nauseating. In the distance, giant furnaces vomit pillars of fire, the lurid flashes accentuating a line of frame structures, dilapidated and miserable. They are the homes of the workers who have created the industrial glory of Pittsburgh, reared its millionaires, its Carnegies and Fricks.
The sight fills me with hatred of the perverse social justice that turns the needs of mankind into an Inferno of brutalizing toil. It robs man of his soul, drives the sunshine from his life, degrades him lower than the beasts, and between the millstones of divine bliss and hellish torture grinds flesh and blood into iron and steel, transmutes human lives into gold, gold, countless gold.
The great, noble People! But is it really great and noble to be slaves and remain content? No, no! They are awakening, awakening!
1 To protect his identity, Alexander Berkman gave Modest Aronstam, later Modest Stein (1871–1958) the name Fedya, a name Emma Goldman would also use in Living My Life. Berkman also refers to him as “The Twin”—as many of their acquaintances in New York felt they looked alike. In Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and Living My Life, Berkman and Goldman both intentionally omitted Stein’s leading role in the attempt to kill Frick. Stein had long left the anarchist movement by the time of Prison Memoir’s publication in 1912 and was working as a commercial illustrator. “The Girl” (also “Sonya”) is Goldman. At the time of the Homestead events all three were operating a lunchroom together in Worcester, Mass. The incident Berkman describes here probably took place on the morning of July 7, 1892.
2 On June 28, 1892, the eight-hundred members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Carnegie Steel Company in Homestead, Pennsylvania went on strike in response to having been locked out of the plant the day before when negotiations over pay had broken down. On June 29, the three-thousand non-union and unskilled laborers at the plant voted to support the strikers. By June 30, management had locked out the entire workforce. Henry Clay Frick, the plant manager, organized the erection of a barbed wire and board fence surrounding the plant while negotiations between workers and management were still carrying on and also, allegedly, had been in regular contact with the Pinkerton Detective Agency during this period. Once the men were locked out, Frick heavily fortified the plant, earning it the sobriquet “Fort Frick.” On July 5, Frick commissioned three-hundred strike-breaking Pinkerton detectives, at $5 a day, to ensure a passage for replacement workers (scabs) into the plant by breaking through the 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.
