IN THE US 100 years ago in spring 1919, at least three dozen dynamite-filled bombs were posted to prominent politicians including the attorney general as well as justice officials and newspaper editors.

One bomb was sent to capitalist businessman John D Rockefeller founder of the Standard Oil Company and the man who had become the first ever dollar billionaire just three years before.

One clue to who had sent the bombs was to one addressed to Rayme Weston Finch. Finch was a federal agent who in 1918 had arrested two prominent Galleanists while leading a police raid on the offices of their newspaper.

The Galleanists were a group of Italian anarchists and radicals in the United States who followed Luigi Galleani the figurehead in the Italian anarchist movement.

Galleani is known for what he called “propaganda of the deed,” the use of violence to eliminate those he viewed as tyrants and oppressors and to act as a catalyst to the overthrow of government. Galleani was deported back to Italy in June 1919.

The police captured what they claimed was an Italian-language bomb-making newspaper article. It was all the evidence they needed to blame the bombing campaign on the anarchists.

The bombs were wrapped in brown paper around a cardboard box containing a a stick of dynamite.  There was a small bottle of sulphuric acid and three blasting caps. When the box was opened a coil spring broke the acid bottle and the bomb went off.

The bombers intended their bombs to be delivered on May Day but bombs started to arrive early. On April 28 a worker in the Mayor of Seattle’s office narrowly avoided death when he opened a parcel.

Mayor Ole Hanson had recently been in the headlines for opposing a general strike in Seattle. An assistant in the mayor’s office ignoring the “open this end” message opened the wrong end of the box. The bottle of acid dropped harmlessly onto a table.

Next target was racist Georgia Senator Thomas W Hardwick, sponsor of the hated 1918 Anti-immigration Act. The senator avoided injury but both his wife and housekeeper were injured.

A sharp-eyed post office employee in New York spotted 16 packages which matched the description of the bombs. Ironically they had been set aside a few days earlier for insufficient postage. Another dozen bombs were intercepted before reaching their intended targets.

These bombings, attributed to anarchists, were just the excuse the government, police forces, intelligence services along with various racist and white supremacist groupings needed to launch a mighty backlash.

It became known as the Red Summer. Dozens of riots broke out in major cities where black Americans, many of them troops back from the trenches, were starting the struggle for civil rights.

In Chicago white people stoned a black boy for swimming at an unofficially whites-only beach.

In Elaine, Arkansas, whites attacked a meeting of black sharecroppers who were organising to demand fairer treatment in the cotton market.

After a white person was shot, federal troops were brought in, supposedly to quell the violence, instead they joined racist mobs in hunting black residents. More than 200 black men, women, and children were killed over just a few days.

Law enforcement declared open season on anyone they suspected of being leftists, radicals, anarchists or communists.

Today it is perhaps difficult to understand how close and parallel the two revolutionary philosophies of communism and anarchism were a century ago. Certainly law and order saw them as inseparable twin forces of terrorism and revolution.

Communist Parties were being formed at this time. The Russians established the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 and achieved their revolution in 1917. The US established a Communist Party in 1919; Britain in 1920; Italy in 1921.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party as 1918 closed and the momentous year of 1919 opened.

In the US police were not at all politically picky. They beat, arrested and murdered suspected anarchists or communists equally.

One of the leading anarchists was Emma Goldman, a Russian immigrant from Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire). She became a popular writer and speaker who often attracted crowds of thousands. She was a leading anarchist theoretician and imprisoned many times for her political views, usually on some trumped up charge.

She campaigned against capitalism, for women’s rights, for birth control, racial equality and many other social issues. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

She summed up her principles simply and beautifully when she declared “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

Convinced that the political and economic organisation of modern society was fundamentally unjust, she embraced anarchism for the vision it offered of liberty, harmony and social justice.

A fiery orator and a gifted writer, she became a passionate advocate of freedom of expression, sexual freedom and birth control, equality and independence for women, radical education, trade unions and workers’ rights.

These ideas made her hated by the ruling classes. The state machine declared her “exceedingly dangerous.” She was harassed, physically attacked or arrested while speaking at meetings, and sometimes banned outright from speaking at all.

Insisting on the right to express herself in the face of overwhelming odds, Goldman became a prominent figure in the establishment of the right to freedom of speech in America. She inspired what became the American League for Civil Liberties still doing good work today.

On December 21 1919, the US establishment could take no more of what they entitled the Year of the Red Scare.

They were terrified by the black troops back from the trenches of the first world war, and starting to demand civil rights; by militant labour struggles and by anarchist bombings.

Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer tried to suppress these diverse working-class struggles using tactics that included illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detention and deportation. He organised a notorious nationwide series of police actions that became known as the Palmer Raids.

Using the hated and unjust Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, over 10,000 people were arrested, of which 3,500 were detained without trial. Of those held in detention, nearly 600 aliens living in the US were eventually deported.

Emma Goldman was among them. She and 248 other radicals were deported by steam ship to the young Soviet Union.

Rest assured it would not be the last the world heard of feisty Emma Goldman.