Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Berkman Alexander

picket lines around Homestead and taking over the plant. They came in boats down the Monongahela River early on the morning on the July 6. The locked out men and their families were expecting them. Gunfire broke out. At least eight of the workers and two Pinkertons were killed. After coming under regular and sustained fire through most of the day, the Pinkertons surrendered around 5pm.

      3 Janizary is an alternate spelling of Janissary, a soldier of a privileged military class that formed the nucleus of the Turkish infantry, but was suppressed in 1826. The term is used to connote an elite or highly devoted follower or troop often associated with cruelty.

      4 Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was a Scottish-born industrialist and philanthropist. He was owner of the Carnegie Steel Company and, by 1892, had decided that the workforce at Homestead would become non-union. Carnegie had published two essays in the April and August 1886 editions of the magazine Forum entitled “An Employer’s View of the Labor Question” in which he argued against strikes and in favor of arbitration between workers and owners. Berkman quotes from the April essay.

      5 Steel billets were small pieces of steel, sometimes created by casting, and similar to gold ingots in shape. Their price varied according to market forces, and their market price apparently could determine the wages of those who worked in Homestead and other plants.

      6 Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) was Chairman of the Carnegie Company. Both within Homestead and among wider radical circles he was seen as a ruthless intransigent who was determined to break the Union by any means necessary, including lowering the piece-work rate paid to the workers, so he could increase company profits. He was quite prepared to bring in a force of armed Pinkertons to defeat those who took strike action to oppose the reduction.

      7 The leaflet “Labor Awaken” was probably drafted by a group of autonomists that included Goldman, Claus Timmerman, Fritz Oerter, Sepp Oerter, and Frank Mollock (in all probability at Mollock’s house). Berkman deliberately claimed sole responsibility for it in order to avoid compromising the other people involved. The leaflet, though, would never appear because at some point a decision was taken by the group to kill Frick. Berkman’s reasoning that the Pinkerton invasion at Homestead changed everything is somewhat questionable. In the private and underground prison journal Zuchthausblüthen (Prison Blossoms), which he edited with Henry Bauer and Carl Nold, he writes “The 6th of July found me in Worcester, Mass., where I was working as a manager of a friend’s business. I was leading a quiet, secluded life, and had taken no active part in the anarchist movement for several months.” Clearly then, the leaflet was prepared after the 6th and not before, as Berkman suggests here.

      8 Nihilism and nihilists became popular in Russia around the mid-nineteenth century and were terms used to describe Russian intellectuals whose ideas of revolutionary change were often influenced by Western, radical ideas. Berkman described nihilism as denying “all existing institutions and beliefs” and as “the social and political equivalent of universal atheism” (Alexander Berkman to Bolton Hall, April 16, 1907, Emma Goldman Papers, ISSH, Amsterdam; and published in the May 1907 Mother Earth).

      9 Berkman arrived in America on February 18, 1888.

      10 Yevgeny Vassilyich Bazarov was a character in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Father and Sons (1862). He is perceived as a representative of the growing ideas of nihilism that were gaining traction among some of the Russian student population. For later militants, like Berkman, he became something of a role model. Georg Hegel’s (1770–1831) work had a major effect on Russian radical thinking especially with regard to how change happens. It’s interesting to note that anarchist Michael Bakunin had provided the first Russian translation of Hegel’s “Gymnasial Lectures” in 1836. Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) was an early member (1862) of the first version of Zemlya I Volya (Land and Liberty). His hugely influential novel, What Is To Be Done? (1863), was written while he was in prison for radical activities during the repression of 1862. In 1864, two years after his arrest, he was sentenced to fourteen years hard labor in Siberia and then perpetual banishment there, as well as having to undergo a civil (mock) execution. The Tsar later reduced the hard labor to seven years. In July 1883, he was allowed to leave Siberia and lived in Astrakhan in the Volga Delta until 1889 when he was allowed to move to his birthplace, Saratov. He died shortly after.

      11 V naród—literally “To the People”—was a movement re-kindled in the 1870s by those students in and around the Chaikovsky circle where radicals went among the Russian peasantry and nascent working class to understand their needs and appreciate their strengths. Central to this ideology was the belief in the debt that the middle classes and intellectuals owed to those who radicals referred to as “the people.” In the early parts of Prison Memoirs, Berkman uses the words regularly and with reverence.

      12 Rakhmetov is a fictional character from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done? and was, to Berkman, and other radical Russian youth, the epitome of what a revolutionary should be—ascetic and, above all, dedicated to the cause. On July 22, 1892, the day before his attempt on Frick’s life, Berkman checked into the Merchant’s Hotel in Pittsburgh under the name Rakhmetov. Until that evening Berkman had been staying with Carl Nold.

      13 Author’s note: An act of political assassination.

      14 David Edelstadt (1866–1892) was a poet and active member of the Pioneers of Liberty. He became the third editor of Freie Arbeiter Stimme in 1891.The incident Berkman describes here may have been later than 1890. Edelstadt had to give up his editorship of the paper in October 1891 and move to Denver in search of a cure for the tuberculosis that was debilitating him. He died shortly after.

      15 An affiliate of the International Working People’s Association, the Pioneers of Liberty (Pionire der Frayhayt) was founded on October 9, 1886 and was the first Jewish anarchist group in the United States—and, for that matter, the world. Members would include David Edelstadt, Moishe Katz (who had been at school with Berkman in Kovno), Roman Lewis, Hillel Solotaroff, Saul Yanovsky, and Katherina Yevzerov. In February 1889, they began publishing Varhayt, the first Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper in America. Together with the Philadelphia branch of the Knights of Liberty (Riter fun Frayhayt) they went on to establish the important Yiddish anarchist newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme in July 1890. Berkman joined the group in 1888.

      16 Louis Lingg (1864–1887) was one of the Haymarket anarchists arrested and sentenced to death. He was the only one of the Haymarket men to be found with bombs in his possession. His behavior in court, where he evinced total contempt for the proceedings (“I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it”), made him an iconic figure, both in attitude and style, for the anarchist youth of Berkman’s generation. Some even copied his pompadour hairstyle. Goldman would later describe Lingg as “the sublime hero” (Emma Goldman, Living My Life [New York: Alfred A. Knofp, 1932], 42).

      17 Carl Nold (1869–1934) was a German-born anarchist who immigrated to the United States in 1883. Berkman stayed with Nold until the night before his attempt on Frick’s life. Henry Bauer (1861–1934) was also a German-born anarchist who immigrated to the United States in 1880 and had been active in the eight-hour-day movement in Pittsburgh. Both were supporters and