and confidential. When comrades arrive they should go and
see Domela Nieuwenhuis, 20 Burgmestre Schooklaan, Hilversum
(near Amsterdam). He will tell them where to meet me. Please
also write a letter to the above address in Scheveningen, in
addition to the telegram. Telegram may be intercepted.
“H. D.”
[Illustration: Lieutenant Commander Spencer Eddy]
Not satisfied apparently that this letter would reach Berkman, Har
Dayal wrote another a week later, which read as follows:
“Address: Israel Aaronson,
“c/o Madame Kercher,
“116 Oude Scheveningerweg,
“Scheveningen.
“Dear Comrade:
“I am well and busy. Can you send me some earnest and sincere
comrades men and women, to help our Indian revolutionary party
at this juncture? They should be persons of good character. If
Tannenbaum is free, would he like to come?
“Please keep this matter strictly _secret_ and _confidential_.
Kindly don’t discuss it with too many people.
“This is a great opportunity for our party. I need the
coöperation of earnest comrades for very important work.
Several of our comrades have come from India with encouraging
news and messages.
“If some comrades can come, please _wire_ and _write_ to the
above address to my assumed name, ‘Israel Aaronson.’ I shall
send you money immediately to the name which you telegraph. Let
it be a name beginning with a B. I shall understand. Please
don’t telegraph in your own name.
“Kindly also word the telegram in such a way that I can
understand how many comrades are coming. If five comrades wish
to come, please wire:
“‘Five hundred dollars job vacant come.’ Just put the number of
comrades before the ‘_hundred_.’ Or use any other device.
“Kindly also send me names and addresses of the prominent
anarchist comrades in Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden,
Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and other European
countries. Please also send letters of introduction for me to
them from Emma or yourself, if you know them.”
And so on. There is enough to show the company the Hindu-German
intriguers kept, and to show that the Hindu committee in Berlin had
enough money to buy mercenaries from the American anarchist group, for
which the American brokers would hardly go unrewarded. Rintelen, within
a week of his arrival in the United States in May, 1915, had tried to
hire anarchists to blow up shipping and start strikes in munitions
plants. It further shows that during that week in October of 1915,
Har Dayal had a bright thought that if he could only get letters from
Emma Goldman or Berkman introducing him to the anarchists of Europe,
and could perhaps introduce to them in turn his lieutenant, Frank
Tannenbaum, from America--the same who stormed St. Alphonsus’ church
with a gang of I. W. W.’s in 1914, demanding food--he could hoodwink
the anarchists into believing that he was playing their game, and
really make good use of them in playing his game--which of course was
Berlin’s.
As it happened, Tannenbaum was busy. So was Emma. So was Berkman,
who received the letter. He was just formulating plans to go to San
Francisco and become an editor--not a new avocation, for he had for
ten years helped Emma Goldman issue a publication known as “Mother
Earth”--and to carry out certain radical and novel ideas. Before we
sketch the way in which he put those ideas on paper, it may be well
to see what experiences he had had to generate ideas, and just what
promise his career contained that he would be of guiding benefit to
these United States.
Alexander Berkman was a Russian by birth, and was then about 44 years
old. When he was a youth of 20 he became involved in the famous
Homestead strike in Pennsylvania, and on July 22, 1892, he burst into
the office of Henry Frick, a steel manufacturer, in the Carnegie
Building in Pittsburg and shot that gentleman in the neck. He then went
to the Western Penitentiary and served fourteen years. This qualified
him as a rare martyr among anarchists. After he got out of prison he
was occasionally arrested in various cities, for wherever he appeared
among advocates of violence there was pretty certain to be trouble.
The long prison term had given him a chance to develop his mind, and
he had written 512 pages on “The Prison Life of an Anarchist,” which
the “Mother Earth Publishing Company” brought out, and which sold for
$1.15--a very interesting book indeed.
So he went to San Francisco in the fall of 1915. A short time before he
left New York his friend Bill Shatoff gave him a farewell dinner. As
the evening wore on the diners adjourned to the neighborhood of Second
Avenue and Fifth Street for a frolic, and Berkman and Shatoff playfully
mauled a policeman, and took his club away, for which both men were
arrested. But that did not interfere long with Berkman’s departure for
the Coast, and the purpose and fruit of his journey appeared within a
short time.
[Illustration: Major Fuller Potter, Military Intelligence]
It was called _The Blast_. According to its own description _The
Blast_ was a revolutionary labor weekly, which meant that it preached
revolution every so often to those who had a grievance against their
employers and to those who had no employers but who had a deep contempt
for anything of the sort. Alexander Berkman appeared as editor and
publisher, E. B. Morton as associate editor, and M. E. Fitzgerald
as manager. It sold for five cents a copy, unless you bought it in
bundles, in which case you paid half that price.
In the first issue, dated January 15, 1916, the title of the paper is
explained by the editor. “Do you mean to destroy?” he asks. “Do you
mean to build? These are the questions we have been asked from many
quarters by inquirers sympathetic and otherwise. Our reply is frank and
bold: We mean both: to destroy and to build. For socially speaking,
Destruction is the beginning of Construction.... The time is NOW. The
breath of discontent is heavy upon this wide land. It permeates mill
and mine, field and factory. Blind rebellion stalks upon highway and
byway. To fire it with the spark of Hope, to kindle it with the light
of Vision, and turn pale discontent into conscious social action--that
is the crying problem of the hour. It is the great work calling to
be done. To work, then, and blasted be every obstacle in the way of
the Regeneration!” In a congratulatory telegram in the same issue,
Emma wrote to Alexander: “Let _The Blast_ re-echo from coast to coast,
inspiring strength and courage into the disinherited, and striking
terror into the hearts of the craven enemy, now that one more of our
brothers has fallen a victim to the insatiable Moloch. May _The Blast_
tear up the solidified ignorance and cruelty of our social structure.
Blast away! To the daring belongs the future.”
A sample of the methods by which _The Blast_ proposed to begin its
regeneration of the disinherited is this delicate editorial paragraph:
“_Judas Made Respectable._
“Judas Iscariot delivered the Nazarene agitator into the hands
of the Roman District Attorney. This base betrayal incensed the
people against the mercenary stool-pigeon. Judas had enough
decency to go and hang himself.”
A slap evidently at the person whom Emma referred to in her telegram,
who had just sold out to Moloch.
It was a cardinal principle of the paper to be scurrilous and direct
in its attacks upon the enemies of anarchy. General Harrison Grey
Otis, a Los Angeles publisher whose newspaper building was bombed in
1912 after labor trouble, was referred to as “General Hungry Growl
Otis,” Colonel Roosevelt as “The Human Blowout.” The leading cartoon
of the second issue, drawn--and well drawn--by Robert Minor, showed a
huge figure of a laborer bearing on a tray the figure of a tiny though
corpulent judge, its mouth open in speech, and its chair guarded by
three stolid elephantine policemen. The laborer is bearing the dish to
a feast of anarchists, the title of Minor’s contribution is “The Court
Orders--.” The court had evidently ordered in the direction of _The
Blast_, and Berkman did not like the order. In the same issue he wrote
editorials against conscription in England, against the convention
of the American Federation of Labor which had just been held in San
Francisco, against its president, Samuel Gompers, and against national
preparedness.
I have quoted these extracts not because they are specially interesting
or readable, but because they will give one who is not wholly familiar
with the practical platform of anarchy a suggestion of anarchy’s tone
of voice. It is not friendly, but is on the contrary quite snobbish.
Selig Schulberg, in an article on Mexico, gently suggested: “Toilers
of America, if the Hearsts, Otises and Rockefellers have property, for
which they want protection, in Mexico, let _them_ protect it!” The
editor says: “The Fords, the Bryans, the Jane Addams may be sincere.
If so they are blind leaders of the blind.” A writer signing himself
“L. E. Claypool,” wrote, under the title “Preparedness is Hell,” this
tribute to our tortured Ally in Europe: “Most of you gents that yell
(i. e., yell, ‘What about Belgium?’) never heard of Belgium till this
war broke out. A lot of you probably don’t know that the language
of the Belgians is French. Further, you don’t know that Belgium had
a treaty with England and France which placed the little nation in
the war before the German invasion. You may not know that French and
English engineers and military experts had surveyed the land and were
preparing to make it a battle ground long before the Germans did
so.” That statement was typical German propaganda of a very crude
sort, calculated to appeal by its insinuation to the class of readers
who affected _The Blast_. The platform of the paper, in a word, was
Against.
Berkman was in a rich field for labor unrest. California is a strong
labor state. The whole country, outside as well as inside California,
had been excited over the _Los Angeles Times_ bomb affair in 1912, and
it revived that excitement when two of the culprits were prosecuted
three years later. One finds constant reference to the case in the
files of _The Blast_, and to the strikes at Lawrence, Mass., and
Ludlow, Colorado, and Youngstown, Ohio. Anti-capitalistic rough-house
in any corner of the continent was good copy for Berkman. If it
flagged for a moment he took up the cudgels for his friend Emma, who
had just been arrested in New York and sentenced to the workhouse for
distributing birth-control literature. Or he dove into international
relations, comparing in one instance Villa and President Wilson, with
little mercy for the latter. The issue of April Fool’s Day, 1916,
carried a leading editorial directed against the Pacific Coast Defense
League, just organized to bring the national guard of the Pacific and
Mountain states into a condition of higher efficiency and to start
a program of “healthy physical and military training” in the public
schools. This editorial was signed by Tom Mooney, who soon appeared in
the columns of the paper in another capacity.
The publication did not go unheeded by the Post Office department.
On May 1 Berkman burst out with an article headed, “To Hell With The
Government,” in which he used language that would make any ordinary
head of hair curl up. He was angry because the Government had issued an
order holding up all succeeding issues of the paper. In an editorial
he said he welcomed the uprising in Ireland--the Easter Day affair in
Dublin which cost several Sinn Feiners their lives. Other anarchistic
publications in the country were meeting the same fate. _The Alarm_, in
Chicago, _Revolt_ of New York, _Regeneracion_, a Mexican revolutionary
sheet issued in Los Angeles, and _Voluntad_, a Spanish paper in New
York, were closed up. But Berkman went on publishing, and howling about
the constitutional freedom of the press. Back in New York other friends
of his had been making more trouble: Mrs. Max Eastman and Bolton Hall
were arrested for circulating birth-control pamphlets, and Bouck White
was jailed for distributing an effigy of the American flag bearing a
dollar-mark. Berkman took up their cases and howled. He sent appeals
for help in his fight against the Post Office department, and raised
a little money. One of his liberal contributors was a writer named
John Reed, who sent him five dollars from New York. Then a strike
broke out, fostered by the I. W. W., on the iron ranges in Northern
Minnesota, and William M. Haywood wrote Berkman an appeal for help
which the latter published in _The Blast_ with a eulogy. He found
no dearth of subjects to fill his pages, and then suddenly came an
interruption.
San Francisco turned out in a great preparedness parade on July 22.
Someone threw a bomb into the ranks of the marchers. Nine people were
killed. The next issue of _The Blast_ said substantially: “Well,
they might have expected it,” and said actually: “To try to connect
the Anarchists, the I. W. W., the Labor elements or the participants
in the peace meeting with the bomb tragedy is stupid. The act was
obviously the work of an individual who evidently sought to express
his opposition to Preparedness for Slaughter by using the ammunition
of Preparedness. Terrible as it is, it is merely a foretaste in
miniature of what the people may expect multiplied a million times,
from the Preparedness insanity.” When two men, Nolan and Tom Mooney,
were arrested and charged with the crime, _The Blast_ rushed to their
defense. When Warren Billings and Israel Weinberg were added to the
list of accused, _The Blast_ ran sketches of the defendants by Minor,
the staff artist. The case was of consuming interest to the anarchist
group, and they rubbed their hands, in _The Blast_ office, over their
good luck that it had happened right in their own little circle. _The
Blast_ ceased firing random shots and focussed on the bomb case in
salvos, followed the course of the trials, drew a parallel between the
condition of the San Francisco suspects and that of Fielden, Neebe and
Schwab, three of the anarchists who were implicated in the Haymarket
bomb outrage in Chicago in 1886 and pardoned.
The business of being an anarchist became surrounded with more and
more difficulty as the year drew toward a close. Caplan, the fourth
Los Angeles bomb suspect to be tried, was convicted and sentenced to
ten years; a group of laborers who had engaged in violence in strikes
against the United States Steel Corporation were under sentence in a
Pittsburg prison; Carlo Tresca (whom we recall as a speaker at the
Brescia Circle in 1915), and ten others were in jail in Duluth charged
with murder in the I. W. W. strike on the Mesaba Iron range; the Magon
brothers, two Mexican revolutionary anarchists, were in prison, and the
days of _The Blast_ were numbered. Berkman came back to New York in the
fall. While he was absent, _The Blast_ sputtered once more in its
issue of January, 1917, with a venomous cartoon by Minor, and went out,
for want of funds.
[Illustration: Lieutenant A. R. Fish, Naval Intelligence]
Berkman found Emma Goldman well and prosperous. She had visited him in
March in San Francisco, and again in June and July had delivered two
series of birth-control lectures there. After her first visit, _The
Blast_ had blossomed out with a book advertisement, which included
the list of volumes sold by the Mother Earth Publishing Company in
New York. There were the usual texts on anarchy, revolution, and
syndicalism, and it is interesting to note among the books sent to
Berkman for review the following titles: “A Few Facts About British
Rule In India. Published by the Hindustani Gadar, San Francisco,”
“India’s ‘Loyalty’ to England. Published by The Indian Nationalist
Party,” and “The Methods of the Indian Police in the Twentieth Century.
Published by the Hindustan Gadar.” Har Dayal had been the editor of
_Ghadr_ until 1914; apparently his acquaintanceship with Berkman was
being kept fresh by his successors at the nest of Hindu intrigue in
Berkeley.
But when Berkman got back to New York he found that birth-control was
no longer the thing. A new development had taken place, half-way
around the earth, and it looked promising for the anarchistic
interests. So we must leave the two for a moment.
On January 9, 1917, the Russian premier resigned. A fortnight later
the newspapers announced that the Germans had recaptured considerable
important ground on the Riga front. On February 3, the United States
severed diplomatic relations with Germany, gave Bernstorff his papers,
and sent him home two weeks later. On March 11 a revolutionary
demonstration broke out in Petrograd, and the next day the Czar of All
the Russias abdicated his throne. A new cabinet was formed, its foreign
minister told the Allies that Russia would continue to fight, and the
United States recognized the new régime. The news was hailed with a
good deal of fraternal spirit in America, and with special cordiality
in New York, where there were great numbers of Russians who had left
Europe to escape the persecution of the old régime.
Many of the New York Russians knew what was going to happen in
Petrograd. The Bomb Squad made friends with an anarchist as early as
February 1, 1917. On that day at a spot not far from where Shatoff
and Berkman had attacked the policeman a year before, a certain
Mr. Plotkin met a Mr. Bogdanovitch. Plotkin urged Bogdanovitch to
call a special conference of all the revolutionary organizations in
the city to protest against militarism. “No,” said the conservative
Bogdanovitch. “Our group will either have to pass a resolution as a
single unit, or else go over to Group 2 and see what they are doing
about this news that we are going to have war. Don’t be too ready to
jump to conclusions.” So the two went to call on Group 2, which was
in session--some 50 Russians and Russian Jews, who spent the evening
harmlessly reading the war prospects from American newspapers. No
resolution was passed.
The next night, however, there was a lecture at Beethoven Hall, at 210
East 5th Street. The speaker was introduced as “Mr. Bornstein,” who had
just returned from Russia. “Mr. Bornstein” was Leon Trotzky.
Trotzky, using the Russian language, told of the plans that were being
developed for revolution. “You anarchists here,” he said, “don’t want
any militarism or any government which is of no help to the working
class, and is always ready to fire on the workman. It’s time you did
away with such a government once and forever!” After his speech, the
chairman, Comrade G. Chudnofsky, rose and addressed the crowd of 300
in the hall, to this effect:
“Comrades, some of you can’t read English. You don’t know what is
going on until you see it in the Russian papers. Only to-day I noticed
that the Police Commissioner is going to call out all the reserves he
can get to handle the situation, since Germany notified America what
she would do. The capitalistic government is _afraid of us_! They are
afraid of the working class. Remember that, for in case of war, we can
protest against militarism and start our own war. Here is a resolution
which I propose to prevent any of our loyal number joining the army. I
will read it.” And he read it.
The next day Bill Shatoff was scheduled to speak at a meeting at Number
9 Second Avenue, but he was suddenly called to Boston, and a substitute
took the platform. He was howled down because he made a speech which
reflected loyalty to the United States. The audience consisted of 75
Russians, of whom some 30 were anarchists known to the Bomb Squad. The
United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany that night.
On February 4 the representatives of several of the Russian anarchist
groups were to meet at 534 East 5th Street and pass the resolution
against militarism, but they could not agree upon it, and the session
ended by postponing the matter. Most of the delegates present adjourned
to 64 East 7th Street (almost within earshot of the Washington Arch),
to hear Chudnofsky rave against enlistment, the police, the government
and the war.
Those little meetings were typical of the eruptions which occurred
throughout the poorer districts of the great city during the remainder
of the month of February. Such propagandists as Chudnofsky and Trotzky,
uttering their exhortations to a multiplication of such groups as
gathered in the Fifth Street house, spread among the gossipy East
Siders and into the remotest slums the news that great things were
about to happen in Russia, and rumor and expectancy set the stage for
the arrival of the news of the revolution on March 12. The leaders then
began to mobilize their forces and act quickly. Under Shatoff, Schnabel
and Rodes the revolutionary fire was passed along from one to another.
The story was that Russia was free, reclaimed from Czardom and all that
it had meant of oppression.
The lid was off, and it was a case of first come, first served. The
Provisional Government was no better than any other, these men said.
“Russia shall be ours.” “How?” asked the eager disciples. “By helping
yourselves,” answered Shatoff and Schnabel and Rodes. “That’s all very
well,” said the proletariat, “but we haven’t the price.” “Oh, in that
case, come to the farewell meeting on March 26 for Leon Trotzky, at
Harlem River Casino, and all will be made clear to you.”
Some 800 people were at Trotzky’s farewell party, which was held under
the auspices of the German Socialist Federation. Alexander Berkman and
Emma Goldman were among those present. A blond Russian made a speech in
which he said: “Comrades, some of us are going back to Russia to push
the revolution as we think it ought to be pushed, and those who remain
here must get ready to do their share of the work as it ought to be
done.” Trotzky then rose and speaking first in German, then in Russian,
repeated the advice the previous speaker had given, and added: “You who
stay here must work hand in hand with the revolution in Russia, for
only in that way can you accomplish revolution in the United States.”
He was cheered to the echo.
(There are still those who wonder why we have not recognized the
Bolsheviki.)
The pier of the Norwegian-American line the next morning was a strange
sight. Trotzky, with his wife, Chudnofsky, Plotkin, and a group
of fifty more Russians, including such names as Muhin, Rapaport,
Dnieprofsky, Yaroshefsky and Rashkofsky, sailed for Norway. An
undersized, wild-eyed, fanatic little plucked-bantam of a Russian
expatriate literally set out from Hoboken to upset the Provisional
Government of Russia, prevent the formation of a republic, stop the war
with Germany and prevent interference from other governments--that was
his open boast. And, if such a mission can be crowned with success, he
succeeded.
The leaders of the groups left behind began that very afternoon to
examine recruits for the return to Russia. They met at 534 East 5th
Street and elected a committee of five to serve as examining board
for applicants for the $20 to $50 free passage money extended by the
Provisional Government to help Russians who had fled the persecutions
of the old days to repatriate themselves. It is unnecessary to state
that the Provisional Government hardly knew how thoroughly these homing
pigeons were going to re-establish themselves. All those who passed
muster were put down for a sailing date.