Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [55]
That personal emotions played a part both in Most’s act and hers can hardly be doubted. Most may have taken his cue from Kropotkin and Malatesta, who already in Ravachol’s case had begun to question the value of gestures of violence. But the dedicated Berkman was no Ravachol and it was clearly jealousy of him as a younger rival both in love and in the revolutionary movement that galled Most. His splenetic attack on a fellow Anarchist who had been ready to die for the Deed was a stunning betrayal from which the movement in America never fully recovered.
It had no effect on the public at large, who were aware only of the Anarchists’ blows, or attentats, as the French called them. Society’s fear of the disruptive force within its bowels grew with each attack. In the year after Homestead the fear burst out when Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois pardoned the three remaining Haymarket prisoners. A strange, hard, passionate man who had been born in Germany and brought to the United States at the age of three months, Altgeld had come from a boyhood of hardship and manual labour. He had fought in the Civil War at sixteen, had studied law, become State’s Attorney, judge and finally Governor and had made a fortune in real estate, and was an almost demonic liberal. He had pledged himself to right the injustice done by the drumhead trial as soon as he had the power and he was also not unmotivated by a personal grudge against Judge Gary. As soon as he was elected Governor he set in motion a study of the trial records and on June 26, 1893, issued his pardon along with an 18,000-word document affirming the illegality of the original verdict and sentence. He showed the jury to have been packed and “selected to convict,” the judge prejudiced against the defendants and unwilling to conduct a fair trial, and the State’s Attorney to have admitted that there was no case against at least one of the defendants. These facts had not been unknown, and in the year between the verdict and the hanging, many prominent Chicagoans, uneasy over the death sentence, had worked privately for pardon and had in fact been responsible for the commutation of the sentence of the three defendants now still alive. But when Altgeld displayed publicly the cloven hoof of the Law, he shook public faith in a fundamental institution of society. Had he pardoned the Anarchists as a pure act of forgiveness, there would have been little excitement. As it was, he was excoriated by the press, by ministers in their pulpits, by important persons of all varieties. The Toronto Blade said he had encouraged “the overthrow of civilization.” So outraged was the New York Sun that it resorted to verse:
Oh wild Chicago …
Lift up your weak and guilty hands
From out the wreck of states
And as the crumbling towers fall down,
Write ALTGELD on your gates!
Altgeld was defeated for office at the next election. Although there were other reasons besides the pardon, he never held office again before he died at fifty-five in 1902.
Simultaneously with these events the era of dynamite exploded in Spain. There it opened with more ferocity, continued in more savagery and excess and lasted longer than in any other country. Spain is the desperado of countries, with a tragic sense of life. Its mountains are naked, its cathedrals steeped in gloom, its rivers dry up in summer, one of its greatest kings built his own mausoleum to inhabit while he lived. Its national sport is not a game but a ritual of danger and blood-letting. Its special quality was expressed by the deposed Queen, Isabella II, who, on a visit to the capital in 1890, wrote to her daughter, “Madrid is sad and everything is more unusual than ever.”
In Spain it was natural that the titans’ struggle between Marx and Bakunin for control of the working-class movement should have ended in victory for the Anarchist tendency. In Spain, however, where everything is more serious, the Anarchists organized, with the result