The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean

Abstract

This book is a study of the relationship between US settler colonialism and US antiradicalism. It brings anticolonial analyses to bear on labor and working-class history. It focuses on the period—roughly the 1840s -1920s—when US leaders developed explicitly anticommunist and antianarchist ideology, language, policies, and tactics. It argues that US imperial expansion, US enslavement, and US colonial warfare and their related genocidal policies to expel, contain, and eliminate Indigenous peoples significantly shaped the development of US anticommunism. In other words, the way the United States understood and dealt with the so-called “Indian-problem” deeply informed its approach to the so-called “labor problem” and its approach to suppressing anarchism, socialism, and communism. Although most histories of US anticommunism focus on the post -World War II Cold War era, or the earlier “First Red Scare” period of 1917-21, this study backs the timeline up to the period when US leaders first employed explicitly anticommunist rhetoric in the late 1840s to justify the system of enslavement and violent settler colonial expansion. Internal repression against proletarian insurgency was colonialism turned inward: meaning the tactics, weapons, mythology, and ideology the state wielded to control the “foreign,” migrant, multiracial, multilingual, multiethnic urban working class were developed and refined in the “Indian wars” and other outward imperialist invasions and occupations. It historically contextualizes US internal repression and antileft counterinsurgency.