Books: Blood and Progress
A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America
This review was originally written for Quillette, and you can find a version here on the magazine’s website. Thanks to the discipline of an editor, it’s more concise and review-shaped than my usual books posts. So too is the version below, though it does expand a bit on the Quillette piece.
The assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and insurance executive Brian Thompson, the murder of a Jewish couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum, the latest (as of this writing) attempt on the life of Donald Trump—these are some recent examples of serious violence in the name of left-wing causes. Others include the spate of bombing and shooting attacks against ICE facilities, and, going further back, the deadly and destructive riots of 2020.
Noah Rothman’s Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America aims to “confront its readers” with “the quickening tempo of left-led attacks and their political motives,” as well as with the ways in which such violence is often forgotten or justified.
Rothman opens the book with recent examples like the Kirk assassination, then goes back in time to consider waves of leftist violence since the early 20th century. It thus proceeds from the anarchist bombers of the 1910s to the Marxist terrorists of the 1970s, on up through violent offshoots of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and pro-Palestinian movements. Consider a few highlights.
Anarchy in the US
How could any regular people, or indeed anyone with a heart, have ever been suspicious of worker’s unions? How could people in the America of the 1910s get so worked up about labor activism, socialism, and immigrants—culminating in the first Red Scare and a massive wave of politically motivated deportations?
If you see this purely as blind prejudice—well, that’s probably always part of the story with human beings. But in this case it’s not all of it. You also need to account for things like the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times. The sixteen sticks of dynamite were planted by two brothers, both labor activists, who also planted a bomb near the editor’s home (where it was discovered and detonated by police) and outside the home of the anti-union president of a manufacturing association.
And you need to account for the prominence of immigrants among the violent anarchists of the early 20th century. Inspired by Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani, anarchists declared war on capitalism and government, believing, as radicals are wont to do, they were just a few killings away from Utopia. It was an anarchist immigrant who assassinated President McKinley in 1901. Italians especially were drawn to the ranks of the Galleanist anarchists responsible for a wave of bombings across America, including the bombings of the Bronx Burrough Hall and NYPD headquarters in 1915, a bomb that killed eight police officers in Milwaukee in 1917, and the 1920 blast on Wall Street that killed 38 people and injured hundreds more.
There were more bombings, foiled plots, and attempted assassinations. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General behind the Red Scare’s unconstitutional deportations, was radicalized by repeated attempts on his own life, including one that left his and his neighbor’s yards strewn with the body parts of an assassin whose bomb went off early. And a mass poisoning of hundreds of people at the Chicago University Club very nearly wiped out most of America’s industrial leadership at a time when the country was just becoming an industrial power. The victims survived only because the would-be killer—an immigrant whose apartment was stuffed with anarchist, socialist, and “red” literature—used too much poison, causing immediate vomiting and treatment.