This Day in Labor History: July 23, 1892. The anarchist Alexander Berkman tries and miserably fails to kill the steel capitalist Henry Clay Frick. Let's talk about why this happened and the problems with anarchism as a resistance ideology, then and now. 
Maybe I shouldn't say that Henry Clay Frick deserved to be murdered. So I won't say that. But Frick was a terrible human being. First, there was his culpability in the Johnstown Flood, where the negligence of he and his friends led to over 2,200 dead people.
Admittedly, he didn’t order their killings, but he also just didn’t care whether they lived or died. Second, there was his actions at Homestead. Frick was the second in command to Andrew Carnegie at Carnegie Steel. Frick hated unions. Truly despised them.
He once personally evicted a worker from company housing by picking him up and throwing him in a creek. The world would have been better off without Henry Clay Frick in it. But that doesn’t excuse Berkman’s actions.
Berkman was born in 1870 in Vilinus, in what is today Lithuania, to a wealthy Jewish family. Because of their wealth, the Czar allowed them to move from the Pale of Settlement to St. Petersburg.
The young Berkman became attracted to the radical political ideas part of the atmosphere there, which had famously led to the assassination of Alexander II. With his family increasingly ashamed of his radicalism, Berkman immigrated to the United States in 1888.
Berkman immediately became involved in the fight to free the remaining Haymarket martyrs and joined the first Jewish anarchist group in New York. He met another young Jewish anarchist, Emma Goldman, in 1889. They became lovers.
They also fell under the influence of Johann Most, the anarchist articulating “the propaganda of the deed,” which meant that ndividual acts of violence were good, even if they killed innocents, because the repressive state would show its true colors and spark revolution.
Berkman and Goldman moved to Worcester and opened an ice cream shop. Then Homestead happened. Although they had no connection to the steel workers, they decided that action was necessary to make Frick pay for what he had done. So they decided to kill him.
Goldman attempted to fund it by working as a prostitute, to ridiculous results. But Berkman managed to get his assassination attempt in anyway. He wanted to make a bomb, because that’s how Russian anarchists rolled, but he didn’t know how.
So he got the knife and gun. He managed to get into Frick’s office. He fired two bullets at him and missed, because he was an incompetent clod. He was then tackled but managed to stab him three times. But Frick did not suffer serious wounds.
An associate of his and Goldman’s named Modest Aronstam arrived in Pittsburgh the next day wtih dynamite to finish the job, but he was already known and when his name appeared in newspapers, he fled.
How do you walk into the office of an unarmed capitalist with a knife and a gun and fail to even seriously wound him? There’s a simple answer. You are completely incompetent. That was Alexander Berkman to a tee.
Let’s step back a moment and look at the ridiculousness of this act. It would be one thing if the Homestead strikers themselves decided to kill Frick. One could almost justify it.
It wouldn’t have been the first time Gilded Age strikers used violence to defend their interests. The Molly Maguires, while not really a labor movement per se, had done this.
Some anarchist threw the bomb at Haymarket, and while it was certainly not a member of the McCormick workers union who cops had killed the previous day, was at least someone involved in the larger maelstrom of the Chicago 8-hour day strikes.
The miners at the Frisco Mill in Idaho had bombed a mine in a pitched battle with Pinkertons.
In 1910, two Ironworkers leaders would blow up the Los Angeles Times building because Harrison Gray Otis was so critical to that city’s anti-unionism. It was a complete disaster, but at least in all these cases, it was the affected workers acting.
Berkman and Goldman were acting out of pure ideology. They didn’t know any Homestead workers and they didn’t consult with any Homestead workers. Moreover, the attempted assassination turned public sympathy away from the strikers, who of course had nothing to do with it.
Even Johann Most repudiated Berkman for this, embittering him. All Berkman’s actions accomplished was 14 years in prison. He got out in 1906 and still worked with Goldman, even though their romance was dead. He suffered from crippling depression in his post-prison years.
Finally, in 1907, Goldman named him editor of her paper, Mother Earth. Berkman learned nothing. He was involved in a plot to build bombs after the Ludlow Massacre, again totally disconnected from the miners. But one went off in construction and most of his co-conspirators died.
Goldman and Berkman were both rounded up and deported to the Soviet Union during the Red Scare. They both became disillusioned as well, but found themselves isolated by the left which had largely turned toward seeing the Soviet experiment as the future.
Berkman moved to France in 1925 and lived there until 1936, when he committed suicide because his health was failing badly. He still didn’t know how to use a gun. He missed his heart and instead lingered on, unable to speak, for awhile before slowly dying.
It’s also worth noting that for all their fame, not only did Berkman really accomplish nothing but Goldman didn’t either. They never connected with actual workers movements, nor did they become involved in the IWW, which welcomed leading anarchists as organizers and propagandists
If I want to be harsh, they are massively overrated as historical figures, especially Goldman, who used her fame to give speaking tours that made her a good bit of money and avoided the hard work of organizing.
I know people love Emma Goldman, and I know I am being overly harsh, but if you step back and look at her compared to, say, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or Mother Jones, it is striking how little she accomplished.
Even if I am being too harsh, we need critical analysis of leftist heroes.
Frick would go on to be the most publicly hated man of the Gilded Age.
It's also worth a brief discussion of anarchism and social movements. To be blunt, I really hate anarchism. I think anarchists in the end do much more to help capitalists than they do to cause revolution. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, you can't create social change through individual operators or tiny groups doing whatever they want. Second, anarchists are hopeless romantics about human nature and believe their experiments will work out because people are good. I don't see the evidence for that.
Third, too often anarchist groups just decide to use violence. Whether Most's "propaganda of the deed" or black bloc anarchists at the WTO protests in Seattle, you can't hijack other people's movements for your own ends without their permission!
If you want to move people to the left, it is a moral responsibility to work with the affected individuals. If workers are on strike, you can't commit radical acts without their permission. The same if it is someone else's protest. To me, this is Organizing 101.
I also have a strong ideological opposition to anarchism, as I believe in a strong and active role for the state in creating any sort of just society.
Anyway, I could go on all day about this. Back on Friday with a discussion of one of the many UAW failures to organize the southern auto plants.
