Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [54]
On July 5 the strikebreakers recruited by Frick were to be brought in to operate the plant. When they were ferried in armored barges across the Monongahela and were about to land, the strikers attacked with homemade cannon, rifles, dynamite and burning oil. The day of furious battle ended with ten killed, seventy wounded, and the Pinkertons thrown back from the plant by the bleeding but triumphant workers. The Governor of Pennsylvania sent in eight thousand militia, the country was electrified, and Frick in the midst of smoke, death, and uproar, issued an ultimatum declaring his refusal to deal with the union and his intention to operate with non-union labour and to discharge and evict from their homes any workers who refused to return to their jobs.
“Homestead! I must go to Homestead!” shouted Berkman on the memorable evening when Emma rushed in waving the newspaper. It was, they felt, “the psychological moment for the deed.… The whole country was aroused against Frick and a blow aimed at him now would call the attention of the whole world to the cause.” The workers were striking not only for themselves but “for all time, for a free life, for Anarchism”—although they did not know it. As yet they were only “blindly rebellious,” but Berkman felt a mission to “illumine” the struggle and impart the “vision of Anarchism which alone could imbue discontent with conscious revolutionary purpose.” The removal of a tyrant was not merely justifiable; it was “an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people” and it was the “highest duty” and the “test of every true revolutionist” to die in its cause.
Berkman boarded the train for Pittsburgh bent on killing Frick but surviving long enough himself “to justify my case in court.” Then in prison he would “die by my own hand like Lingg.”
On July 23 he made his way to Frick’s office, where he was admitted when he presented a card on which he had written, “Agent of a New York employment firm.” Frick was conferring with his vice-chairman, John Leishman, when Berkman entered, pulled out a revolver and fired. His bullet wounded Frick on the left side of his neck; he fired again wounding him on the right side, and as he fired the third time, his arm was knocked up by Leishman so that he missed altogether. Frick, bleeding, had risen and lunged at Berkman, who, attacked also by Leishman, fell to the floor dragging the other two men with him. Freeing one hand, he managed to extract a dagger from his pocket, and stabbed Frick in the side and legs seven times before he was finally pulled off by a deputy sheriff and others who rushed into the room.
“Let me see his face,” whispered Frick, his own face ashen, his beard and clothes streaked with blood. The sheriff jerked Berkman’s head back by his hair, and the eyes of Frick and his assailant met. At the police station two caps of fulminate of mercury of the same kind Lingg had used to blow himself up were found on Berkman’s person (some say, in his mouth). Frick lived, the strike was broken by the militia, and Berkman went to prison for sixteen years.
All this left the country gasping, but the public shock was as nothing compared to that which rocked Anarchist circles when in Freiheit of August, 27, Johann Most, the priest of violence, turned apostate to his past and denounced Berkman’s attempt at tyrannicide. He said the importance of the terrorist deed had been overestimated and that it could not mobilize revolt in a country where there was no proletarian class-consciousness, and he dealt with Berkman, now a hero in Anarchist eyes, in terms of contempt. When he repeated these views verbally at a meeting, a female fury rose up out of the audience. It was Emma Goldman, armed with a