it first fueled a tendency to equate institutional-
ized opposition to government policy with sedition. Here, intolerance of sec-
tion melded with a rich tradition of fear of anti-American conspiracy. Since the
Federalists alleged that agents of the French Revolution were conspiring with
Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati to destroy their independence, Ameri-
cans had detected national threats from Catholics, Masons, the Mormon church,
the “monster-hydra” of the Second Bank of the United States, abolitionists, the
“Slave Power” conspiracy, and “demon rum.” These fears had biblical utopian and
apocalyptic roots, but they also reflected a “dark side of American individualism”
as well as the fluidity of antebellum society, where individuals had ample op-
portunity to represent themselves as something or someone they perhaps were
not. Thus “pervasive role-playing generated suspicions of hidden motives” and
of secret, nefarious centers of power.15
A principal response to the threat of subversion was to “domesticate American
freedom.” Revolutionary reformers such as Benjamin Rush hoped to transform
citizens into “republican machines” who would “perform their parts properly, in
the great machine of the government,” exercising their freedom with self-control.
For the middle classes, the most important institution reinforcing self-control
was the nuclear family, supplemented by schools. Together, they helped to enforce
an “ideology of domesticity [that] limited political dissent in scarcely measur-
able ways.” When successful, this self-censorship “did not simply intimidate
political opposition already formed but inhibited the formation of new opposi-
tion,” resulting in the “suppression of politics at the pre-political level, through
8 • Chapter 1
the transformation of potentially political discontent into problems of personal

life.” In this fashion, “reform practice turned conflicts of interest into problems of
personal and social adjustment” and encouraged “the criminalization of political
differences, the collapse of politics into disease, the spread of surveillance, and
the stigmatization of dissenters as social pariahs.”16
Yet the structural inequality of the Gilded Age produced political, social, and
economic problems of a magnitude that patently could not be addressed by per-
sonal adjustment or “a therapeutic approach to social problems.” In postbellum
America, the full power of the state had to be coupled to the pressures of public
opinion to subdue the “communist” threat of labor organization. Compared with
other industrializing, Anglophone societies (where the franchise was steadily
growing), the US state played an unusually great role in suppressing labor orga-
nization (and other subsequent forms of protest). Moreover, the state’s adjudi-
cation of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate dissent had since
the eighteenth century often been hostile to a broad concept of political let alone
economic liberty.17
Anticommunism as a form of countersubversion thus had great “symbolic
power” that stemmed from a “demonological worldview” that had long formed
part of “the core of American politics.” Many of its proponents practiced the
“paranoid style” and were mired in the “paranoid position” of politics. How-
ever, like earlier countersubversives, many of the most influential creators and
proponents of anticommunism were “real conservatives, defending privilege,”
and were principally concerned with staving off economic redistribution. Anti-
communism therefore traversed quite distinct fears and purposes, and anticom-
munists’ paranoid fears and fantasies along with their material interests could
“neither be reduced to nor separated from one another.”18
The Political Purposes of Anticommunism

Notwithstanding the cold-blooded efficiency with which it was usually applied,
anticommunism often expressed a primal fear that the forces of “communism”
might succeed where all previous doctrines and people’s movements had failed;
“communists” might just meld the disparate elements of America’s vast un-
derclass into a united force that would rise up in revolution, as had occurred
in Paris and later in Russia in 1905. Where Progressivism, Populism, Free Sil-
ver, homesteads, Free Soil, Redemption, Reconstruction, and emancipation fell
short, “communism” might triumph. Under its banner, the huge urban and rural
proletariats might sink their differences; so, too, might white and black laborers
and sharecroppers, native-born and immigrant factory hands, Catholics and
Protestants, Christians and Jews. Here was the nightmare.
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A TUAREG WOMAN.
Still the Tuareg woman is allowed to have friends of the opposite

sex, and, as in the days of the Troubadours, her praises are sung in
many a charming rondeau. These male friends, who correspond to
the Italian cicisbeos, draw their swords in honour of the fair lady of
their choice, and shout her name as a war-cry as they fling
themselves upon the foe in the clash of combat. The woman, in her
turn, celebrates the exploits of her cicisbeo in verse, and she adorns
his leather shield and the scabbard of his sword with the work of her
hands. All, however, ends there, and we are irresistibly reminded of
Petrarch’s songs in honour of his Laura when she was a stout,
middle-aged woman, the mother of seven children.
Alas! we must tell the whole truth, and this reference to Petrarch
brings me back to my subject: Tuareg women in general. What a pity
that after all I have said about their lofty spirit, their manners, and the
good influence they exercise, I am obliged to own that I cannot
admire their figure, which resembles that of a Durham cow ready for
a prize show, or of a moulting goose more than anything else.
Their faces are pleasing, sometimes even very pretty. Delicate
features, big eyes full of expression, and very long black hair parted
in the middle and plaited together at the back of the head, give them
a charming appearance, but they have absolutely no figures, they
are just one mass of fat; their arms are like the jellies exposed for
sale in pork-butchers’ shops, and the less said about the rest of their
bodies the better.
In striking contrast to their wives, Tuareg warriors are generally
very lean, and their figures are well knit. Their limbs are very finely
moulded, and they walk with a slow dignity all their own, raising their
feet rather high from the ground much as an ostrich does, a mode of
progression which is probably the reason for their habit of leaning on
their spears as they advance.
The most striking peculiarity of the Tuareg costume is the veil,
called the litham in Arabic, and the tagelmust in Tamschek, which
covers the face, leaving only the eyes visible. It consists of a band of
stuff, generally black, which goes round the head like a turban to
begin with, and then passes over the mouth and nose, coming round
a third time across the forehead, and looking rather like a visor.
The tribe to which a Tuareg belongs is shown by his tagelmust. A
well-bred Amacher never takes it off, not even to eat or sleep, and
the negroes of the riverside have adopted the custom in imitation of
their masters. Their veils are, however, generally white, as are also
those of Tuaregs who are not rich enough to buy the lustrous black
stuffs from Haussa, used by the well-to-do.
The veil seems to have been originally adopted as part of the
Tuareg costume on hygienic grounds, for in the long wanderings of
the tribes amongst the sand of the deserts it protects the respiratory
organs. By degrees, however, this tagelmust grew to be considered
a sign of the modesty of the wearer, and to show the face became a
breach of etiquette.
Strange to say, the women do not hide their faces, a very
noteworthy difference this between Mahommedans, whose females
are always veiled, and Tuaregs, amongst whom it is the men who
thus disguise their features. To make up for this, however, if a Tuareg
woman wishes to show great respect to any one she is talking to,
she covers her mouth with a piece of her robe.
The Tuaregs themselves tell the following legend—they have one
for every occasion—to explain this peculiarity of their costume.
“In olden times women used to keep their faces veiled as do the
Mahommedans, whilst men left their faces uncovered; but one day
the enemy surprised a camp of our ancestors. The attack was so
sudden and so utterly unexpected that the Tuaregs were seized with
panic and fled, leaving behind them their families and their property.
They flung down their arms, making no effort to defend themselves,
but trusting for escape entirely to the fleetness of their legs.
A TUAREG IN HIS NATIONAL COSTUME.
“The women, however, picked up the swords, the spears, and the
daggers, with which they faced the enemy and drove them off.
“From that day, to show their admiration for the conduct of their
wives, and their shame for their own cowardice, the men wore the
veil and the women left their features exposed to view.”
In addition to the veil the Tuaregs wear a tunic of lustrous black
cotton, which falls nearly to the ankles, and in the front of which is a
huge pocket.
The Tuareg who wishes to be very “chic,” to use the last slang
expression in vogue in France and England, has this pocket made of
red material; but whatever the colour it is always of huge size. It is
difficult to imagine what quantities of things that pocket will hold. In it
a Tuareg can stow away yards upon yards of stuff, any amount of
beads, whole coverlets, etc., etc.; and to see him dispose of
everything in such a limited space, reminds one of the conjurors who
put a cannon ball, a cage full of birds, and a bowl with gold fish all
into a single nut.
Long wide trousers envelope the lower part of the body, and are
drawn in at the waist with running strings, whilst sandals made of ox
or antelope hide protect the feet from the burning heat of the sun-
parched sand.
The costume is completed by quantities of little leather sachets,
containing amulets, hung round the neck on thin cords. These
amulets protect their wearer from all evil influences, and secure to
him all the good things his heart desires.
The weapons of a Tuareg are all what the French call armes
blanches, that is to say, swords, spears, daggers, etc., and it is rare
indeed for any of them to own firearms. Even if they have them they
will not use them unless they are positively driven to do so. They
have a kind of superstitious dread, and at the same time a contempt
for guns. “They are not weapons worthy of a man,” say these
Tuaregs, who admit that their women excel them in courage.
The national weapon par excellence is the so-called tellak or short
dagger, the sheath of which is fastened to the left wrist with a leather
armlet. The hilt of this tellak is of the shape of a cross, and the
wearer is not at all inconvenienced by wearing it. He generally rests
his hand on the hilt when he is not using the weapon. If he is
threatened with any danger, the dagger is drawn from the sheath
with the right hand in an instant.
The spear or lance is generally made entirely of iron, except for
certain copper ornaments; a few, however, have wooden handles,
though the actual weapon is of metal. The Ihaggaren alone have the
right of wearing the iron spear, and the so-called takuba or sword
worn at the side, suspended on a cotton or silk cord.
According to circumstances, the spear is used as a missile or as a
lance. Mounted Tuaregs use it much as European lancers do, but
when they are fighting on foot, they fling it with marvellous skill, and
will rarely miss an enemy at a distance as great as fifty feet. The red
and green leather shields of the Tuaregs are often decorated with
considerable taste, and we must not forget to mention the ahabeg,
which is alike a weapon and an ornament, consisting of a circlet of
stone worn on the left arm a little above the wrist.
The horses of the Tuaregs are very ugly and small but strong. The
saddles in use are of wood covered over with leather, and a thick
coverlet of felt protects the hinder quarters of the steed. The bits are
of very well forged iron, the bridle is of plaited leather; the stirrups of
copper are very small, no bigger than a child’s bracelet, and the
horseman only rests his big toe in them.
But the animal which takes first rank, whether for riding or for
carrying bales of merchandise, the equipment of camps, meat, milk,
etc., is the camel.
The Tamschek language has many names for this useful animal,
a different one being used for it according to its age and capacity.
The camel used as a beast of burden is a strongly-built and heavy-
looking animal, known as an amnis, whilst the areggan or saddle
camel, used for riding, is much lighter, has slenderer limbs, and is far
more spirited. For guiding the amnis or the areggan a bridle is used,
passing through a ring which was fixed in the nose of the animal at a
very early age.
The camel is the chief wealth of a Tuareg. “How many camels has
your father?” I was asked, and it was very difficult to convince my
questioner that this useful animal would be of no good to us in
France.
The costume of Tuareg women is simpler than that of their
husbands, and consists of a long piece of stuff, which is rolled round
and round the body, a pair of cotton drawers, and a fariuel, or shawl,
which they wear over their heads, and drape about their figures as
gracefully as their extreme stoutness will admit.
Copper ornaments are much valued and are very rare. As a
general rule the women and men both like any sort of trinket which
can be hung round the neck; an old sardine tin is a very suitable
present for an admirer to give to a Tuareg lady. A Tuareg’s house is
his tent. The very poor, however, live in straw huts called ehan.
The tent or ehakit is made of skins upheld by a central stake; the
edges of the skins are very irregular, and are fastened with the aid of
tags to pegs stuck in the ground.
During the night the tent is closed, and the owner is shut up within
it, but in the daytime it is left open on the side opposite the sun;
blinds made of very thin laths of wood, kept together with strips of
leather, plaited in and out, shield those in the tent from the heat and
glare of the rays reflected from the burning sands.
An encampment of tents is called an amezzar, a group of camps,
generally occupied by one tribe, is a tausi, and over such an
agglomeration the chief or amrar has full authority.
The imrad camps are surrounded
by palisades or afaradj, between
which and the tents occupying the
centre of the enclosure the flocks and
herds are sheltered at night and
protected from the lions, which still
prowl in the vicinity.
The Ihaggaren seldom have their
flocks and herds with them, but when
they have, certain of the imrads under
them live in the camp and look after
the animals.
TUAREGS.
Within the tent the woman is
mistress. It is her business to look
after and order about the slaves. She milks the cows and she does
the cooking. But amongst the more important tribes the house, or
rather tent-keeping cares do not occupy the whole of the day, and
the nights are so warm that all sensible Tuaregs sit up till midnight at
least.
Well, how does the woman employ her spare time? She does her
leather work very much as European ladies do their embroidery, or
she sings to the accompaniment of an amzad, or violin with but one
string. She even composes verses.
Yes, she makes verses! Will not this arouse the interest of all the
blue-stockings of Europe? Surely when their occupations are so
much alike their sympathies will go out to their sisters in the distant
desert.
I can even add that Tuareg verses will always scan, and that they
all rhyme. Surely this is a good deal more than can be said of the
effusions of most female scribblers!
The men too write poetry sometimes. I have not time or space to
give specimens of the productions of these writers of the Niger
districts; but I cannot refrain from quoting two examples given by
Commandant Hanotaux in his Tamschek grammar, which were
written by Tuaregs of the north.
The first is a madrigal, composed and transcribed in the album of
a young lady of Algiers by Bedda of Ida. It must be observed that
Bedda was the first Tuareg to visit Algeria.
I speak; and, Angelina, thine the name!
Love in my heart for thee can never die.
What son of Adam may endure the flame
That burns within that dark, alluring eye?
For love of thee, enslavèd by thy glance,
I e’en would journey forth afar to France!
Who holds thee, Angelina, in his arms,

May dream secure, the fairest vision thou!
We thought no human limbs the lissom charm
Of fleet gazelles could e’er surpass, but now,
Since we have seen thy perfect form and face,
We know that we were wrong; thou hast all grace!
If thou shouldst come to us, come to our land,

Each man among us would go forth to thee
And sue thy favour; and should one demand
What price I’d pay could I but purchase thee,
I ween, for such possession I would give, indeed,
Six thousand golden pieces, or my steed![7]
Are not the sentiments expressed in this madrigal wonderfully

gallant for a so-called savage?
The second piece of poetry is really a satire, the daughter of
Abukias apostrophized in it having been compelled to repulse the too
ardent advances of an admirer, who could not forgive her scorn.
Daughter of Aboukias! thou hast come,
And the sun was hot when thou didst say “good-day”;
Time was, when but to hear thy words repeated
Filled me with mad desire to be with thee,
For thou wast in mine eyes a houri.
But now we know thy nature through and through.
Rash are thy words—reserve unknown to thee;
And in thy treachery thou wilt die.
Wert thou of noble race, how would thy good blood show?
By silence golden—not by reckless blame of other women,
For thou wouldst know thyself!
Yet one more word before I close,
A word which many others will confirm;
Aye, others married ere thy birth,
Whose steps have led them far away to lands unknown to thee,
And towns, whose very names thou hast not heard.
Young men there are, thou fain wouldst know,
Owners of herds and camels which will ne’er be thine,
To saddle in war or to milk when at peace.
But as for thy lover, the man thou didst scorn,
What matter to us though thou left him forlorn?
No translation could really give any idea of the vigorous ring of

these verses in the original Tamschek. They are alike forcible and
rhythmic without any of that undue use of gutturals for which the
Tuaregs blame the Arabs, calling their language in derision the
Takhamkhamen.
When Tuareg women receive, or, as we should say, are “at home
to their friends,” they recite such verses as those quoted above, or
tell long stories which last for several meetings. The men gather
about them wearing their best clothes, and vieing with each other in
their efforts to appear to advantage. The worthy deeds of those who
acquitted themselves well in recent conflicts are recounted, whilst
the cowards (who take care not to put in an appearance) are held up
to public scorn. It will readily be understood that the Tuareg customs,
which differ in so marked a degree from those of the Mahommedans,
give a great influence to the female sex, and place a woman far
above her admirers, who often sue in vain for notice from her.
As long as there is plenty of pasturage for the flocks and herds
the days pass peacefully by, as we have described, in the Tuareg
camp, but directly grass becomes scarce the tents must be struck,
and the tribe moves on to better feeding-grounds.
When the word to break up the temporary home has been given
all is bustle and animation, the amezzar resembling some great
beehive. The camels which are to carry the loads are assembled, the
tents go down as if by magic, some of the imrads rapidly roll them
up, and pack them on the backs of the patient beasts, whilst others
stow away the modest furniture and household utensils.
Meanwhile the young Ihaggaren have gone forward to choose the
spot for the new camp. Presently they return, and place themselves
at the head of the party, acting alike as guides and protectors to it.
Behind them come the women, chattering together in the quaint,
cradle-like saddles they occupy on the fleeter camels, whilst the
older men gather round the amrar, and march solemnly on with him.
Last of all, led by the slaves, come the pack-saddle animals,
guarded by the warriors, who protect them from pillage, of which
there is always more or less danger in the desert.
The site of the new encampment reached, tents and furniture are
unladed, and all is arranged as it was before. The same kind of life
as that already described begins again, and goes on without
interruption for weeks or even for months, according to the fertility of
the district.
Of course all this refers only to times of peace, but amongst the
Ihaggaren constantly, and amongst the imrads more rarely, but still
pretty often, war, with its many complications, breaks out and upsets
everything.
Amongst nomad tribes constant struggle with others is all but a
necessity of existence. In certain dry seasons pasturage is alike
meagre and innutritious, but the flocks and herds must have food,
hence perpetual disputes and quarrels, in which the Amenokal, when
there is one, often intervenes to prevent bloodshed if the would-be
belligerents are of the same confederation.
If, however, there is no central authority to preserve order the
quarrel spreads and becomes general. This was the original cause
of the feud between the Awellimiden and the Hoggars of the north,
as well as with the Kel Gheres on the west, a feud which has been
going on uninterruptedly from time immemorial.
In time of war the imrad or worker suffers but little. Everything is,
in fact, so settled by tradition amongst the Tuaregs that even a battle
is more like a set of quadrilles than anything else.
To begin with, there is generally a palaver, and when all attempts
to patch up the quarrel have failed resort is had to arms. The
disputants separate, having fixed a time for their meeting, and on the
day and at the place agreed upon the two armies or attabu are
drawn up as in a mediæval tournament.
The forces advance in closely serried battalions. Sometimes the
Tuareg fights on horseback, but as a rule he prefers to meet his foe
on foot. The combatants hurl defiance at each other and rush
shouting to the fray. Spears are flung at a distance of some fifty feet,
but they are pretty well always caught on the shields of those at
whom they are hurled.
Meanwhile the confusion rapidly increases; the chiefs now begin
to challenge each other to single combat, and it is no unusual thing
for the two armies to cease hostilities with one accord to watch the
issue of the struggle between the leaders. Spears, no longer of any
use, are flung aside, the dagger and sword taking their place, and
gleaming in the sunshine as they are raised against the foe. Blood
begins to flow copiously on either side. Here two warriors are holding
each other at bay at arms’ length, each trying to pierce his
adversary’s heart with his sword; there two others are locked in a
murderous embrace, stabbing at each other with their daggers, or
trying to crack each other’s skulls with the stone amulet alluded to
above.
TUAREG HORSEMAN.
At last one side wavers, inferior in strength or in numbers to the

other. The warriors begin to flee, and the victors shout, “Ia! ia! Our
adellin rour’ onen imzaden!” (“Ah! ah! There will be no violins for
you!”) And this sarcasm, which means that their wives will be angry
and scorn them, often so stings the fugitives that they rally and go
back to the struggle, eager to win the praises of their women on their
return to their tents.
In these battles life is taken without pity or remorse; but, as I have
already said, when the victory is won the prisoners are spared. I
have even been told by several very trustworthy authorities, that
when peace is made on the request of one side or the other, the
victors will entirely reclothe the prisoners taken before sending them
home.
War, however, amongst the Tuaregs generally takes the form of
raids, such as those in vogue with the Arabs.
Dangerous as are these raids, they offer the advantage of taking
the enemy by surprise, and meeting him face to face instead of
being attacked in the rear. Moreover, the profit if victorious is
immediate, and the booty often considerable.
There is plenty of scope in them too for individual courage and for
skill in stratagem, promptitude in attack, and for showing off what
they greatly admire, the military virtues of endurance under privation,
knowledge of the country to be traversed, and so on.
Here I must just add, by way of parenthesis, that one of the chief
charges brought against the Tuaregs, that of being treacherous, is
the result of this habit of theirs of falling unawares upon their foe. I
really cannot blame them, however, for are not surprises and night
attacks amongst the tactics of European armies, and does any one
dream of attaching dishonour to them?
Military regulations deal with them quite openly, only stipulating
that they should not be attempted except with very well-disciplined
troops, who are thoroughly in hand. All the more honour then to the
Tuaregs that this is their usual way of going to work.
MOORS AND TUAREGS.
What I may call these hunting expeditions are greatly facilitated, if

not altogether necessitated, by the very nature of a nomad life. The
preparations are made with the greatest secrecy, and only the
sturdiest walkers and the best horsemen are allowed to take part in
them. The party, never very large, numbering at the most a hundred,
if the way is long as it often is, starts preceded by guides, who lead
the razzia by the least frequented route. The most important point to
be kept in view is the position of the various wells by the way, for on
a knowledge of this essential detail success chiefly depends.
Gliding silently between the encampments of the enemy on the
frontiers, the Tuaregs in which are always on the alert, for their
exposed situation makes them watchful, the marauding expedition
flings itself suddenly upon the amezzar or tribe chosen. The greatest
skill is needed to take the enemy unawares, and sometimes all the
precautions are in vain, for those attacked have had warning
beforehand, but not in time to send couriers out to summon their
friends to their aid.
The men then all take to flight, but the women remain, for though
the men who resist are slain, no Tuareg would stain his hands with
the blood of a defenceless woman; the flocks and herds with the
camels are hastily hidden in the bush, but the assailants, or
imihagen as they are called, know how to find and collect them.
The next thing to do is to carry off the booty before those pillaged
or the imihagen come back to avenge themselves, for they
meanwhile have not been inactive, but by means of messengers, or
by fires lit on the tops of the dunes, have let their relations know of
their need. A column is quickly formed, and starts in pursuit of the
raiders.
It is their turn now to have to flee for their lives. The big camels
used as beasts of burden and the flocks and herds hamper their
march. If they do not get a good start they are often overtaken, and
being far less numerous than those they have robbed they have to
pay dearly for their audacity.
The pursuing column now shows considerable skill in getting
ahead of the raiders, and awaiting them at some well or pond which
they must pass, they there in their turn fall suddenly upon the enemy.
The marauders are by this time weary, whilst the robbed are fresh
and in first-rate positions. The robbers are dying of thirst; their
enemies have drank their fill at their ease.
One such razzia succeeds another, until at last one party to the
quarrel is worn out and sues for peace, a marabout acting as
intermediary. Innumerable palavers now take place, the Tuareg
warriors holding forth to the assembled crowds in long speeches, for
they are as anxious to show off their eloquence as they are jealous
of their reputation for military skill. A truce is finally patched up, and
though it never lasts long it serves as an excuse for a feast, in which,
by the way, the Tuaregs, who are naturally frugal and abstemious,
rarely indulge.
Children are very kindly treated in Tuareg camps. Except to
compel the girls to empty the bowls of the curdled milk, the drinking
of which makes them fat, they are never beaten. As soon as they
can stand alone the little boys are taught to fling the spear, small
weapons suited to their size being specially made for them. The
father looks after the martial education of his sons, whilst the mother
teaches the girls to work leather, to sing, and to read the written
characters I have already described. This is how it comes about that
women can generally decipher inscriptions more readily than men.
A strange custom prevails with regard to inheritance, not only
amongst the Tuaregs but in other African tribes, and that is, the
nephew is the heir of the uncle, not the son of the father. The child of
an imrad woman is a serf, and the son of a slave is a slave no matter
whether the father is a free man or not. “It is the womb which gives
to the child its complexion,” say the Tuaregs. It is the law of Beni-
Omia.
The great Awellimiden tribes, however, repudiate this custom,
saying that it reflects unfairly upon the virtue of their women. “One is
always sure to be the son of one’s mother,” they say, “but not of
one’s father. That is why a race less noble than our own have
adopted the custom of inheritance from uncle to nephew. They are
sure that in the veins of the latter flows the blood of the former.”
The rest of the Tuaregs, however, who have always been noted
for their gallantry, date the origin of the so-called Beni-Omia law from
Gheres, the father of the Kel Gheres.
Gheres, they say, had a wife named Fatimata Azzer’a, and a
sister called Gherinecha. Each of them had a son; the child of the
former was called Ituei, that of the latter, R’isa.
Now Gheres, feeling old age gaining on him, wished to prove his
wife. He pretended he was ill, and went to consult an old sorcerer
who dwelt in a hut on a lofty dune, from which he never came down
into the plains. There was no well there, and the sorcerer had neither
sheep nor oxen nor camels, none knew what he drank or what he
ate.
On his return to his camp after his visit to the sorcerer, Gheres
sent for his wife and said to her—“Woman, thou alone canst cure
me. My days are numbered unless I can anoint my body with magic
ointment made from the brains of a child. Give me thy son.”
“My son is mine,” replied Fatimata; “I have had the trouble of
bearing and rearing him. It is true I love thee next to him, but even if
thy life depend on it, I will not have him die.”
The chief then sent for Gherinecha and made the same demand
of her as he had of his wife.
“After thee, my brother,” she said, “I love R’isa best. But if God
inflicts on me the anguish of choosing between thee and him, I
choose. Take thou the child, do as the sorcerer bids thee, and may
Allah protect thee.”
So Gheres hid his nephew in the bush, killed a kid, took its brains,
rubbed his body with them and returned to his camp, where he
summoned his relations and subjects to appear before him. He then
told the story of what he pretended had happened, and everybody
admired the devotion of Gherinecha. Then he called for the child—
who had been brought in unperceived under the cloak of a slave—
and presented him to the assembled crowds, saying, “Behold my
heir and my successor. As my sister loves me more than my wife
does, it is but just that after my death my sister’s son should inherit
my wealth and my rights.”
The Ben-Omia law has at least had the good result where it is
enforced of preserving the purity of the Tuareg blood, for the son of a
black slave woman would be and remain a slave all his life, no
matter how great the power or how high the lineage of his father.
Amongst the Awellimiden, on the other hand, that is to say,
amongst the three chief tribes, the Kel Kumeden, the Kel Ahara, and
the Kel Tedjiuane, which dominate the rest of the Confederation, this
system has not been observed, with the result that the complexions
of the Awellimiden have been notably darkened by the admixture of
negro blood.
The Tuaregs are extremely superstitious, and I have already
alluded to the number of charms with which they deck themselves.
The Demons or Alchinen play a great part amongst them, and are
looked upon as almost human. They are supposed to inhabit the
mountains, camping on them, and living a life very much like that of
the Tuareg tribes themselves. They have their own quarrels, their
own wars, and they too make raids on each other. They are,
however, endowed with the power of becoming invisible, and they
come unseen to take and to drink the milk of the cows belonging to
the Tuaregs. “Beware,” say the Tuaregs, “when you are out at night
that you do not run against an alchin (the singular of alchinen). You
will see nothing at the time, but the next morning when you wake you
will find that your foot is sore and you cannot walk. You have trodden
on the foot of a demon.”
A YOUNG TUAREG.
In spite of the undoubted courage of the Tuaregs, they hate the

idea of death. They do not say of any one who has died, “He is
dead,” but Aba, he has disappeared. It is a sign of very bad breeding
to speak of a dead relative or even to pronounce his name. He must
be alluded to only as mandam, or such an one. None but the
descendants of an illustrious chief or the sons of an Amenokal
tolerate any allusion to their ancestors, in which case pride is
stronger than superstition.
We came in contact on our journey with the two great
Confederations of the Igwadaren and the Awellimiden; the former, as
we have seen, are a prey to anarchy and they rob traders, but their
importance is almost nil.
It is very different with the Awellimiden. I do not of course deny
that certain tribes are dangerous to travellers; for frequent revolts
against the central authority occur, and during our stay at Say the
Cheibatan tried to shake off the suzerainty of the Amenokal, but they
were cruelly punished by Madidu and his nephew Djamarata.
As a rule, however, the protection promised by a chief can be
depended on, and for this reason the Awellimiden will certainly be
the first Tuaregs whom we shall be able to induce to lead a more
civilized life.
True Awellimiden, or direct descendants from Lemta, are few.
They include at present three tribes, the Kel Kumeden, the Kel
Ahara, and the Kel Tedjucane. The Amenokal or principal chief is
always a member of the first-named, and inherits in the usual order
of primogeniture in these districts, that is to say, the brothers reign in
succession according to age, then the son of the eldest, and so on.
It is, however, open to the Confederation to depart from this rule,
and the Amenokal is not regularly invested with authority until the
consent of the assembled Ihaggaren has been given. But it is a very
rare thing for an exception to be made, and the right of veto, though
it has been used, is seldom exercised.
The predecessor of Madidu was Alimsar, who had succeeded his
brother El Khotab, the protector of Barth. I transcribe below the
genealogy of the descendants of El Khotab and Alimsar just as it
was given to me.
EL KHOTAB

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Spider Web: The Birth of American

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List of Illustrations vii

Chapter 1. The Origins of American Anticommunism,

1. Wanted notices for Arnold Henkel and Jacob Breuer,

The School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash

A great paradox lies at the heart of America’s understanding of its anticom-

To prosecute this war, anticommunists marshaled supporters in government,

Army and intelligence personnel also were instrumental in developing and

This book revives several important historical voices, including those of

The Origins of American

A nticommunism was a response to the failure of US political institutions and

Capital and Corruption

Although the United States initially relied on a partnership between capital

concessions to corporations and underwrote the costs of their expansion. Be-

Labor in the Gilded Age

decent and consistently remunerated work. They discovered that contrary to

The Birth of Anticommunism

Communal Loyalty and Conspiracies

about contemporary conditions and prospects. It also reflected the influence of

the transformation of potentially political discontent into problems of personal

The Political Purposes of Anticommunism

Still the Tuareg woman is allowed to have friends of the opposite

Who holds thee, Angelina, in his arms,

If thou shouldst come to us, come to our land,

Are not the sentiments expressed in this madrigal wonderfully

No translation could really give any idea of the vigorous ring of

At last one side wavers, inferior in strength or in numbers to the

What I may call these hunting expeditions are greatly facilitated, if

In spite of the undoubted courage of the Tuaregs, they hate the

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