While the stacks of evidence presented at the Ellis Island hearings marked the beginning of the end for anarchism as a mainstream political movement in America, they were just the beginning for J. Edgar Hoover. The deportation of Berkman and Goldman — and the brilliant display of the power of the Editorial File System — proved to be the first major triumph of Hoover’s career. Less than five years later, he was appointed head of the bureau, a position he would hold for almost a half-century.
The file system might have looked like just a collection of index cards, no different from your routine Dewey Decimal System at a local library, but after Hoover took control of the B.O.I. (later renamed the F.B.I.), it proved to be one of the most menacing expressions of state power in American history, paving the way for the notorious undercover investigations into the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedys, John Lennon and countless other notable figures and so-called subversives.
If the Dynamite Club was the terrible unintended consequence of Nobel’s innovation, the unintended consequence of the anarchist bombs turned out to be the emergence of Interpol and the F.B.I. — one of those stretches of history when some of the most powerful institutions in the world are shaped by the activities of marginal groups, working outside the dominant channels of power, who end up ushering into being the very thing that they were protesting against. In the 1950s, the creation of the National Security Agency took the techniques of surveillance and wiretapping to an even more insidious level, increasingly tied to digital-age technologies. When Edward Snowden exposed the vast sweep of the N.S.A.’s cybersurveillance, he was charged with violating the very same Espionage Act originally deployed against Goldman and Berkman.
In the middle of the 19th century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously declared, “To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.” Proudhon would no doubt be appalled to learn that the F.B.I.’s current “Next Generation Identification” database contains more than 70 million fingerprints of convicted criminals, arrestees and immigration violators, and that its National Crime Information Center now handles more than 10 million queries a day. But he might be even more appalled to learn of the role anarchism played in making those systems a reality.
This article is adapted from “The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror and the Rise of the Modern Detective,” published this month by Crown.
Dan Winters is a photographer and portraitist based in Austin, Texas. He is known for his portraiture, scientific photography, photo illustrations and drawings.