Tariq D. Khan. The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean. How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. University of Illinois Press, Urbana (IL) [etc.] 2023. xiii, 253 pp. $110.00. (Paper: $30.00; E-book: $19.95.)
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: 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 wellknown context of Goldman's deportation that US Congressman William Vaile uttered
Author: Colin E. Reynolds
Institution: Phoenix Houses of New England
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4412386765