Abstract
This article explores the relationship between mob violence, immigration control, and the early twentieth-century US deportation regime. Scholars examining the decline of lynch violence in the South typically see modern criminal justice as a new incarnation of white, heteropatriarchal violence. But they have left the deportation apparatus, a conjoined element of a US carceral assemblage, unexamined. This article argues that modern border policing’s ostensibly bloodless removal absorbed anti-immigrant mob violence within its carceral-eliminatory system. As with the diminution of the Southern, anti-black lynch mob, invocations of legality in deportation proved better suited to the biopolitics of liberal capitalist modernity. Nevertheless, the deportation regime, bolstered by an extensive federal infrastructure, still targeted migrants of color, took aim against political radicals, and policed heteropatriarchy in its production of settler-colonial citizenship via the spatial elimination of so-called undesirable aliens.
In May 1932, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born issued a remarkable set of postcards. The Committee’s supporters signed and sent the postcards to the Department of Labor, and demanded “the release of all foreign born held for deportation.” In addition to advocating on behalf of those facing removal, the cartoon on the front of the card showed an octopus looming before a multi-ethnic crowd of men, women, and children. The octopus’s top hat was emblematic of capitalism; its tentacles variously bore the words Wage Cuts, Frame Up, Deportations, and, partially obscured, Lynch, and stretched for the people behind it, who held signs reading “To China,” “To Hungary,” and “To Italy,” among other locations to which they would be removed. And at the edge of the image, the words: “Native and Foreign Born, Negro and White – Unite!” 1 The figure of the octopus radically linked political economic exploitation (wage-cuts) to domestic racial penality (lynching and frame-ups) and nativist international removal (deportation), all enabled by the state and its extralegal allies, against the masses behind it. 2 Moreover, at the time of the card’s circulation, nativists railed against what they saw as Mexican illegality, and forced the mass deportation of Mexicans from the country. 3
The postcard offered a remarkable assessment of racial capitalism and the different branches of the carceral state. It showed insight that scholars of modern penality have only recently come to recognize. Yet, in the 1930s, the connection it drew between political economy and the practices of extralegal violence was more powerful as critique than as sociological analysis. To be sure, state violence and mob violence still intertwined in the depression years, but extralegal violence was in a period of relative decline. (See Figure 1.) Researchers in African American studies, Southern history, critical legal studies, and criminology have traced the historical shift in racial violence from racial enslavement and an anti-modern plantation economy, through a hybrid postbellum transition bolstered by spectacular mob violence, and toward the political aesthetics and penal institutions considered appropriate to industrialized twentieth-century racial capitalism. In their edited volume on the modern death penalty, legal scholars Charles Ogletree and Austin Sarat neatly summarized this as a shift from lynch mobs to the killing state, linking modes of anti-black violence to their specific historical contexts. 4 The declining numbers of people lynched and the subsequent rise of the capitally-condemned or imprisoned substantiate the argument that violence would increasingly be concentrated within the state’s legally sanctioned apparatus. (See Figure 2.)
Lynchings, by Race, 1885–1965. 5
US State and Federal Prison Populations, 1925–2015. 6
The historiography of mob violence against those deemed national foreigners in the American West and the Southwestern borderlands tend toward a different but related trajectory. 7 With the Texas revolution in 1836 and the US war against Mexico between 1846–1848, the US conquered half of Mexico’s territory, transforming Mexico’s citizens and denizens into foreigners in the land where they were born. 8 During the course of that war, US volunteers and soldiers summarily executed soldiers and civilians alike. 9 William Carrigan and Clive Webb tracked the persistence of anti-Mexican violence beyond military conquest and into a period of domestic pacification, and linked the chronology of anti-Mexican mob violence to periodic border crises, with spikes connected to the California Gold Rush in the 1850s, border crossing by “bandits” in the 1870s, and the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. 10 (See Figure 3.)
Mexican-Descent Victims of Mob Violence, by Decade, 1848–1928. 11
While the periodization and causes of anti-Mexican violence differed from anti-black violence in the South, by the 1930s, Carrigan and Webb argue, the broad tendency was similar. Extralegal border violence diminished, and incarceration “had to a certain extent supplanted the role of the lynch mob.” 12 It is an important insight. But Carrigan and Webb might have looked to the dynamic of immigrant removal and deportation, a process that paralleled incorporation into the domestic carceral state, and to which scholars of lynching or mob violence have yet to fully attend. 13 (See Figure 4.)
US Deportations and Forced Removals, 1892–2014. 14
This article draws on three case studies from the American West to reveal more capacious relationships between the histories of mob violence, immigration control, and the rise of the modern deportation state in the early twentieth century. Hidetaka Hirota’s assessment of mid-nineteenth-century nativism on the eastern seaboard and Jean Pfaelzer’s history of anti-Chinese violence in the nineteenth-century West set the necessary pre-history for such a study, but stop prior to the modern deportation regime, while Erika Lee, Mae M. Ngai, and Elliott Young have done crucial work in histories of Chinese immigration and the state mechanics of exclusion and expulsion in the Exclusion Era. Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Migra! identified key shifts from interpersonal Texas Ranger violence to the managerial violence of the US Border Patrol and Daniel Kanstroom’s Deportation Nation traced a long duree social and legal history of forced removal, but we have yet to trace the connection between the nineteenth-century violence described in Arnoldo De León’s They Called them Greasers, in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West, and in Corrigan and Webb’s Forgotten Dead to the forced removals analyzed in Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez’s Decade of Betrayal and Camille Guerin-Gonzales’s Mexican Workers and the American Dream, or the painful history that followed. 15
In connecting these stories, the article argues that local, cathartic, expressive anti-immigrant violence was (partially) sublimated into modern border policing and an ostensibly anodyne deportation regime. By the early twentieth century, mob rule and state coercion intertwined and were subsumed within an emergent regulatory federal government with new institutional capacities for population management. 16 While this might be taken to substantiate Norbert Elias’s thesis about civilizing processes, it is better understood as a threshold process between the biopolitics of population management, the necropolitics of elimination, and what William Walters calls the viapolitics of travel. 17 Immigration authorities deported only a few hundred people each year between 1892 and 1907, and in absolute terms, these numbers were relatively small. 18 But as anti-immigrant movements gained strength and the American deportation apparatus became more efficient by the 1920s, annual numbers grew into the thousands and climbed. Since 1892, nearly 50 million people have been deported or forcibly expelled from the United States. 19
Though US state agents have scarcely shied away from directly exercising violent power – especially at the border and behind prison walls, and particularly against radicals and people of color – its modern incarnations are based more on infrastructural capacities and spatial control rather than bodily destruction. To build on Stephen Skowronek’s influential work, we might see this as a shift from the nineteenth-century state of courts, parties – and mobs – to the twentieth-century administrative state. 20 As with the diminution of the Southern, anti-black lynch mob in favor of legal incarceration invocations of legality in deportation proved more durable and better suited to the political economy and aesthetics of liberal capitalist modernity. Deportation, like incarceration, would absorb the potential challenges that white mobs posed to the ascendant liberal capitalist – but still white supremacist – state and constrain them within a modulated rule of law. 21 At the same time, the consolidated apparatus heightened non-citizens’ ontological precarity, and affirm nativist citizens’ confident national belonging. 22
A second argument suggests that to better understand the transition from the lynch mob to the deportation regime we must augment questions of racial nativism with intersectional analysis in the multiple forms of difference in settler-colonial citizenship. If a key project of settler colonialism is the attempted removal of sovereign Indigenous peoples from the land – through eliminatory violence, forced assimilation, or territorial removal and containment in reservations (processes including forced removal as well as incarceration; and missing from the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born’s postcard) – an additional element concerns the regulation of who counts as a permitted settler and thus might aspire to becoming a full citizen. 23 This is the distinction immigration authorities posed between desirable immigrants and undesirable aliens, or, as Jodi Byrd has put it, between welcomed immigrants and those arrivants displaced by the forces of global racial capitalism and empire. 24 Migrant denizens and travelers who could or would not adhere to the eugenic contours of settler citizenship – in terms of race, sexual morality, political sensibility, physical and cognitive ability, or self-sufficient economic production, which might congeal within but were never fully reducible to the alternatively gendered notions of helplessness or criminality – risked capture, arrest, and expulsion as undesirable aliens. 25 The absorption of mob violence into the federal deportation regime targeted migrants of color, and particularly Chinese and Mexican denizens early in the twentieth century, but it also took aim against political radicals, and, more obliquely, embraced the policing of family violence and the contours of proper heteropatriarchy. Large-scale deportation, whose legal precepts were increasingly materializable in the early twentieth century thanks to new federal capacities for coordinated capture and removal, operated in tandem with incarceration as a means of racial, spatial, and behavioral governance. 26 Together, as Kelly Lytle Hernández has recently argued, they functioned as flexible mechanisms of settler colonial control. 27 Deportation asserted sovereignty over national territories by regulating community membership through the partitioning of citizenship, undesirable alienage, and criminality.
I. Chinese Elimination: Mobbing the Boundaries of Racial Belonging
The 1892 Geary Act extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another ten years. Its exclusion of Chinese laborers was a victory for the restrictionists whose cause was sharpened by the 1890s economic depression. It also smoothed the roughest edges of anti-Chinese violence across the Pacific Coast and Mountain West by bringing it under the auspices of federal law, and projecting its enforcement internationally. The Supreme Court decisions that validated the Geary Act – Chae Chan Ping (1889) and Fong Yue Ting (1893) – claimed immigration control and deportation as matters of absolute federal sovereignty and executive administrative prerogative. Justice Gray opined that “The right to exclude or expel all aliens, or any class of aliens, absolutely or upon certain conditions, in war or peace, [is] an inherent and inalienable right of every sovereign and independent nation.” 28
Writers for the Los Angeles Herald reported “rejoicing” in California when the Supreme Court validated the Geary Act’s deportation provisions in May 1893, but the costs of deporting the Chinese were daunting. Amidst cheering white crowds, Congressman Geary blithely assured an Associated Press reporter that deportation would be “cheap and feasible,” and that the government should of course begin removal, regardless of the costs. Others were skeptical. Lyman Mowry, an attorney for the Chinese Six Companies, estimated that it would “cost $10,000,000 to deport the Chinese” and consequently, he thought that “no immediate action” was likely to be taken. When Los Angeles Herald reporters asked a deputy collector of Internal Revenue how the government would pay for deporting so many Chinese, the official was “rather at a loss for an answer.” The Cincinnati Enquirer was similarly concerned about practicalities: “How are we to deport them? Neither money nor ships have been furnished.” Drawing on the real prospect of lynch violence, Cincinnatians proposed that they “might get up a riot and kill them,” but worried that the reaction would be “unpleasant” and threaten much-valued China trade. 29 The subsumption of popular sovereignty into federal authority satisfied white crowds, for a time, but it soon became clear that the federal government’s deportation regime was not equipped to exercise the spatial sovereignty that Justice Gray promised.
Wong Dep Ken was among the first people deported under the Geary Act. His case revealed the early federal deportation apparatus’ inchoate nature, and how the practicalities of forced Chinese removal – the literal costs of transport and material arrangements of state power – retained elements of mob violence. Enraged members of cook and cigars rollers unions compelled the Internal Revenue commissioner to arrest Wong despite the fact that there was no funding available for his removal. An armed US marshall nonetheless brought Wong from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where he was loaded aboard the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s SS Rio de Janeiro, bound for Hong Kong. Yet Los Angeles Herald writers admitted that Wong’s removal was a Pyrrhic victory. The state paid $35 dollars for his ticket to China, but thanks to the Six Companies’ legal defense, “it cost [the government] a lot more than that to get him started.” 30
With funding uncertain, Circuit Court Judge Ross made clear that private citizens should enforce the Geary Act by making “citizens’ arrests” of any suspicious Chinese people. The decision led directly and indirectly to mob violence against the Chinese, in California and beyond, just as it brought non-registered Chinese into state scrutiny. 31 As a result, jails across the Golden State quickly filled, overstretching municipalities’ ability to feed and house prospective deportees. On September 26, 1893, US Marshal Gard (who, the previous month, had conveyed Wong Dep Ken to San Francisco) “announced that there were no more funds to enforce deportations.” Banks refused to lend the marshal any money to pay for deportation, and though Pacific Mail had accepted a voucher for Wong Dep Ken’s steerage ticket to Hong Kong, railroad companies – themselves invested in maintaining an abundant supply of low-wage Chinese laborers – now demanded payment in advance. Despite having overseen the deportation of 120 Chinese men, Gard could deport few more without substantial appropriations. 32 But as Jean Pfaelzer and others have shown, white volunteers continued to threaten, harass, murder, and drive the Chinese from their communities. The Geary Act would have been a certain failure without white settler-citizen voluntary violence to expand state capacities for enforcement. 33
After 1903, the Department of Labor took control of immigration policy and policing, and its immigration bureau signaled an increasing professionalism and movement away from vigilantism. 34 Officials also addressed what they saw as the inefficiencies of removal. In 1903, Commissioner-General Frank Sargent made explicit the connection between exclusion and removal. “Any reasonable amount of success in the continuance of the exclusion policy [depends upon] the success of the expulsion [policies] as well.” 35 Sargent attempted to solidify the new mode of bureaucratization through his own personal network building, improving lines of communication and making personal trips to immigration stations around the country, and imposing centralized and more systematic mode of recordkeeping. 36
This more sophisticated state apparatus would turn its attention to Chinese residents within the United States, not just at borders and ports. “Let it be known,” Sargent declared in 1906, “that even thickly settled city districts will not afford, as in the past, a safe-harbor for those who clandestinely enter.” 37 Special immigration agents known as “Chinese Catchers” would comb the cities and the interior for non-registered and deportable Chinese, interrogating whomever they saw fit. The most highly celebrated agents were lauded for their talents and high arrest rates, and traveled throughout the country to share their techniques. J.D. Putnam bragged that he had a special ability to tell Chinese apart from one another – a skill that most whites apparently lacked. “Whenever I meet a Chinaman I can tell whether or not I have ever seen him before, and if so, where. I never forget a Chinaman’s face. It is very easy to detect a newcomer – a Chinaman who has come unlawfully into the country… His walk, his gestures, his manner, all make it as easy to find him out as it is to tell a white man from a negro.” 38
The increased governmental scrutiny of Chinese, and the ability to harass, was bolstered by the diminution of Chinese legal rights. In 1901, the Supreme Court ruled in Li Sing v. United States that aliens were ineligible to trial by jury and were not protected against unreasonable search and seizure. Yet officials still complained of the difficulty in deporting those whom they had captured. “If the Chinese is arrested in the proximity of the [Canadian or Mexican] boundaries, generally there is either evidence or a strong suspicion that they have recently been smuggled in; if they are arrested in the interior, no such evidence exists. It is only occasionally that a Chinaman arrested in one of the large interior cities having a considerable Chinese population can be deported.” 39 Moreover, when Chinese denizens claimed US citizenship, the government had difficulty in proving otherwise, and an immigration agent must “depend on [his] ability to break down by cross examination the testimony of the witness carefully coached for the purpose of proving American birth.” 40 New guidelines empowered inspectors to interrogate “all Chinese persons in the United States not personally known to them” to determine if they might be deported. Inspectors wielded tremendous discretionary power, demanding papers and other proof of residency, simply for claiming not to have interrogated them in the past. 41
Chinese Catchers employed a host of techniques to ensnare undocumented Chinese, but the most spectacular came in the form of militarized raids into a city’s Chinatown. Unlike European immigrant communities at the same time, the Chinese were subject to particular harassment by way of ongoing public raids into Chinatowns’ lived spaces: vegetable markets, churches, schools, and places of business. The raids that the Chinese Catchers led after 1903 were hardly the disorganized or semi-spontaneous mob violence of the second half of the nineteenth century in the Mountain and Pacific West. But nevertheless, officials did smash-and-grab raids in Chinatowns across the country in the early 1900s, and well beyond the Pacific States: in Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere, harassing Chinese laborers, merchants, and laundrymen who were doing little other than living or working. 42 The raids curtailed the murderous excesses of the nineteenth century’s vigilantism, and government officials understood their action to be of the utmost procedural propriety. Chinatown residents felt otherwise. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce complained that the Chinese were “raided repeatedly, sometimes as often as once a month” despite consistent failures to find “contraband” Chinese. Moreover, the Los Angeles-based Chinese-America League of Justice accused the immigration authorities of conducting these raids with “the grossest insolence and most brutal conduct.” Chinese suffered physical abuse, blatant disrespect, as well as the indignity of having their property destroyed and rifled through. 43 By 1923, denizens of San Francisco’s Chinatown complained that they were suffering under a “veritable Reign of Terror” from the Bureau of Immigration. 44 This suggests a considerable but shifting continuity of marginal legality and violence becoming incorporated into new state forms.
By the 1930s, Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants were long familiar with the white legal and extralegal violence, and the hazy border between them. An increasingly professionalized Border Patrol shifted from immediate and bloody violence characteristic of Texas Rangers to spatial controls and regulations, much as the massive carceral state apparatus in the borderlands could be leveled against ethnic Mexicans, US citizens or not, accused of crime. 45 Extralegal violence was never absent, but it was increasingly augmented by the more supple practice of mass removal, and particularly after the 1931 La Placita raids in Los Angeles. The La Placita raid was no lynch mob, but its architects deliberately terrorized Mexican immigrants and residents. 46 Elsewhere, Mexican communities in Mississippi, Indiana and Texas were threatened with violence unless they boarded trains or packed up their cars and “voluntarily” left. 47 The subsequent exodus from around the nation – Seattle to Pittsburgh and all points South – was enabled by a patchwork of state, municipal, and private concerns, from state welfare offices to religious charities and transport companies offering reduced fares. Together, they revealed a continuous extralegality in the collusion of white civil society, businesses, and state actors. 48 As a result, “small barrios virtually disappeared,” and busy colonias “took on the eerie look of abandoned ghost towns.” 49
II. Gendered Behavior, Correct Patriarchy, and the Limits of Protecting White Womanhood
A central tendency in the anti-black lynch mob scholarship is a focus on gendered racial domination, and white male attempts at the destruction of black political subjectivity through sexualized racial violence, coupled with the assertion of control over white women’s bodies and sexualities. 50 But lynching also expressed intra-racial community retributive violence and the guarantee of “proper” heteropatriarchal norms. 51 The heteropatriarchal nuclear family is the smallest sovereign domain under modern racial capitalism, and an intimate site of the settler polity’s reproductive future. 52 Moreover, officials suspected that immigrant women without male providers were either likely to become public charges or potential prostitutes, if not both. The anti-Chinese 1875 Page Act codified these racially-gendered fears with particular virulence, and they continued well into the future. 53
The links between intra-racial gendered lynch mob traditions and deportation came clear in the case of James Pepper, and his daughter, Olive. 54 Their experience coincided with concerns around what would become known as the white slave trade, a social panic that represented innocent white women entrapped by exploitative immigrant pimps, procurers, and enabled corrupt political machines. Driven by middle class anti-vice and progressive reformers, the panics condensed complexly gendered fears of untrammeled immigration, urbanization, the impact of industrialization and wage labor on women’s public roles and family life. 55 Advocates in urban centers called on benevolent non-profit groups and religious organizations to enforce moral vigilance, and increasingly relied on state agents. 56 In the mining West, deadly mob action remained a very real alternative.
James Pepper left his family in Longdale, England in 1904, to earn decent money as a Head Timberman at gold and silver mines in Fairview and Fallon, Nevada. His wife died while he was in the United States, and his two children, still in Longdale, moved in with his sister. In Nevada, Pepper began living with Minnie Brundage, who had a teenage daughter from a previous relationship. As an Englishman and a skilled worker, James Pepper’s whiteness and class status were secure. His gendered status as a proper father were more troubling.
In late 1913, Pepper traveled to England and returned to the United States with his daughter, Olive, who was then 17 years old, leaving his son in his sister’s care. Had she traveled alone, Olive Pepper might have been denied entry at Ellis Island. Young women traveling without husbands or fathers commonly garnered inspectors’ suspicion as either likely to become public charges or as potential prostitutes. 57 En route from their home, according to testimony Olive Pepper would later give, her father raped her, first, at a hotel in New York, and again on the train from New York to Nevada. Remarkably, though she lacked an established support network, Olive Pepper spoke to her de facto step-mother, Minnie Brundage, and reported the attacks to local authorities. Minnie was prepared to believe her. She had reportedly sent her own teenaged daughter back to Germany – the official reason was for her music education, but really, the rumors went, to save her from James Pepper’s advances. After Olive brought the charges against her father, he was arrested. James Pepper was jailed while the charges were investigated, but it also seems that he was locked up for his own protection. Because the rapes had happened beyond Nevada state lines, charges were dismissed, but a mob had formed and threatened to castrate him. Its members included townspeople from Fairview, but a doctor from Wonder, Nevada, was called to aid in the procedure. Under other circumstances – had he not been white and the victim not his daughter – the mob might have demanded his release to exact their own summary justice. That did not come to pass. Pepper still remained under some form of state protection until he was released from jail and told to leave Fairview, quickly. He did.
Meanwhile, Fairview’s citizens raised about $200 for Olive Pepper. Part of the money went toward a train ticket to New York City; a benevolent form of community removal, perhaps, in contrast to her father’s having been warned out. When Olive Pepper arrived in New York, she lodged at the Florence Crittenden Mission, a charitable institution, but soon came to the attention of immigration authorities. 58 Ten days later, immigration officials sought a warrant for her arrest. They brought her from the Mission Home to Ellis Island, where she was locked up and interrogated.
Occasionally, women who had fallen into disrepute through the so-called White Slave trade were accorded the status of victims, considered worthy of being saved by those who might instruct them in the virtues of Victorian Protestant femininity. 59 Pepper might have been a good candidate. If, as Estelle Freedman has argued, the ability to level rape charges is a measure of sexual and political sovereignty, and thus a measure of citizenship, Olive Pepper’s was very much a threshold case. 60 Fairview’s community members believed her, as did its local government officials. As she explained to immigration officials, she had some money left over from the citizens of Fairview, and she planned to remain in New York to study nursing. However, the immigrant inspector who heard Olive’s case was unmoved; she received none of the benefits of victim status. Abused by her father rather than entrapped by a stranger, the inspector determined “that on account of the criminal tendencies of her father, [she was] a person likely to become a public charge,” a malleable accusation that was nearly impossible to disprove. 61 The inspector’s disdain followed a callous eugenic logic, in which the crimes her father committed against her became evidence of her future guilt. In such an understanding, Olive Pepper was less the victim of family sexual violence than she was an inheritor of her father’s criminality. The futurity of her offense was the possibility of receiving public aid – either collecting welfare or serving time in a jail – rather than any kind of intergenerational trauma. For those reasons, Olive Pepper was deported from the United States, presumably returning to her aunt and younger brother in Longdale.
While Olive’s case was being investigated, immigrant inspectors went forward with charges against her father. James Pepper had fled Fairview but soon was arrested and brought to Angel Island in California. There, he faced questioning about his life in the United States, his relationship with his daughter, and the details of their travels. He flatly denied any wrongdoing.
In the face of conflicting testimony and little direct evidence, immigration inspectors had to make a difficult decision. Inspector Lawler believed that there was little motive for a daughter to make false charges against her father, and that the accusations were likely true. Given that Pepper’s “bad reputation” in Nevada nearly led to his lynching, the inspector was inclined to believe that the charges were merited. 62 Commissioner Backus concurred. According to Backus, the threats to James Pepper’s life by the citizens of Fairview revealed “a state of popular disapproval and public indignation as would indicate the truth of the charges made by the daughter.” James Pepper would be deported, too.
Their decision to deport James Pepper sublimated lynch violence through legal territorial removal, enabled by the federal government. It displaced, but did not address, the family violence that Olive Pepper survived. James Pepper was loaded aboard a deportation train in San Francisco, bound for Ellis Island, and then onto a steamship for Liverpool. From there, however, available records fall silent. Like his daughter, he probably returned to Longdale, and he probably visited his sister. We can only speculate what might have taken place when Olive Pepper and her father met again. US immigration officials were not particularly concerned.
III. Anti-Radicalism: the Boundaries of Political Community
Military style raids on non-white communities helped secure territory in the transition from a period of settler conquest to a period of social management within a broadly, if always incompletely, pacified territory, asserting governmental sovereignty and control over the racial foundation of precisely who the settlers in this settler colonial regime would be. But confirming and maintaining the polity’s capitalist economic order, and particularly its basis in wage labor relations – as determined by employers rather than by workers in collective struggle – was also important. For this reason, radical organizations were also subject to both vigilante violence and military-style raids. Not coincidentally, reportage frequently discursively linked labor protest to both unruly immigrants and racial savagery, justifying the suppression of each. 63
Anti-radical raids shared much with the trajectory of violence and state incorporation seen in the anti-Chinese raids. The incorporation of state and military force into labor and anti-radical repression was not entirely new – business owners and local and state officials frequently drew on military force and strategy to crush organized workers’ protest or the threats they posed to the economic status quo. After the Haymarket riot in May 1886, the Chicago police appointed and armed a special squad of military veterans to conduct patrols and suppress protest. 64 In 1892, five different states called out the National Guard to put down strikes, and federal troops dispersed railroad strikers in Chicago in 1894. 65 Policymakers added political radicals and leftists to the expanding roster of aliens prohibited from entering the United States in successive immigration acts between 1882 and 1924; so too would they be subject to expulsion as techniques for the capture and removal were developed. Following the McKinley assassination in 1903, anarchists came to bear the brunt of the state’s repressive weight against dissidents. Intentionally or coincidentally, immigration officials intent on eliminating radicals from the nation used military raids to intimidate, capture, and expel non-citizen radicals. 66
As William Preston, Jr., has argued, “most antiradical arrests had been and were to be made by raids or mass roundups in halls and on the streets.” 67 Radicals need not have committed any specific criminal offense: challenging employers’ power was enough. Leftists found their union halls under siege whenever state agents, large employers, or local bourgeoisie felt themselves under threat. In the early twentieth century, and across the West, from San Francisco to Seattle and from Bisbee to Butte, radicals, and especially members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), were subject to beatings, murder, or deportation when vigilantes joined with local police forces and the US military. 68 IWW members suffered under what Kate Holladay Claghorn called “open lawlessness” from citizens and town officials. According to Claghorn, the IWW members were subject to capture “through the cooperative action by the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, and unofficial bodies of citizens, such as the Minute Men of Seattle, and other groups affiliated with the American Protective League.” 69 In the dual crises of the Mexican Revolution and in the years surrounding World War I, a hybrid of military, police, and vigilante forces attacked radicals, and drew links with the modern deportation regime.
Labor struggles in the rural and Mountain West had long been heated and periodically violent, and became more so in the early twentieth century. The combination of rapid industrialization and unforgiving labor conditions, the cultures of masculinity and of rapid transience, the multiethnic combinations of recent and long-time immigrant populations and attendant emergences of nationalist conflict, the forms of spatial and physical labor control, and low wages and indebtedness to owners or contractors, comprised a volatile mix in which workers were only somewhat less likely than owners to resort to violence. 70 Tensions heightened during World War I and the Mexican Revolution, when anarcho-syndicalist ideologies and revolutionaries traversed the border, such as Ricardo Flores Magon’s Partido Liberal Mexicano US outposts and Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico. The discovery and suppression of the Mexican insurgent Plan de San Diego and then the Zimmerman Telegram led Anglo-American settlers to institute a brutal counterinsurgency, fearing a German-backed Mexican reconquista of the territory that the United States had only recently come to control. 71 Officials and capitalists’ fever dreams confected radical workers’ challenge to employers’ dominance as a national existential threat. In this period, historically localized forms of anti-radical violence were woven into much broader nationalist state-building projects. 72
In 1917 the War Department authorized army officers to “sternly repress acts committed with seditious intent,” and to protect “public utilities” in their localities that they deemed essential to the war effort. The language proved flexible enough to account for local officers’ discretion to suppress industrial actions. Commanding officers commonly worked with local authorities and businessmen, and took very seriously their opinions on what constituted seditious intent toward public utilities. At the platoon level, Lieutenants and their men would be made available to municipal authorities. 73
They were often joined by vigilantes, paid for or allied with business interests, and hyperpatriotic organizations. Between 1917 and 1919, the federal military raided IWW outposts, breaking up meetings and jailing members across the West. The Bisbee IWW raids and subsequent deportation of July 1917 is perhaps the most famous of the forced removals – interstate rather than international – but similar assemblages of patriotic vigilantism and state and federal force took place elsewhere. 74 The vast majority of Wobblies were arrested on the grounds of anticipated lawlessness rather than the actual commission of a crime. Frequently, they were beaten or at least threatened with violence, driven beyond county borders and told never to return. 75
In 1917, Frank Little, an IWW organizer and General Executive Board member, evaded vigilantes in Michigan who threatened to hang him. Little had organized among lumberjacks, oil field workers, and migrant harvest workers, and was a vocal advocate of anti-capitalist direct action and sabotage. He was a fervent critic of US involvement in the Great War, which he called a “capitalistic slaughterfest,” and declared that he was “ready to face a firing squad rather than compromise.” 76 Little spent time in Bisbee prior to the deportation drives there, and more time in the copper mines of Butte, Montana. 77 But on the morning of August 1, 1917, five armed, masked men (who identified themselves as “officers”) pulled Little from his Butte boarding house, beat and dragged him behind their car, and hanged him from a railroad trestle outside of town. 78 The note they left pinned to his chest promised more of the same: “Others Take Notice! First and Last Warning!” 79 Newspapers, near and far, supported the lynchers. Writers for the Helena Independent opined “that unless the courts and the military authorities take a hand now and end the IWW in the West, there will be more night-visits, more tugs at the rope, and more IWW tongues will wag for the last time when the noose tightens about the traitors (sic) necks.” The Chicago Tribune similarly justified the lynching, and called for more state coercion. “If the mine owners hired [Little’s] lynchers they only anticipated what the community would eventually be compelled to do if the law did not act. And the law must act with more power and promptness against such men.” 80
As a result, Federal troops came to Butte, ostensibly to keep the peace. They would remain until January 1921. Their task was to restore law and order in the face of vigilantism while protecting utilities against German espionage. Yet, as Melvyn Dubofsky found, they served as a “vigorous and open ally of the Anaconda Copper Company.” 81 To no small extent the mine owners were the chief purveyors of disorder. Indeed, the chairman of the Butte Council for Defense said as much when he proclaimed that “[t]he minute the military here stop detaining men for seditious acts we have got to take it into our own hands and have a mob. And we don’t want to start that. I can get a mob up here in twenty-four hours and hang half a dozen men.” Similarly, mine owner W.A. Clark claimed not to “believe in lynching or violence of that kind … unless it is necessary.” 82 Federal troops curtailed vigilante violence by adopting the mine owners’ mission of suppressing the radicals themselves. To this end, and as it was in the Chinese raids, vigilante and company violence was incorporated into a hybrid governmental and private practice.
Irish-born miner Joe Kennedy had been arrested on numerous occasions, all related to his union activities. Kennedy helped form the Metal and Mine Workers Union after the Spectator Mine disaster killed 178 miners in June 1917, and joined the Butte IWW in solidarity in August 1917 after Frank Little’s murder. 83 He spent ten days in jail after an arrest for “disturbance” in March 1918. He was arrested and held for eight days for “being an IWW” in August 1918, and arrested again a month later, after raids on the IWW’s Finlander Hall. The raid took place in the midst of a strike, protesting for a $6 day and a 6-hour workday.
According to Kennedy, the August raid and a subsequent raid in September, involved police and soldiers as well as Anaconda’s hired gunmen. After the August raid, Kennedy was forced into a car, which surely recalled Frank Little’s fatal experience. But while Little had been beaten and murdered, raiders brought Kennedy back into the hall, where they searched his clothes and rifled through his office. Afterwards, he was locked in the city jail. Kennedy testified that a Special Agent from the Department of Justice nominally led the raid but Ed Morissey, the Chief of Detectives, and John Berkin, associated with the County Council of Defense and “known as a gunman” for Anaconda Copper, also took part.
Kennedy and other miners continued to organize after his release from jail, and on the morning of September 13, miners walked off the job site to protest a wage cut. Between two hundred and three hundred workers were gathered in the union hall when it was raided. As with the August raid, Kennedy later explained, many of the raiders were company gunmen. 84 After the September 1918 raid, some 40 miners were booked as being “held for [the] Council of Defense,” though the legal basis under which this council could incarcerate people is unclear. 85 Kennedy was released, but in February 1919 – during another strike – he was arrested for deportation. Officers charged Kennedy with membership in an organization advocating the forcible overthrow of the government, but his lawyers successfully argued that the relevant legislation was passed after his August and September 1918 arrests, and thus constituted ex post facto charges. Prosecutors changed their line of attack, and charged Kennedy with advocating the unlawful destruction of property. With little other evidence, they found justification in the lyrics to IWW songbooks stored in the union hall. Kennedy’s deportation warrant was signed on May Day, 1919. In mid-June 1919, he was loaded aboard an eastbound deportation train, along with fellow Wobblies and other so-called undesirables. After arrival at Ellis Island, he was deported on June 21, 1919.
In a curious way, Kennedy’s deportation was a victory for the emergence of American liberalism’s durable, supple, and repressive anti-radical power. He wasn’t lynched, and neither was he part of a mass expulsion. 86 Though his removal engaged symbolic and coercive power of the state and employers to expel those they disdained, he was one of the only Wobblies deported from the Butte raids. Historian William Preston saw Butte as a location where federal immigration officials exercised particular equanimity and restraint. Indeed, Department of Immigration officials in Butte were, in Preston’s estimation, political moderates, who understood that many of Butte’s IWW members had been framed, that there was widespread local corruption, and that there was no evidence that Wobblies were involved in anything illegal. 87 Nevertheless, the Butte raids were unquestionably part of a process that, as Melvyn Dubofsky found, effectively transformed the IWW from a militant labor organization into a legal defense fund. 88 Even as legal battles shifted struggle away from the shop floor (and instead struggled for the right to exist and express beliefs), radical trials became sites of contest. Radicals bolstered by defense committees could restrain deportation proceedings, make them costly to government coffers, and create new platforms for political speech. 89
Anti-radical raids became decidedly less liberal in the context of the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920. 90 That hysteria cooled by the mid 1920s, when Louis Post and others argued that Attorney General Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover had overstepped liberal capitalist governmental propriety. Raids nonetheless continued, variously targeting immigrant communities, or gatherings of seamen suspected of organizing or jumping ship. 91 But when the Depression prompted new waves of radicalism and repression, raids on leftist spaces resumed. More than one thousand people were held during a February 1931 joint police and federal raid at a dance held by the Finnish Workers’ Education Association. Raiders stopped the music and blocked the doors, and demanded to see the papers of all present. Eighteen of the dancers were taken in and led to the overcrowded pens at Ellis Island, joining five hundred people captured at the Seamen’s Mission and the Municipal Lodging House by New York City’s anti-immigrant “flying squadron.” 92 The New York raids paralleled the means employed in Los Angeles, the “scare head” tactics targeting specifically-racialized Mexican Americans in the La Placita raid, among others. 93 Challengers to settler racial capitalist sovereignty no longer needed the excessive, surplus violence of lynching. It wasn’t that these leftists had to die, but they could not live in the United States. They would be forced to leave. The lynch mob’s popular, sovereign right to kill was transformed into the legal power to expel. 94
* * *
At the turn of the twentieth century, modern US state power began to absorb, sublimate, channel and contain forms of mob violence in its new disciplinary and eliminatory apparatuses. Southern historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage cautioned against seeing clear continuity between lynch violence and the modern carceral state. While acknowledging the racism of more recent prison systems, Brundage wrote that “no legal lynching could convey the full, frightful symbolism of white supremacy that lynching by seething mobs had once conveyed.” 95 This is undoubtedly true. But heteropatriarchal white supremacy remained, transformed, arguably more thorough in its institutional banality than in earlier, more visible versions. Incarceration and deportation formed interlocking but divergent means of racial, spatial, behavioral, and bodily control, which continued to shift under new historical and political economic forces, enabled by new political and technological assemblages. The US state would increasingly rely on both imprisonment and deportation in its racial-gender formation and the production of citizenship, alienage, and criminality, all of which served to eclipse the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples across the continent. In the years following World War II, border control and immigrant policing – Operation Wetback in 1954, Operation Intercept in 1969, and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, among others – would accommodate political-economic and social crises, navigating between employers’ desire for low-wage agricultural labor and restrictionist calls for ethno-national protection. 96 The twenty-first century systems of mass deportation, built by Democrats and Republicans alike, is among the largest the world has ever known, expelling more than 400,000 people each year. 97 In a perverse sense, the lack of frightful symbolism – to most citizens, at least – bespoke the complexity of the new system. Nevertheless, affected and precarious communities fully understood its terrors.
Yet in 2016, many US voters perceived this massive deportation regime as insufficient. In this late modern moment, driven by a global financial crisis and decades of deregulation, matched by a growing carceral-eliminatory state, the conjuration of Mexican rapists and criminal aliens expressed but also enflamed incipient gendered racisms in the language of national and personal protection. 98 As in Wong Dep Ken’s day, racial nationalists claim the mantle of national protection to physically attack or inform on suspected non-citizens. 99 Women suffering domestic violence, like Olive Pepper, risk removal after seeking help from the police. 100 Despite the modern deportation regime’s fearsome effectiveness at capture and mass removal, the relative invisibility of its structural violence – invisible to white audiences, at least – was unable to express the desired catharsis available to nationalist mobs a century ago. For many voters, the massive and, indeed, terrifying deportation regime of the past century – based to the extent that it was on the rule of law – hid the violence of the mob too well.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Law, Culture and the Humanities outside reader and editorial staff for their comments. David Barrie, Stephen Berrey, Andrew Broertjes, Frances Clarke, Tanya Golash-Boza, David Hernández, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Michael McDonnell, Micol Seigel, Patrick Timmons, and colleagues at the 2016 Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas (especially Daniel Nemser, A. Naomi Paik, and Gilberto Rosas), all provided critical feedback on early versions.
Funding
This research was supported by UWA Near Miss Funding and a teaching relief grant.
1.
Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and the International Labor Defense, RG 85, Entry 9, 54809/General, recorded as “54809/General to 54809/General No 2,” Folder 3. National Archives and Records Administration, Archive 1 (hereafter NARA 1), Washington D.C.
2.
On the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, Rachel Ida Buff, “The Deportation Terror,” American Quarterly 60(3) (2008), 523–51; John W. Sherman, A Communist Front at Mid-Century: The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, 1933–1959 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001).
3.
Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the American Dream: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
4.
Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (New York: New York University Press, 2006). But more broadly, Angela Y. Davis and Eduardo Mendieta, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and, covering a broader geographic sweep than much lynching historiography, Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
5.
Data drawn from the Tuskegee Institute, “Lynching, White and Negroes, 1882–1968,” available at http://archive.tuskegee.edu/archive/bitstream/handle/123456789/511/Lyching%201882%201968.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. It is difficult to know how many of the lynching victims recorded as White may have been understood locally as ethnoracially Mexican, a racial formation that articulated with class, geography, and complex admixtures of Indigeneity. Broadly speaking, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised Mexican Americans full citizenship and recorded Mexican Americans as White; in 1930 Mexican became a racial category in the US census. See Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001); Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Arnoldo de León, They Called them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983).
6.
7.
David A. Johnson, “Vigilance and the Law: The Moral Authority of Popular Justice in the Far West,” American Quarterly 33(5) (1981), 558–86; Keith Edgerton, Montana Justice: Power, Punishment, and the Penitentiary (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004); Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), esp Ch 3; Miguel Antonio Levario, Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2012); Modupe Labode, “The ‘Stern, Fearless Settlers of the West’: Lynching, Region, and Capital Punishment in Early Twentieth Century Colorado,” Western Historical Quarterly 45 (Winter 2014), 389–409; Monica Muñoz Martinez, “Recuperating Histories of Violence in the Americas: Vernacular History-Making on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” American Quarterly 66(3) (2014), 661–89; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. 36, 43, 66–7, 84–6.
8.
Despite processes of Spanish colonization in Mexican history, this dynamic is akin to that Indigenous peoples face in settler colonies. But see David J. Weber (ed.), Foreigners in their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1973). Iyko Day differentiates between the settler colonial logic of elimination, which intends the eradication of Indigenous peoples from the land, and the logic of exclusion, which regulates social and political belonging through a host of spatial, educative and coercive mechanisms, in the interest of labor exploitation. The logics and practices intertwine “on a moving spectrum of biopolitical violence.” Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), esp. pp. 25–31.
9.
Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 4th edn. (New York: Longman, 2000), esp pp. 50–53.
10.
William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 21–3; also, Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978–1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin, TX: CMAS Books, 1996).
11.
Data from Carrigan and Webb, Table 1.2, Mexican-Descent Victims of Mob Violence by Decade, 1848–1928. Forgotten Dead.
12.
Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, pp. 28–30, 162.
13.
We might understand incarceration and deportation as interlocking, structurally homologous bureaucratic formations in the spatial control of unruly subjects and racial aliens within the carceral state. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 101–7; Chandan Reddy, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 100–106. See also Torrie Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State,” Journal of American History, (2015), 141–51; Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, illegals, and the case for a new abolition movement,” BOOM: A Journal of California 1(4) (2011), 54–68; Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Deirdre M. Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and US Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); David Manuel Hernández, “Pursuant to Deportation: Latinos and Immigrant Detention,” Latino Studies 6 (2008), 35–63, and “Surrogates and Subcontractors: Flexibility and Obscurity in U.S. Immigrant Detention,” in Critical Ethnic Studies Collective (eds), Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Nancy Hiemstra, “’You don’t even know where you are’: Chaotic Geographies of US Migrant Detention and Deportation,” in Dominique Moran, Nick Gill and Deirdre Conlan (eds), Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 57–75; Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (eds), Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
14.
Deportations, 1892–2014. Data from Table 39, Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2014.
15.
Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Arnoldo de León, They Called them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983); Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Carrigan and Webb, The Forgotten Dead (2013); Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the American Dream: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
16.
Christopher Capozzola, “The Only Badge you Need is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History 88(4) (2002), 1354–82; and for more highly theorized discussion, Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15 (2003); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (3 vols., New York, 1990), 1: pp. 135–59; Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2002), pp. 239–64.
17.
On the anti-modern expressive violence of lynch mobs, David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America,” Law & Society Review 39(4) (2005), 793–833; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Edmund Jephcott, tr.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, pp. 239–64; Mbembe, “Necropolitics,”, 11–40. On viapolitics, William Walters, “Migration, vehicles, and politics: Three theses on viapolitics,” European Journal of Social Theory 18(4) (2015), 469–88.
18.
Moloney, National Insecurities, pp. 9–10.
19.
Hernández, City of Inmates, p. 90; also, Mae M. Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921–1965,” Law and History Review 21(1) (2003), 69–107; Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 274.
20.
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); also, William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113(3) (2008), 752–72.
21.
Rebecca N. Hill productively drew on anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells to identify a police-mob continuum in the history of anti-black and anti-radical violence: we might say that under the new regimes of modernity, the weighting shifted, but never fully, toward the policing side of that spectrum. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 15–16.
22.
Nicholas De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31(1) (2002), 419–47; William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,” in Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (eds), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 69–100, esp. 82.
23.
Hernández, City of Inmates; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999); and “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106(3) (2001), 866–905.
24.
Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. xix; Day, Alien Capital, pp. 20–21.
25.
Lorenzo Veracini differentiates between settlers (who carry their sovereignty with them), and migrants (who do not), in The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 32–48. On the relationship between political economics of unemployment and anti-criminal deportation over time, Ryan D. King, Michael Massoglia and Christopher Uggen, “Employment and Exile: U.S. Criminal Deportations, 1908–2005,” American Journal of Sociology 117(6) (2012), 1786–1825.
26.
Ethan Blue, “Strange Passages: Carceral Mobility and the Liminal in the Catastrophic History of American Deportation,” National Identities 17(2) (2015), 175–94.
27.
Hernández, City of Inmates, pp. 7–9.
28.
Fong Yue Ting v United States, 1893, quoted in Hernández, City of Inmates, p. 78.
29.
Los Angeles Herald, May 16, 1893 p. 2, cols 3–4. http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&cl=search&d=LAH18930516.2.1&srpos=2&e=—–-en–20–1–txt-IN-Los+Angeles+Herald%2c+May+16%2c+1893—
30.
31.
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, pp. 314–16.
32.
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, p. 315.
33.
Hernández, City of Inmates, pp. 84–6.
34.
Lee, At America’s Gates, pp. 68–72.
35.
Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903, p. 90, as quoted in Lee, At America’s Gates, p. 224.
36.
Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108(2) (2003), 377–403, esp 384.
37.
Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1906, p. 95; quoted in Lee, At America’s Gates, pp. 185–6.
38.
“New Chinese Inspector,” El Paso Herald, June 27, 1899, quoted in Lee, p. 186.
39.
Annual Report Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1911, pp. 142–3; quoted in Torrie Hester, “Deportation: Origins of a National and International Power” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Oregon, 2008), pp. 67–8.
40.
Annual Report Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1911, pp. 142–3; quoted in Hester, “Deportation,” pp. 67–8. Indeed, Chinese migrants bolstered by the Chinese Six Companies made excellent use of the legal system to prevent or stymie deportation proceedings under the Chinese Exclusion laws. After 1912, immigration officials began to charge Chinese migrants under the general immigration laws rather than the exclusion laws, which lessened opportunities for legal challenge. Torrie Hester, Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 30–32.
41.
US Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Treaty, Laws and Rules, 1915, p. 42; Quoted in Lee, At America’s Gates, p. 226.
42.
Lee, At America’s Gates, p. 231.
43.
Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Chinese American League of Justice, “Report of the Special Committee in Charge of the Investigation of the Treatment of Chinese Residents and Immigrants by U.S. Immigration Officers,” Jan. 4, 1913, File 53620/115; quoted in Lee, At America’s Gates, p. 230.
44.
Native Sons of the Golden State to Julius Kahn, Oct. 24, 1923, File 55383/30, quoted in Lee, p. 231.
45.
Hernández, Migra!
46.
Abraham Hoffman, “Stimulus to Repatriation: The 1931 Federal Deportation Drive and the Los Angeles Mexican Community,” Pacific Historical Review 42(2) (1973), 205–19.
47.
Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, p. 99.
48.
Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal; Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams. Given the shift in eliminatory practice – from lynch mobs to the deportation state that La Placita demonstrated – the League of United Latin American Citizens’s relative successes in limiting mob violence through inclusionist civil rights strategies would do little, even if it wanted to, for Mexican nationals who faced expulsion. See Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, p. 167.
49.
Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, p. 103.
50.
The literature is vast, but see Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching, rev edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
51.
William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), ch. 4.
52.
Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 2(2) (2012), 2–22; Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), pp. xxii–xxiii; Lindsey Schneider, “(Re)producing the Nation: Treaty Rights, Gay Marriage, and the Settler State,” in Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, 92–105, esp. 100–101.
53.
Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 31–54.
54.
The following discussion of James Pepper and Olive Pepper draws from records in 53835/61, Entry 9, NARA 1.
55.
Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 280; Deirdre M. Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy,” Journal of Women’s History 18(2) (2006), 95–122.
56.
Capozzola, “The Only Badge you Need is Your Patriotic Fervor,” 1370–1374.
57.
Moloney, National Insecurities, pp. 28–50.
58.
On mission homes, Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
59.
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
60.
Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 11.
61.
Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency,” 98.
62.
Dec. 7, 1914 Corresp from Lawler to CI, Angel Island, 53835/61, RG 85, Entry 9, NARA 1.
63.
Richard Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 338–42; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), pp. 94–5.
64.
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 10.
65.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 27.
66.
Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
67.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 188.
68.
Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, pp. 146–7. For San Francisco police raids on the “Latin Branch” of the IWW, Maria Sakovich, “When the ‘Enemy’ Landed at Angel Island,” Prologue 41(2) (2009), 
. Accessed April 22, 2013. On the Bisbee “deportation,” Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor Wars in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
69.
Kate Holladay Claghorn, The Immigrant’s Day in Court (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), p. 339.
70.
Carlos A. Schwantes, “The Concept of the Wageworkers Frontier: A Framework for Future Research” Western Historical Quarterly 18(1) (1987), 39–55; Gunther Peck, “Padrones and Protest: ‘Old’ Radicals and ‘New’ Immigrants in Bingham, Utah, 1905–1912,” Western Historical Quarterly 24(2) (1993), 157–78; Elizabeth Jameson, All that Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
71.
Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1993); John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1930 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Blood Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
72.
Michael Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government’: Vigilantism, Lynching, and the Repression of the IWW,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1(1) (2007), esp. 32.
73.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 105.
74.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 161. The Bisbee raid and deportation was neither formally nor federally sanctioned, but was driven by Sheriff Harry Wheeler, who believed that the IWW strike was a German-backed effort to undermine the US war effort. Phelps Dodge officials supported the action, as did the local bourgeoisie and Nativist pro-company workers, but the federal government was outside the loop. Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, esp. pp. 211, 217–25.
75.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 106–108; Tom Copeland, The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1993), p. 42.
76.
Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government,’” 41.
77.
Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, p. 147.
78.
Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government,’” 41.
79.
Aug. 2, 1917 New York Times; Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government,’” 41.
80.
Both quoted in Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government,’” 42.
81.
Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 67. Quote from Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 110.
82.
Quotes and emphasis in Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 111.
83.
Joe Kennedy case file, Interview and Examination, March 19, 1919. 54161/74, RG 86, Entry 9, NARA 1.
84.
Defense brief for Joe Kennedy, by attorneys Nolan + Donavan and H.A. Tynand (last signature illeg), sent from the Helena immigration office to the Commissioner-General, April 30, 1919. 54161/74, RG 86, Entry 9, NARA 1.
85.
E.W. Byrn to A.B. Bielaski, Sept. 15, 1918, Department of Justice File 195397-1, and US Attorney Wheeler to Thomas W. Gregory, Sept. 16, 1918, Department of Justice File 195397-2, quoted in Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 114.
86.
Kenyon Zimmer argues that deportation was relatively ineffective in suppressing anarchist movements in the United States due to anarchists’ skillful legal maneuvering within federal bureaucratic complexity and inefficiencies. I am less sure. The total number of people deported for anarchism may have been small, but my sense is that the symbolic violence and threat of removal was a powerful kind of repression. Zimmer documents this, too, in his discussion of Ludovico Caminita’s experience after a 1920 raid in Patterson, New Jersey, which undermined regional anarchist networks. See Zimmer, Immigrants against the State, pp. 156–8; 152–6.
87.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 232–3.
88.
Dubofsky, State and Labor, p. 69.
89.
Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law.
90.
Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, pp. 208-237; Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of 1920 (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1923); David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: The New Press, 2003), pp. 105–28.
91.
Reuben Oppenheimer, “Report on the Enforcement of the Deportation Laws of the United States,” (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), pp. 55–56.
92.
“18 Aliens Seized at Finnish Dance,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 1931.
93.
Hoffman, “Stimulus to Repatriation,” Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, esp. pp. 56, 57.
94.
Of course, as Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and their defenders learned in 1927, the state retained the power to kill radicals. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, pp. 162–208.
95.
Brundage, Lynching in the New South, pp. 256–7.
96.
Hernández, Migra!; Patrick Timmons, “Trump’s Wall at Nixon’s Border,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 49 (March 2017), pp. 15–24; Gilberto Rosas, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
97.
Golash-Boza, Deported.
98.
Michael D. Shear and Ron Nixon, “New Trump Deportation Rules Allow Far More Expulsions,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 2017; Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2014), esp. pp. 107–33.
99.
100.
Mariana Alfaro, “El Paso Arrest could deter Immigrants from Reporting Crimes,” Texas Tribune, Feb. 16, 2017; Patrick Timmons, “Terrorizing the Undocumented in El Paso,” NACLA.org, March 1, 2017.