“Perhaps under the same conditions I would do the same. If I had been starving in Milan, and had raised my starving baby in the air as an appeal for justice, and had that baby shot in my arms by a brutal soldiery, who knows what I might have done? I might have changed from a philosophical anarchist to a fighting anarchist. Do you suppose if Santo Caserio had had anarchist organization back of him he would have tramped all the weary way to Paris, without money, in order to kill Carnot? If Bresci had been sent out from us, would he have had to scrape together every cent he could, even forcing one of his anarchist friends to pawn some of his clothes in order to repay a loan Bresci had made him? The friend curses Bresci for a hardhearted creditor, but Bresci never told why he needed the money so desperately.
“Anarchy’s best future lies in America. We in America haven’t yet reached conditions—economic conditions, I mean—that necessarily breed violence. I am thankful for that; but we are much nearer such conditions than the old-time American ever dreamed we would be, and unless something is done to stop it, the time will come.
“It’s all too absolutely silly, this talk about my being dangerous. Half my fellow believers think me a fool because I am always talking against violence and advocating individual work. I believe that the next ten years will see a wonderful spreading of the true principles of anarchy in this country.”
Emma Goldman, at the time of the assassination, was a woman thirty-two years old, with coarse features, thick lips, a square jaw and prominent nose. She wore glasses on account of nearsightedness, and her hair was light, almost red—the color of the doctrine she teaches.
She was held without bail, but afterwards released.
After Czolgosz, the first arrests for complicity in the attempt on President McKinley’s life were made in the city of Chicago. The metropolis of Illinois, with its cosmopolitan population, has always been a hotbed of anarchy, and it was there the police instantly looked for traces of the movements of the assassin. The police learned from Czolgosz himself that he had recently been in Chicago, and had visited at the house of Abraham Isaak, Sr., 515 Carroll avenue. Isaak was known as an anarchist and the publisher of a paper called Free Society. The police procured warrants for the arrest of Isaak and others on a charge of conspiracy to kill and assassinate the President of the United States, William McKinley, and on visiting Isaak’s house Saturday, September 7, found nine persons there, all of whom were arrested. They were:
Abraham Isaak, Sr., publisher of the Free Society and former publisher of the Firebrand, the organ of anarchy, which was suppressed; Abraham Isaak, Jr., Clemence Pfuetzner, Alfred Schneider, Hippolyte Havel, Henry Travaglio, Julia Mechanic, Marie Isaak, mother; Marie Isaak, daughter.
The same day three other men were arrested at 100 Newberry avenue, Chicago, for the same crime. These men were: Martin Raznick, cloak-maker, who rented the premises; Maurice Fox, Michael Raz.
In the house the detectives found box after box heaped with the literature of anarchy and socialism. There were pictures of Emma Goldman and other leaders and many copies of the Firebrand, Isaak’s old paper.
The arrests were decided on thus early because of the receipt by the Chicago police of a telegram from the chief of police at Buffalo, reading as follows: