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By Root 1206 0

it sprouted with the energy of a weed. In Germany he learned the bookbinder’s trade, wrote wrathfully for the revolutionary press, and achieved one term as deputy in the Reichstag in the seventies. Exiled for his revolutionary incitement, he had taken refuge first in England, where he became an Anarchist, founded his journal of fiery sentiments and welcomed the regicide of Alexander II in 1881 with such enthusiasm that he received a prison term of eighteen months. When his comrades, while he was in gaol, applauded equally the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish by Irish rebels in Dublin, England’s traditional tolerance was outraged at last; Freiheit was suppressed and Most, when he emerged, took his paper and his passion to the United States.

Freiheit’s incitements and ferocity continued unabated and to one reader seemed like “lava shooting forth flames of ridicule, scorn and defiance … and breathing hatred.” After working secretly for a time in an explosives factory in Jersey City, Most published a manual on the manufacture of bombs and expounded in uninhibited language in Freiheit on the uses of dynamite and nitroglycerine. His goal, like his hate, was generalized and directed toward destruction of the “existing class rule” by “relentless” revolutionary action. Most cared nothing for the eight-hour day, that “damned thing” as he called it, which even if gained would serve only to distract the masses from the real issue: the struggle against capitalism and for a new society.

In 1890 Most was forty-four, of medium height with gray, bushy hair crowning a large head, of which the lower part was twisted to the left by the dislocated jaw. A harsh, embittered man, he was yet so eloquent and impassioned when he spoke at the memorial meeting that his repellent appearance was forgotten. To one female member of the audience, his blue eyes were “sympathetic” and he seemed to “radiate hatred and love.”

Emma Goldman, a recent Russian Jewish immigrant of twenty-one, with a rebellious soul and a highly excitable nature, was transported. Her companion of the evening was Alexander Berkman, like herself a Russian Jew, who had lived in the United States less than three years. Persecution in Russia and poverty in America had endowed both these young people with exalted revolutionary purpose. Anarchism became their creed. Emma’s first job in the United States was sewing in a factory ten and a half hours a day for $2.50 a week. Her room cost $3.00 a month. Berkman came from a slightly better-class family which in Russia had been sufficiently well-off to employ servants and send him to the gymnasium. But economic disaster had overtaken them; a favorite uncle of revolutionary sentiments had been seized by the police and never seen again and Sasha (Alexander) had been expelled from school for writing a Nihilist and atheistic composition. Now twenty, he had “the neck and chest of a giant,” a high studious forehead, intelligent eyes, and a severe expression. From the “tension and fearful excitement” of Most’s speech about the martyrs, Emma sought “relief” in Sasha’s arms and subsequently her enthusiasm led her to Most’s arms as well. The tensions of this arrangement proved no different from those of any bourgeois triangle.

In June, 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the steelworkers’ union struck in protest against a reduction of wages by the Carnegie Steel Company. The company had ordered the wage cut in a deliberate effort to crush the union, and in expectation of battle, set about erecting a military stockade topped with barbed wire behind which it planned to operate the mills with three hundred strikebreakers recruited by the Pinkerton Agency. Having become a philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie discreetly retreated for the summer to a salmon river in Scotland, leaving his manager, Henry Clay Frick, to do battle with organized labour. No one was more competent or more willing. A remarkably handsome man of forty-three, with a strong black moustache merging into a short black beard, a courteous controlled manner and eyes which could become