The World That Never Was (62 page)

Rachkovsky was not to be deterred. The agents who followed Kravchinsky home on his nightly walks out to the suburbs of West London may have been easily paid off by their mark with the price of a beer, glad to avoid the antagonism from the locals that the presence of shady foreigners evinced, whatever side of the political divide. No similar solution was available, though, when it came to the professional cracksmen paid to burgle the homes of known associates of the émigré revolutionaries, or the thugs hired to beat up young women who worked on the society’s stall in Hyde Park, and a general air of intimidation prevailed. Most damagingly of all for the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, Okhrana agents were also targeting the movement from within.

Alexander Evalenko had first offered his services to the police in St Petersburg in early 1891, when he and his wife had decided to emigrate from Russia to the United States; Rachkovsky’s decision to recruit him on a generous salary, under the cover name of Vladimir Sergeyev, was quickly vindicated. Money supplied from the Okhrana purse bought ‘Sergeyev’ ready access to the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, on both sides of the Atlantic, and his dedication earned him both a trusted position as the movement’s librarian in New York, and the friendship of the ambitious Yegor Lazarev, then the leading figure of the American movement. It took Evalenko’s talent for cool dissimulation to allay suspicion of his extravagant donations, but as contributions from genuine well-wishers slowed to a trickle, his funding became ever more crucial, whilst tempting the society into a dangerous dependency upon him.

It was a slow-burn strategy, but one that would ultimately prove hugely effective. Curtailing positive propaganda for the revolutionary cause, however, was only half of the task. Even if weaned away from their sympathy for the anti-tsarist movement, the British and American governments still had to be made to understand the need to take firm action
themselves against the ‘terrorists’ in their midst. America’s own industrial unrest, however, would spawn violence of a kind that, whilst directed at plutocrats rather than princes, would powerfully illustrate the nature of the threat.

Years later a friend would recollect that Kravchinsky had never appeared happier than during the time he spent teaching impoverished black children whilst on a visit to America. Having come to ask for support from a nation founded upon freedom, he had been taken aback by the levels of inequality he saw, claiming never before to have witnessed such a disparity of wealth in a society. Nor was he alone in viewing the United States as a country much in need of a new revolution of its own. ‘When the Americans start, it will be with energy and violence. In comparison we will be children,’ Engels himself had recently remarked, and Kravchinsky, on friendly terms with the German, may well have tailored his tone of address with such perceptions in mind. For whereas in England he had always been at pains to offer assurances to the Friends’ supporters that ‘the only help we shall ever ask…is that of bringing the public opinion of free countries to bear on Russian affairs’, in his written appeal entitled ‘What Americans Can do for Russia’ he revealed a far greater and more militant dream: ‘to see one day … an army spring into existence – not a host, but a well-selected army like that of Gideon – composed of the best men of all free nations, with unlimited means at their command, fighting side by side …[for] the supremacy of the triumphant democracy.’ The summer of 1892 revealed the germ of what might become such an army among the downtrodden steelworkers of Pennsylvania.

In June 1892, Henry Clay Frick was appointed chairman of the vast Carnegie Steel Company, which amalgamated Frick’s own business interests with those of Andrew Carnegie. Having made an extraordinary fortune, Carnegie was now getting on for sixty years old and was content to take a back seat, burnishing his image as a philanthropist and rediscovering his Scottish roots, while Frick brought to bear the same ruthlessness he had shown while building his own fortune as the ‘King of Coke’. But the steel workers of the Homestead plant, the centrepiece of Carnegie’s empire, presented a challenge. They must, it had been made clear, accept an 18 per cent pay cut and the loss of union rights, or face the sack. But after almost twenty years of deep recession, during which America’s leading industrialists had continued to accumulate almost
inconceivable wealth, workers labouring long hours for already pitiful wages were in no mood to compromise. Nor did the libraries and meeting halls that Carnegie was busy erecting across the country persuade them otherwise. Evidence of plutocratic vanity as much as genuine philanthropy – whatever the moral message propounded by Carnegie in his 1889 apologia for the ‘robber barons’,
The Gospel of Wealth –
they were funded by a small portion of company profits that, every year, exceeded the entire wage bill for his workforce. They certainly did not appease the Homestead workers, who came out on strike.

‘We think absolute secrecy essential in the movement of these men,’ wrote Frick to the Pinkerton Agency, ‘so that no demonstration can be made while they are en route.’ The paramilitary organization he was referring to comprised 300 freelance security contractors: a tiny proportion of the 30,000 that the Pinkertons could mobilise, which amounted to a force greater than the whole standing army of the United States. While some of the mercenaries sent to Homestead were veterans of past confrontations, most were thuggish greenhorns, hired off the streets of New York, Chicago, Kansas City or Philadelphia, and loaded on to one of the two huge roofed-in barges that had been readied to transport them down the eight miles of the River Monongahela from Pittsburgh with no foreknowledge of their task or destination. It was hoped that what they lacked in experience would, however, be compensated for by the daunting defences that they would garrison: a three-mile palisade around the industrial site, twelve feet in height, topped with barbed wire, with holes drilled at regular intervals to allow concealed rifle fire, water cannon and even a system of piping to spray boiling water at assailants: ‘Fort Frick’, as it had become known to the thousands of locked-out steelworkers who watched its erection.

The tugs pulled the barges crammed with Pinkertons upstream under the cover of thick fog, but as the men crowded into the boats’ dark bellies held their breath, they could hear the voices of striking pickets along the banks on either side. It was two days after the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and having celebrated it as patriots, the steelworkers were resolved to defend the town and works that they had built up over the past decade: Carnegie might be the owner, but they were stakeholders whose moral rights were manifest.

It took a single shot, from an unknown source, for violence to erupt. The crates of Winchester rifles stowed on the barges were broken out and distributed to the Pinkerton employees, and a great fusillade followed. The crowd of strikers, dragging their dead and wounded with them,
retreated only so far as a series of makeshift barricades on higher ground; the Pinkertons hastily sawed loopholes into the wooden flanks of the barges, through which to level the muzzles of their rifles.

For two days the Homestead workers laid siege to the floating redoubts. Dynamite charges were thrown, exploding on the roof of the barges and causing consternation within; a flaming rail hopper was rolled down the incline towards the river, but stuck in the muddy strand before it could reach its target. All the while, telegrams arrived from around the country pledging support for the workers; their Texas colleagues even promised the loan of cannons. Yet when the Pinkertons finally surrendered and were forced to run the gauntlet of beatings, the strikers’ leaders intervened in the name of justice to prevent summary executions. Eager to dissociate themselves from violence, they laid the blame for the uglier behaviour at the door of the plant’s Hungarian workers but, above all, on anarchist outsiders who had come to advance their own ideological struggle against capital. Three anarchists were even attacked by the strikers, who recognised that association with the sect that was blamed for the Haymarket Affair would lose them much of the goodwill they had accrued. They were right, but powerless to protect themselves from the inevitable propangandist attacks.

Hardly had the smoke cleared on the Battle of Homestead than the anarchist Alexander Berkman set off from New York for Pittsburgh, armed for action. A Russian Jew from Odessa, Berkman had arrived in America in 1888. Aged eighteen, he was part of the great wave of refugees from the tsar’s anti-Semitic policies, fleeing the fear of pogroms to pour through the port of Hamburg and across the Atlantic. Like many of his more radical compatriots, he had quickly gravitated towards the anarchist politics of Johann Most, who subsequently hired him to work as a compositor on the newspaper
Freiheit
, in its grime-encrusted offices down by the Brooklyn Bridge. The relationship between the two men was complicated, however, by their shared passion for a young Russian divorcee, Emma Goldman; she, for her part, was happy to reciprocate the affection of both men. ‘Something gripped my heart,’ Goldman later wrote of her first meeting with Most, ‘I wanted to take his hand, to tell him that I would be his friend. But I dared not speak out. What could I give this man – I, a factory girl, uneducated; and he, the famous Johann Most, the leader of the masses, the man of magic tongue and powerful pen.’

Goldman provided Most with a rare exception to his gruff rule that, other than Louise Michel and Vera Zasulich, all women were ‘stupids’,
and he encouraged her to study and develop her natural talent as a political speaker. Meanwhile, Berkman suffered agonies of jealousy in silence, laboriously setting type, while the woman he loved mounted the stairs to Most’s office, not to descend again until dawn. The young compositor’s commitment to the doctrine of free love that Goldman advocated was sorely tested, and when Most gave his beloved protégée a bouquet of violets in the middle of winter, Berkman could not help but protest at the indulgent expense, when so many around them were short of food. Most, for his part, simply dismissed his rival as a figure of no consequence. But it was with Berkman that Goldman chose to make a home, and after Most was dragged off to the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island in the spring of 1891, for the second time in three years, the pair set up an ice-cream parlour together in Worcester, Massachusetts, to support their continued work in the anarchist cause.

When Berkman checked into the Merchants Hotel near the train depot in Pittsburgh on 13 July, in the guise of Mr Rakhmetov, an employment agent, it is not known whether he was motivated by pure idealism, or the desire to prove to Goldman that unlike the loquacious Most he was a man of action. The stated purpose of the attack on Frick that Berkman had in mind was propaganda: to demonstrate where the true guilt for the Homestead debacle lay, and to show that, however forcefully the strikers might reject the anarchists’ involvement in their affairs, ‘the proletariat had its avengers’. Berkman had come armed with a bomb, constructed according to the instructions in Most’s booklet
The Science of Revolutionary Warfare
, but Vera Zasulich’s famed shooting of General Trepov in St Petersburg seventeen years earlier would ultimately prove the closer model. Having twice been turned away by Frick’s receptionist at the Carnegie Steel Company when he requested a meeting, eventually Berkman marched straight past her and into the chairman’s office. Dazzled for a moment by sunlight falling through the window, Frick turned from his desk to squint at Berkman who, levelling his pistol, fired three times. Frick hauled himself to his feet, blood pouring from two wounds to his neck, in an attempt to grapple with his assailant, only to be stabbed twice in the side with a stiletto before the belated appearance of his security staff.

Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years; his accomplices, Bauer and Nold, received five, on evidence that included the distribution of anarchist literature at Homestead. A soldier by the name of Iams, serving with the federal troops deployed to keep the peace around the steelworks, spontaneously shouted ‘Three cheers for the man who shot Frick!’ His reward
was to be hung by his thumbs until unconscious, and drummed out of camp. A legal case brought by Iams’ barrister cousin against the army officers responsible caused a minor stir. This time, though, no one dared delineate anarchism’s long heritage, right back to Jesus, the great ‘Redeemer of Mankind’, as Bauer’s defence lawyer had done, to the horror of the presiding judge.

The greatest impact of Berkman’s attack, though, was on the status and credibility of the leading voices of European anarchism. Only a few weeks earlier, Johann Most had been released from his most recent spell of incarceration on Blackwell’s Island. It had been a traumatic experience. On his arrival at the penitentiary, his hair had been cropped close to the skull and beard shaved off, revealing the hideous scar that disfigured his cheek to the mockery of the wardens. The twelve months he had then spent subject to ‘the Spanish Inquisition to the United States’ had further broken him: endless hours in a cell so small that he had to stoop, under strict orders to do nothing and make no sound, even when members of the public visited to peer in at the inmates. Now at liberty, Most promptly seized the opportunity to demonstrate to the authorities that he was a reformed man by openly criticising Berkman to a reporter from the
New York World;
envy of his romantic rival may have also played a part in the decision to break ranks.