The public agitators are such people as Currlin, Holmes, Morgan, Mikolanda, Grottkau, Mostler, Bergman, G. Smith, Poch, Mittag, Mentzer and others. They declare themselves openly as Anarchists and agitators. They are of course well known to the police, and consequently they are on the look-out not to come in contact with us. They only enlist recruits, however. The secret agitators visit public meetings occasionally, but they very seldom do any talking. Nobody notices them, and this is what they want. They are seldom members of any “Verein,” and they form acquaintances on the street, in shops or saloons, but always with the utmost caution until they have gained confidence. They meet at private houses in parties of three or four, agitating wherever they can gain a point. When charged with being Anarchists they deny it, and to throw off suspicion some of them even go regularly to church. Among these there are fanatics who would do almost anything to gain their ends. I know a great many of this class, and I would not believe it if I did not know of my own knowledge that they are Anarchists of the purest water. They are the most harmless-looking men in Chicago.
The open and public movement still goes on under cover of the cause of labor. The plan of campaign is, so far as the public associations and meetings are concerned, to teach Anarchy; to create in the minds of Socialistic adherents a hatred of all law and of all religion, and to inspire a spirit of revenge for the execution of Spies and his comrades. Their teachings are carried out by speeches more or less incendiary.
The most potent factor for evil in Chicago to-day, as heretofore, is the Arbeiter-Zeitung. When this paper was first established it was delivered secretly through alleyways and at back doors. Now it has a circulation of 7,000 copies daily. Time was when the daily tirades of abuse scattered broadcast by that sheet were viewed with indifference by the English-speaking press of this city. That was in the seed-time of “theoretic” and “practical” Anarchy in Chicago. Then the dire meaning of it all escaped the bulk of the population. It was said—and the saying was flaunted in the faces of the sullen hordes until it acted like the red rag on an infuriated bull—that all this talk would end where it began—in talk. The paper is more readable and interesting now than it ever was. Its present editorial staff is an abler one, and understands better on occasion how to convey its meaning without expressing it in so many plain words. It comprises not only some of the old-time writers—men like Paul Grottkau and Albert Currlin—but it has now at its head a man of infinitely more cunning and ability than ever distinguished August Spies.
Editor Jens Christensen, a native of the formerly Danish province of Schleswig, is a good-looking young German, and bears quite a resemblance to his predecessor in personal appearance. He is thoroughly proficient not only in German, but also in English, French, and all the Scandinavian tongues, is a scientifically trained man, and has at command an arsenal of facts, arguments and deductions to be marshaled up in defense of his specious pleadings.
Christensen was at one time a Socialist candidate for the German Reichstag, and is now in constant and confidential correspondence with the leading European prophets of destruction. Although he has been in America less than a year, he has inspired in his disciples within that short time a degree of confidence which Spies never possessed. He has not the easy address of Spies in dealing with a crowd, and he is at all times a better, more logical and more forcible writer than orator; but he is, for all that, the best public speaker the destructionists of this city have within their ranks to-day. He is more suave than impassioned in his speech—reserved and self-possessed, and never at a loss for a reply. He is a zealot and a fanatic in the cause he has espoused, and he is probably the only Socialist in Chicago who can give a scientific basis for every dogma he announces, and a proof for every word he utters.
Since Christensen’s arrival here he has been in a newspaper warfare with Johann Most. He attacked Most, charging him with being an injury to the cause of the revolution by his bad judgment and radical plans of dynamite and other methods for the application of physical force. Most has been striking back in his characteristic way, and this has brought Christensen into considerable prominence. Moreover, he is a writer with great executive ability. He is a man of strong convictions, evident courage, but is quite a diplomat, and does not propose to follow his “comrades” to the gallows by any slip of the pen or tongue if he can help it. Christensen is a Socialist, not an Anarchist, he says, and yet he declares with a good deal of frankness that Socialists and Anarchists are pretty much the same, so far as the result sought is concerned, the only essential differences being in the tactics used to reach the object aimed at.
Such a man, it will be readily seen, when once started in the wrong path, is a much more dangerous foe than the hot-headed, rather selfish, openly ambitious Spies. And he shows his power in nothing better than in his manner of conducting the avowed organ of all the destructionists. Since his advent, this afternoon sheet has set the ferment of social agitation going again until the movement, as a matter of fact, is to-day in reality more formidable than it was three years ago, for now it is directed by a cautious, self-contained man who weighs every step before advising it, and who in all things considers the question of expediency first.
The paper he presides over is a daily proof of his skill and of his capacity for doing harm. It spreads the old doctrine of destruction and social upheaval, but it does so in a much more insidious, in a more guarded, and, probably, in a more effective manner. There is a general policy laid down, and that is never deviated from. Every line that goes into the reading columns of the Arbeiter-Zeitung has to serve a purpose. That purpose is to teach a lesson, to serve as one more grain of disgust with the existing state of things, to render the reader more weary of the society of to-day. Every piece of news is bent to that end—distorted, falsified, or magnified—so as to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” If a laborer has been cheated out of his wages, for instance, by his employer, a general deduction as to all employers is made. If a wealthy thief escape more or less merited punishment, the sharp edge of sarcasm and of lament over the futility of trying to regenerate this world by any but “radical” means is again used. Every piece of rascality, in fact, on the part of well-to-do or highly placed men, every misstep, every error, every unwise law and every unwise application of a wise one—all of these things and many more are seized and made to serve the purpose of this personally smooth and amiable Mephistopheles, and are dished up to his benighted readers, peppered, salted and seasoned with Chile sauce, to make them palatable.
Thus the paper acts on that vast body of half or wholly discontented, on all those who, with or without their own fault, are not as well off as they might be, on all those thousands who sympathized or still sympathize with the dread fate of the eight Anarchists arrested after the Haymarket slaughter, as a constant irritant, distorting everything to their mental eye and keeping them forever in an irritable mood and in a sort of self-made purgatory which embitters even their hours of rest and recreation. That this sort of effect cannot go accumulating in the minds of many thousands of men and women and children without finally producing something tangible, an explosion, is self-evident and needs no emphasizing. Did space permit, I should like to give here extracts to show how insidious and subtle the poison which is daily instilled into the minds of these readers.
Mr. Currlin, ex-editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, is known as the wandering missionary of Anarchy. He is busily engaged in the propagation of revolutionary ideas. His style of oratory and the general drift of his sentiments may be gathered from quotations heretofore given in this book.