The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression

Can the framework of settler colonialism help us better understand late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antileft repression? This is the core question asked and answered by Tariq D. Khan's impressive book. Khan, drawing on a wide range of theorists and digging into multiple case studies, makes a mostly convincing case. He maintains that the people who zealously denounced and aggressively fought anarchists, communists, socialists, and radical trade unionists during the second industrial revolution's beginning found inspiration from their predecessors, those who stigmatized and ethnically cleansed Native groups decades earlier. Khan seeks to, as he puts it, “apply anticolonial frameworks and understandings to US labor and working class history” (6). This interpretation, echoing the insights of American studies scholar Richard Slotkin, has many strengths and a few limitations.First, readers will be immediately struck by Khan's ability to draw from a rich set of historians and theorists. He is well steeped in critical theory, and he builds on writers who seldom appear in labor history publications: Sam Mbah, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Frantz Fanon, Kanno Sugako, Robert Blauner, Mary Helen Washington, Claudia Jones, Sarah Deer, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and numerous others. And his subjects are equally diverse. This is a truly intersectional study; the working class he covers consists of different genders, races, and ethnicities, and he often places his subjects in international contexts. Of course, labor historians, including Marcel van der Linden, Neville Kirk, and Julie Greene, have previously emphasized global history's importance. Khan reminds us that we must not accept the anti-labor-history caricatures peddled by the profession's bad-faith actors that the subject remains too pale and male: “In the United States and globally, the working class cannot be properly characterized as primarily white or primarily male” (16). “To characterize the working class, working class struggles, anarchism, and labor militancy as white,” he stresses, “is an erasure of many of the people who were at the center of radical labor and working-class history” (23).Khan understands power relations and provides numerous case studies from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth to advance his argument. The repression has a long history, and he notes that “the first ‘communists’ US authorities mobilized to contain and eliminate were not Marxists or anarchists but were Indigenous peoples” (34). The ruling classes and their allies continued to use repression against immigrant and native-born workers, and Khan covers many of labor history's key episodes: the combative strikes and strikebreaking events in 1877, the Haymarket hostilities in 1886, the Industrial Workers of the World free speech confrontations in San Diego with elite thugs in 1912, the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, and high-profile actions like the Bisbee Deportation and the lynching of Frank Little in 1917. Unwilling to accept the liberal claptrap so commonplace in much of the academy, he challenges the idea that the Progressive Era was in fact “progressive.” Honest observers will nod their heads in agreement at statements like this one: “Police did not become less violent or less dishonest. Courts did not become less cruel or less unjust in their treatment of the poor. Police, courts, jails, and prisons continued to be wielded by the bourgeoisie as weapons with which to keep the working class in subjection. Repression increased, with episode after episode of state violence against labor” (151). This is brilliantly put, and hopefully readers will incorporate his insights into their classroom lectures.Additionally, Khan offers fresh insights into some of the key revolutionary leaders of the period. His analysis of activist Lucy Parsons is especially strong. Here he convincingly challenges Jacqueline Jones's interpretation that Parsons was too narrowly focused on class. He does an excellent job showing that activists like Parsons drew revolutionary conclusions based on their own experiences living in a highly exploitative settler-colonial society. The repression carried out by politicians from both mainstream parties taught her and other sober-minded observers the necessity of prioritizing direct action techniques over electoral politics.The parallels Khan seeks to make between the early to mid-nineteenth century and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, however, are imperfect. Consider this statement: “The state used colonial counterinsurgency, particularly the tactics and ideological framework developed through the Indian Wars, as its template for repression of proletarian social movements” (75). He is undoubtedly correct that state forces and vigilantes drove radicals out from communities, often violently, just as earlier generations had expelled massive numbers of Native Americans. Indeed, employers periodically ousted dissidents from their communities, and the state deported hundreds of radical immigrants during the first Red Scare. And we know that turn-of-the-century anti-union elites and their allies celebrated earlier triumphs over Indians. Yet most union-busting and strikebreaking campaigns were less bloody and dramatic. Although US employer and state violence generally exceeded the levels of repression carried out by their counterparts in most of Europe during the same period, such brutality was considerably less severe than that employed against Native Americans in the nineteenth century.Second, capital's terrorists were inspired by more than Native American removal and white supremacy. For example, Khan maintains that the 1917 kidnapping and murder of Frank Little “drew heavily on Montana's white settler mythology to give meaning and justification for their violence” (178). Yet his murderers drew from early waves of landholder-generated vigilantism against mostly white gold and cattle thieves. As with Montana's vigilante campaigns from the 1860s to the 1880s, the murderers left the ominous numbers “3-7-77” next to Little's dead body as a warning to other potential lawbreakers. Furthermore, the open-shop movement, which fought unionists and leftists throughout the early twentieth century, was led by employers who were more inclined to cite Abraham Lincoln and free labor ideology than Andrew Jackson and Indian removal campaigns. Whether or not movement spokespersons sincerely believed in protecting “free” workers from what they frequently called the slavery of closed-shop unionism is impossible to know, but they nevertheless mastered the language of liberal individualism.Yet the book's virtues are more numerous than its weaknesses. Khan's decision to link the past to the present is especially noteworthy. He is both a chronicler and present-day fighter of militarism and settler colonialism. For instance, he highlights the importance of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement against the apartheid state of Israel, and rightly calls out those who violate the boycott as “scabs” (193). As I write this, the genocidal Zionist state, armed by Washington, has slaughtered over thirty thousand people in Gaza, and far too many of today's labor leaders have sought to give Israel cover. Sadly, union heads, including the American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten, have fought the BDS movement despite the campaign's popularity among the union's rank and file. Khan reminds us that we need a democratic and revolutionary labor movement that embraces the struggles of ordinary people irrespective of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and place. This is the book's most meaningful takeaway.