The 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing

Anarchy and Terrorism in Progressive Era America

Jeffrey A. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317204008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book places the 1916 San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing within the broader context of American radicalism and isolationism during the Progressive Era. A concise narrative and key primary documents offer readers an introduction to this episode of domestic violence and the subsequent, sensationalized trial that followed. The dubious conviction of a local labor organizer raised serious questions about political extremism, pluralistic ideals, and liberty in the United States that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER 1

“Perpetuated Hatred and Suspicion”

Labor and Capital at Odds

Around lunchtime on Saturday, July 23, 1892, a clean-shaven and slender young man walked into the Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh office of Henry Clay Frick, the executive head of the famed Carnegie firms. He had arrived two days earlier from the apartment he lived in on 42nd Street in New York City and registered at the Merchants Hotel under the name “Simon Bachmann.” He had already tried a number of times, unsuccessfully, to gain access and have an audience with Frick in his large private office in the Hussey Building, a workspace complete with a large bay window overlooking the avenue. The visitor, dressed in a light suit and wearing a brown derby hat, handed the office boy his card that, written in pencil, read “Alexander Berkman, Agent New York Employment Company.” Around 1:45 pm, he was allowed to see the noted executive, who was fresh from his usual lunch at the exclusive Duquesne Club. He sat at his desk in the back of the room, wearing his normal black beard and fine clothes. Berkman nervously swung open the door and walked into Frick’s office, which was washed in midday sunlight. Frick looked up from the papers that busied him on his large oak desk only to discover Berkman, who managed to say “Fr-” as his eyes met Frick’s in a moment of understanding of what was about to happen. Berkman, about 25 ft. away, then fired two shots from his pistol. The bullets from the .38 caliber handgun struck Frick, causing him to exclaim, reportedly, “murder … help!”

Vice chairman John Leishman, whose desk sat near Frick’s, jumped on Berkman and attempted to wrestle the assassin to the ground. Yet Berkman had already produced a dagger, surprisingly freed himself (he weighed only 114 pounds and stood 5'4"), and plunged the knife into dazed Frick’s side. The entire attack unfolded in front of Frick’s large office windows, so hundreds of shocked onlookers standing on the street below saw most of the scrum. They saw police, office clerks, and workmen combine to overcome and subdue Berkman. A police officer, grabbing Berkman’s head by his hair, held his head up to face the bleeding Frick and asked “Mr. Frick, do you identify this man as your assailant?” which was met with an affirmative nod. Berkman mentioned to the officer that he had lost his glasses in the scuffle, to which the uniformed man responded, “You’ll be damn lucky if you don’t lose your head.”¹

When police officers brought Berkman outside, chants from the crowd called for his head. “Hang him to the lamp post!” yelled one onlooker. Cool and collected, though according to the press he appeared “bordering on the verge of stupidity,” the blood-covered Berkman was brought to the police station and saw several rounds of questioning. During a physical search, authorities discovered under his tongue a small copper tube containing dynamite, precisely the type of cartridge used in 1887 by Chicago anarchist Louis Lingg to kill himself the day before his execution. Berkman’s further plotting thwarted, police continued the interrogation, and he remained indifferent, refusing to mention any organizational affiliations and only calmly stating he had come to Pittsburgh with the sole intent of killing Frick.

Authorities and newspapers revealed who Berkman was: a 22-year- old who had emigrated to the United States only a few years earlier, in 1888, at age 17. Berkman found early employment as a compositor in Johann Most’s, an anarchist of growing fame, New York office on 167 William Street, and worked there from April 1 to July 4, 1891. Berkman then spent a stint at the Singer sewing machine factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then a printing office in New Haven, Connecticut, before finding later work as a cigar maker and printer. At the time of the Frick attack, he had been living in New York City, and this young extremist had just tried to kill one of America’s most famous business leaders. Miraculously, Frick survived the attack. Doctors ably removed the two bullets from the base of his skull and bandaged his wounds. Frick even dictated a telegram to Andrew Carnegie that afternoon, promising the magnate that all was well. Despite a stifling summer heat wave during those July days, doctors kept Frick comfortable, so much so that he remained restless during his recovery, even expressing regret and disappointment he could not get back to his day-to-day duties immediately.²

What did the Frick assassination attempt mean? For Berkman’s part, he proudly labeled his attempt on Frick’s life as “the first terrorist act in America,” raising the eye, and fears, of many. Yet, others were not so celebratory. The press pointed out that Berkman seemed to be a devotee of the suspicious Johann Most, and when they dug deeper into the story, Berkman himself was “known as an anarchist tramp … a wild and irresponsible fanatic.” Yet Berkman, who would live and work in San Francisco years later, was only beginning a long career of radicalism, a reactionism endemic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³

Why did Berkman make Frick a target? The short answer was that Frick stood center stage in one of the most significant labor battles from earlier that year: the Homestead Strike. Part of the much broader struggle and fight between capital and labor at the time, it had unfolded earlier in 1892. Pennsylvania, in part because the state passed a law in 1891 safeguarding unions and permitting strikes, had been a hotbed for labor unrest during the last decades of the nineteenth century, so much so that one in four U.S. strikes happened there between 1881 and 1905. These tensions boiled over during the Homestead Strike that summer of 1892, and Frick attempted to both break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) and flatly refused to negotiate terms with the union. Many reading the newspaper accounts of the assassination attempt might have readily remembered the connection between Frick, labor, and someone like Berkman, described in the dailies as a “blood thirsty … Russian nihilist.” Berkman’s frustration and radicalization had unquestionably stemmed, in no small part, from a seminal event that same summer.⁴

When the Homestead Affair boiled over in 1892, Berkman was working at a lunch parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts. When he was not standing over a grill or serving customers their drinks, Berkman’s thoughts drifted to the plight of the working class and his developing dreams of anarchism. In fact, he moved to Worcester with the intent of saving enough money for a return to Russia, a place where he felt his revolutionary attitudes could be best employed. For Berkman and many radicals, Homestead was nothing short of what historians Miriam Brody and Bonnie Buettner called “a call to arms,” and Berkman followed the Homestead events closely. He vividly remembered, in fact, sitting in the back of his flat on July 6, 1892, when his ideological ally and lover Emma Goldman, waving a newspaper, told him that amid the strike at Homestead, Pinkertons had shot women and children. Snatching the paper from her, he recalled, he read details of the Carnegie Company’s fight with the AAISW there, the tales of Pinkertons brought in under the cover of night, and the battles that unfolded.⁵

Alexander Berkman, then, plotting with his accomplice Emma Goldman, hoped to assassinate Frick for not only the industrialists’ role in cracking down on the Homestead Strike but also as a blow against what Berkman perceived as a broader American capitalism gone awry. Their plans were not perfect: Berkman initially thought he might use a bomb but discovered he was not equipped for bomb making and Goldman initially planned to pay for the operation through prostitution but, like Berkman’s bomb making, failed.⁶

The Frick-Berkman affair undeniably represented a wider national climate of uncertainty and distrust. The events in Pennsylvania were no different than things in the rest of the country, signaling a long and unsettled history.

Ever since the days of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the U.S. economy had eased into and embraced an unregulated free market capitalistic system. On the surface, this model allowed the economy to grow unchecked for decades, with particular acceleration after the Civil War (1861–1865), bringing great industrial expansion and economic growth. Fueled by technological advance and mechanization, American industrialization quickened. Inventions like the incandescent light bulb now allowed factory work to no longer be limited by daylight, and employees could engage in shift work through the night. Originating in England, the Bessemer process—which shot a cold blast into iron and forged stronger steel—saw widespread usage, and the nation’s new skyscrapers could now rise skyward. Mechanization, standardized parts, and automation all accelerated production. Companies looked for new and pioneering ways to govern all aspects of production, too, to save on costs and heighten production. Concepts like vertical integration allowed industries like steel and later car manufacturing to control manufacturing from start to finish, reducing overheard and increasing efficiency along the way. The American business world got smaller. Vast new transportation networks, and especially the railroads (which had over 250,000 miles of track by 1916), facilitated the shipment of goods quickly and across the country. Communication enabled quicker contact, too, and by 1900, there were 1 million miles of telegraph wire handling 63 million messages per year.⁷

Controlling much of this new Progressive Era economy were a legal reality called “trusts.” Initially the brainchild of Standard Oil lawyer Samuel Dodd, trusts (and later, a new and clever workaround called “holding companies”) allowed companies to own smaller ones. This classification made it perfectly legal for corporate behemoths to exercise monopolistic control over certain industries and commodities. Between 1897 and 1904, and certainly not only during this particularly excessive period, thousands of smaller businesses disappeared as the great merger movement created vertically and horizontally integrated corporate giants. Before long, there were the famous steel and oil trusts, but also a beef trust, a sugar trust, and more emerged on the scene. By 1904, trusts or single monopolistic companies dominated at least 50 major industries in the United States.

At the center for these corporate giants were business giants themselves. The so-called “captains of industry,” as we may know them, emerged like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Financiers like J.P. Morgan made fortunes purely by buying and selling other companies. He showed that creditors and intermediaries could now flex their financial muscle in the developing climate. He famously bought Carnegie Steel in 1901, and with one exchange via telegram, created a new corporate titan: U.S. Steel, America’s first billion-dollar company. These kinds of dealings did not go unnoticed, though, and a 1912 Congressional committee study of the swelling “House of Morgan” revealed that the financial conglomerate owned stakes in a stunning 112 corporations, with total assets valued at $22 billion. Company heads and entrepreneurs accumulated mass wealth during this period. Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, for example, retired in 1897 with a fortune of $900 million, all in an age before a federal income tax.

Still, in the age of Social Darwinism, many would not have resented the financial success of entrepreneurs and the mega wealthy. In fact, many on the lower end of the financial scale would have believed in the hopeful messages of Horatio Alger stories they may have read, tales that made clear how anyone in the United States, regardless of their current status, could “make it” if they worked hard enough. These beliefs in “rags to riches” stories and their potential were, and are, at the heart of Americanness.

Helping to push the American economy at the time was an agreeable and affordable labor force. Not only did the U.S. population double between 1870 and 1890 (from 38 to 76 million), but much of that population explosion also consisted of newcomers to the United States. Indeed, from 1871 to 1901, 11.7 million, most from Europe and Asia, came to American shores, providing ready and willing workers. The previous “old” wave immigration, with most of the newcomers arriving from Northern and Western Europe, gave way to a larger, and much more distinct, cadre of foreigners. The “new” immigrant of the late nineteenth century—unique and, for some, ominous—increasingly came from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new American immigrants of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras brought languages, customs, and religions dramatically dissimilar to the traditions of the white American Christian majority.

On the surface, the United States has long celebrated its image as a “melting pot,” where immigrants of all stripes were not only welcomed but also, in many cases, desired. Certainly, more than a few celebrated the new American immigrant and what they added to society. Norman Hopgood, writing in The Menorah Journal in 1916, announced, “Democracy will be more productive if it has a tendency to encourage differences. Our dream of the United States ought not to be a dream of monotony.” Similarly, essayist and social critic Randolph Bourne, in his essay on “Transnational America,” wrote “Let us make something of this trans-national spirit instead of outlawing it,” urging the citizenry to embrace the new “cosmopolitan America.”⁸

Concern, however, continued to surround the dangers of this swelling immigrant population. Certainly, after Berkman’s assassination attempt, the “typical” bomb-throwing, European, anarchist immigrant caused great concern. “Anarchists from Europe Must Be Refused Landing” read one headline, as the possibility of immigration reform saw discussion. The Commissioner of Immigration (and former Knights of Labor head) Terence Powderly asked in his annual reports for Congress to consider laws adding anarchists to those denied admission to the United States. He also proposed that anyone attending anarchist meetings be “taken out” and, if they had alien status, deported. Making plain the connection between immigrants and “troublemakers,” the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury called for more Secret Service agents and their powers extended to combat plots, presumably by immigrants, against the government.⁹

Indeed, notable about the Frick/Berkman affair, though, was how Berkman’s ethnicity, and the subsequent fear of similarly radical and violent Jews, featured prominently. The day after the attack, The Pittsburgh Dispatch described Berkman, already in custody, as a “Russian Hebrew Nihilist.” The paper made important, then, the fact that Berkman was a wild-eyed Jewish radical, and its physical description mentioned that he “looked like a crank or a fanatic,” with a “dull and stolid” face. This representation is significant, in correlating Berkman’s Jewishness with radical and undesirable qualities. Criminality and radicalism intersected, too, fueling the willingness of some to further generalize about American Jews. The Berkman example came to symbolize what many presumed was a typical and widespread radical American Jewish agitator.¹⁰

By the 1890s, the United States had begun an unprecedented period of economic growth, spurred by new technology and modernization. On the one hand, the late-nineteenth-century American economy had produced unprecedented wealth and excess. Indeed, and probably much to the chagrin of America’s ordinary workers who might have struggled with a living wage (particularly amid the Depression of the 1890s), there was the extravagance openly exhibited by the nation’s el...