The World That Never Was (47 page)

That Kravchinsky was being granted a platform for his propaganda in London – the
Commonweal
being one of several publications that was taking his articles – was provoking in St Petersburg ‘an extremely sore feeling…in the highest circles’. Olga Novikoff strove to counter his popularity, shamelessly exploiting sympathy for her martyred brother, Nicholas Kireev, who had given his life in the cause of Balkan liberty; having fought there himself, Kravchinsky must have felt doubly aggrieved that it became a cause célèbre. For the moment, though, he was safe in Britain, one of those nihilists whom it was unthinkable to throw back into the clutches of his hosts’ autocratic enemy: ‘Imagine the consequences in England’, a recent Home Secretary had reasoned, ‘if such a man was a Kossuth or a Garibaldi.’ While Kravchinsky was a prophet abroad, however, Morris was one in his own land; for him, the years of Establishment opprobrium were only just beginning.

‘It is good to feel the coming storm’ Morris wrote, as the growth of the reactionary Primrose League and other such organisations seemed to signal a refusal on the part of the ruling elite and the middle class to concede or compromise. Less than four years had passed since Morris decided to join the federation, when he had read More’s
Utopia
and Butler’s
Erewhon
out loud to his family and guests. Now, congregations in the churches of the East End listened rapt to socialist hymns written by Morris himself, and dreamed of an ideal future of their own fashioning:

Come hither lads, and hearken, for a tale there is to tell,
Of the wonderful days a’coming when all shall be better than well
And the tale shall be told of a country, a land in the midst of the sea,
And folk shall call it England in the days that are going to be.

13
The Making of the Martyrs

London and Chicago, 1883–1887

‘The king-killer is here for speeches and other radical mischief,’ the
Chicago Times
proclaimed on Christmas Day 1882, warning its readers against Johann Most. His fingers sore from the hard labour of picking oakum, his eyes slowly readjusting to daylight after eighteen months in the gloom of Clerkenwell prison, Most had arrived in New York a week earlier, and despite a rough crossing of the Atlantic had immediately thrown himself into an ambitious lecture tour. His violent gospel of resistance drew eager audiences. For Most had a rich vein of discontent to mine among those workers who had lived through the recent depression and were now bracing themselves as the economy again began to founder, and among the tens of thousands of immigrants who poured into America every year, only to have their dreams broken on the brutal reality of industrial exploitation.

Seven years earlier, William H. Vanderbilt had received a $90 million inheritance from his father, a New York railroad magnate; that he had doubled his fortune since then was symptomatic of a society riven by obscene discrepancies in wealth. The period had seen the value of factory output rise exponentially, with 300 per cent increases in most years, as industrialists ambitious to secure monopolies had gambled carelessly with the jobs of their woefully underpaid workers, safe in the knowledge that they could sack them without compunction at the first sign of a downturn. ‘Slavery is not dead, though its grossest form be gone’ preached Henry George; ‘The essence of slavery consists in taking from a man all the fruits of his labor except a bare living, and of how many thousands miscalled free is this the lot?’

Since 1879, the cruellest blows had fallen on those workers brought up in a tradition of craftsmanship, whose skills were abruptly rendered obsolete by the advent of mechanisation: coopers who had served long
apprenticeships, only for machines to crank out barrels in a quarter of the time, or cigar rollers who could generate barely a quarter of the profit of a factory-line process. The social cost was enormous. Cigar workshops had offered a model of labour solidarity and of self-advancement, appointing one of their number to read informative texts out loud while the others worked; now their representatives were reduced to crude scaremongering. ‘More than half the smallpox patients in Riverside Hospital were inmates of tenement houses where cigars are made,’ advised the
Paterson Labor Standard;
‘This ought to be a warning to persons who smoke non-union cigars.’

The New Jersey town of Paterson, where immigrant artisans from the highly politicised silk-manufacturing areas around Lyons in France and in north-west Italy had helped recreate the industry on American soil, proved especially receptive to Most’s brand of socialism. ‘Swiss workers coming to Paterson think it a paradise,’ warned the
Standard
, ‘soon they will realise it is a purgatory, and that their cheap labour will make it a hell.’ And while it carried advertisements for the latest silk suits in the Paris style, and was wisely circumspect in its views concerning the attempt on President Garfield’s life in 1881, the ‘Best Family Newspaper in New Jersey’ was not blind to the iniquities of the ‘silk kings’, nor to the more extreme position held by some in the community. Indeed, in the spring before Most’s arrival, it was pleased to announce an instructive lecture entitled ‘Dynamite and Freedom’, to be delivered on the anniversary of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination by ‘Prof. Mezeroff, the Russian scientist who speaks like an educated Irishman’.

Nowhere on his travels, however, either in Europe or in the United States, can Most have encountered such a developed socialist movement or such determined activism as on the shores of Lake Michigan. While the workers in the Chicago industries were among the most exploited in the country, the last great year of strikes had revealed the depth of their solidarity. In 1877, on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, upwards of 40,000 had converged on the Exposition building to celebrate the ‘Dawn of Liberty’, and their unity had been maintained in the years since, with the annual event growing ever more elaborate, to include gymnastic displays, recitations and musical and dramatic performances.

Testimony to the participants’ unshakeable optimism can be found in the plot of the play
The Nihilists
, performed in 1882, whose fourth act deviated from the historical account of the tsar’s assassination by allowing the conspirators to escape while being transported to Siberia. The cast itself, unsurprisingly, provided a fertile recruiting ground for Most, with
the ferociously theatrical style of his speech-making appealing to at least two of its members, the shopkeeper August Spies and salesman Oscar Neebe. Indeed, so taken with the notorious firebrand was yet another German from Chicago, Michael Schwab, that he joined Most as a warm-up act for his exhausting programme of 200 speeches in six months, during 1883.

The efficacy of dynamite and the bombing of police stations were recurring themes of their lectures, as Most glossed the idea of ‘propaganda by deed’ with his own terroristic interpretation. Yet for all the enthusiasm with which audiences received his bombast, Most seemed better able to provoke than to lead: a man of words rather than action; a cowardly braggard, according to some. While the flow of ships to and from Europe facilitated the smuggling of
Freiheit
and allowed Most to imagine that, based in New York, he presided over operations by his proxies in Europe, any hope that his American exile would be the short-lived prologue to a triumphal return seemed increasingly delusional. Although agents of the Imperial German Police continued to file compelling reports about his translation of Nechaev’s
The Revolutionary Catechism
and the job he took in a dynamite factory in order to gain a first-hand knowledge of explosives, the ideas about which he only talked and wrote were being put into practice in Chicago.

For some time, police headquarters in Berlin had been preoccupied with the vast underground army of terrorists that Most’s lieutenant, Johann Neve, was said to be organising on his behalf in Germany and around its borders, with the help of the Belgian Victor Dave. Alleged to number 7,000 members divided between eighty cells, it supposedly possessed a stockpile of bombs and poisoned daggers. But despite Neve’s dedicated efforts, the threat from this ‘army’ was vastly overestimated. It would, in any case, be ruthlessly eradicated during 1884, when a further crackdown followed the failure of August Reinsdorf’s spectacular attempt to blow up the kaiser, the crown prince and Chancellor Bismarck during the unveiling of a vast statue of Germania on the ridge of the Niederwald high above the River Rhine.

In Chicago, by contrast, the socialist militia was already a reality. The Lehr-und-Wehr Verein, or Society for Education and Defense, had been formed during the upheavals of 1877 to counter intimidation by paramilitary outfits in the pay of the bosses, and was now some 1,500 strong, grouped under nationality with names such as the Bohemian Sharpshooters. When Reinsdorf was sentenced to death, moreover, it was one of his old protégés, Louis Lingg, now living in Chicago, and not
Most, who would lead the tributes, addressing a working population that had always proved unwilling to concede their rights or their livelihoods without a fight, yet was now facing the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Left to catch up as best he could, Most dedicated his autobiography to Reinsdorf as ‘a tribute of esteem’. ‘Let us never forget’, he wrote in characteristic style, ‘that the revolutionists of modern times can enter into the society of free and equal men only over ruins and ashes, over blood and dead bodies.’ To effect his vision in a foreign land, though, Most would need new allies.

Despite the willingness of the American socialist movement to confront capitalism on the picket line, it had hitherto shown notable restraint in seeking to revive the ideals of the American republic without recourse to the revolutionary methods espoused by its European comrades. By 1883, however, the blatant injustices of a society under plutocratic rule had led to mounting despair that the ballot box could ever bring about meaningful reform, causing many socialists to seek an alternative in anarchism. Less than a month after the Niederwald incident, Most took his place on the speakers’ platform when the American Federation of the Working People’s Association met in Pittsburgh to thrash out a new policy. His observation that America’s capitalists had exploited their workers more in twenty-five years than had Europe’s monarchs in 200 stiffened their resolve, but among the more familiar faces it was Albert Parsons, an excolonel in the Texas militia and now one of Chicago’s leading socialists, whose ideas lent American radicalism a new, patriotic dimension.

Back in 1877, Parsons had implicitly linked the socialist cause of liberating the workers with that of the abolition of slavery, framing the strikers as a ‘Grand Army of Salvation’ after the Grand Army of the Republic from the Civil War. The intervening years, however, had taught him harsh lessons about the corrupt nature of power, not least when he had been hauled off the street in Chicago and thrown before a conclave of the city’s business elite in the cellars of the labyrinthine Rookery, the makeshift police headquarters. These men had warned him off in the crudest terms. Far from being deterred by their intimidation, though, Parsons renounced his previously moderate position after witnessing votes being rigged in a local election. Invoking historical precedent once again in his address to the federation, this time he looked further back, to the insurrectionary example of America’s fight for independence. ‘By force our ancestors liberated themselves from political oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves from economic oppression,’ Parsons reminded
the delegates. ‘“It is, therefore, your right; it is your duty,” says Jefferson; to arms!’

Assisted by Spies, Most drafted the
Pittsburgh Manifesto
, setting down the principles agreed upon by the federation, and printing presses spun off hundreds of thousands of copies in English, German and French, for distribution. For all his egotism, Most had wisely decided to make common cause with Parsons and the others. ‘A new era in America’s labour movement has begun,’ crowed
Freiheit
, ‘The word is ALL ABOARD!’ But what political species were the adherents to this new political configuration, and how should they be identified: as radical patriots, revolutionary socialists, or anarchists?

Inevitably, perhaps, it was the mainstream newspapers that would have the final say. During the 1870s, while the Commune was the greatest bugbear of the right, ‘communist’ had been the preferred term of disparagement for the socialists, but since around the time of the tsar’s assassination, as a consequence of the usual legerdemain, ‘anarchist’ had become common, as an effective trigger for rousing middle-class ire and anxiety. As early as 1881, Parsons had written of how ‘the capitalistic press began to stigmatise us as anarchists, and to denounce us as enemies to all law and government’. Quite apart from the undiscerning application of the term ‘anarchist’ to socialists whose sympathies lay with Marx, the development of a very different kind of individualistic American ‘anarchism’ by Benjamin Tucker made the label problematic even when used to refer to men like Spies and Schwab, who were inspired by the European tradition. Parsons, though, whilst conciliatory towards the diverse branches of socialism, accepted the inevitable: ‘That name which was at first imputed to us as a dishonor, we came to cherish and defend with pride.’

Even before the Pittsburgh Congress, the more extreme Chicago socialists had embraced anarchist ideas. After it their revolutionary ambitions only expanded, fed by the publication in the summer of 1885 of Most’s booklet,
The Science of Revolutionary Warfare
, whose detailed exposition of terroristic solutions was based on esoteric knowledge he had acquired while working for the munitions manufacturer. ‘Rescue mankind through blood, iron, poison and dynamite,’ he urged his readers: policemen could be done away with using dipped daggers and dosed cakes; dignitaries killed by grenades rolled under banqueting tables; miniaturised bombs enclosed in letters. Some months earlier, though, Spies’ and Neebe’s Chicago-based newspaper the
Alarm
had already been providing a steady stream of incendiary advice: ‘One man armed with a dynamite bomb is
equal to one regiment of militia, when it is used at the right time and place,’ advised an edition from October 1884, while only a few weeks later another offered the view that ‘In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work.’ The same issue contained instructions for how to make a rudimentary pipe bomb for use against ‘the rich loafers who live by the sweat of other people’s brows’.