American Pluralism after 9/11

...Many school districts have begun to look for ways to include discussion of Muslims in their diversity curricula...

...In the weeks after 9/11, at least four individuals were murdered because they looked Middle Eastern...

...Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of university students from Middle Eastern countries have dropped out of school and gone home...

...Louis mob lynched an innocent German immigrant whom they suspected of subversion...

...These sorts of experiences devastated the once proud German American community...

...Public libraries removed works of German literature from their shelves, and politicians urged school districts to prohibit the teaching of the German language...

...In 1990, the U.S...

...The Germans, in many respects, were the pioneers of this movement, committed to the proposition that they could become American in politics, meaning a loyalty to the American republican system of government, while remaining German in culture...

...These were the years when the first multicultural republic died, replaced by a rigid emphasis on Americanization and cultural homogeneity...

...Yet the sense of vulnerability that we feel, as a result of the success of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, is great...

...and although Muslims and Arabs have suffered considerably from prejudice and discrimination, they have not been subjected to decades of legally sanctioned ostracism...

...It is true that the hard multiculturalism that cohered in the 1970sone that condemns American nationalism as irredeemably compromised by racism and that upholds an identity grounded in race, ethnicity, or gender as innately superior to it—is in retreat...

...The Treasury Department's Operation Green Quest, a project to identify and freeze the assets of those Islamic charitable and educational institutions thought to be linked to radical Islamic groups abroad, could damage the autonomy and vigor of Islamic communal life...

...Some mosques have reported a decline in attendance because worshippers fear for their safety both in the buildings and on the way there and home...

...Several months later, the government asked five thousand men from Middle Eastern and Muslim countries to "volunteer" for interviews with immigration officials...

...In such circumstances, private discrimination against Muslim and Arab Americans could spread...

...government, these PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR foreign visitors imagine a society given over to militarized patriotism and the repression of dissent...

...But the characters in their books and movies, like the men in the platoons whose stories they tell, are always whites of European descent...

...World War II images of white warrior heroism are so powerful in our culture today that three white firemen in New York City, amid the chaos of September 11, needed no advance planning to raise a flag on a mound of World Trade Center rubble in the manner done by the Marines on Iwo Jima in 1944...

...Universities have felt able in this climate, in ways they did not in World War I (when many abandoned German language and cultural instruction), to expand the number of Islamic scholars on their faculties and to offer more courses on the history and culture of Islam and the Middle East...

...government had barred Japanese nationals from immigrating to America...

...Accustomed to drawing news about the United States from anti-American European newspapers or from American television networks that have turned themselves into propaganda arms of the U.S...

...The 1924 law, which reduced immigration from eastern and southern Europe from a prewar annual average of 738,000 to only 18,439 (a 97 percent decrease), governed U.S...

...I first ask how the experience of Arab and Muslim Americans since 9/11 has been similar to and different from that of Japanese Americans in World War II, German Americans in World War I, and southern and eastern Europeans after World War I. I then ask, more generally, what effect the War on Terror is having on multiculturalist beliefs and practices in the United States...

...T T HE WORLD WAR I years offer another example of how America stigmatized and repressed an entire ethnic group during wartime...

...A federal noose is tightening around Muslim and Arab immigration...

...We know that such terrorists are likely to be Muslim, and we also know that some communal organizations within Muslim and Arab America abet terrorism...

...Second, too great a preoccupation with the politics of diversity seems to have distracted us from the reality, growing more alarming by the day, of deepening economic inequality...

...GARY GERSTLE teaches history at the University of Maryland and is the author, most recently, of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century...

...Europeans and other foreigners who have visited America since 9/11 have often remarked to me about the extraordinary cultural vitality and diversity of places like New York City, characteristics that, to their eye, seem undiminished by the destruction of the World Trade Center or by the continuing War on Terror...

...But if we adhere to this line of argument, we must also recognize the costs of the policies: that the surveillance will not be sufficiently discriminatory in its targets and that many innocent people will suffer its effects...

...IN THE LAST one hundred years, war-induced worries about unity and loyalty have led to fears of foreigners in our midst and campaigns to restrict their rights and opportunities...

...As I write the final words of this piece in early March, we are not yet at war with Iraq...

...The government justified this action on the grounds of "military necessity," but it is clear now that its real source was a racism that looked on the Japanese as an unassimilable, untrustworthy, and dangerous "enemy race...

...The historical precedent that does illuminate these developments is one that unfolded more quietly and insidiously than either Japanese American internment or the World War I assault on German Americans: that which Italian and Jewish Americans experienced in the 1920s, when they were stigmatized as inferior, barred from immigrating to the United States, and pressured to adopt "proper" American values...

...In 1921, Congress passed emergency immigration restriction legislation to prevent these now despised groups from coming to America, legislation that became permanent in 1924...

...This rollback began with the "culture wars" of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of battles ostensibly won by political conservatives (and culturally conservative liberals) over what kind of American history public schools should teach, what projects the National Endowment for the Arts should fund, and what views of the American past museums should exhibit...

...Sikh men, with their distinctive headdress, and Muslim women wearing the hijab, or head covering, have received the heaviest abuse because, to the untrained eyes of non-Muslim Americans, they "look" most like the Islamic enemy...

...Several dangers lurk...

...Christian rightists took the University of North Carolina to court to prevent the school from requiring incoming freshmen to read parts of the Quran (the rightists lost...

...As AMERICANS, we continue with our own struggles over diversity, manifest most obviously in the intensifying debate over affirmative action, soon to be the focus of an extraordinarily important Supreme Court ruling...

...The stress on loyalty and conformity in World War I—the campaigns for "100 percent Americanism"— made this diversity impossible to sustain...

...Immigrants from the Middle East and other Islamic countries are finding it much tougher to enter the United States, and many are experiencing far more pressure than they have in the past to behave in "appropriate" ways—to become citizens, to prove their patriotism, and to Americanize their religion and culture...

...As a result, Muslim Americans have not yet faced 34 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 the kind of thoroughgoing cultural repression undergone by German Americans in World War I. This could change...

...Stories circulate of immigrants who languish in jail or who are deported for minor visa violations...

...38 n DISSENT / Spring 2003...

...The government did not augment racist immigration policy with attempts to suppress Jewish or Italian culture...

...Now African Americans occupy two of the most important positions in the Bush administration, while those Republicans, such as Trent Lott, who continue to speak in the Buchanan way, find themselves, much like Buchanan himself, repudiated by their own party...

...So, although multiculturalism in America has thus far proved sturdy, its future is not yet assured...

...Certainly, the Bush administration understands itself to be engaged in an all-out war, not a limited one...

...But should an American attack occur, especially in circumstances of mass opposition to war in the United States and Europe, pressures for cultural and political conformity may increase dramatically...

...Boston's city government banned performances of Beethoven's symphonies, and the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was forced to resign...

...They are the only ones called upon to save America in the moment of its peril...

...Indeed, of the 343 firemen who died on September 11 only 24 (less than 1 percent) belonged to these minority groups...

...After only twenty-five minutes of deliberation, a St...

...Since September 2001, AAADC has recorded more than eight hundred cases of employment discrimination and more than eighty cases of passengers with perceived Middle Eastern features being removed from planes...

...As the government failed to identify actual individuals involved in the terrorist acts of 1919, it began to stigmatize all eastern European Jews and Italians as racially inferior, as PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR the carriers of inbred ideas and traits that would harm America, and as incapable of acquiring the virtue and democratic habits required of U.S...

...German Americans risked being fired from work, losing their businesses, and being assaulted on the street...

...The concerns about Muslim and Arab Americans have not escalated into a campaign to stop all immigration or to extinguish all cultural difference...

...That the Bush administration immediately followed its dumping of Lott with the nomination of one of Lott's Dixiecrat buddies, Judge Charles W. Pickering, Sr., to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reveals how much the party's older attitudes survive...

...indeed, the platoons of soldiers they celebrate were, in World War II, at the forefront of breaking down prejudice and divisions between Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Gentiles, northerners and southerners...

...Louis jury acquitted the mob leaders, who had brazenly defended their crime as an act of patriotism...

...Moreover, it may well be that his solicitude toward Islamic America is motivated chiefly by geopolitical concerns, especially the need to keep Muslim countries such as Pakistan aligned with the United States...

...It may seem odd that an ostensible respect for diversity within America among Republicans coexists with a uniculturalist approach to world affairs...

...One can easily imagine William Bennett or Lynne Cheney becoming the cultural commissar of a "100 percent Americanism" campaign for the twenty-first century...

...A A RAB AND Muslim immigrants confront a similar peril today...

...This has been especially true at times, such as the 1910s and 1940s, during the two world wars, when immigrants and their children have constituted a large percentage of the American population...

...This war, like the two world wars, is being waged at a time when the presence of immigrants and their children in the general population is high...

...For the same reason, it seems unlikely that we will see campaigns to obliterate Islamic culture or to enforce a high degree of cultural homogeneity on all immigrant Americans that recall the anti-German and antipluralist crusades of World War I. And DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 31 PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR yet, there has been an alarmingly large number of violent and hostile acts committed against Arab and Muslims Americans since 9/11 and an intensifying government campaign to restrict, and even end, Arab and Muslim immigration to the United States...

...in this sense it was less severe than what the government did to Germans Americans in World War I. But the government's actions did legitimate discrimination against eastern and southern Europeans, who experienced increased difficulty landing choice white- and blue-collar jobs, getting access to restricted residential neighborhoods, and gaining admission to elite private universities...

...It was absurd to distort the photograph in this way, but equally absurd to make a monument to New Yorkers' sacrifice an all-white affair...

...immigration policy from the 1920s through the 1960s...

...but, DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 35 PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR perhaps, if we come to understand better the as the true meaning of Americanism...

...And the Department of Justice's arrest of University of South Florida professor Sami alArian and seven others on grounds that they are supporting Palestinian terror against Israel could escalate into a campaign against any Arab or Muslim American who expresses support for the Palestinian cause...

...By 1918, the hatred of German Americans in World War I had grown so intense that it spilled over into suspicion of other ethnic groups who were thought to be too clannish and too attached to their Old World cultures...

...Levels of cultural pluralism that were accepted in peacetime became intolerable once the United States entered World War I, and in both wars, particular groups—German Americans and Japanese Americans especially—suffered severe repression...

...Despite serious questions about the fairness of the trial and worldwide protests, the government executed both men in 1927...

...The struggle to desegregate New York City's Fire Department, like many other battles for racial equality, is the metaphorical equivalent of Mao's Long March...

...Most obviously, the federal government, which led the campaign against German Americans in World War I, has not joined the post-9/11 campaign of anti-Muslim calumny...

...citizens...

...No one, to my knowledge, has counted the number of ethnic and racial slurs directed at Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs, but it is likely in the tens or even hundreds of thousands...

...Nevertheless, his public insistence on the legitimacy of Islam as an American religion has had beneficial effects, particularly in the encouragement it has given private non-Islamic civic and religious groups to express their solidarity with Muslim Americans and to condemn those who would stigmatize Islam as a religion of terror...

...The Council on American Islamic Relations reports that since 9/11 almost four out of five Muslims they surveyed "reported acts of kindness by [nonMuslim] friends or colleagues...

...Prior to World War I, America tolerated a high level of what we today call "multiculturalism...

...The September 11 attacks naturally drew attention to World War II, the only other war of the last hundred years that involved a devastating attack on American soil...

...But, unlike the generation of the Gilded Age, too many Americans today seem incapable of summoning up the appropriate outrage...

...German Americans became the objects of popular hatred...

...The phenomenon of a racially segregated fire department in the heart of the world's most diverse city does not seem to have troubled many nonblack or non-Hispanic Americans...

...Not many Americans would treat a proposal to intern Muslim and Arab Americans in a similar way today...

...Next to slavery and the near annihilation and confinement of Native American populations on reservations, this policy arguably constituted the worst violation of civil liberties in American history...

...Its members began hiding their ethnic identity, changing their names, speaking German only in the privacy of their own homes, and celebrating their holidays out of the public eye...

...In the immediate aftermath of World War I, so did eastern and southern European immigrants, who were accused of anarchism and communism...

...These invocations of Japanese internment strike me as unfounded...

...Thus, it seems appropriate to ask whether the intolerance and repression of those eras have resurfaced in the War on Terror...

...The anti-immigrant climate of which this policy was part also sanctioned the severity of the government's campaign against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists convicted of a 1920 robbery and murder...

...established that even the Republican Party feels compelled to honor its principles...

...But until such escalations occur, we should resist equating the situation of Arabs and Muslims today with that of German Americans in World War I. B B UT MUSLIM and Arab Americans do face a threat similar to that which Jews, Italians, and other eastern and southern Europeans experienced in the 1920s: a stigmatization milder than what the Germans experienced during World War I, but strong enough to make them targets of discrimination and to render them uncertain about their place in American society...

...Only during the world wars and the tensest moments of the cold war did our government arrogate to itself the kind of powers to suspend civil liberties that it has now taken through the Patriot Act and related measures...

...Given this history, it seems appropriate to ask how the "War on Terror" that the United States has been fighting since September 11, 2001, is affecting the American experiment with diversity and pluralism...

...We need, so the argument goes, to place Muslim/Arab immigrants under surveillance...

...that the range of permissible cultural behavior will narrow and thus damage the openness of American society...

...excesses of the 1920s policies against Italians This "soft" multiculturalism is now so well and Jews, we will be less likely to repeat them...

...I I N FEBRUARY 1942, the U.S...

...I want to examine how we are faring in this test by putting current developments in the context of how America performed in similar situations in World War I and World War II...

...That the struggle for racial equality is still incomplete does, however, draw attention to continuing threats to diversity and pluralism in America...

...Many immigrant groups shared this belief in practice, if not in name, and the result was an America of extraordinary cultural diversity...

...Around the same time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ordered public and private universities to provide it with information about their Middle East ern and Muslim students...

...government ordered the roundup of the entire West Coast Japanese American population (approximately 120,000 people) and imprisoned them for two to four years in ten "relocation centers" in California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas...

...I am not suggesting that the internment of a suspect population could never happen in America again...

...A New California Media Poll reported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California found, meanwhile, that "overwhelming majorities of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent living in California say they feel their families belong and are welcome" in America...

...Not yet...

...Many Americans do not know that Sikhs are not Muslims...

...but, more important, they fail to note that anti-Japanese prejudice in American society prior to World War II was far more extreme than what Muslim and Arab Americans experienced prior to September 11...

...The New York City Fire Department then chose this photograph as the basis for a memorial sculpture for the fallen firemen, but insisted, in a bow to the realities of New York City politics, that one of the three firemen be cast as black and another as Hispanic...

...Indeed, it is an unstable mix...

...Is something similar happening today...

...The surveillance began, as already noted, with the immediate arrest of more than eleven hundred individuals, most of whom were immigrants from Arab or Muslim lands...

...A true pluralism, one that celebrates the diversity of cultural practices among Americans, needs an DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 37 PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR international correlate: a respect for the interests of other nations and the cultures of other peoples...

...Long before December 7, 1941, the U.S...

...This interest in Islamic history and culture and concern for the rights of Muslim Americans in the United States has been noted by Muslim Americans...

...Finally, how long can domestic multiculturalism flourish when unilateralism shapes America's approach to foreign affairs...

...To that total, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (AAADC) added more than two hundred acts of vandalism against Muslim homes, schools, mosques, and businesses, bringing the number of violent incidents to more than seven hundred...

...Given these circumstances, this war can be construed as a test of the multicultural society that many Americans have labored to create, a society that values diversity and treats as fundamentally equal groups that are culturally, racially, and religiously different from the majority...

...The PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR resulting anti-German hysteria justified the arrests of thousands of immigrants from Germany and Austria-Hungary whom the government suspected of subversion...

...If the Republicans remain secure in their power at home and succeed in their unilateralism abroad, they may well be tempted to launch, in domestic politics, a program of cultural homogenization and coercion...

...At this point, it is hard to know what the ultimate outcome of the choke hold on Muslim and Arab immigration will be...

...government acknowledged the shamefulness of this policy, formally apologized to Japanese Americans for implementing it, and paid token reparations of $20,000 to each Japanese American who had been interned...

...initiative to grant amnesty to illegal Mexicans in the United States, has yet to compromise that prestige...

...The FBI compiled reports of 481 attacks on people of Middle Eastern descent, Muslims, and Sikhs in 2001, up from 28 the previous year...

...The government will soon have the ability to choke it off altogether...

...when one group in particular, defined either as Arab Americans or as Muslim Americans, is tied by nationality, ethnicity, or religion to our foes...

...It is hard to know how much difference the federal government's policy has made overall...

...But although the events of September 11, 2001, highlighted this problem, they did not create it or even worsen it...

...W W E CAN DISCERN some parallels between the experience of Arab and Muslim Americans today and German Americans in World War I. Suspicions of Arabs and Muslims mushroomed in the months following September 11, often escalating into overt hostility, discrimination, vandalism, and physical assault...

...It would be wrong to conclude from this that most Republicans have undergone a true change of heart on matters of diversity...

...To the contrary, George W. Bush, within days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, stressed that the United States was waging war on Islamic terrorists, not on Islam, and that Americans must not confuse the two...

...On the one hand, beliefs in racial equality and cultural diversity have sunk deep roots in America these last thirty years, making a mass roundup of Arab and Muslim Americans on the model of Japanese internment far more difficult to justify or enact...

...The victims in this case were the Germans, who, on the eve of war, constituted the largest immigrant group in America—four million strong...

...Only a N THE 1910s and 1920s, the attack first on the Germans and then on Jews and Ital ians became part of a general crusade against pluralist practices and beliefs in the United States...

...His government, after all, has dramatically intensified its surveillance of Muslim and Arab immigrants...

...And why should it have, one might ask...

...In this Republican acquiescence to soft multiculturalism we can discern an important victory for the principles of diversity and pluralism...

...And none of the consequences of September 11, with the exception of the intensifying surveillance of Muslim Americans and the collapse of a Mexican-U.S...

...For the last decade, Stephen Ambrose, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Tom Brokaw have fed us one story after another of "The Greatest Generation," its members always represented as warrior bands of white brothers giving their lives so that America would be saved...

...The answer turns out to be complex...

...One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find a government so brazen in its determination to serve the interests of the rich and so contemptuous of the poor and middle class...

...The Bush administration's and the Republican Party's unilateralism is an expression of what we might call their "uniculturalism," a belief that American culture and the American way of life are superior to all others and ought to dominate the world...

...Some school boards actually burned their districts' German-language books...

...These immigration, naturalization, and land laws expressed the popular view that the Japanese were a dangerous and unassimilable race whose numbers had to be limited and whose access to citizenship and property had to be denied...

...Bush has reiterated that position many times and, in an effort to demonstrate his commitment to it, has held several high-profile meetings with American Islamic leaders...

...However, the vanquished "hard" multiculturalism has not been replaced by campaigns for "100 percent Americanism" in the spirit of World War I, but by a soft multiculturalism, a patriotic version of the pluralist creed that honors the nation and that celebrates racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity 36 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 decade ago, Republicans allowed Patrick Buchanan to fulminate from the pulpit of their national convention about the damage that minorities and diversity had done to this country and to the white Christians who formed America's core population...

...In this regard the conservative Bush has performed better than the liberal Woodrow Wilson did eighty years ago...

...only that we should resist facile comparisons of the Japanese and Muslim and Arab predicaments...

...Americans renamed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and hamburgers "liberty sandwiches...

...In January 2002, the Fire Department quietly abandoned plans to build this sculpture, an admission of how race, more than forty years after the civil rights revolution began, can still paralyze New York City politics...

...For decades, governments in California and other far western states had prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land...

...There are grounds for worrying that this damaging policy could be unfolding in America again...

...Congress, meanwhile, began requiring German-language publications to submit all war-related stories to Post Office censors for approval and prohibited the manufacture and distribution of alcohol, at least in part because of the belief that the German American brewers who controlled the beer industry would ply loyal Americans with alcohol and thus weaken their will to fight...

...But the story unfolding here is more complicated and hopeful...

...Even before Prohibition went into effect, German American brewers found it difficult to sell their beer...

...A newspa per photographer caught the act on film, and Spielbergian and Ambrosian America embraced it as an evocative image of September 11 heroism...

...How else to contrast the popular outcry against Trent Lott's fond memories of segregation with the public's complacent response to the Bush Administration's latest round of proposed tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans...

...Nevertheless, we can easily imagine that had the Bush administration acted differently, and used the opportunity presented by 9/11 to condemn Islam, that the experience of Muslim Americans in the United States these past two years would have been far worse...

...First, one or more groups, such as African Americans or Muslim or Arab Americans, may find their entry into multicultural America blocked...

...These government actions, which threaten the Bush administration's formal policy of protecting the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans unconnected to terror, have generated considerable fear in the target communities...

...Although Congress has not banned immigration from Arab or Muslim countries, it has placed that immigration under a surveillance that has grown stronger in the eighteen months since September 11...

...This is a belief that the leaders of our government, with few exceptions, do not possess...

...A St...

...Transnational family networks that depend on a regular circulation of members between their home countries and the United States no longer function effectively...

...Some individuals on the right have suggested that internment may be neces 32 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 sary if terrorists succeed in another act of terror on American soil...

...To look at the faces of the several hundred who died, a glance made possible by the New York Times's decision to publish pictures of them all in one of its editions, was to realize that no more than a small number were black or Hispanic...

...In February 2003, the INS began registering and fingerprinting fortyfour thousand immigrants from specified Arab and Islamic countries...

...Not only do they ignore the logistical difficulty of incarcerating a Muslim and Arab population that numbers in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands...

...Some may think that the comparison of the War on Terror with the two world wars is unfair...

...To them, this vitality and diversity come as something of a shock...

...The current war has not required anything resembling the mobilization of economic resources, war materiel, and military personnel necessitated by the world wars...

...When more than eleven hundred Muslim and Arab immigrants were arrested in the weeks after September 11 and detained indefinitely, some groups on the multicultural left began to articulate fears that this sweep was but the first step of a general Arab or Muslim roundup based on the Japanese internment model...

...The newer attitudes are ones that many Republicans have taken on reluctantly, even cynically, and should be interpreted primarily as a measure of soft multiculturalism's prestige...

...citizens...

...Numerous Muslim women reportedly have put away their headscarves so as not to expose themselves to hate speech when they go out in public...

...In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, these suspicions focused most intensely on eastern European Jews and Italians, whose ranks included significant numbers of political radicals...

...Those who had come prior to the ban (or who had slipped in after it went into effect) were prohibited from becoming U.S...

...When the United States entered the war in 1917, the government undertook a propaganda campaign to turn all Germans into beastly and ruthless "Huns...

...Some may argue that this pressure is necessary in this time of war, when terrorists can strike America at any moment...

...This level of harassment does, in some ways, resemble that experienced by German Americans in World War I. But in other ways it does not...

...and when worries about internal security have intensified nationalism and suspicions of cultural and religious difference...

...Ambrose's band of narrators and mythmakers are hardly reactionaries...

...The scope, duration, and intensity of this anti-Japanese antipathy conditioned most non-Japanese Americans to regard internment as a reasonable, even enlightened, policy...

...that a substantial population of Muslims and Arabs will feel under siege and that its sense of alienation from the mainstream will deepen...

...There are reasons, of course, to doubt the DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 33 PLURALISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR sincerity of Bush's concern for the welfare of American Muslims...

...The experience of 9/11 has occasionally brought those struggles into sharper relief, perhaps nowhere more so than in the racial identity of the firemen who perished in New York City on that fateful day...

...Fear of these groups crystallized in spring 1919, when anarchist terrorist cells launched a mail bomb campaign against wealthy individuals and elected officials who were thought to represent capitalist interests...