Episodes of political violence in the US such as the 1886 Haymarket riot in Chicago, the Homestead labor casualties in Pennsylvania in 1894, the 1901 assassination of President McKinley, and the Wall Street bombing in 1920, are among many other such moments that could be cited. The distinguishing and prevalent explanation of these events, as presented relentlessly in newspapers across the country, was that the people responsible for the violence were politicized immigrants from Germany, Italy, Russia and elsewhere in Europe, acting under the nefarious influence of anarchist and socialist ideologies. The corresponding understanding was that, with the aid of the authorities charged with public security, whether private forces like the Pinkertons or the local police, the danger posed by these aliens to ordinary American citizens could be eliminated.

There was, however, a far deeper current of American terrorism that, rather than occurring episodically, persisted over many decades throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Moreover, the problems that undergirded the violence were longstanding domestic issues traceable to unresolved conflicts that emerged as far back as the establishment of the republic. Because the US had been a democratic republic from its inception in 1776, operating under a constitutional legal system without monarchical authority, concerns about state legitimacy and public security evolved in ways that differed from the established European patterns of nation state development. Moreover, widening the lens in this way presents us with evidence showing that there are, in certain contexts, situations of multiple currents of terrorism functioning simultaneously within a single country that may operate independently of one another from below, but are confronted by the same authority from above.