A sample of the methods by which The Blast proposed to begin its regeneration of the disinherited is this delicate editorial paragraph:
“Judas Made Respectable.
“Judas Iscariot delivered the Nazarene agitator into the hands of the Roman District Attorney. This base betrayal incensed the people against the mercenary stool-pigeon. Judas had enough decency to go and hang himself.”
A slap evidently at the person whom Emma referred to in her telegram, who had just sold out to Moloch.
It was a cardinal principle of the paper to be scurrilous and direct in its attacks upon the enemies of anarchy. General Harrison Grey Otis, a Los Angeles publisher whose newspaper building was bombed in 1912 after labor trouble, was referred to as “General Hungry Growl Otis,” Colonel Roosevelt as “The Human Blowout.” The leading cartoon of the second issue, drawn—and well drawn—by Robert Minor, showed a huge figure of a laborer bearing on a tray the figure of a tiny though corpulent judge, its mouth open in speech, and its chair guarded by three stolid elephantine policemen. The laborer is bearing the dish to a feast of anarchists, the title of Minor’s contribution is “The Court Orders—.” The court had evidently ordered in the direction of The Blast, and Berkman did not like the order. In the same issue he wrote editorials against conscription in England, against the convention of the American Federation of Labor which had just been held in San Francisco, against its president, Samuel Gompers, and against national preparedness.
I have quoted these extracts not because they are specially interesting or readable, but because they will give one who is not wholly familiar with the practical platform of anarchy a suggestion of anarchy’s tone of voice. It is not friendly, but is on the contrary quite snobbish. Selig Schulberg, in an article on Mexico, gently suggested: “Toilers of America, if the Hearsts, Otises and Rockefellers have property, for which they want protection, in Mexico, let them protect it!” The editor says: “The Fords, the Bryans, the Jane Addams may be sincere. If so they are blind leaders of the blind.” A writer signing himself “L. E. Claypool,” wrote, under the title “Preparedness is Hell,” this tribute to our tortured Ally in Europe: “Most of you gents that yell (i. e., yell, ‘What about Belgium?’) never heard of Belgium till this war broke out. A lot of you probably don’t know that the language of the Belgians is French. Further, you don’t know that Belgium had a treaty with England and France which placed the little nation in the war before the German invasion. You may not know that French and English engineers and military experts had surveyed the land and were preparing to make it a battle ground long before the Germans did so.” That statement was typical German propaganda of a very crude sort, calculated to appeal by its insinuation to the class of readers who affected The Blast. The platform of the paper, in a word, was Against.
Berkman was in a rich field for labor unrest. California is a strong labor state. The whole country, outside as well as inside California, had been excited over the Los Angeles Times bomb affair in 1912, and it revived that excitement when two of the culprits were prosecuted three years later. One finds constant reference to the case in the files of The Blast, and to the strikes at Lawrence, Mass., and Ludlow, Colorado, and Youngstown, Ohio. Anti-capitalistic rough-house in any corner of the continent was good copy for Berkman. If it flagged for a moment he took up the cudgels for his friend Emma, who had just been arrested in New York and sentenced to the workhouse for distributing birth-control literature. Or he dove into international relations, comparing in one instance Villa and President Wilson, with little mercy for the latter. The issue of April Fool’s Day, 1916, carried a leading editorial directed against the Pacific Coast Defense League, just organized to bring the national guard of the Pacific and Mountain states into a condition of higher efficiency and to start a program of “healthy physical and military training” in the public schools. This editorial was signed by Tom Mooney, who soon appeared in the columns of the paper in another capacity.
The publication did not go unheeded by the Post Office department. On May 1 Berkman burst out with an article headed, “To Hell With The Government,” in which he used language that would make any ordinary head of hair curl up. He was angry because the Government had issued an order holding up all succeeding issues of the paper. In an editorial he said he welcomed the uprising in Ireland—the Easter Day affair in Dublin which cost several Sinn Feiners their lives. Other anarchistic publications in the country were meeting the same fate. The Alarm, in Chicago, Revolt of New York, Regeneracion, a Mexican revolutionary sheet issued in Los Angeles, and Voluntad, a Spanish paper in New York, were closed up. But Berkman went on publishing, and howling about the constitutional freedom of the press. Back in New York other friends of his had been making more trouble: Mrs. Max Eastman and Bolton Hall were arrested for circulating birth-control pamphlets, and Bouck White was jailed for distributing an effigy of the American flag bearing a dollar-mark. Berkman took up their cases and howled. He sent appeals for help in his fight against the Post Office department, and raised a little money. One of his liberal contributors was a writer named John Reed, who sent him five dollars from New York. Then a strike broke out, fostered by the I. W. W., on the iron ranges in Northern Minnesota, and William M. Haywood wrote Berkman an appeal for help which the latter published in The Blast with a eulogy. He found no dearth of subjects to fill his pages, and then suddenly came an interruption.
San Francisco turned out in a great preparedness parade on July 22. Someone threw a bomb into the ranks of the marchers. Nine people were killed. The next issue of The Blast said substantially: “Well, they might have expected it,” and said actually: “To try to connect the Anarchists, the I. W. W., the Labor elements or the participants in the peace meeting with the bomb tragedy is stupid. The act was obviously the work of an individual who evidently sought to express his opposition to Preparedness for Slaughter by using the ammunition of Preparedness. Terrible as it is, it is merely a foretaste in miniature of what the people may expect multiplied a million times, from the Preparedness insanity.” When two men, Nolan and Tom Mooney, were arrested and charged with the crime, The Blast rushed to their defense. When Warren Billings and Israel Weinberg were added to the list of accused, The Blast ran sketches of the defendants by Minor, the staff artist. The case was of consuming interest to the anarchist group, and they rubbed their hands, in The Blast office, over their good luck that it had happened right in their own little circle. The Blast ceased firing random shots and focussed on the bomb case in salvos, followed the course of the trials, drew a parallel between the condition of the San Francisco suspects and that of Fielden, Neebe and Schwab, three of the anarchists who were implicated in the Haymarket bomb outrage in Chicago in 1886 and pardoned.
The business of being an anarchist became surrounded with more and more difficulty as the year drew toward a close. Caplan, the fourth Los Angeles bomb suspect to be tried, was convicted and sentenced to ten years; a group of laborers who had engaged in violence in strikes against the United States Steel Corporation were under sentence in a Pittsburg prison; Carlo Tresca (whom we recall as a speaker at the Brescia Circle in 1915), and ten others were in jail in Duluth charged with murder in the I. W. W. strike on the Mesaba Iron range; the Magon brothers, two Mexican revolutionary anarchists, were in prison, and the days of The Blast were numbered. Berkman came back to New York in the fall. While he was absent, The Blast sputtered once more in its issue of January, 1917, with a venomous cartoon by Minor, and went out, for want of funds.