Fringers: Why their problem is our problem - 19th-century radicals; 21st-century demonstrators

National Review, March 5, 2001 by Michale Knox Beran

It has become a familiar sight, wherever businessmen and central bankers gather in newsworthy numbers: angry young people shouting in the streets, riot police in body armor standing by with tear gas and rubber bullets. Barriers block the roads; police helicopters hover overhead. This time it was Davos, in the Swiss Alps, where in January the World Economic Forum met behind barbed wire and steel barricades to talk of interest rates and universal law. While the dignitaries talked, Swiss police cornered some 300 protesters in a square near the Sheraton hotel, then dispersed the chanting mob with blasts of water cannon.

Chased by water hoses: It's all in a day's work for what Teddy Roosevelt long ago called the "lunatic fringe." After 20 years of nearly unbroken prosperity-in an era of confidence, opportunity, and, for the most part, peace-the unkempt denizens of dismal rented rooms, pining for the lost anarchy of the college dorm, have reached the wonderful conclusion that the world is headed in the wrong direction. Big Western funds compete with one another to send capital to India, China, and Southeast Asia to create businesses, factories, and jobs for people who don't make enough in a year to buy an organically grown dinner in Berkeley-and the troubadours of the traveling riot are throwing themselves in front of the train yelling, "Stop!"

We've seen it before. History is repeating itself-not, this time, as farce, but as grunge-soaked road-trip. A hundred years ago, in the midst of the pre-World War I economic boom, the prosperous nations confronted a similar collection of anarchists, nihilists, labor organizers, and self-styled revolutionaries, all of them insisting that contented citizenries in the West had gotten it wrong, that their prosperity was founded on the misery of others, that their notions of progress and freedom were a degrading illusion. Like the fringers who take to the streets in places like Davos, Prague, and Seattle today, the anarcho-fringe groups of the late 19th century had little real power; what power they possessed was mainly the power to make a nuisance of themselves. A century ago, fringers assassinated presidents and princesses; today, they disrupt meetings of financiers.

Like today's radicals, those earlier fringers were difficult to take seriously. To thoughtful observers they appeared much as the Davos and Seattle fringers appear today-a group of confused young people (like Hyacinth Robinson, the sensitive, doomed anarchist in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima) manipulated by a few older, more sinister figures. (Ralph Nader would not seem out of place in The Possessed, Dostoyevsky's novel of Russian radicalism.) Teddy Roosevelt, always looking for trouble, was an exception in his alarmist appraisal of the power of the fringers. The would-be revolutionaries, he said, could "only be suppressed as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing . . . them against a wall, and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that." Roosevelt later denied that he had said this, though at the time of the Haymarket riots he allowed that his cowboys were thirsting for "a chance with rifles at one of the mobs."

Few were as troubled by the fringers as Roosevelt was. "You're just a lot of damn fools," Republican kingmaker Mark Hanna told grumblers at the Union Club in Cleveland. "There won't be any revolution." The late- 19th-century radicals were nuisances, to be sure, and very often criminals; but they did not seem like the kind of people who were likely to get into history's saddle and ride, booted and spurred, to some apocalyptic triumph.

But that is precisely what the late-19th-century radicals did do. In the course of a couple of decades, they transformed themselves into an organized, purposeful, and cunning revolutionary force, one that, in the 20th century, came close to overturning the political, economic, and spiritual institutions of the West. Could the sloppy, slouching radicalism of today produce, in the future, some similarly cruel and capable beast, one with the ability to do more than disrupt trade meetings and capture 3 percent of the U.S. presidential vote?

Three things transformed the loosely organized radicals of 100 years ago, with their disparate causes and cris de coeur, into a disciplined force capable of obtaining power and wielding it viciously: war, economic depression, and the development of a party-line orthodoxy. World War I and its economic repercussions were of course beyond the radicals' control; the development of party orthodoxy was not. Orthodoxy took the form of socialism, which eventually absorbed most of the undirected energy of the radicals, and imposed on it a discipline that made it dangerous.

Like most orthodoxies, socialism triumphed because its advocates offered a more compelling variety of quasi-spiritual poetry than the competition. Edmund Wilson called Karl Marx, who as a young man wrote bad Romantic verses, the "poet of commodities."