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modern industrial state. Rather than looking back to agrarian and craft communities as the model for social organization, Kropotkin admired the power of industrial production, on which achievement anarchist collectives might build and improve without wasting labor, as he argued, “in keeping up the stables, the kennels, and the retinue of the rich” (The Conquest of Bread, 24). Although Goldman revered Kropotkin, admiring his gentle and generous nature, as she described in meetings with him in her autobiography, privately she believed he was bookish, isolated from the real world, an isolation that may have explained his confidence in the intrinsic cooperativeness and generosity of human nature. While this did not lead her to Bakunin’s rather grim vision of cutthroat competitiveness, Goldman would become quite contemptuous of the “masses,” particularly as they failed to rise in defense of Berkman. His attempt on the life of Frick did not lead, as he and she had hoped, to wide-scale protests from the Homestead strikers he was defending. “The mass is really hopeless as far as real progress and freedom is concerned,” she wrote later in life to Berkman (Nowhere at Home, 49). “The mass unfortunately cannot be depended upon” (ibid., 106).

Such hopes as Berkman and Goldman entertained as they planned the assassination of Frick were derived from a strategy of revolution that came to be known in the 1880s as an attentat, or “propaganda by the deed.” The path to anarchist revolution had never been certain. Before Kropotkin, the principal anarchist theorists Proudhon and Bakunin had offered dramatically contrasting narratives of social change. Rather than the revolutionary violence Marx predicted, Proudhon foresaw incremental alterations in the political economy as associations of workers, educating the proletariat, took over production, workshop by workshop. The revolutionary Bakunin, on the other hand, envisaged an apocalyptic breakdown of society, a purifying and regenerating baptism by fire out of which, phoenixlike, the voluntary and autonomous network of workers’ federations would emerge. Kropotkin assumed that the path to revolution was a natural process, arising out of a clash that obeyed the inexorable laws of social development, although later in life he recoiled from violence and hoped for social progress through peaceful development.

And yet it had been Kropotkin who became identified with the theory of the violent revolutionary act as a tool of anarchist social change. Kropotkin’s newspaper Le Revolte had given a legitimacy to political terror that Kropotkin himself hesitated to endorse wholly: “Permanent revolt by word of mouth, in writing, by the dagger, the rifle, dynamite. Everything is good for us which goes beyond legality” (Miller, Selected Writings, 20). With few recourses for democratic protest, the attentat was an attractive strategy in repressive regimes like czarist Russia’s, where nihilists had conspired to achieve the assassination of Czar Alexander II and had, indeed, sent seismic convulsions through the political landscape.

On the Lower East Side in New York, the convulsions of the Haymarket murders and, later, the violence against the Homestead steelworkers had inspired talk of striking back. As a memoir writer of the period recalled the young radical immigrants in New York, “the judicial murder of the heroic anarchist leaders in November 1886 was still fresh in their minds and ... they were full of bitterness. It was amusing to hear these mild-mannered and soft-spoken boys and girls talk glibly about blowing up buildings and killing tyrants. But it was all theory with them” (Hillquit 5). But for young Emma Goldman, enthralled by the call to self-sacrifice the anarchist revolutionary movement inspired in her, theory alone was inadequate. In a fusion of romantic and political passion, Emma Goldman and her young lover Alexander Berkman pledged themselves “to die together if necessary, or to continue to live and work for the ideal for which one of us might have to give his life” (Living My Life, 47).

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