More Powerful Than Dynamite

by Thai Jones

  On July 23, around noon, he stopped in a fashionable men’s store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh and purchased a lightweight summer suit, almost pure white. Next, he pushed through a few busy blocks to the Chronicle-Telegraph Building, Frick’s headquarters during the lockout. Climbing the stone steps to the second floor, Berkman brushed past the porter and crashed through a swinging door to the inner chamber. He saw his enemy seated at a long table studying some documents. Their eyes met. “He understands,” thought Berkman, pulling a .38-caliber Hopkins & Allen revolver. Frick moved to flee, but he only had time to turn his head. Berkman fired twice. His first bullet sliced the cords at the back of Frick’s skull, grazing the spine. The second cleaved his neck, passing clean through. Frick collapsed to the ground, his head and shoulders beneath the chair on which he’d been sitting. “Dead?” Berkman wondered, when suddenly he was tackled by a second man whom he hadn’t noticed. They grappled on the floor. “Help! Murder!” Frick shouted, still alive. Berkman threw off his assailant and triggered again, but the gun misfired. Carpenters and clerks entered the room, pummeling and clawing the assassin; he staggered, carrying them on his back, grabbing Frick, rolling him to the ground. Pulling a dirk from his pocket, he stabbed, convulsively hacking at the screaming man’s legs and hips, until at last he was knocked unconscious by a hammer blow from one of the carpenters. Even then the two men remained locked together. Frick was shaking and swashy with blood; red stains covered the carpets and furniture. The new white suit was ruined.

  Henry Clay Frick.

  Following a two-hour trial, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. For the attentat, the anarchist term for an assassination attempt, he was unrepentant—he regretted only that Frick still lived—but in Allegheny City’s Western Penitentiary, depression thorned deep. “At times the realization of my fate is borne in upon me with the violence of a shock and I am engulfed in despair,” he wrote. “Existence grows more and more unbearable.” Beyond the walls: the Pullman Strike, a nationwide labor battle that paralyzed American railroads for weeks in 1894; Czolgosz’s 1901 assassination of President McKinley; Bloody Sunday, in 1905, when the czar’s guard massacred peaceful demonstrators in St. Petersburg. Inside his cell, Berkman lost his youth, his physique, his hair. Long months passed when he didn’t see a woman at all. Just the sound of a feminine voice could linger in his mind for days. “I long to hear the soft accents,” he wrote, “feel the tender touch.” After fourteen years, his day of freedom loomed. Overwhelming all other emotions, he felt “the swelling undercurrent of frank and irrepressible sex desire.”

  In 1906, he returned to New York. “I found the world changed,” he wrote, “so changed, in fact, that I am now afraid to cross the street, lest lightning, in the shape of a horseless car, overtake me and strike me down.” The one constant he hoped to rediscover was Emma Goldman. But the love affair that had sustained them both during the years of absence barely survived the shock of contact; both expected the feverish child of the other’s recollection. Instead, they each confronted a middle-aged adult. She had become world-renowned as a lecturer, not just on anarchism but on literature and drama. Her wider interests antagonized his single-minded devotion to the revolution. Friends and sympathizers offered every consideration, smothered him with generosity and attention.

  He resented all these efforts and could hardly stand to be near those who cared for him most. Instead he wandered the city, seeking familiar landmarks. Orchard Street, the primitive ghetto alley where he had attended his first meetings, now “conformed to business respectability.” The lecture hall had become a dance studio; the café was a counting house. Most of the old comrades had died or betrayed the faith; the young people didn’t measure up. He sensed a “spirit of cold deliberation in the new set” and was estranged by their “tone of disillusioned wisdom.” The sum of his bereavement became apparent. “The fervid enthusiasm of the past,” he wrote, “the spontaneous comradeship in the common cause, the intoxication of world-liberating zeal—all are gone with the days of my youth.”

  Despite himself, he could still inspire love and affection, had a magical effect on children, and could rile a crowd with just an angry gesture and a sharp word. “The red leader,” an acquaintance observed of him, “never lost his temper except on the speakers’ platform, and there very rarely and only for the purpose of producing a desired effect.” Others were less generous: “Phony as a three dollar bill,” one rival concluded. Newspaper reporters remarked on his uncanny ability to slip “through the crowd as rapidly as he could” when a situation became truly dangerous. To the mind of a sympathetic friend, Berkman “was of that very rare species of human being, a genuine fanatic.”

  Emma Goldman.

  His beliefs gave him will. He was part of something grand; he was an anarchist.

  Of all the many philosophies that emerged from the Enlightenment, anarchism was the purest and most hopeful. Humanity was perfectible. Each could prosper. All were worthy of trust. Self-government was government enough. In a society of equals, there would be no need for any authority other than one’s own conscience. The uses of government—policing, jailing, war making—were all made necessary by the twisted morality of capitalism. After the revolution, when a new generation had been raised without physical want and had absorbed the teaching of anarchist schools, there would be no need for any of it.

  THERE WERE ANARCHIST theoreticians who puzzled out the applied details of utopia. But Berkman was not one of them. He left it for others to ponder the intricacies of how—in practice—an egalitarian society would administer justice, coordinate production, and ensure security. Believing that “the principal thing is to get people to rise against the oppressive institutions and that everything else would take care of itself,” he had dedicated his energies toward revolution. Destruction would breed construction. “The more radical the treatment,” he argued, “the quicker the cure.”

  Berkman’s politics were driven by a need for revenge. His uncle, a Russian radical, had been exiled to Siberia for a decade. The Haymarket martyrs had sacrificed themselves to the spirit of liberty. Frick had been made to suffer for his crimes against the workers. And this determination to retaliate led Berkman from one facet of anarchism to the other—from the humane preachment of human excellence to the violent application of destruction.

  “Bombs and anarchists are inseparable in the minds of most of us,” a New York journalist wrote. “Mysterious destroyers of life and of property, merciless men who have pledged their lives or their knives or their guns to some nefarious cause or another.” For heads of state, anarchy spelled death: In 1881, radicals killed the tsar; in 1894, the president of France; in 1897, the prime minister of Spain; in 1898, the empress of Austria; in 1900, the king of Italy; in 1901, the U.S. president; in 1911, the Russian prime minister; in 1913, the king of Greece. “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance,” Theodore Roosevelt had warned. “The Anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind.”

  Members of the movement tried continually to separate themselves from this notoriety. It was capitalism itself that was the supreme killer. “Do we build warships for educational purposes?” asked Berkman. “Is the army a Sunday school? … Is the gallows the symbol of our brotherhood, the electric chair the proof of our humanitarianism?” The spectacular litany of anarchist attacks was inconsequential compared to the homicides of state and industry. “Our whole social life,” he wrote, “is based on murder and mutual slaughter. War, extermination, is its very breath—the war of the classes against the masses, the war of man against man in the perverted struggle for existence.” It had taken decades for the radicals to claim a few monarchs and politicians. At any given moment, their enemies could be found to be doing far worse. In spite of such arguments, Berkman and his comrades could never explain away the history they themselves had made.

  “Of all paradoxes,” Jack London wondered, “is there one that will exceed t
he paradox of our anarchists—men & women who are so temperamentally opposed to violence that they are moved to deeds of violence in order to bring about, in the way they conceive it, the reign of love and cosmic brotherhood?”

  AFTER EIGHT YEARS of freedom, Alexander Berkman had barely managed to accommodate himself to his disappointments. He clung to the potential of his politics; “The times are pregnant with revolutionary thoughts and deeds,” he had written recently. But by 1914, his old idealism seemed irretrievable. Caving to fashion, he had adopted an implacable reserve, cultivating a “cool and suave” persona that replaced commitment with distance, zeal with calculation. An interrupted revolutionary, he somehow had to regain what he’d lost. He needed more than a cause to dedicate himself to; the robber system of capitalism provided an endless litany of causes. He required an enemy, a villain who could inspire something other than sarcasm. If he could find another Frick, then he could retrieve some echo of his past. Perhaps he might even recover the sensations of that one afternoon in Pittsburgh, two decades earlier, when he had finally felt like “a man, a complete MAN.”

  Statistical Abstract

  The Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1914, compiled by the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce and published by the Government Printing Office, presented a comprehensive accounting of the nation’s productive capabilities. Anything that could be quantified, inventoried, ranked, or averaged out had a place within the 720 pages of the report.

  Chart Number 16: “Coal.” No. 89: “Potato Crop.” No. 37: “ForeignBorn White Paupers Enumerated in Alms-Houses.” No. 44: “Religious Organizations.” No. 54: “Marital Condition of Persons 15 Years of Age and Over.”

  Chart No. 135, “Summary of Manufactures, By Specified Industry,” listed relevant facts concerning the production of Axle Grease, Buttons, Billiard Tables, Cigar Boxes, Corsets, Crucibles, Grindstones, Horseshoes, Oakum, Pavers, Peanuts, Shoddy, Whips, Windmills, and Wall Paper. Chart No. 154, “Population 10 Years of Age and Upward Engaged in Gainful Occupations,” tallied six million farm workers, two and a half million manufacturers, six hundred thousand coal miners, three hundred thousand iron and steelworkers, 105,000 bankers, 101,000 bartenders, 98,000 telephone operators, 30,000 newsboys, 25,000 ticket takers and railroad station agents, 26,000 paper hangers, 21,000 undertakers, 14,000 bootblacks, 7,000 piano tuners, 5,000 cornshellers, 1,600 lighthouse keepers.

  No. 174: “Wireless Telegraph Systems.” No. 190: “Traffic on Railroads.” No. 210: “Cattle, Hogs, and Sheep.” No. 222: “Panama Canal Excavations.” No. 313: “Life Insurance By Fraternal Orders.”

  An entire chapter belonged to Chart Number 352. Rather than offering a snapshot of a particular commodity, it combined dozens of categories into one agglomerated “Statistical Record of the Progress of the United States.” In 1914, the population stood at 98,646,491, of whom more than a million were immigrants who had arrived during the course of the year. The railroads carried more than a billion passengers. The mails delivered 960 million postcards. Wires transmitted ninety million telegraphs. Twenty thousand newspapers published editions. Thirty-two million cotton spindles turned. Two hundred and eighty-six metallurgical furnaces were kept in blast. The government issued forty-two thousand patents. Nineteen million pupils studied in the public schools. Three and a half trillion dollars circulated.

  Taken as a whole, these numbers offered objective and undeniable proof of American achievement. Even adverse data—the 18,000 commercial failures that occurred in 1914, the 2,454 fatalities suffered “in and around” coal mines, or the eleven million working days lost to strikes—were merely the inevitable by-products of large-scale enterprise. To anyone who cared to examine them, the figures conveyed the most sensational epic of the age.

  But few Americans had patience for the Statistical Abstract.

  Edward Mott Woolley was typical of the rest in eschewing these “huge volumes” of data. “Ordinarily such books were of no use to me,” he wrote, “they lacked altogether the human element which made up most of my work.” A magazine writer, Woolley, along with his articles, was everywhere in 1914. He claimed to freelance simultaneously for forty different periodicals, and had ten articles published during the year in McClure’s magazine alone—a feat of popularity that none of his colleagues could approach.

  Of all the magazines in the United States, McClure’s was most closely associated with the muckraking movement. It was in its pages a decade earlier that Ida Tarbell had pilloried John D. Rockefeller, and Lincoln Steffens had dramatically exposed corrupt urban politics to a scandalized middle-class readership. Like them, Woolley was a skilled reporter who tenaciously pursued his subjects. But he despised the anticapitalist principles of his peers and considered two topics off-limits: “No muckraking or sex stuff,” he’d tell any editor who pitched him a sensationalist assignment.

  Woolley may not have found the Statistical Abstract compelling reading, but he enthusiastically believed in the news value of American industry. He stuffed his notebook with such story ideas as “peanuts, clothespins, buttons, cotton and tin cans.” And as dry as the material looked on paper, editors were eager to acquire it. The December 1913 McClure’s contained Woolley’s feature on peanut farming. The next month it was the grocery business. In February, “Buttons: A Romance of American Industry.” In March, “Tin Canners: The Story of the Greatest Utility Industry of the Age and the Men Who Built It.” Then, beginning in April, the magazine published a seven-part series on executives, including Samuel Insull, the Chicago electricity magnate, and D. W. Griffith, who earned at least $100,000 a year.

  Lincoln Steffens.

  Despite his emphasis on industry, Woolley hated to hear the phrase “business stuff” applied to his work. “What I was trying to do went wholly beyond mere business,” he wrote. It was nothing less than “the eternal and ubiquitous competition of men for existence and supremacy.” Three quarters of a million readers subscribed to McClure’s or purchased it at newsstands. In each issue they received the same edifying lessons. “There is money sticking out everywhere in this land of ours,” Woolley suggested in a story about the grocery business, “but you’ve got to reach for it quickly or somebody else nabs it.” American business—any business, no matter how lowly or obscure—offered the chance at success to any individual with the grit to seize it. “Every industry is worth studying, if only to get acquainted with the stayers who have made it,” he wrote in an article on button making. “After all, the real inside story of an industry is the story of the men, not the money.”

  Frank Wiegel.

  Woolley believed that his own rise from lowly reporter to magazine luminary followed the same trajectory that his subjects had taken. The cold numbers in the Statistical Abstract did not convey his story; instead he took the novels of Horatio Alger, Jr., to be his model. Conceding that such works as Strive and Succeed or Andy Grant’s Pluck featured some “crude workmanship,” Woolley nevertheless insisted that the tales contained “eternal truths” and “ranked as masterpieces.” Even more to the point, Alger’s books for boys sold a million copies each year, putting them “easily first among the best-sellers.” Every so often, small-town lads, their imaginations agitated by the paperback tales of metropolitan adventure, would run away to New York. The police were used to it. After some bitter lessons, the kids would be put on a train and sent home, chastened and disappointed.

  Frank Wiegel had lived in Brooklyn long enough to have abandoned any such naïve ideas. Around eight A.M. on Saturday, January 18, he showed up to work at the Henry Bosch wallpaper company, which had a factory on Thirty-fifth Street, near the East River. At nearly two A.M. on Sunday morning, still at it, he fell asleep at his station; “in some way,” speculated the subsequent report, “he knocked against the controlling pedal, and the next thing he knew his hand was caught in the machine.” When rescuers finally disentangled him from the apparatus, the index and pinky fingers of his right hand were too badly mangled to be saved. The accident
had occurred seventeen hours and fifty-five minutes into an eighteen-hour shift. Frank was fifteen years old.

  2.

  The Jobless Man and the Manless Job

  “I wisht they’d hurry up.”

  “Look at the cop watchin’.”

  “Maybe it ain’t winter, nuther.”

  —THEODORE DREISER, “THE MEN IN THE STORM”

  They arrived early at the Municipal Lodging House in January, gathering out front during the afternoon and waiting hours for admittance. By evening they stood ten wide, blotting out the sidewalk, stretching down East Twenty-fifth Street and around the corner to First Avenue. Their hats no longer kept to shape. Fists rooted deep inside coat pockets. On the coldest nights, as many as two thousand men, as well as dozens of women and a few children, queued outside—nearly twice as many as the facility could accommodate. Of all the homeless in New York, these were the neediest cases: They could not afford a dime for a bed at one of Manhattan’s hundreds of cheap hotels, they did not possess the pennies it took to sleep in the back room of a saloon. With no friends or relatives to shelter them, they had no choice but the last resort, to ask for the city’s charity.

  “Ain’t they ever goin’ to open up?”

  Toward the front: smiles and jostling. Fewer jokes further back. There was “no anger, no threatening words,” only “sullen endurance.” The newspapers called them loafers. College students went slumming to observe them. To sociologists they were “human derelicts and poor stranded flotsam and jetsam.” Among the hundreds and hundreds of homeless, perhaps a few deserved these derogations: the rounders, Bowery bums, and “confirmed beggars.” Others were broken and without hope, the “physically disabled, the mentally deficient, the infirm from age.” Many had succumbed to “intoxicating liquors.” But most were vigorous “native sons” of New York, “a collection of broad back, red faced, strong armed young men,” who had been victimized by a devastating industrial recession. Bakers, barbers, printers, teamsters: Their motive power had built the subways and office towers, unloaded ship cargo onto the piers, operated the machines of production. Chance had not befriended them, and it was their fell misfortune in this grave-cold winter to be “reserve labor out of place and out of season.”