• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2525 0

of danger. But I longed to be at his side, in my beloved city, to take part with him in those stirring activities. My engagements, however, kept me in the West. Then came the news of an explosion in a tenement-house on Lexington Avenue which cost the lives of three men—Arthur Carron, Charles Berg, and Karl Hanson—and of an unknown woman. The names were unfamiliar to me. The press was filled with the wildest rumours. The bomb, it was reported, had been intended for Rockefeller, whom the speakers at the New York meetings had charged with direct responsibility for the Ludlow massacres. 1 The premature explosion had probably saved his life, the papers declared. Sasha’s name was dragged into the case, and the police were looking for him and the owner of the Lexington apartment, our comrade Louise Berger. Word came from Sasha that the three men who had lost their lives in the explosion were comrades who had worked with him in the Tarrytown campaign.2 They had been badly beaten up by the police at one of the Union Square demonstrations. The bomb might have been intended for Rockefeller, Sasha wrote, but in any case the men had kept their intentions to themselves, for neither he nor anyone else knew how the explosion had occurred.

Comrades, idealists, manufacturing a bomb in a congested tenement-house! I was aghast at such irresponsibility. But the next moment I remembered a similiar event in my own life. It came back with paralysing horror. In my mind I saw my little room in Peppi’s flat, on Fifth Street, its window-blinds drawn, Sasha experimenting with a bomb, and me watching. I had silenced my fear for the tenants, in case of an accident, by repeating to myself that the end justified the means. With accusing clarity I now relived that nerve-racking week in July 1892. In the zeal of fanaticism I had believed that the end justifies the means! It took years of experience and suffering to emancipate myself from the mad idea. Acts of violence committed as a protest against unbearable social wrongs—I still believed them inevitable. I understood the spiritual forces culminating in such Attentats as Sasha’s, Bresci’s, Angiolillo’s,3 Czolgosz’s, and those of others whose lives I had studied. They had been urged on by their great love for humanity and their acute sensitiveness to injustice. I had always taken my place with them as against every form of organized oppression. But though my sympathies were with the man who protested against social crimes by a resort to extreme measures, I nevertheless felt now that I could never again participate in or approve of methods that jeopardized innocent lives.

I was worried about Sasha. He was the spirit of the tremendous campaign in the East, and I feared the police would involve him in their dragnet. I wanted to return to New York, but his letters held me back. He was perfectly safe, he wrote, and there were plenty of people to help him in the work. He had succeeded in obtaining the bodies of the dead comrades for cremation, and he was planning a monster demonstration at Union Square. [ ... ]

Now the remains of the dead comrades, Sasha wrote me, were deposited in a specially designed urn in the form of a clenched fist rising from the depths. The urn was exposed in the office of Mother Earth, which had been decorated with wreaths and red and black banners. Thousands passed through our quarters to pay the last tribute to Carron, Berg, and Hanson.

I was happy to learn that the perilous situation in New York had ended so favourably. But when I received copies of the July issue of Mother Earth, I was dismayed at its contents. The Union Square speeches were published there in full; with the exception of Sasha’s own address and those of Leonard D. Abbott and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the harangues were of a most violent character. I had tried always to keep our magazine free from such language, and now the whole number was filled with prattle about force and dynamite. I was so furious that I wanted the entire issue thrown into the fire. But it was too late; the magazine had gone out to the subscribers.