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In reaction, harsh new laws were passed criminalizing any writings “sympathetic to anarchism.” Kiosks were forbidden to sell socialist newspapers, and 248 people were arrested on suspicion of being anarchists. The number of arrests, according to Merriman, “gave the impression that the government and the police force were persecuting the poor on behalf of the rich.” Vaillant was arrested, tried, convicted and put to death in less than two months. Given that his bomb had killed no one, and that the unemployment, poverty, hunger and cold affecting thousands of working-class families had driven him to his act, intellectuals and workers alike viewed Vaillant as a “victim of the bourgeoisie.” This was Smile Henry’s view, and he propagated it with his own bomb seven days after Vaillant was guillotined. In his own defense, Henry declared that the state, by guillotining Valliant and making hundreds of arrests that suggested all anarchists were responsible for Vaillant’s act, had acted in support of the bourgeois, who profit from the labor of workers. It was therefore time for anarchists and the suffering poor “to show their teeth.” Henry argued that anarchist bombings like his extracted vengeance for the unacknowledged murders of poor children, who “slowly die of anemia, because bread is rare at home”; poor women, who are worn out in workshops for “forty cents a day”; and men who are “turned into machines” and then “thrown into the street when they have been completely depleted.” Reading Merriman’s history of Smile Henry may not make us sympathetic to terrorists, but it should make us aware of our role in creating and tolerating conditions that breed what we call terrorist “hatred.” It was not mere moral relativism or radical sophistry that led Smile Henry to reason, “To those who say: Hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often gives birth to hate.” Tom Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches seminars on the human response to war and violence. REVIEW BY JENNY BROWNE Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature Edited by Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel NYU Press 288 pages, $32.95 111111 his past Halloween, two neighbors who live on opposite sides of the street and vote opposing political tickets strung an undecided-voter piata up on a pulley system between their houses. The red, white and blue figure dangled above traffic. After polling trick or-treaters on their preferred candidates, the neighbors on their respective porch es either cheered and tugged the unde cided voter closer, or frowned at the par ents waiting on the sidewalk. All in good sugar-charged fun. As I approached the McCain-favoring house, I knew what my 5-year-old and her friend, who happens to be the daughter of our Democratic state representative, were likely to say. “Obama,” they shouted together. The woman wearing Sarah Palin specs didn’t miss a beat. “Okay,” she said, “then you have to give me some of your candy:” As we left the house, my daughter asked about the encounter. “Well,” I said, “that lady is worried that if Obama becomes president he’s going to take money from people who have a lot and give some to people who don’t have so much:’ “Like sharing?” my daughter said. “Yeah, like sharing.” “Why is she worried about that?” But by then we had arrived at another house, this one with a howling, headless woman in the yard, so I didn’t have to reply. Campaign hysteria aside, the answer to my daughter’s question, like so many asked by children, is complicated. Already she infers insights about how the world works based on factors that include, but are in no way limited to, the way her Progressive Primers “X: A Fabulous Children’s Story,” by Lois Gould, illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast. 8 THE TEXAS OBSERVER JANUARY 9, 2009