“Berkman and Goldman had met three years earlier, in the dim, smoke-filled dining room of Sachs’ Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sachs’ was the regular hangout of Yiddish-speaking radicals, poets, and free spirits. Goldman had found her way there… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share Image
“Goldman laid low until the 1927 executions of anarchists and convicted bank robbers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti stirred her back into action. With the support of admirers such as novelist Theodore Dreiser and philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim, Goldman began to write her memoirs as a way to reach the public in America. If she could not reach its shores, at… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“A few weeks later, in the middle of a cold December night, the pair, along with 247 other radicals, were herded onto a freighter and shipped off to Soviet Russia, a government the United States didn’t even recognize. Greeted as heroes upon their arrival, Goldman and Berkman believed they had landed in a country where their politics would find a… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“The country, it seemed, was on the verge of a second civil war, this one over industrial slavery. But Frick was a gambler who… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share Image
“But except for committed anarchists, the assassination attempt was widely condemned. In fact, it turned the tide of public opinion that, up until this moment, had been sympathetic to the strikers. Americans feared anarchists more than robber barons. Labor leaders, sensing the mood, went on the attack. “This man Berkman is an anarchist and, of course, is not identified with… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“In his years in prison, Berkman had come to believe that bullets directed at their oppressors were insufficient because eliminating what he viewed as the representatives of modern slavery didn’t resolve the problem. “The real despotism of republican institutions,” he wrote Goldman, “is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independent. That is… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“Lying alone in bed in New York City, an anxious Goldman decided she could get the money Berkman needed to buy a weapon and clothing suitable to get him close to Frick by taking a page from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When she had read the novel, Goldman had been especially moved by the story of Sonia, the woman… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“Upset over having deceived her sister, her failure as a prostitute, and the tension in waiting for Berkman to make his move, Goldman walked aimless about New York in the July heat and whiled away her evenings at Zum Groben Michel. The bar, a few blocks from her room, had become the hangout of one of the sects of anarchists.… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“Unlike religions that offered a better life after death, the idealist callings of anarchism espoused making heaven on earth by ridding humankind of the shackles of oppressive governments and capitalism. Labor unions, like those at Homestead, were grenadiers on the front lines of the struggle. By challenging the rule of the robber barons they deserved the support of revolutionaries. But… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“the headline death and disaster atop the latest dispatch from Homestead. “Capital and labor have met once more on a bloody field,” the article stated. “Never in the history of strikes and riots, since the railroad riots of 1877, have there been so many lives sacrificed, and such fighting between the representatives of the two great social divisions.” Members of… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share
“Berkman and Goldman had met three years earlier, in the dim, smoke-filled dining room of Sachs’ Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sachs’ was… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share Image
“Asking a question whose echo has been heard each time America went to war since, Goldman said, “How else is the world to take… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share Image
“In the weeks leading up to his arrival by train in Pittsburgh, Alexander Berkman had been obsessed with the escalating drama at Homestead. He… — James McGrath Morris Copy Share Image
