Not satisfied apparently that this letter would reach Berkman, Har Dayal wrote another a week later, which read as follows:
“Address: Israel Aaronson,
“c/o Madame Kercher,
“116 Oude Scheveningerweg,
“Scheveningen.“Dear Comrade:
“I am well and busy. Can you send me some earnest and sincere comrades men and women, to help our Indian revolutionary party at this juncture? They should be persons of good character. If Tannenbaum is free, would he like to come?
“Please keep this matter strictly secret and confidential. Kindly don’t discuss it with too many people.
“This is a great opportunity for our party. I need the coöperation of earnest comrades for very important work. Several of our comrades have come from India with encouraging news and messages.
“If some comrades can come, please wire and write to the above address to my assumed name, ‘Israel Aaronson.’ I shall send you money immediately to the name which you telegraph. Let it be a name beginning with a B. I shall understand. Please don’t telegraph in your own name.
“Kindly also word the telegram in such a way that I can understand how many comrades are coming. If five comrades wish to come, please wire:
“‘Five hundred dollars job vacant come.’
Just put the number of comrades before the ‘hundred.’ Or use any other device.
“Kindly also send me names and addresses of the prominent anarchist comrades in Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and other European countries. Please also send letters of introduction for me to them from Emma or yourself, if you know them.”
And so on. There is enough to show the company the Hindu-German intriguers kept, and to show that the Hindu committee in Berlin had enough money to buy mercenaries from the American anarchist group, for which the American brokers would hardly go unrewarded. Rintelen, within a week of his arrival in the United States in May, 1915, had tried to hire anarchists to blow up shipping and start strikes in munitions plants. It further shows that during that week in October of 1915, Har Dayal had a bright thought that if he could only get letters from Emma Goldman or Berkman introducing him to the anarchists of Europe, and could perhaps introduce to them in turn his lieutenant, Frank Tannenbaum, from America—the same who stormed St. Alphonsus’ church with a gang of I. W. W.’s in 1914, demanding food—he could hoodwink the anarchists into believing that he was playing their game, and really make good use of them in playing his game—which of course was Berlin’s.
As it happened, Tannenbaum was busy. So was Emma. So was Berkman, who received the letter. He was just formulating plans to go to San Francisco and become an editor—not a new avocation, for he had for ten years helped Emma Goldman issue a publication known as “Mother Earth”—and to carry out certain radical and novel ideas. Before we sketch the way in which he put those ideas on paper, it may be well to see what experiences he had had to generate ideas, and just what promise his career contained that he would be of guiding benefit to these United States.
Alexander Berkman was a Russian by birth, and was then about 44 years old. When he was a youth of 20 he became involved in the famous Homestead strike in Pennsylvania, and on July 22, 1892, he burst into the office of Henry Frick, a steel manufacturer, in the Carnegie Building in Pittsburg and shot that gentleman in the neck. He then went to the Western Penitentiary and served fourteen years. This qualified him as a rare martyr among anarchists. After he got out of prison he was occasionally arrested in various cities, for wherever he appeared among advocates of violence there was pretty certain to be trouble. The long prison term had given him a chance to develop his mind, and he had written 512 pages on “The Prison Life of an Anarchist,” which the “Mother Earth Publishing Company” brought out, and which sold for $1.15—a very interesting book indeed.
So he went to San Francisco in the fall of 1915. A short time before he left New York his friend Bill Shatoff gave him a farewell dinner. As the evening wore on the diners adjourned to the neighborhood of Second Avenue and Fifth Street for a frolic, and Berkman and Shatoff playfully mauled a policeman, and took his club away, for which both men were arrested. But that did not interfere long with Berkman’s departure for the Coast, and the purpose and fruit of his journey appeared within a short time.
Major Fuller Potter, Military Intelligence
It was called The Blast. According to its own description The Blast was a revolutionary labor weekly, which meant that it preached revolution every so often to those who had a grievance against their employers and to those who had no employers but who had a deep contempt for anything of the sort. Alexander Berkman appeared as editor and publisher, E. B. Morton as associate editor, and M. E. Fitzgerald as manager. It sold for five cents a copy, unless you bought it in bundles, in which case you paid half that price.
In the first issue, dated January 15, 1916, the title of the paper is explained by the editor. “Do you mean to destroy?” he asks. “Do you mean to build? These are the questions we have been asked from many quarters by inquirers sympathetic and otherwise. Our reply is frank and bold: We mean both: to destroy and to build. For socially speaking, Destruction is the beginning of Construction.... The time is NOW. The breath of discontent is heavy upon this wide land. It permeates mill and mine, field and factory. Blind rebellion stalks upon highway and byway. To fire it with the spark of Hope, to kindle it with the light of Vision, and turn pale discontent into conscious social action—that is the crying problem of the hour. It is the great work calling to be done. To work, then, and blasted be every obstacle in the way of the Regeneration!” In a congratulatory telegram in the same issue, Emma wrote to Alexander: “Let The Blast re-echo from coast to coast, inspiring strength and courage into the disinherited, and striking terror into the hearts of the craven enemy, now that one more of our brothers has fallen a victim to the insatiable Moloch. May The Blast tear up the solidified ignorance and cruelty of our social structure. Blast away! To the daring belongs the future.”