Dynamite E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Labor disputes have produced more violence over a longer period of time in the United States than in any other industrialized country in the world. From the 1890s to the 1930s, hardly a year passed without a serious-and often deadly-clash between workers and management. Written in the 1930s, Dynamite recounts a fascinating and largely forgotten history of class and labor struggle in America’s industrial beginnings.
It is the story of brutal exploitation, massacres, and judicial murders of the workers. It is also the story of their response: when peaceful strikes yielded no results, workers fought back by any means necessary.
Louis Adamic has written the classic story of labor conflict in America, detailing many episodes of labor violence, including the Molly Maguires, the Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, Colorado Labor Wars, the Los Angeles Times bombing, as well as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Louis Adamic emigrated from Slovenia when he was fifteen years old and quickly joined the American labor force. The author of eleven books, he is now recognized as a great figure in early twentieth-century American literature. He was found shot to death in a burning farmhouse in 1951.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1931

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Dedication

To

STELLA SANDERS

Authors Note to the Revised (Second) Edition

The first edition of this book appeared in the spring of 1931. At that time it was, on the whole, rather favorably received by critics and reviewers throughout the United States and abroad, and three and a half years later friendly references to it still appear in public prints; but, as I now see it, the original volume had several flaws. Some of those flaws I attempt to remove in this revised edition.

Then, too, much has happened on the capital-labor front since 1931; so I have added paragraphs and sections dealing with those events. Much more is bound to happen on that front in this country, as elsewhere, in the very near future—what will that be?

Although I have rewritten comparatively few pages—chiefly those dealing with the depression years 1929-34, which I now see rather differently than as they appeared to me three or four years ago—the book is almost a new book.

The title and the subtitle, I think, clearly indicate what the book is about, but to all seeming that is not enough. Only a few months ago someone complained, in connection with a review of another book, that Dynamite was a sadly incomplete study of the American labor movement and radical or revolutionary stirrings in the United States during the last century. Well, Dynamite was never meant to be anything more than an attempt at telling the story of the evolution of violence in the class struggle in America, which, of course, is but one phase of the history of our labor and of our radical or revolutionary movements, stirrings, and upheavals.

In two chapters near the end of the book I go a bit into the phenomenon of racketeering as it has developed in the United States in the last several years; and I do this because I believe that, to a very considerable extent, the highly organized criminal terrorism which reached its heights in the days of Al Capone, back in 1922-32, has its roots deep in America’s national life, in the class structure of our capitalist economic system built upon the ideals of liberty and democracy. Racketeering appears to me an inevitable result of the chaotic, brutalizing conditions in American industry, a phase of the dynamic, violent drive of economic evolution in the United States. To understand it, one must know something of the history of the class struggle in this country during the last hundred years. One must know something, also, of the American labor movement, its tragic inefficacy from its inception to the present day; and particularly of the American Federation of Labor, which for half a century has dominated—and at the moment still dominates—the field of organized labor in this country.

In this revised edition I have added some remarks on the A. F. of L. under the New Deal, on violence as publicity for the underdog, on the impersonal nature and social irresponsibility of capitalism as we have it in America, and on the probable developments in the class war in the immediate future; which, I trust, will be helpful to those sincerely trying to understand the current labor situation in this country.

I am not, and never was, a member of any labor union or political party or movement in the United States. I wrote this book uninfluenced by anyone with a special ax to grind. I wrote it as truthfully as I could determine truth. My aim was not to please anyone. The book undoubtedly still has flaws. I hope I shall be able to remove them in the next revision (perhaps two years hence).

The story that I present here is, as I see it, a criticism of our American capitalist-democratic civilization, the most severe criticism, it seems to me, that anyone could write; but during the writing of the book my constant attitude toward America—this vast country with its 125,000,000 people, its immense natural wealth and great beauty, its high genius and marvelous technical equipment—was, and still is, one of love and of confidence in its ultimate future.

America is at the crossroads. She can’t stay where she is, not for long. Right or left? Probably right first, then left. But eventually it will be left: for, in its very nature (which I can’t discuss here) it is a left or revolutionary country.

But whichever way she turns first, America will be, within the next few years, the scene of thousands of bitter disputes between labor and capital and between radical or revolutionary and conservative (in many cases racketeering) labor unions. Many of these disputes will be accompanied by violence of an extreme character. One does not have to be a prophet to see all this just around the corner. One need only know something of our socio-economic situation and the story, thus far, of class violence in this country.

And these impending disputes and outbreaks of violence will be a factor of paramount importance in the decision which America will make as to her future course. Intelligent, patriotic citizens should follow closely these events on the capital-labor front as they develop and try to see and understand them, not as something isolated and of mere local importance, but as something that has a deep root in our history and significance in our current national life, and that will profoundly affect the future of the United States.

Louis Adamic

July 1934

Part One

MILD BEGINNINGS

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”

JAY GOULD

Chapter 1

“IMPUDENT CONDUCT”

I

The struggle of the have-nots against the haves in the United States was first referred to as “class war” in 1826 in New York City by Frances Wright, “that bold blasphemer and voluptuous preacher of licentiousness,” as a conservative writer of that day called her; but at that time, and for some while afterward, the war was merely verbal. The fiery Fanny, with other reformers and uplifters then haranguing the young Republic, contented herself with fierce and frequent blasts of eloquence denouncing the social and economic evils of the period.

There were, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a few labor strikes for higher wages and for the recognition of workmen’s organizations, such as they were. The walkouts usually involved a dozen or a score of men, but they were, without exception, tame, peaceful affairs. So far as any records tell us, not even a fist was lifted in any of them; strikers, it appeared, got even with scabs by calling them “rats” and other bad names. Strikes were considered “conspiracies” or “malicious enterprises,” coming under the old common law of England against interference with trade which continued in force in the United States after the Revolution; and more often than not workmen were arrested and fined or jailed as soon as they struck, and replaced by unorganized men.

But that was no serious matter to the strikers. The country was young and vast beyond conception, and one could move on and very likely better oneself. The frontier lured the adventurous man who found himself at odds with the New Industrialism in the East. In the West, land was to be had for the asking, at no expense save that of a journey, a few implements, and a beast or two. There was no sense in fighting for a job. And if one wanted excitement, the wilderness was full of Indians still to be killed.

Toward the end of the eighteen-thirties, however, immigrants—for the most part Germans, Irishmen, and Dutchmen—began coming to the Land of Promise in considerable numbers, and thenceforth incidents of labor violence were frequent.

Conditions in Europe at that time were bad, and rising American industrialists who found native labor too independent in regard to wages and working hours sent agents to Ireland and to the Continent to lure the poor people there to the United States with fantastic tales of mountains of gold and unbounded freedom and opportunities. The Voice of Industry, a leading labor and reform paper of that day printed in Massachusetts, editorialized indignantly against the “importation of strikebreakers” and charged the employers with providing themselves “against walkouts by creating a numerous poor and dependent populace… whose abject condition in their own countries made them willing to work fourteen and sixteen hours a day for what capital sees fit to give them.”

This indignation was justified. The majority of the immigrants then, as later, were unskilled laborers and lowly peasants. American employers, with the development of machinery and ever greater specialization of tasks in the shops, could use them advantageously, paying them low wages and working them from before sunrise till after dark, to no small detriment of the native mechanics. American workmen naturally resented the presence of these low Europeans—“dung,” they called them. Some of the trade unions, which were then coming into existence in Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England States, eyed them with deeper dislike than the employers who were directly responsible for this class of immigration.

Foreign laborers were employed in large numbers in construction gangs upon canals in New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania at from $5 to $12 a month “and found.” They worked, too, at slightly higher wages, on railroads under construction. Often, when some overseer absconded with their money, they lost even these meager earnings, and in such cases they had no legal redress. The canals and railroads passed through marshy regions, and laborers were dying of malaria and other diseases. But contractors found no difficulty in replacing the sick and the dead, for nearly every ship that arrived from Europe brought in more “dung.”

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century frequent “riots” occurred, as the press called the disturbances, most of which, no doubt, were spontaneous, unorganized, leaderless strikes for higher wages and better working conditions of these wretched foreign laborers driven to desperation. The militia was often called out to quell the outbursts; men were killed and property was destroyed or damaged.

In most of the riots the Irish predominated. The Germans, the Dutch, and other immigrants were comparatively patient sufferers.

II

In 1836, a gang of Irish harbor workers in New York City “rioted for higher wages” and for their “impudent conduct,” as a local newspaper put it, the police distributed among them “some severe and probably dangerous wounds.”

Irishmen also took part in the riot at Allegheny City in the summer of 1848. The Pennsylvania reformers had just succeeded in inducing the legislators of the State to pass an act limiting the workday to ten hours and forbidding the employment of children under twelve years of age in cotton, woolen, silk, paper, and flax mills. This had displeased the up-and-coming manufacturers of Allegheny City very much. They immediately laid off 2000 operatives, who, living from hand to mouth as they did, could not afford to be jobless. Within two weeks most of them starved, or were on the verge of starvation.

One day, in their desperation, several hundred men, women, and children tried to return to work on the old twelve-hour basis, or upon any terms whatever. Such was their eagerness to get back to their machines and benches that they attempted virtually to break into the mills. The armed guards repulsed them; but before they returned home, a riot occurred at one of the factories in which several people were injured and some property was damaged. About twenty arrests were made; thirteen of the rioters—five of them Irish—were convicted and fined, but the majority, unable to pay the fines, went to prison. A few days after the riot a settlement was made on the new ten-hour basis with a 16 per cent reduction in wages.

The high-toned New York Journal of Commerce referred to the riots as “an exotic phenomenon in this country which has been imported with the dregs and scum of the Old World that we so much covet,” and the super cilious Pennsylvanian called the rioters “foolish and hotheaded foreigners.”

III

Such were the extremely mild beginnings of violence in the class struggle in the United States—mild as compared with the violence that flared up with great frequency in the later decades of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth.

Ignorant immigrants were “dung” and “dregs and scum,” and were treated accordingly. They spoke a variety of tongues; there were other important racial differences among them; and even if native labor leaders and reformers had had any sympathy with their lot, which they lacked completely, organization among them would have been impossible.

In consequence, hunger and general wretchedness drove them to sporadic “impudent conduct,” which the hundred per cent Americans of that day were perhaps justified in characterizing as a “foreign phenomenon” in the sense that only—or largely—immigrants were guilty of it; but the conditions which provoked them to riots were quite American. It was the American industrialists who imported these foreigners and then treated them inhumanly.

Chapter 2

THE MOLLY MAGUIRES

I

During the two decades immediately preceding and the two directly following the Civil War, the American labor movement was in a constant state of confusion. The Industrial Revolution was rather overwhelming in its effect upon labor.

Before this the worker with a pair of able hands and a set of good tools had stood on fairly even terms with the master; he had produced directly for purposes of consumption and, indeed, had consumed much of his own actual product. Now, however, the factory system was becoming general. Tools yielded to machinery. Immense factories appeared employing thousands of men, women and children. Suddenly, machines were of greater importance than hands. Labor depended upon conditions created by machinery. Skilled mechanics, once proud of their crafts, were now reduced to common laborers, mere appendages, servants, to the machines. Labor became a commodity on the market, no different from raw materials or coal. Its object was no longer directly to produce, but to keep the machines going for the enrichment of their owners. All human considerations in industry became secondary to the accumulation of great fortunes by those who owned the machines and the raw materials.

And immigrants—more “dung”—came in hordes. Child and female labor increased because it was cheaper than male; besides, women and children were easier to handle than men, who, if they disliked the work, were more likely to bundle up and head West.

There were fine-fibered, tender-minded men in the Republic to whom these swift changes in the industrial field were a source of deep perturbation. Philosophers and reformers put their heads together and there were much pondering and lamenting, vague Socialistic or “humanistic” idealism and speculation. In the forties, Emerson wrote to Carlyle: “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading man but has the draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.” There was the Brook Farm group of idealistic thinkers and dreamers who, in their optimistic moods, entertained charming visions of the future—not so distant—when, among other social improvements and embellishments, disease-breeding factories would be replaced by “grand palaces devoted to Labor and Love” and the whole world, at all events the United States, would be, instead of a chaos of misery and exploitation, a wilderness of sweets. But capitalism, growing stronger by day and by night, took no heed of the learned Brook-Farmers, who, to quote Samuel P. Orth, are now remembered mainly “as an example of the futility of trying to leaven a world of realism by means of an atom of transcendental idealism.” All intellectual movements against the New Industrialism were defeated before they started.

Trade-unionism was tame and timorous. Most of the strikes ended disastrously for the labor organizations concerned. There were labor unions whose membership pledged itself to “avoid exciting topics.” Labor leaders, so called, were for the most part men who neither labored nor led: aspiring third-rate politicians and windy orators who had little capacity for understanding the new industrial forces as they affected the worker; or reformers and lopsided idealists, full of lovely vagaries and longings, who had drawn their original inspiration and their terminology from the writings of the utopian Socialists and the Brook-Farmers. They met in labor conventions to pronounce solemnly upon the nobility of toil and recite verses about the golden sweatdrops upon the laborer’s honest brow, which “shine brighter than diamonds in a coronet.” They used rhetoric to hide their confusion in the face of reality. With the exception of Horace Greeley, who, however, devoted himself mainly to the printers, the labor movement of the time produced no leader of any ability. Opportunities to enrich themselves lured competent men into commercial enterprises and into politics on the side of big money.

The worker was told by his leaders that he was “Nature’s nobleman,” while as a matter of fact he was the cheapest commodity on the industrial market and was lucky if his immediate circumstances permitted him to throw up his job in the mill or the mine and find himself a tract of land in the wilderness.

II

In sharp contrast with the ineffective regular labor organizations of that time, we have the Molly Maguires, a secret miners’ society in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the late sixties and early seventies, whose principal method of achieving its ends was terrorism—murder.

The background of the American Molly Maguires reaches back into feudalistic Ireland of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. There lived then an energetic dame, the widow Molly Maguire, who did not believe in the rent system that was in effect in her country and became the leading spirit of a loosely organized resistance to it.

She was a barbaric and picturesque character. She blackened her face and under her petticoat carried a pistol strapped to each of her stout thighs. Her special aversions were landlords, their agents, bailiffs, and process-servers, and her expression of hatred was limited to beating them up or murdering them. This she did with her own hands or through her “boys,” who called themselves Molly Maguires, or Mollies for short. She was down on the government, which aided the tyrannical landlords in collecting the rent. She was the head of the so-called Free Soil Party, whose banner was her red petticoat. If a landlord or his agent evicted a peasant who was not meeting his payments, that landlord or agent was usually as good as dead. The Mollies, if not Mrs. Maguire herself, were sure to hear of it; eventually the man’s corpse would be found in some ditch or even upon the floor of his own house.

Molly’s systematic assassinations were so effectual that for a time parts of Ireland—notably Tipperary, West Meath, King’s and Queen’s Counties—became uninhabitable except for Mollies. Finally, the authorities, at the behest of desperate landowners, began to persecute Molly and her “boys,” until, in the fifties, hordes of them, including, it appears, Molly herself, emigrated to America.

Many of them sought work in the Pennsylvania coal mines.

The Molly Maguires, as a secret order, already existed in the United States in the mid-fifties. To become a member one had to be Irish or of Irish descent, a good Roman Catholic, and also “of good moral character.” More or less officially (for the organization acquired a charter in Pennsylvania under the name of “The Ancient Order of Hibernians”) their purpose was to “promote friendship, unity, and true Christian charity among the members; and, generally, to do all and singular matters and things which shall be lawful to the well-being and good management of the affairs of the association.” Officially, they meant to attain these ends “by raising or supporting a stock or fund of money for maintaining the aged, sick, blind, and in-firm members.” Their constitution further declared that “the Supreme Being has implanted in our natures tender sympathies and most humane feelings toward our fellow-creatures in distress; and all the happiness that human nature is capable of enjoying must flow and terminate in the love of God and our fellows.”

But while such was the pious basis for the order’s official existence, actually the Molly Maguires became fiercer in the United States than they had been in the Old Country—and, perhaps, with good reason. When the Mollies were at the height of their power—early in the seventies—outrage followed outrage until the coal regions of Pennsylvania became a byword for terror. Wives trembled when their husbands spoke of visiting the mining districts. People feared to stir out after dark, and never budged in broad daylight without a pistol—which, however, availed them little, for the assassins seemed invariably to get in the first shot.

A contemporary writer, in the American Law Review for January 1877, described the anthracite regions of that day as “one vast Alsatia.”

… From their dark and mysterious recesses there came forth to the outside world an appalling series of tales of murder, of arson, and violent crime of every description. It seemed that no respectable man could be safe there, for it was from the respectable classes that the victims were by preference selected; nor could anyone tell from day to day whether he might not be marked for sure and sudden destruction. Only the members of one calling could feel any certainty as to their fate. These were the superintendents and “bosses” in the collieries; they could all rest assured that their days would not be long in the land. Everywhere and at all times attacked, beaten, and shot down, on the public highways and in their own homes, in solitary places and in the neighborhood of crowds, these doomed men continued to fall in frightful succession beneath the hands of assassins.

III

There can be no doubt, however, that the treatment accorded the workers by the responsible mine operators was such as to justify the feelings of resentment and revenge that could prompt these Irish miners to such drastic deeds. The wages were low. Miners were paid by the cubic yard, by the car, or by the ton, and, in the driving of entries, by the lineal yard; there was much cheating in weighing and measuring on the part of the bosses. Little, if any, attention was paid by the owners, of their own accord, to the safety of the miners. Cave-ins were frequent, entombing hundreds of men every year. When and wherever possible, the employers took advantage of the men.

There were all sorts of petty difficulties at the mines. There were, for instance, “soft jobs” and “hard jobs.” A miner naturally preferred a soft job. Irishmen considered themselves superior to the other foreigners, who were also beginning to come to the mines, and hence demanded the soft jobs for themselves. If refused, a Molly was naturally displeased, and his displeasure could immediately get the boss thrashed within an inch of his life, if not eventually murdered. On the other hand, if the boss should hire a Molly, there was always the possibility that the two would get into a row over the measuring of the quantity or the estimation of the quality of the miner’s coal. And to disagree with a Molly was almost certain death. For a time many bosses refused to employ Irishmen altogether, but they all died by violence. If a superintendent dared to come forward in support of his mining boss against the Molly, he, too, became a marked man and eventually was beaten up or assassinated.

But the bosses were not the Mollies’ only enemies. The Mollies also had a thoroughly Irish contempt for the faint-hearted, ineffectual methods of the regular labor unions. Several labor leaders and Socialistic orators were murdered in Pennsylvania during this period—in all probability by the Mollies.

Some of the foremost Mollies were also leaders of non-secret miners’ organizations. A group of them, for example, controlled the Miners’ and Laborers’ Benevolent Association, and were responsible for the unfortunate “long strike” for higher wages in 1874-1875, during which, after suffering had become acute among the strikers, the Mollies kept them from returning to work by threats of murder.

IV

The killings were performed in a cool, deliberate, almost impersonal manner.

The Molly who wanted a boss assassinated reported his grievance in the prescribed manner to the proper local committee. If the latter approved of the wronged Molly’s request, as it ordinarily did, two or more Mollies not personally or directly interested in the case were selected from a different locality, usually from another county, to do the “job,” so that, being unknown, they could not be easily identified. If a Molly to whom the killing had been assigned refused to carry it out, he himself was likely to die.

The grievance committees were wont to meet in the back rooms of saloons run by fellow Mollies and, after the completion of the act, celebrate the “clean job” with the killers in good Irish fashion. Most Mollies were true sons of their spiritual mother, the widow Maguire: strong, dynamic, robust fellows, carousers, drinkers, fighters, brawlers, but good and faithful husbands and fathers. They led a “pure family life.” Most of them were deeply religious. Meetings at which murders were planned often began with prayers. They went regularly to confession. Molly Maguire killings were not considered personal sins by the killers, but incidents in a “war,” so they did not confess them, although the Roman Catholic Church in America had, of course, officially condemned the organization and its terroristic doings.

James Ford Rhodes, in a paper which he read in 1909, before the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Washington, ventured to explain the Molly Maguire psychology as follows:

Subject to tyranny at home, the Irishman, when he came to America, too often translated liberty into license, and so ingrained was his habit of looking upon government as an enemy [due to the seven centuries of misgovernment of Ireland by England] that, when he became the ruler of cities and stole the public funds, he was, from his point of view, only despoiling the old adversary. With this traditional hostility to government, it was easy for him to become a Molly Maguire, while the English, Scotch, and Welsh immigrant shrank from such a society with horror.

V

In the decade beginning with 1865, Molly Maguire killings were frequent, with few arrests, fewer trials, and never a conviction for murder in the first degree. The killers were always strangers in the locality, usually young men, quick on their legs, who had already made their escape before anybody began to pursue them. If one was caught, there always were a dozen Mollies ready to swear by the Lord God and the Holy Virgin that the accused had been with them every minute in the evening of the murder. They packed juries and selected judges.

Using the same drastic tactics, Molly Maguire leaders invaded the political field and, setting themselves up as “bosses,” installed mayors and judges who were members of the order (just as nowadays “racketeers” put their men into public office in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia). Early in the seventies they developed considerable political power in Pennsylvania, especially in Schuylkill County, where five or six hundred Mollies ruled communities of tens of thousands.

Molly Maguire-ism was at its height in 1873 and 1874. Mining bosses and other men displeasing to the Mollies were falling dead week after week. Coal trains were wrecked. However, many killings and outrages attributed to the Mollies unquestionably were committed by other persons.

There were then several thousand Molly Maguire lodges in Pennsylvania, with a central executive body. The organization was about to gain a foothold in West Virginia when, on the initiative of a young mine-operator whose bosses were being killed with great regularity, the part of organized society in Pennsylvania not controlled by the Mollies began a determined secret action against the terrorists. Detectives of Irish descent went to work in the mines and, after joining the order, became the “biggest Mollies of Mollies,” or killers of the first water, and as such were in position to spot the leaders.

In 1875, after a number of especially gruesome murders, several leaders and members of the order were arrested and tried. Pinkerton detectives—notably one James McParland, who subsequently figured in other labor cases—were practically the only witnesses against them. Whether any of the accused were directly guilty of the murders with which they were charged is extremely questionable, but in the course of the next few years ten Mollies were executed and fourteen imprisoned for long terms.

Thereafter the Molly Maguires as a terrorist organization rapidly disintegrated. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, however, exists to this day.

VI

However shocking it may seem to a person who has led a sheltered life, the appearance of organized terrorism at that time and place was quite natural; indeed, it is a wonder that it was not more widespread.

Some of the explanations for the Mollies—namely, the utter ineffectiveness of the regular labor unions in the face of brutal industrial conditions, the criminal disregard for the miners’ safety on the part of the employers, and the intense Irish temperament produced by centuries of misrule and injustice in the Old Country—I have already offered. Coal and more coal, was the important thing; the countless new machines in the factories and the new railroad locomotives had to have their motive power; and the men who mined the coal scarcely mattered. Immigrants hungry for work, any kind of work, were coming to the United States by the thousands every week. Hence, if a dozen miners lost their lives in a disaster, it was a matter of scant importance to the employer, and he was little inclined to do anything to prevent accidents in the future—unless he happened to fear the Mollies. By killing mine-owners and bosses by the dozen, by beating up hundreds of others, the Mollies unquestionably improved the working conditions not only for themselves but for all the miners in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, and saved many workers’ lives. There is no doubt, however, that many Molly Maguire killings were motivated by petty, personal grudges.

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Molly Maguire executions by the State of Pennsylvania, Eugene V. Debs, then at the height of his career as a radical leader in America, wrote in the Appeal to Reason:

They all protested their innocence and all died game. Not one of them betrayed the slightest evidence of fear or weakening. Not one of them was a murderer at heart. All were ignorant, rough and uncouth, born of poverty and buffeted by the merciless tides of fate and chance… To resist the wrongs of which they and their fellow-workers were victims and to protect themselves against the brutality of their bosses, according to their own crude notions, was the prime object of the organization of the Molly Maguires… It is true that their methods were drastic, but it must be remembered that their lot was hard and brutalizing; that they were the neglected children of poverty, the product of a wretched environment… The men who perished upon the scaffold as felons were labor leaders, the first martyrs to the class struggle in the United States.

In the Molly Maguires we have the first beginnings of “racketeering” in America, especially labor racketeering—to use a term that has come into use since 1920. The Mollies whom the State of Pennsylvania hanged in the seventies are considered heroes today by not a few leaders and members of some of the “conservative” labor unions. The Molly Maguire organization disintegrated in the seventies, but the Molly Maguire spirit, constantly stimulated by the brutal and brutalizing working conditions in industry, went marching on through the eighties and the nineties into the current century, and—as we shall see toward the end of this book—it marches on today with a firmer step than ever before.

Chapter 3

THE GREAT RIOTS OF 1877

I

By the end of the sixties the “Gilded Age,” as Mark Twain called it, had begun, and the United States was absorbed in the exploitation and organization—mainly exploitation—of its vast material resources, to the neglect of practically every other consideration. The nation launched upon a crusade of material success. Success at all costs! The Devil take the hindmost and the public be damned!…

An intense feeling about wealth motivated and inspired life in America almost entirely. It produced a philosophy with a healthy enough basic principle: the necessity and desirability of the survival of the strongest and the best; but when that doctrine appeared in practice, it was bare, unrelieved selfishness—fierce, cruel, anti-social. No doubt there was much in industry, and generally in the life of the country, that was admirable, but most of that was dimmed by the sordid individual motives and acts of the financial and industrial giants, untempered by any social feeling or intelligence. The keenest and highest-minded social and political observers of the time were remarking upon “the decline of public morality”… “the evil combinations of capital”… “the new slavery.”

There were bitter wars among capitalists commanding resources, the vastness of which was unknown even to themselves. The competitive spirit grew fiercer every year. It was the beginning of relentless business methods: of secret rates and rebates, graft, subterranean intrigue, murder, special legislation passed by bought lawmakers for the benefit of some capitalist or small group of capitalists. Financial and industrial magnates were struggling tooth and claw to determine who should survive and dominate. When two of them saw that a fight between them would be mutually destructive, they combined to fight a third. The trusts were started… Theodore Dreiser has captured the spirit of Big Business of that period in his novels, TheFinancier and The Titan… It was industrial and financial anarchy, exuberant, hard, irresistible. The Constitution of the United States passed for a joke, and so did the Presidency and the Supreme Court. An honest politician was one who stayed sold to one group of interests. The Federal Government became centralized beyond Alexander Hamilton’s fondest hopes; it was virtually the Central Office of Big Business.

The capitalists as a class were thoroughly agreed upon one thing only—their opposition to the proletariat’s strivings to improve its status. In this, the police club was the symbol of their power. On one occasion Jay Gould boasted, cynically: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

In the labor market every worker competed with every other. Class solidarity was impossible, for, by the natural power of example of the man on top, and by other means of influence, the very rich imparted to the entire population a large measure of their own feelings and ideas in regard to the aims of life in America. The millionaire’s estimate of the value of wealth was almost universally accepted. Essentially, the rich and the poor were dominated by the same ideas, and fired by the same feverish urges and desires. And the universal feeling about wealth naturally and necessarily developed the intense and unlimited competition which made life a bitter struggle, not with Nature to obtain shelter and subsistence, which would seem to be the normal life for man, but of man against man and class against class, in which an ever-increasing number must inevitably fail and be crushed. The rich were getting richer, and the poor poorer.

II

Certain labor leaders and reformers were casting about for some scheme whereby labor might be emancipated from the dominion of employers, but the conditions in general were so chaotic, changing so rapidly and unexpectedly, that one scarcely had time to realize a situation when it suddenly presented a problem different from what it had originally suggested. The labor movement was, therefore, a fitful movement; its impulses were uncertain and confused, stimulated mainly from without, hardly at all from within. The eight-hour day victory of Australian labor in the late sixties, for instance, prompted the American trade unions to start an agitation for the eight-hour system in the United States. Resolutions were endlessly passed; leagues and committees were organized in the larger industrial centers; and politicians in Washington were induced to present bills to establish the eight-hour workday. Several strikes were started on the eight-hour issue, but with the ignorant, unorganizable immigrants arriving in great numbers, ready to take any sort of job at almost any pay, and work twelve and fourteen hours a day, the employers had no difficulty in crushing such walkouts.

Labor at this time scored but one notable victory—in the great strike of 1872 in New York City, in which nearly 100,000 men participated, for the introduction of the eight-hour system in the building and mechanical trades. The fight lasted several months, whereupon the employers yielded.

A great victory, but only a momentary one. It did the workers little good in the long run, for within a few months the dire panic of 1873, the after-effects of which lasted six years, swept the country, and labor everywhere in the United States started on a most critical period in its history.

III

The country was in deep economic distress.

There had been a too rapid building of railroads, wharves, plants, and other projects requiring tremendous sums of capital but offering small immediate returns. A contemporary historian wrote: “Men had no longer any vision for realities, but built upon illusions and impossibilities as if they were the solid facts and laws of nature… The sheer wastefulness of that period, if it could be adequately portrayed, would appear incredible to all who did not witness it.” Finally, with the failure of an important bank, the economic machine jumped out of gear; the “mad gallop” of American capitalism ended abruptly in a great crisis.

The working class, of course, received at once the full impact of the panic. Hundreds of thousands were suddenly thrown out of work. Wages were reduced. These reductions caused prolonged and desperate strikes. Every one of them failed. Some of the strikes were followed by lockouts, so that vast numbers of people could not get work on any terms. Labor leaders were blacklisted. Between 1873 and 1880 real and nominal wages were cut to almost one-half of the former standards. Labor organizations went out of existence. There were no leaders to lead them and no workmen to pay the dues. In New York City alone the trade-union membership dropped from 45,000 to under 5,000.

At a mass meeting in Cooper Union, New York City, in December of 1873, there was a display of placards which told a terrible tale:

10,000  HOMELESS MEN AND WOMEN IN OUR STREETS

7500 LODGED IN OVERCROWDED CHARNEL STATION HOUSES PER WEEK

20,250 IDLE MEN FROM 11 TRADE UNIONS; ONLY 5950 EMPLOYED

182,000  SKILLED UNION WORKMEN IDLE IN NEW YORK STATE

110,000 IDLE OF ALL CLASSES IN NEW YORK CITY

But in other large cities the working people were hit no less cruelly. That winter thousands starved and lacked proper clothing and medical attention.

Meetings of the unemployed were held, but frequently, on the announcement of such gatherings, the conscience-pricked communities took alarm, fearing that a great mob of hitherto patient sufferers, suddenly brought together, might imperil lives and property. Early in January 1874, for instance, the leaders of the poverty-stricken in New York City gained permission from the Police Department to parade the streets on the thirteenth, and then assemble in Tompkins Square, but on the twelfth the department suddenly revoked the permit. It was impossible for the leaders to inform the scattered pauper army of the changed order. When the mob—men, women, and children—poured into the square, the police came and there followed a scene which The World the next day confessed was indescribable. “People rushed from the gates,” so runs a contemporary account, “and through the streets, followed by mounted officers at full speed, charging upon them without provocation. Screams of women and children rent the air, and the blood of many stained the streets.”

A week after this occurrence, The World printed a survey of the conditions, showing that thousands “lived on from 70ȼ to $14 a week”; that hundreds subsisted on the refuse of the city—“veritable scavengers.”

Early in 1877, the Inter-Ocean, an organ of the Administration at Washington, admitted that there

never was a time in the history of the United States when a greater amount of misery, poverty, and wretchedness existed than at the present time. New York is full of want… Workingmen are parading the streets, publicly setting forth their suffering and calling for relief… Nor is this pressing state of affairs confined to the East. In Chicago, today, there are hundreds of wellborn, well-bred, and well-informed men walking the streets without a cent, and without a knowledge of where to get a dinner or a bed.

IV

For four years the fuel had been piled up for the conflagration which suddenly burst forth in connection with the so-called strikes on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the summer of 1877—less than a month after the Molly Maguire leaders had been hanged.

The railroad companies, in common with other industries under the stress of panic, or else using the panic as an excuse, had been cutting their employees’ wages since the start of the crisis, and, openly hostile to trade unions, were unceremoniously discharging the men who dared to serve on grievance committees.

Early in July, the B. & O. announced another ten per cent cut of its firemen’s and brakemen’s wages, effective on the sixteenth of the month. The news brought panic to the employees, who already were scarcely able to support their families on what they received. Desperate, they held protest meetings and sent committees to the manager of the road. He declined to see them. With the other officials of the company, he believed that the hard times would prevent the men from walking out. Besides, if they did, so much the worse for them; for there were hordes of jobless men all along the B. & O. lines to choose from.

On the morning of July 16, the trains were manned as usual. There had been strike talk, but, to all seeming, no action had been decided upon. In the middle of the afternoon, a gang of firemen and brakemen quit at a junction in Maryland. It appeared to be a local movement. The company had no difficulty in replacing them. Hungry men were begging for work everywhere.

But as the afternoon wore on, the company officials received word of difficulties all along the road. Nothing definite as yet; merely “trouble”… “discontent”… “insubordination.” And the trouble seemed most intense at Martinsburg, West Virginia, where, toward evening, the men sidetracked their trains and quit.

Elsewhere the situation became equally acute and dramatic. News came that the canal-boatmen were quitting. By midnight the entire system dominated by the B. & O. was paralyzed.

It was a spontaneous movement, with practically no organization behind it.

Abashed, the company officials appealed to Governor Matthews of West Virginia for armed protection of their property. The Governor responded at once, and on the morning of July 17 the first shots were exchanged in Martinsburg between strikers and militiamen. A locomotive fireman was shot. The situation became tense. Mobs of townspeople and farmers from the surrounding country joined the strikers, and finally two companies of Martinsburg militia, officers and men, went over to the workers’ side.

Hearing of this, the Governor, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the State, decided to lead a detachment to Martinsburg in person, but meanwhile the strike spread to Wheeling, the capital. Alarmed, he wired President Hayes in Washington for Federal troops.

The President acted at once. Regulars were ordered out and within three days the B. & O.’s difficulties in West Virginia were considerably lessened. Trains began to move again.

Meantime the trouble spread—swiftly, alarmingly—to other B. & O. points. Federal troops and the militia appeared at once wherever the railroad company asked for them; in several places their arrival incited open warfare.

At Baltimore, for instance, soldiers armed to the teeth marched about in platoons and companies. In some sections the streets were choked with proletarian mobs—strikers, sympathizers, hoodlums, the unemployed. Some one yelled an insulting remark at the soldiers. A few paving-stones and bricks flew through the air, injuring a militiaman. Immediately, without order from the commanding officer, several soldiers fired into the crowd, killing or wounding a number of people. The terrified mob retreated before the soldiers’ guns; then more paving-stones and bricks, and the militiamen fired again, strewing the streets with more dead and wounded rioters.

For three days the riots continued in Baltimore. The strikers, who were practically leaderless, were joined by thousands of laborers and mechanics out of work as well as by the entire criminal class of the city, eager for an opportunity to plunder. A large number of men in various other occupations, who had recently suffered reductions in wages, were in a sullen mood. They welcomed what they thought was an attempt on the part of the railroad men to right a common wrong. They aided the rioters and stimulated the movement by reckless and inflammatory talk, until it became a loose, haphazard mob action.

In Cumberland, Maryland, the militia killed ten workmen and wounded twice that number.

V

Within a few days of the B. & O. outbreak, the strike epidemic spread to the Pennsylvania Central. Here, too, the action was spontaneous. Two days previous the idea had scarcely occurred to the men. Their grievances were similar to those of the workers on the B. & O. road. The company, holding the upper hand in the situation because of general unemployment, refused to bargain with them.

In Pittsburgh, which became the center of trouble in Pennsylvania, the strikers took all the locomotives to the roundhouses and went home. But as the news of their walkout spread through the city, the streets filled with mobs not unlike those in Baltimore. The public was sympathetic. The militiamen, who were Pittsburgh boys, fraternized with workmen, whereupon the railroad company called for a regiment of militia from Philadelphia, and later for Federal troops.

The jobless and the hungry formed mobs in various sections of the city. Soldiers attempted to disperse them. Within a few days over twenty workmen were shot dead and more than fifty wounded.

One night several hundred box-cars in the Pittsburgh yards were soaked with oil and set on fire. The conflagration quickly spread to the shops and the roundhouses, and before morning over $5,000,000 worth of equipment was destroyed. The strikers, of course, were charged with having started the fire, but labor and radical writers insist that most of the cars were old and useless and that the company had hired firebugs to touch off the equipment, so that it might collect damages from the State for losses suffered during the strike. In her Autobiography, Mother Jones advances the theory that the business men of Pittsburgh, who had felt for a long time that the railroad was discriminating against their city in the matter of rates, were behind the arson.

Mobs, rendered furious by the deadly fire of the military, surged about the city, sacking stores for arms and food. For a time it seemed that the rioters, albeit leaderless, would gain the upper hand over the authorities. As was the case in Baltimore, the striking railroadmen who engaged in the riots were few as compared with the hungry and desperate men who had not worked for months, or even years.

Riots occurred elsewhere in Pennsylvania. At Reading, thirteen were killed and over twenty wounded in a single day.

VI

In Chicago, too, with widespread unemployment and starvation, the situation was extremely tense. Radical orators harangued the wretched proletariat about “the Revolution,” which they proclaimed was imminent. Albert Parsons, not yet an avowed anarchist, was already in the city. Several strikes—all hopeless—were in progress and a number of big factories had recently locked out their employees.

The Daily News issued extra after extra about the riots at Baltimore, Cumberland, Pittsburgh, Reading, and elsewhere. Its circulation of over twenty thousand doubled in a day and more than trebled in another.

On the night of July 23, the switchmen of the Michigan Central struck against the threat of another cut in their wages, which had very recently been reduced from $65 to $55 a month. Three days previously the men had had no thought of striking. Now they formed eager audiences for such extremists as Albert Parsons.

The strike spread and within twenty-four hours the entire Mid-Western transportation system, “the pride of Chicago,” was paralyzed.

On the night of July 24 the police dispersed three crowds of workers who had gathered to be addressed by Parsons and other leaders of the Socialist Labor Party. Parsons issued circulars appealing to the strikers and sympathizers to avoid violence at all costs and thereby solidify the public sentiment behind the eight-hour day movement, which was then being sponsored by his party. “The grand principles of Humanity and Popular Sovereignty,” he said, “need no violence to sustain them.”

But it was too late to preach non-violence. The next day a battle occurred between the police and the strikers near the McCormick Reaper Works. Men were killed and wounded. Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, in their Chicago—A History of ItsReputation, say:

Twenty thousand men, police and citizens, were under arms. Squads of house-holders shouldered rifles and patrolled the residence districts. [At one time] fifty different mobs were clashing with militiamen and volunteer “specials.” Saloons were closed… Citizens brought rifles and horses to City Hall… At the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy roundhouses on West Sixteenth Street, locomotives were destroyed and volleys fired. A pitched battle was fought at the viaduct between Halsted and Archer Avenues. Terror had the business men by the throat, and… they demanded 5000 militiamen to put down “the ragged Commune wretches.”… Scores among the “upper classes” left town.

Then a battalion of the United States regulars, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick D. Grant, son of Ulysses, arrived in Chicago, and that was the end of strife. The strike was broken.

On July 26 The Daily News said editorially:

For years the railroads of this country have been wholly run outside the United States Constitution… They have charged what they pleased for fare and freights. They corrupted the State and city legislatures. They have corrupted Congress, employing for that purpose a lobby that dispensed bribes to the amount of millions and millions… Their managers have been plundering the roads and speculating on their securities to their own enrichment. Finally, having found nothing more to get out of the stockholders… they have commenced raiding not only upon the general public but their own employees.

VII

The warfare spread all the way to the Pacific Coast. In San Francisco the workers clashed with the police and Vigilantes. Throughout the country the number of casualties ran into hundreds; the exact number has never been determined. The number of troops on actual riot duty approached twenty thousand.

By the end of July the rioters were entirely subdued—beaten. Thereupon, the conservative press and the pulpit began to urge, implore, and demand from the Federal Government and the separate States that they reorganize and strengthen their military forces, so that in the future they might be in position to deal more effectively with such outbreaks—for behind the riots they discerned “a dreadful force”… “the awful presence of Socialism, which has more than once made Europe tremble on account of its energy, its despotism, its fearful atrocities.”

The riots had been spontaneous movements, produced by hunger, desperation—and this, upon reflection, impressed the authorities and the respectable element as worse than if it had come about as a deliberately planned, concerted action. Had the riots shown any sign of organization, the failure of the movement would have been a better promise of the underdog’s submission in the future. But in this unorganized upheaval they perceived an elemental spontaneity which showed the existence of deep and widespread discontent among the lowly; indeed, of a powerful disposition on the part of the proletariat to subvert the existing social order. What would happen should this discontent become organized under a strong leader—say, a Danton, a Bakunin?

The underdog had given capitalism in America its first big scare. The memory of the Paris Commune of six years before was still fresh.

Frightened, capitalism decided that it must tighten up the screws that held down the working class. The erection of great armories in the large industrial cities dates from 1877. The War Department published a manual of tactics in riot duty. And it was but a few years later that General E. L. Molineux read before the Military Service Institute of the United States a paper upon “Riots in Cities and Their Suppression” and Stephen H. Olin published a pamphlet, “for private circulation,” entitled Suggestions Upon the Strategy of Street Fighting.

VIII

Those of the strikers who could do so returned sullenly to their jobs at reduced wages. Some of them were required to sign pledges that they would not join any more unions, nor support the eight-hour movement.

Many trade unions, as I have said, went out of existence during the panic, and most capitalists, while still thinking with alarm about the riots, already exulted over “the end of labor unionism.”

The panic lasted for two years after the riots.

The Socialist agitators, who had become numerous during the hard times, rejoiced in the “revolutionary spirit” that the mobs had evinced during the two bloody weeks. Now they knew that they had something to work on.

Also, following Bismarck’s anti-Socialist decree of 1878, there emigrated to the United States hundreds of educated German Socialists, many of them extremists. They joined the loosely organized radical movement in the various cities, notably in New York and Chicago.

For several years it was extremely unwise for workers to join the unions or support radical political movements. The inevitable result was that after the riots many commenced to gather in secret revolutionary meetings. The underdog movement was thus driven underground. Groups of workers even began to provide themselves with arms and to drill in the woods in preparation for the forth-coming final battles with capitalism—“the Revolution”—in which they meant to meet the police and the soldiers with guns and bombs.

The explosion of the Haymarket Bomb was but a few years in the future.

Part Two

“DYNAMITE… THAT’S THE STUFF!”

“Extirpate the miserable brood!”

JOHANN MOST

Chapter 4

AN APOSTLE OF TERRORISM COMES TO AMERICA

I

Such European anarchists as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Guillaume, living in London and the Jura, had been keeping their eyes on the United States for years, as a possible fertile field for anarchist propaganda and action. Indeed, Bakunin, upon hearing of hunger parades in New York and elsewhere, was thinking of going to America as early as 1874, but affairs in Europe and his ill health, which presently resulted in his death, kept him from making the trip. Now, in the summer of 1877, receiving reports of the battles in several States, they were all filled, as Guillaume put it, “with a lively emotion.” In the Bulletin of the Jura Anarchist Federation, Kropotkin immediately published a lengthy review of the riots. He was enthusiastic in his praise of the “revolutionary qualities” which the American proletariat had exhibited. “Its spontaneity, its simultaneousness at so many distant points, the aid given by the workers of different trades, the resolute character of the uprising from the beginning, call forth our sympathies, excite our admiration, and awaken our hopes.”

Then, in 1882, Johann Most, a German anarchist, arrived in the United States and became the chief exponent of the ideas of Bakunin, Nechayeff and other European “propagandists of the deed.”

But first it is necessary to know something of the radical movement in the United States prior to the riots of 1877.

II

Modern American radicalism dates from the late forties, when the country began to receive numerous political refugees from Europe, especially from Germany, following the upheavals there in 1848. They represented the Socialism that was then being crystallized in the mighty literary efforts of Marx and Engels. They were not of the underdog element, but rather the élite, the intelligentsia of immigration. The movement was intellectual, refined, tame, romantic. It was, for about two decades, a vague expression of a multiplicity of ideas aiming at the introduction of drastic social reforms, the basic one of which was a reconstruction of the economic scheme so that the entire product of labor should accrue to the laborer. They did not mean to abolish capital, but to do away with a distinct capitalist class, though, of course, no one had a plausible notion how that might be accomplished in the United States. The movement was a babel of voices in which the most strident note was the wail of discontent.

In the fifties, numerous German-American “revolutionary societies” and “educational clubs” were formed in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other large centers, aiming to start “a revolution in the minds of the people.” Barricades and violence played no part in the thought of the overwhelming majority of the Socialists of that day. They were opposed to “lawbreaking,” holding with Marx and Engels that such tactics were injurious to the cause.

After the Civil War, and even during that conflict, Marxism had begun to appeal—vaguely—to some of the more thoughtful native Americans whose energies were not entirely absorbed by the exploitation of the country and their fellow citizens. Abraham Lincoln himself became—not too publicly, of course—a sort of Socialist. Serious-minded people were disturbed by the rise of influences affecting the vitality of the government and of the individual social conscience as guardians of public order and morality.

There was little interest in politics and government from the broader viewpoint of social welfare or civic patriotism. Under the sway of the passion for material success which had taken hold of the country, honor and social intelligence vanished from public life. Men of honor fled or were driven from official positions. The influence upon the government of one unconscionable millionaire outweighed the votes of a million common people. Except on the frontier, sportsmanship and fair play had ceased to be vital qualities of American public life.

All this outraged the sensibilities of many people. Beneath the roar and bustle of industrial America there was an undercurrent of ideas, hopes, and fitful strivings to restore the government to social interests and to extend its power for public welfare so as to include the lowest worker.

Throughout the sixties Socialism remained tamely idealistic, polite, refined, intellectual, almost respectable. Its appeals were not addressed to the underdog element as such, but to all classes. There were a few hot-headed, wild-eyed radicals here and there, but while industrial conditions were yet bearable to the majority of workers and the frontier was still open, they received little attention.

Then, with the panic of 1873 bursting upon the country, there followed the conditions described in the preceding chapter and, almost overnight, the Socialist movement lost its genial, intellectual temper. The hunger parades in the terrible winter of 1873-1874 were organized by Socialist leaders, both native and foreign-born, and thenceforth Socialism was largely—almost exclusively—an underdog, belly-hunger movement.

As such, it naturally became emotional and violent. It was seized by the desperation of the hungry mob.

III

The most radical city in the United States in the seventies and eighties was Chicago. The Socialist Labor Party of Chicago, whose early career was linked with the bloody events that occurred during the panic, acted under the energetic leadership of such men as Philip Van Patten, Albert Parsons and G. A. Schilling, strike tacticians and agitators of exceptional ability.

Almost from its inception, the Socialist Labor Party contained an extremist element. From time to time, some of its leaders despaired of accomplishing anything for the working class through politics. They were acquainted with the Marxist ideas, but they also read Hegel, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, and Spencer. In addition to the S. L. P., they were organized in the so-called “Revolutionary Clubs,” meeting in secret halls and beginning to despair of starting “a revolution in the minds of the people.” Similar clubs appeared in other cities during the panic.

In 1881, a national convention of the Revolutionary Clubs was held in Chicago and the “Revolutionary Socialist Party” came into existence, competing with the S. L. P. For a year and a half the character of this movement was very vague. There was loose talk of violence, dynamite, and assassination, but the party as a whole dangled self-consciously between Marxism and Nihilism, between theory and action.

Then Johann Most came. He was a man in his late thirties, an intense, striking personality, somewhat of a Bakunin even in looks; possessing a fiery intelligence and violent temperament; largely self-educated, dynamic, irrepressible; with a picturesque prison record as a result of his revolutionary doings in Vienna, Berlin, and London. In London, on the occasion of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by the Russian Nihilists in 1881, he had published, in his paper Freiheit, an article extolling the act and urging others to do likewise with rulers elsewhere. For this he had been sentenced to eighteen months of imprisonment. After serving the term he departed for the United States.

In America he was hailed as a hero by the comrades of the Revolutionary Clubs and became at once the leader of the extremists. His cry was: “Extirpate the miserable brood!”—meaning all politicians and exploiters of the masses. He was an avowed, thoroughgoing revolutionary. His principle of action was the Bakunin principle: “Let us rely upon the unquenchable spirit of destruction and annihilation which is the perpetual spring of new life. The joy of destruction is a creative joy!” Most believed in dynamite and street-fighting and, in his contentions with the nonviolent American Socialists, made no secret of his belief.

He was a frequent visitor in Chicago, where violent revolutionary doctrines and tactics gained a considerable following among workmen and their leaders. Under Most’s influence, Die Arbeiter Zeitung, a Socialist paper, turned out-and-out anarchist. He resumed the publication of his own Freiheit; a group of Czech anarchists began a sheet in Bohemian; and for the English-speaking anarchists, Albert Parsons, who, along with many other Chicago agitators, had accepted Most’s ideas and leadership, edited Alarm.