In his 2023 book The Republic Shall be Kept Clean, Tariq D. Khan traces the origins of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US anti-radicalism to the language and violence used against Indigenous Americans during the nineteenth century. He makes it seem obvious that the forces of state terror that were being weaponized against Indigenous people would also be trained on the Marxist “reds” who arose in the anarchist movement around the same time, making a convincing case that “US anticommunist rhetoric has never been far removed from state terror” (p. 35).
Khan’s narration is topical, rather than chronological, often animated by illustrative literature and stories about familiar heroes of US history, uncovering their violently anti-Indigenous and anti-radical tendencies, while radical activists reveal their solidarity with oppressed workers and Indigenous resistance fighters. Thus, Chapter Three focuses on Leon Czolgosz’s assassination of William McKinley, reminding readers familiar with Czolgosz’s anarchism of his opposition to McKinley’s war against the Filipino independence movement. Chapter Four jumps back to the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, centering statesman John Hay’s violent literary condemnations of both.
Khan writes in the tradition of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, portraying the US as a settler colony and defining genocide as “a process intended to erase the existence of a people as a people”, thus including Indian schools, the Dawes Severalty Act, and military massacres in one broad definition (p. 84). However, by relying on evidence from literature and popular culture, Khan presents a more damning assessment of US empire than even Dunbar-Ortiz manages in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. For example, he cites James A. Quinlan’s 1851 Tom Quick, the Indian Slayer, a popular adventure novel that romanticized and reveled in the killing of Indigenous children (p. 74). In Khan’s telling, settler colonial violence cannot be explained merely as a reaction to perceived threats to settler security on the frontier. He demonstrates that such violence permeated US settler culture, and federal officials were happy to promote it in word and deed.
Along with his keen focus on popular imperial US literature, Khan is an engrossing illustrative storyteller himself. Among his most compelling stories is that of the USAT Buford. Originally named for the cavalry officer and “Indian killer” John Buford, the ship saw action in the invasion of both Cuba and the Philippines, later becoming the “Soviet Ark” that deported Emma Goldman and 249 others in 1919, all before starring in Buster Keaton’s 1924 film The Navigator (pp. 66–70). Indeed, it was in the well-known context of Goldman’s deportation that US Congressman William Vaile uttered the little-known words that became the title of Khan’s book (p. 65). That Khan has found so many historical anecdotes to tie together his themes is a reflection not only of his literary skill, but also a demonstration of how entrenched the language and fantasies of settler colonialism were during his period of study, just waiting to be discovered by a historian with the patience to find them.
Besides its contribution to scholarship on the US as a settler colony, Khan’s book amplifies recent work on the persistence of far-right politics in the US, keeping good company with David Austin Walsh’s Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, reminding us of how thoroughly the anti-fascist framework of World War II helped Americans to forget the repressiveness of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US politics.
More broadly, Khan’s book fits into the broad reframing of western history invited by David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the European Enlightenment was a reaction to the intellectual and cosmological contest between European settlers and their Indigenous critics during the seventeenth century. If we accept that the European and European-influenced far right is fundamentally hostile to the principles of the Enlightenment, it should not be surprising that their violence against Indigenous people informed their hostility to the Marxist movements that drew their inspiration from Enlightenment thought. While Khan locates US anti-radicalism in the experience of promoting and maintaining settler colonialism, he avoids an argument for American exceptionalism. The British, French, and others “similarly racialized anarchists […] by equating them with the Indigenous ‘savages’ of their own frontier”, he argues (p. 100).
It is a rare book that makes a familiar historical narrative seem so fresh and new, while at the same time making it seem as if it should have been obvious all along. Recalling my own research on the intellectual world of the US anti-communist right during the 1950s and 1960s, I realize that I took the incessant language of “civilization” and “savagery” for granted as simply “the way conservatives talk”, without questioning how it had become so. I also recall the first time I saw the word “communist” appear in a nineteenth-century primary source, surprised that it was an epithet on conservatives’ lips even back then. Perhaps like Khan, I filed this away in the back of my mind, but, unlike him, I failed to investigate it much further. I also reflect on the fact that, as my teaching has increasingly incorporated ideas from scholars of settler colonialism, my coverage of Marxist movements has faded. Khan’s book yields new ideas for achieving balance and connection between these narratives.
The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean is fundamentally about the use of language to promote repressive violence, and there are a few uncertain points in this regard. Khan strongly implies in several places that language about Indigenous “reds” was co-opted for use against early Marxists, or that the “communism” of Indigenous societies inspired the “specter of communism” about which Marx and Engels wrote. But because these terms rose to prominence during the 1840s, it is occasionally difficult to separate inspiration from comparison. This hardly matters, though, to Khan’s larger purpose in writing: to demonstrate that settler colonial violence “turned inward” against anarchists during the late nineteenth century (p. 88). Khan’s use of William James’s ideas, via Mary Dougls’s 1966 Purity and Danger, is a brilliant way of framing a uniquitious language about purity and social pollution that is too easily taken for granted (p. 70–71).
While the book’s major focus is on the literature and practitioners of state violence, Khan is also eager to tell the story of anarchist activists, like Czolgocz, who saw common cause with Indigenous activists. Thus, Chapter Five tells the remarkable life story of the interracial couple Albert and Lucy Parsons, their activism as radical Republicans in Texas during Reconstruction, and their persecution by liberal Republican captains of industry after their migration to Chicago, where they co-founded the International Working People’s Association (p. 135).
One might allege that Khan is constrained by his ideological commitments. To fully appreciate his book, the reader is expected to accept his portrayal of genocide, as well as related concepts that tend to exist at the bridge between Marxist and anti-colonial scholarship. As he puts it in his conclusion: “There can be no socialism on stolen land, no equality under a US flag, no ‘liberty and justice for all’ under capitalism and the state” (p. 195). Khan makes clear that he considers working-class activism ideologically correct only if it recognizes the common struggle of Indigenous people, as did Czolgosz and the Parsonses. He alleges that, “[t]oo many leaders of the mainstream labor movement in the United States have forgotten the labor movement’s radical roots and its internationalist history: a history of opposing militarism, white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism and a history of solidarity with anticolonial struggle”. Thus, today’s “US labor leaders who oppose [the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement] are scabs” (p. 193). Still, a reader or scholar does not have to commit to Khan’s ideology to gain a great deal from the history he has rediscovered.
Khan’s book has become even more timely a year after its publication, as the US president talks of using military force against “radical left lunatics” and the vice president promotes a book that characterizes leftists as “unhumans”. When Khan writes of how “empire becomes invisible, and radicals become symbols of the very system that waged war on them” (p. 28), I am reminded of the outgoing first Trump Administration’s 1776 Report and its portrayal of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King as heroes working toward an unrealized American promise, rather than activists working against a racist system. Ultimately, Khan’s book is a necessary if difficult reminder that the United States is headed not into uncharted political territory, but may be slipping back to an anti-radicalism that is deeply embedded in its history, one that a generation of activists and scholars after World War II helped us temporarily to forget.
