Bill Nowlin

Alexander Berkman Anarchist Bill Nowlin

As a young student in Russia, Alexander Berkman claims to have heard the bomb explode which killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881. He emigrated to America and, inspired by the Haymarket martyrs, became active in Jewish anarchist circles. When Henry Clay Frick of Carnegie Steel sent in armed Pinkertons who killed strikers at Homestead Steel, Berkman traveled to Pittsburg and shot Frick in an assassination attempt of his own, hoping to inspire a workers' revolt. He spent 14 years in prison, then rejoined his comrade Emma Goldman and was active in the free speech movement, in setting up free schools, in the beginnings of the birth control movement, and in defensing numerous activists charged by prosecutors. He and Goldman organized against military conscription during World War II and were deported to Russia, arriving shortly after the Revolution. There, as anarchists, they also ran afoul of the Communist Party authorities who were intent on consolidating political power. They had to leave Russia as well, and then to leave Germany, finally landing in exile in France. Throughout, Berkman was a skilled organizer and both edited and wrote numerous publications. His life, his work, and his ideas are explored in this book. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman are prominent figures in any consideration of American anarchism. From roughly 1892 to 1919 they were at the forefront of the American anarchist movement and deeply involved in the international movement for yet another decade and a half. Since their deportation to Bolshevik Russia in 1919, there has been a dearth of explicitly anarchist writing and organization in the United States which earned any sizable or responsive audience. Neither Goldman nor Berkman were original political theorists of the first order, but both dealt with the great questions of political thought, and they can be said to have advanced anarchist theory in the light of the first modern socialist revolution. Although virtually inseparable as comrades in thought, action and life, there were differences of opinion between them. This book focuses specifically on Berkman.