Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [868]
March 4, 1886: club-wielding policemen attempt to clear Grand Street of striking streetcar workers and their supporters. Harper’s Weekly, March 13, 1886. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Since the depression of the 1870s, violence had been an ever-increasing fact of life for New York’s laboring classes. Year after year platoons of police cracked skulls, broke up meetings, and smashed picket lines while press and politicians acquiesced or applauded wildly. Nationally, too, employers employed squads of Pinkertons to combat strikers: Jay Gould was thought to have boasted he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Some New York German socialists responded by forming Lehr-und-Wehr Verein (education and defense societies). Resolved to never again be beaten or shot without resisting, they trained, drilled, and, on special occasions, marched in the streets. Such activities proved particularly appealing to newly arrived German immigrants, who had experienced at first hand Bismarck’s antisocialist laws, which disbanded unions, suppressed newspapers, and arrested radicals. They too were determined to draw the line.
In Lower East Side cafes and saloons where intellectuals, writers, workers, and students hung out, there was talk of going farther, of taking the offensive, of launching an armed struggle to rip up the old order “root and branch.” When the Socialist Labor Party denounced such notions, dissidents formed the Social Revolutionary Club. Derided as “anarchists,” they adopted the name as a badge of pride. Their headquarters was First on First—Justus Schwab’s saloon at First Avenue and ist Street, a tiny beer hall with a bas-relief of Marat behind the bar. Schwab, the Social Revolutionary Club’s president, was a tall, powerfully built man who had raced through Tompkins Square in 1874 waving the Commune’s red flag, and when he sang the “Marseillaise” at First on First, his deep voice rattled the glasses on their shelves.
The anarchists remained a tiny, unknown sect devoted to drill and discussion until December 18, 1882. Then, after a terrible crossing, a steamship out of Liverpool limped into Pier 38 at the foot of King Street and unleashed Johann Most on the American scene. Schwab and his associates had invited the famous European comrade. They hastened him to a mass meeting at Cooper Union, where Most delivered a flaming speech that electrified his listeners, then set off on a national speaking tour that within six months transformed the anarchist movement into a national presence. Back in New York City, Most set up his newspaper Die Freiheit on William Street and issued pamphlets filled with apocalyptic appeals to violence.
The quickest route to the Cooperative Commonwealth, Most explained, lay through a field of capitalist corpses. “The best thing one can do with such fellows as Jay Gould and Vanderbilt is to hang them on the nearest lamp-post.” Dynamite was his favorite panacea. Dynamite would enable ordinary workmen to stand up to police, Pinkertons, and militias, even armies. As gunpowder had brought down feudalism, so dynamite would blow up capitalism.
In 1884 Most took a job in a Jersey City dynamite factory to explore its mysteries, and in July 1885 he issued a seventy-four-page booklet, Revolutionary War Science: A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc. In this manual of urban guerrilla warfare, Most explained how to destroy bridges, capture arsenals, and sabotage telegraph and railroad lines. He also offered helpful tips on exterminating the bourgeoisie