“Them Anarchists is like rattlesnakes; fust they rattle dangerous warnin’s and then they strike a deadly blow. No civilized community ez safe while they’re about. It’s high time they waz exterminated; jes’ make it high treason when they rattle on’ about removin’ rulers; an’ let ther strong arm of ther law grasp ’em around th’ neck an’ strangle ’em tew death before they hev time tew coil an’ strike. Naow ye see th’ danger ov ’lowin’ ther scum of Europe tew cum inter th’ country. Yer quarantine yaller fever, but ye never think ov quarantinin red anarchy, which is a sight more dangerous diseese. . . .”

“Anarchy has nothing to gain, it has all to lose, by acts like this. It has been tolerated; it may be, and deserves to be, proscribed. If there is to be no security, for either good man or bad, from its fatalistic hand, the time will surely come when the anarchist will be hunted with the implacable resentment that the man-eating tiger is now followed, the hunt being unremitting until the last assassin of them all is swept from the earth.”

“William McKinley’s kindly heart and generous spirit, his enormous public services, resulting in countless benefits to the poor man, his unswerving devotion to the principle that no minority is without rights, his purity and power are permanent forces and realities which have been exalted upon an altar of martyrdom. The assassin supposed he could slay them from the high and heavenly place in which the citizens of the republic behold them. They will organize into a knightly personality and William McKinley will be the slayer of anarchy in America. From this time forward, whatever makes for anarchy must hide its treacherous face away from the light of him whom we loved.”

“But one duty now remains—the enactment of such Federal legislation as will forever stamp out anarchism. The adherents of this doctrine—if doctrine it may be termed—are Ishmaelites whose hands are against everyone and who cannot justly complain should the hand of everyone be raised against them. They are outlaws and should as such be driven from the precincts of every civilized state. The first action of the next Congress should be directed to this end.”

“The only permanently effective weapon against anarchy, in a self-governing republic, is respect for law.”

“Liberty does not and never did mean license. These so-called anarchists have too long abused the freedom of our constitutional privileges. The scum of decaying European feudalism, they must be taught that there is no place for them among our free institutions and law-abiding citizens. They are enemies of public order, and must be banished from the society of the freemen they contaminate even by their presence. Toleration of their vile creed has emboldened them to presume on the patience of the nation. The hour for their total extirpation has come.”

“There is no room in America for such creatures, and there is not one of them who is worthy of freedom.”

“. . . men who profess or proclaim doctrines of which such unspeakable crimes are the issue should be made to understand and to feel that they cannot teach them in this country, nor can they themselves enjoy this country’s hospitality.”

“Punishment administered to the would-be assassin and to his co-conspirators, if he has any, should be such as to warn all inclined to anarchy that, while this is an asylum for those who love liberty, it is an inhospitable place for those who raise their hands against all forms of government.”

“The shooting of President McKinley by an anarchist should convince all Americans of the danger to life and liberty by allowing such dastardly fiends to exist in this country. . . .”

“The law of God requires the maintenance of civil order and the repression of anarchism.”

“How evil must be the teachings and sentiment that should prompt in a sane mind so heinous a crime.”

“The fact that anarchy is rampant in the United States today is due to the parsimony of the government. It is a notorious fact among police officers that the secret service department is so badly handicapped by lack of funds that it can not even keep track of counterfeiters, to say nothing of watching anarchists.”

“They are atheists, having no fear of God or a future life, and are swallowed up by the conceit of their own folly, and think they make themselves heroes for all the ages if they sacrifice their own lives to slay the tyrants of the world.”

“When one-half of the creed of philosophical anarchism—that, namely, which denies the rightfulness of government—is adopted by fanatics, neurotics, and instinctive criminals, while the other half—namely, the gospel of non-resistance—is ignored or discarded, the result is an exceedingly dangerous product which, by its very nature, is bound to assume a criminal character, and, unless watched and restrained by the community, to grow into murder and revolution.”

“Organized anarchy in this free country must be declared a capital crime. There is no occasion for its existence here. Immigration laws must be made more strict and be more rigidly enforced, and keep out the murderous, fanatical dregs of Europe, who seek our shores only because there is greater opportunity to carry out their dark and bloody designs.”

“. . . every right-minded citizen shares a deep sense of shame and disgrace that our country harbors a class of men of whom Leon Czolgosz is a representative. . . .”

“The peril that assails men in great place from the attacks of lunatics and fanatics cannot be absolutely eliminated from any civilization, but no theory of personal liberty compels us to tolerate the utterances of men and women who incite their followers to the murder of rulers or the existence of societies for the purpose of instigating to crime.”

“. . . their absurd and contradictory tactics prove that the theories that they wish to impress on the people are equally as unreasonable and senseless.”

“So long as the assassin is a hero or a martyr, even to a small group of sympathizers, exactly so long will political assassination be repeated.”

“The Christlike utterance of our beloved President, ‘May God forgive him!’ which he spoke when pierced by an assassin’s bullet, will disarm more Anarchists than all that man’s vengeance or gibbets can deter.”

“Providence, as we have often been reminded, moves in mysterious ways; and one result of this tragedy will be to fill all honest men’s minds with detestation for the dangerous and senseless doctrines of anarchy. . . .”

“We believe that our so-termed yellow journals are responsible in large part in keeping alive and introducing into men’s minds the seditious principles of anarchy which bear such rotten fruits.”

“It is true that there is a body of Anarchists in this country who have brought their Old World hatreds with them, and whose acts and utterances are so wholly irrational as to suggest that they should be classified among the intellectually degenerate if not absolutely among the insane.”

“The professional anarchists in this country have almost without exception been of foreign birth. If the family history of the individuals forming this body of malcontents could be traced, it is probable that they would prove to belong to a class of unfortunates who have passed through generations of poverty, depravity, and perhaps oppression, with the result that they have, perhaps, inherited a bent of mind which is distinctly abnormal.”

“One is tempted at this moment to recommend any measures, however severe, to keep these shores clean of the foul brood of anarchy, but it is a serious problem, and one with which Congress has wrestled in the past and will have to wrestle with in the immediate future. The horror and indignation which have resulted from the striking down of a man of the noble character of our President will, I am sure, find immediate results in concerted and decisive legislative action against anarchy.”

“One-half of the world is terrorized by anarchism; the other half pooh-poohs it with contempt. But too often contempt is only another name for blindness or insanity. However we look at it, the spectacle of anarchy springing at the throat of government and of the rulers of the most democratic countries in the world being afraid to grip it and grapple with it is not a pleasant one.”

“Predominance of the imaginative faculty, inaction, and mutual excitation are the three fundamentals of anarchical conspirators. And thus from the gatherings of these generally half-mad, half-imbecile, half-criminal individuals, from obscure clubs met for drinking and chatting there arises a continuous misty cloud of terribly grandiose plots against society, grotesquely impracticable, perhaps, but beside which the most sensational revelations of the police seem insipid.”

“Anarchistic crimes are invariably manifestations of a perverted conscience.”

“The assassination of Mr. McKinley has shown us too plainly that though they talk of peaceful changes and of philosophical anarchy they are ready at any time to startle the world with most horrible crimes against society.”

“Anarchism as an intellectual theory is beneath contempt; but as an intellectual theory it is also the mildest, most optimistic creed ever enunciated by man. It is a curious phenomenon that it is the exponents of this milk-and-water theory who have made their name a terror to society.”

“Our right to punish anarchistic crimes cannot be questioned; it is founded upon the necessity to defend society against its enemies.”

When anarchy’s malign and poisoned sting,
     Like Erynnis’ destructive venom spread,
More feared than war or pestilence, will ring
     A nation’s lamentation for its dead.

“It is out imperative duty to stamp out the evil.”

“If the assassination of President McKinley has taught no other lesson, it has taught 70,000,000 people that anarchy is worse than treason and must be driven forever from the country.”

“No punishment, however severe, will stop their bloody deeds. They must be expelled—banished—from the continent; yea, from the face of the earth.”

“Summary justice properly executed will do the work. Drive the anarchists out of America. Hang every one of them caught in these crimes without delay. Let the movement begin with vigorous action on the part of the community and they will disappear when they find we mean business. Every anarchist arriving in this country should be sent back by the next steamer. The European police will attend to them. They are shadowed everywhere, and they should be kept over there, and hunted down and promptly exterminated.”

“Anarchy is an agency for the obstruction of repentance and the perdition of souls.”

“It could not be expected that such as these should discriminate. Lincoln and McKinley, in their minds, are in the same category with Nero and Caligula.”

“We look in the wrong direction when we seek for a remedy, for a preventive of the evil in the exclusion of anarchists or the revision of the criminal code. Anarchists and nihilists were exotics once but we are beginning to breed them now, and no closed door, no punishment for crime, can safeguard us from this ill. When contempt for law sits in the high places of a metropolitan city, when reverence is weakening for that parental rule, and that authority of law, which are the very representatives of God, when prosperity awakens not the sense of responsibility but the instinct of self-gratification, then the country is in danger, for this, far more than the reign of tyranny, is the environment in which is nurtured, not that revolt against evil rule which is a nation’s safeguard, but that rebellion against all rule which is its destruction. The one safeguard which our country needs, that all potent safeguard, is the revival of true religion; a new recognition of the character of God and our relations to him as children, owing his therefore love and obedience wherever he manifests himself, a new recognition of our relations to men as fellow children of God, brothers by that bond, and by it entitled to our love and our self-sacrificing service. McKinley will not have died in vain if his death awakens his country to this need, and if that Christianity which as a nation we profess becomes a potent influence in our institutions through its influence upon individual lives.”

“The gates of schools and libraries and of churches and every needed institution for individual advancement stand wide open, and yet there are men—what shall I call them?—haters of humanity, assassins of society, plotters against church and state and society, who would undermine the structure of everything, hoping that in the universal chaos something may turn up which they may clutch and so better themselves.”

“The selfishness and cruelty of anarchy come out to sight. The vileness of the sentiments that are sown under the guise of friendship and good will for the people, is fully exposed. Let there be an end. Toleration can no further go.”

“Probably nothing can be done to preclude the possibility of such attacks upon the heads of nations, but the preaching if not the mad practise of anarchy can be stopped, and it doubtless will be until we again grow careless of the safety of our highest state officials.”

“Nothing has been accomplished by the idiot Czolgasz [sic] except to inspire with new life the forces of reaction, and if for no other reason than this he and his kind are enemies of mankind.”

“In these latter days it seems that a body of beings has been evolved, out of what conditions it is needless to say, among whom even the semblance of what is known as good is so far absent that they have bid farewell to hope, farewell to fear, farewell to remorse, and by a strange metamorphism have made evil their good.”

“The foul murder by an anarchist of a man so universally beloved would have justified serious perturbation in trade and industry, but the very occurrence has only served to show how free our people, as a whole, are from acceptance of the villainous doctrines of those who see in social chaos a regeneration of mankind.”

“The only full and final protection against the moral and mental insanity which makes Anarchism possible is the complete cleansing of society to the very bottom.”

“Czolgosz acted as the exponent of a theory, founded upon a degree of truth quite extensively admitted, that large classes of the people are oppressed by existing conditions, social and political, for which there is no remedy except force. Whatever may be said for or against such a conclusion, no doubt there are rational views on each side held by sane persons—honest people, and good citizens. Opinions cannot be successfully combatted by force. But when the exponents of a theory individually resort to force and commit crime, they should and must suffer punishment.”

Must anarchy strike virtue down, in terror,
     In land redeemed by patriotic blood?
How can we purify our land from error
     And make it strong in Christian brotherhood?

“An avowed anarchist is more dangerous than a wild beast and should no more be allowed to roam at large than a tiger from the jungle.”

“. . . these revolutionary anarchists, the anarchists of the pistol, the poniard, and the running noose; the anarchists who are opposed to government because it uses force, but whose entire programme consists in the use of force in the most cowardly and infernal ways—these are the people who are outside the pale of reason and humanity; their words and deeds prove them impervious to all rational and humane motives; they are the sworn foes of society, and it is absurd for society to harbor and protect combinations of men whose only purpose in life is the destruction of the order which protects them.”

“Before he has hatched his plots of foul conspiracy against earthly government; before he has defiled the air of heaven with the bombast and bitterness of his contempt of human authority; before he has lifted his treacherous hand against the civil magistrate, or laid his underground mines to break up social order, he has dethroned God. He is an atheist before he is an Anarchist; he is an Anarchist because he is an atheist.”

“We picture to ourselves an Anarchist in the unlovely personality of man or woman plotting, scheming, conspiring in the dark, or blatant and bitter in their denunciation of all government; cruel and stealthy and deadly, with the trail of a serpent and the tread of a tiger, and the snapping and snarling of a mad dog—unsexed women and dehumanized men; and such he is, such she is, in the finished development of their rabies.”

“So long as the causes of anarchy continue—deep seated, widespread, upheld and promoted by governments, excused and lauded in the press and the pulpit, tolerated and trifled with by the people—anarchists will continue to appear. For every one hung, or electrocuted, or beheaded, or lynched, two will arise.”

“[The assassination] gave startling proof that republics no less than monarchies, democracies no less than despotisms, the land of the free no less than the government of tyranny and oppression, will sooner or later be the victim of these indolent, conscienceless, vindictive and unspeakably brutal wretches who seem to see nothing in industry, right living and frugality but an opportunity for them to divide and despoil, who see nothing in honest accumulations of wealth but organized crime; that in these Anarchists whom we have foolishly permitted to enter this country for years unchecked, we have been nursing nests of vipers who have now turned upon their protector and buried their deadly fangs in its heart.”

“. . . anarchists are not more but less dangerous if they are given an opportunity to blow off steam in vapid discussion of their crazy doctrines than in being suppressed by inquisitional police measures that have no place in our polity.”

“. . . it is our duty to stamp out anarchy’s fiendish and unholy cult, and not only to make an example of the misguided and infatuated assassin, but also to bring to just retribution those who incite him to his hideous crime against society.”

“Most of these anarchists are simply criminals, whose perverted instincts lead them to prefer confusion and chaos to social order and beneficent institutions. Their pretense of concern for workingmen is as impudent as it is false; for the political institutions of this country afford the greatest hope and reliance of all honest and intelligent sons of labor. The anarchists everywhere are enemies of society and of progress. They are deadly foes of real liberty.”

“It can doubtless to some extent be hunted down as essentially treasonable and criminal; but it must not for a moment be forgotten that a very large measure of freedom of speech and general liberty is the best safeguard against the dangerous plotting of anarchists.”

“Anarchy is the science of getting along without any Government. It is in an academic sense a purely utopian idea, which could only become practical were it possible to so train the physical and moral nature of each individual that each could exist and thrive and exercise all desirable rights without ever trenching or seeming to trench in thought, word or aim on the rights of any other. In other words, under ideal anarchy each individual would simply govern himself. There would be no disputes or differences of opinion, in fact a sort of governmental Nirvana, heavenly only to those who could enjoy a perfect stagnancy of mind and body, and utterly unattainable by beings having the characteristics of men and women. Unluckily, this ideal of moon-struck philosophers has been taken up by people either half educated or wholly ignorant, who do not possess the faculty of detecting impracticability.”

“Anarchy, and fads, and fools cannot be suppressed by law.”

“The cruel murder of William McKinley reminds us that Anarchy is still a living and a working terror. Not only was it cruel—it was purposeless, even for an anarchistic outrage.”

“But we shall never find a proper remedy for Anarchism until we understand what an Anarchist is, and what he wants. He is an indolent monster, diseased with vanity, whose first and last desire is advertisement. He has no practical aim, no definite ambition. He knows that when he has slain one ruler, good or bad, another will arise; he knows also that so long as he and his friends live policemen will be a patent necessity. He knows all this, or he would know it, if thirst for publicity had left any space for knowledge in his narrow brain. It is not wrong that goads him to revenge, for he is as often as not well supplied with the things which make life pleasant, and the money which shall purchase the instruments of his crime are seldom lacking to him. He travels at will from one end of the earth to the other, generally accompanied by a mistress, and when he has driven home his dagger, thrown his bomb, or pulled the trigger of his pistol, he is aureoled with glory, in whose reflected light his companions proudly bask.”

Anarchy’s irreligion failing God, fails mankind.
Christ’s are the only ethics potent to draw and bind
Men unto men as brothers, striving for human good,—
Sons free and equal under God’s common Fatherhood!

“So far as the preaching of anarchy is concerned,—whether it be ‘philosophical’ anarchy or plain, ordinary, murderous anarchy,—there need be no difficulty. Some things are settled forever, and one of those things is the necessity for law and organized government. It is not guaranteeing freedom of speech, but licensing lunacy, to permit the public discussion of the contrary view. Society owes no protection to men and women who believe and who teach that there should be no society at all.”

“We cannot silence the anarchist without endangering the freedom of patriotic citizens, departing from our high theory, forgetting of what country we are inheritors, and disregarding our mission to our successors. That thought and word and printing-press shall be free is so clearly of the essence of our system, that, if anarchists shall ever provoke us in sudden heat to exchange freedom for repression, then they will indeed have wrought a revolution, and will have destroyed—as in no other way can they destroy—the present government of the United States.”

“. . . [anarchy] is the gospel of individualism gone mad.”

“. . . the real cure for the evil must wait for the slow process of assimilation and education of alien and untutored races pouring in an ever increasing deluge on our shores.”

“It is an anti-social force of slow and insidious growth developing in the untrained intellects and undernourished brains of the half-starved laboring and peasant classes of southern and eastern Europe. Driven from its natural habitat by the wisely repressive laws of European governments it takes refuge in free America, only to turn its blood-stained hand against our institutions and the highest person in our government.”

“The time has come when the Constitution of the United States must be so altered as to give to the country and its political workers some definite protection from the free hand of anarchy. . . .”

“The trial was conducted by Justice White with dignity and dispatch, and the solemn lesson taught to all of Czolgosz’s way of thinking that they may expect nothing more of the American people than a short shrift and a tight rope, or a sufficient electric voltage, as the lex loci may provide.”

“[Czolgosz’s] crime is the most foolish . . . as well as the most cowardly in the annals of anarchy.”

“This festering sore in our body politic calls for and should receive drastic treatment.”

“Anarchy can not be suppressed any more than the school-boy’s belief that arithmetic is all a mistake. . . .”

“‘Anarchy’ may be looked at psychologically or physiologically, as a mental disease or a physical degeneration, and it may be regarded philosophically as a systemless system, being utterly reprehensible from either point of view.”

“There is no excuse for anarchy in the United States. There is no room for anarchy in the United States. The anarchists must go.”

“The words spoken by a leader of the anarchists, Herr Most, are full of meaning. ‘Czolgosz,’ he said, ‘is not a Pole: the Poles are Catholics,’—the perfectly correct inference being that no Catholic can be an anarchist.”

“Happily there are not enough degenerates of the Czolgosz type or sentimentalists of the pseudo-scientific type to make protection from anarchy anything more than one of the ordinary police duties.”

“. . . while anarchism is, to some extent, respectable in Russia, there is no place for it or any part of it in the United States. . . .”

“They who preach or advocate assassination are the most efficient allies of despotism.”

“There is a wholesome appreciation . . . at the present crisis, of the fact that professed anarchists are not the only promoters of anarchical sentiment in America. The sordid and assumed friendship of ‘yellow journalism’ with the working-man whom it deceives and deludes has led to utterances which may prove as dangerous as any emanating from the convinced, or demented, or solely criminal advocates of anarchy.”

“Approval of lynch law, the killing and burning of negroes, the unbridled license of campaign speakers and partisan organs, the use of physical force by strikers—these and other phenomena, by no means exceptional with us, are breeders of anarchy.”

“As regards anarchism, one of two things must be true. Either some nefarious divinity has surreptitiously imparted it in the minds of its devotees, or else it is the creature of circumstances. Now the first hypothesis is inexpressibly silly to anyone who will take a moment to think; for, with the theory of origins now prevailing, it is inconceivable that an idea or an object should be created out of nothing; that it should be thrust extraneously into a given environment and be expected to live there and find a home. The only possible belief is that anarchy, somehow or other, is the expression of a certain set of circumstances; and if this is so, how can anarchy be condemned? The conditions out of which it grows may seem to those who are not anarchists to be horrid, dark and abnormal, but are they not, nevertheless, rather sacred and solemn? If we trace out their genesis we shall find that they are connected with other circumstances, and these circumstances, in turn, with still other circumstances, until, by an infinite process, we have included the whole universe. Anarchy, indeed, is a universe-production: it is of human nature.”

“We value greatly the right to the free utterance of our opinions in this country; but it may be questioned whether ‘free speech’ should carry with it liberty to attack in public places the foundations of society, marriage, the family, government, the Church, and religion.”

“There is no intention of, in any way, impugning the present Chief of the United States Secret Service, who, although not having been previously engaged in Police or Detective Service, has proven his capability for the position he holds, but the department of which he is the head has had but very little to do with anarchists, and, as at present organized, I do not believe it would be in a condition to handle this important problem. It would require a thorough reorganization, a large increase in the present force, no little legislation, and a large additional appropriation before much could be done toward controlling or eradicating the dangerous anarchists we have here now as well as those who are coming here in greater or less numbers at all times, and who, of late years, have seemed to do most of their plotting in this country.”

“Theosophy alone contains the solution of this problem of anarchy.”

“. . . for, after all, the man who fired the shot at the President was the least of the criminals. The men and women who egged him on by their teaching and preaching were far more guilty than he. Without them he would never have been inspired with his mad design. President McKinley would be alive to-day had these others, who have not even been molested, but permitted to continue their teachings, been dealt with in the first instance as their criminality deserves.”

“It is unquestionable that the speedy trial, conviction and execution of Czolgosz for the crime charged against him, will have a more potent effect and a more deterrent influence upon others of his class,—Anarchists, Socialists,—what you will, than whole libraries of theory for the suppression of Anarchy and Socialism.”

“It is a well-recognized fact that this crime [presidential assassination] is not likely to be committed—as an Anarchical crime at least—except by persons whose unbalanced and morbid minds are so inflamed by the spectacular features of the act that the legal punishment is rather an incentive than a deterrent.”

“In dealing with the wild beast or the deadly rattlesnake we consider, that the right to inflict death, as to an enemy of our race is an inherent right. Measured by every standard available to human reason, the Anarchist who decides to prevent the organization of human government by the assassination of him who has been chosen to act as the head of the government becomes the deadly enemy of the race, far more terrible than the hyena, the tiger or the rattlesnake.”

“The germ of anarchy is in every wrongdoer, in every lawbreaker.”

Blot out foul anarchistic stain,
Let not a trace of it remain,
For traitors on this nation’s sod,
Are traitors to Almighty God.

“The fault of the Anarchist lies in that he wishes to begin an ideal society before the human race has evolved into a fit state to receive it. He wishes to take the last step first; and, although the millennium can never be begun with the imperfect education of to-day, he would begin an earthly paradise with an unfit human nature, which would wear its wings as awkwardly as the Tsar holds out his olive-branch to the nations. The average man does not view Anarchism and Anarchists with a kindly eye. Their philosophy is above him, and he views with horror the bad logic of those men who preach peace and yet commit outrage, and he absolutely refuses to be terrorized into perfection. Whatever progress is made by Anarchist philosophy among thinkers will be nullified, and a feeling of horror against deeds such as those of Lucchini and Czolgotz [sic] will take its place in their hearts.”

“This problem of anarchy is dark and intricate, but it ought to be within the compass of democratic government—although no sane mind can fathom the mysteries of these untracked and orbitless natures—to guard against their aberrations, to take away from them the hope of escape, the long luxury of scandalous days in court, the unwholesome sympathy of hysterical degenerates, and so by degrees to make the crime not worth committing, even to these abnormal and distorted souls.”

“If all the anarchists in the world were slain, assassins of crowned heads and presidents would still be at hand. The name by which each would be known would matter but little, either to society at large or to our large army of degenerates. Elnikoff, who slew the Czar, Alexander II., was styled a nihilist. He would have fitted the rôle of anarchist equally well.”

“To those who wish to know what the Anarchists have to say, these words are addressed. We have to say that not Anarchism, but the state of society which creates men of power and greed and the victims of power and greed, is responsible for the death of both McKinley and Czolgosz.”

’T is there, in Freedom’s very home,
     That anarchy has maimed its host;
There ’t is that it has turned to bite
     The hand that fed it; there repaid
A country’s welcome with black spite;
     There, Judas-like, that land betrayed.

“The anarchists are the enemies of all who believe in law or order or government of any kind, and they promulgate their views by assassination and the fear of assassination. If ordinary society desires to protect itself, these worse than wild beasts must be properly dealt with, and our best legal minds should grapple with the problem how this is practically to be done.”