"The main fact is this: that for nearly two years a large number of the most active members of the German Group of the International Working People's Association in New York City, and of the Social Revolutionary Club, another German organization in that city, have been persistently engaged in getting money by insuring their property for amounts far in excess of the real value thereof, secretly removing everything that they could, setting fire to the premises, swearing to heavy losses, and exacting corresponding sums from the insurance companies. Explosion of kerosene lamps is usually the device which they employ. Some seven or eight fires, at least, of this sort were set in New York and Brooklyn in 1884 by members of the gang, netting the beneficiaries an aggregate profit of thousands of dollars. In 1885 nearly twenty more were set, with equally profitable results. The record for 1886 has reached six already, if not more. The business has been carried on with the most astonishing audacity. One of these men had his premises insured, fired them, and presented his bill of loss to the company within twenty-four hours after getting his policy, and before the agent had reported the policy to the company. The bill was paid, and a few months later the same fellow, under another name, played the game over again, though not quite so speedily. In one of the fires set in 1885 a woman and two children were burned to death. The two guilty parties in this case were members of the Bohemian Group and are now serving life sentences in prison. Another of the fires was started in a six-story tenement house, endangering the lives of hundreds, but fortunately injuring no one but the incendiary. In one case in 1886 the firemen have saved two women whom they found clinging to their bed posts in a half-suffocated condition. In another a man, woman, and baby lost their lives. Three members of the gang are now in jail awaiting trial for murdering and robbing an old woman in Jersey City. Two others are in jail under heavy bail and awaiting trial for carrying concealed weapons and assaulting an officer. They were walking arsenals, and were found under circumstances which lead to the suspicion that they were about to perpetrate a robbery, if not a murder.
"The profits accruing from this 'propagandism by deed' are not even used for the benefit of the movement to which the criminals belong, but go to fill their own empty pockets, and are often spent in reckless, riotous living. The guilty parties are growing bolder and bolder, and, anticipating detection ultimately, a dozen or so of them have agreed to commit perjury in order to involve the innocent as accomplices in their crimes. It is their boast that the active anarchists shall all go to the gallows together."
The history of terrorist tactics in America largely centers about the career of Johann Most. In August Bebel's story of his life he speaks in high terms of the unselfish devotion and sterling character of Most in his early days. "If later on," says Bebel, "under the anti-socialist laws, he went astray and became an anarchist and an advocate of direct action, and finally, although he had been a model of abstinence, ended in the United States as a drunkard, it was all due to the anti-socialist laws, laws which drove him and many others from the country. Had he remained under the influence of the men who were able to guide him and restrain his passionate temper, the party would have possessed in him a most zealous, self-sacrificing, and indefatigable fighter." [(12)] Most, then, was one of the victims of Bismarck's savage policies, as were also nearly all the other Germans who took part in the sordid crimes related by Tucker. And the Haymarket—the greatest of all American tragedies—leads directly back to the Iron Chancellor and his ferocious inquisition.
A few minor incidents of anarchist activity may be recorded for the following years, but the only acts of importance were the shooting of President McKinley by Czolgosz and the shooting of Henry C. Frick by Alexander Berkman. In the "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist," Berkman has now told us that as a youth he became a disciple of Bakounin and a fiery member of the Nihilist group. It was after the Homestead strike that Berkman saw a chance to propagate his gospel by a deed. Leaving his home in New York, he went to Pittsburgh for the purpose of killing Henry C. Frick, then head of the Carnegie Steel Company. Berkman made his way into Frick's office, shot at and slightly wounded him. In explanation of this act he says: "In truth, murder and attentat (that is, political assassination) are to me opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people." [(13)] For this attempt on the life of Frick, Berkman was condemned to a term of imprisonment of twenty-two years. Despite a few isolated outbreaks, it may be said, therefore, that the seeds of anarchism have never taken root in America, just as they have never taken root in Germany or in England. To-day there are no active American terrorists and only a handful of avowed anarchists. In the Latin countries, however, the deeds of terrorism still played a tragic part in the history of the next few years.
FOOTNOTE:
[I] See Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft.
