Much of America was preparing to go back to work after the long Independence Day weekend the first Tuesday of July in 1892. Men still chatted about the fireworks displays they had witnessed the night before and bragged about victories in sack races and pie-eating contests. Women tossed out watermelon rinds and washed homemade ice cream makers.
There had been little time for such frivolity for Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. On the train to New York, they excitedly planned their response to the Homestead strike. Pausing the conversation occasionally as the train’s whistle blew at crossings, they contrived to head straight to the apartment of an Austrian anarchist when they arrived in New York. Though the man known as “Mollock” had a wife and two children who might hesitate to share their flat with unannounced strangers, Goldman and Berkman were sure he would put them up for a while. He had to. They had neither the money nor the time to spend any effort looking for another place. Berkman was already mulling plans to write a fiery manifesto denouncing Carnegie, and Goldman hoped that speaking engagements for her might be arranged in Pittsburgh. It was exhilarating.
Late in the evening of July 5, 1892, two heavily armored barges, the Iron Mountain and the Monongahela, set off upriver for Homestead, crowded with three hundred Pinkerton men charged with the job of securing Carnegie’s plant. Mostly rookies, the men included a number of roughneck down-and-outers, criminals running from the law, and nervous university students looking to make a few bucks for tuition. The men had been told little about the job that awaited them and were unusually green by Pinkerton standards. Some were plainly uncomfortable with what they had gotten themselves into. With more than a little trepidation they put on uniforms that gave them the look of a paramilitary unit—slouch hats, blouses with metal buttons, and dark blue trousers with light blue stripes running along the leg.1 Even more unsettling was the cargo that they noticed had been stored on board: crates of Winchester rifles.2
Pulled by side-wheel steam tugs, the barges moved slowly against the current during the night. A few men tried to sleep, but many peered into the gloomy darkness out of firing holes cut in the side of their vessels, wondering if anybody had noticed them. In fact, they had been first spotted not long after pulling away from shore by strikers manning the Smithfield Street Bridge. Men on the riverbanks monitored their progress, while the town of Homestead erupted as strike leaders ran from house to house, barking orders to repel the Pinkertons when they tried to land.3 With grave faces, men armed themselves with whatever was available—some with old-fashioned Civil War rifles, others with shotguns and revolvers. Still others carried little more than spiked clubs they had fashioned by pounding nails through wood torn from fences.
By the time the barges arrived around dawn, some ten thousand men, women, and children were crowded along the river near the factory to taunt the newcomers and possibly do battle. Inside, the Pinkerton officers checked their weapons and steeled themselves for what promised to be a tricky situation. One thing they had learned in past confrontations, however, was to always exude an air of authority. Brimming with bravado, Pinkerton captain Frederick Heinde strode out on a gangway linking the barges with the shore and bellowed to the crowd, “We were sent here to take possession of this property and to guard it for this company.… We don’t wish to shed blood, but we are determined to go up there and shall do so. If you men don’t withdraw, we will mow every one of you down and enter in spite of you.”
Angry words were exchanged. There was the crack of rifle shot and then, before anyone could react, the bank and the barges erupted with smoky gunfire. Heinde was hit twice. Another strikebreaker was shot through the head and fell dead, and four others were wounded. Among the steelworkers, three were killed and dozens more wounded.4
Over the next twelve hours, an orgy of bloodshed and terror unfolded. Both sides poured down rifle fire on each other, the Pinkertons crouching in their barges and the union men hiding behind scraps of iron that littered the area. Strikers unsuccessfully attempted to roast the Pinkertons alive, first floating a flaming oil-soaked raft downriver and into the barges and later rolling a burning railroad flatcar down a track and onto the dock. Trapped and with no chance of escape because their tugs had fled, the Pinkerton rookies panicked. Some hid under mattresses; others threw themselves into the river.
In Pittsburgh, news of the violence stunned leaders of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Standing up to management was one thing; killing had to be stopped. Senior union men led by William Weihe rushed to Homestead, arriving by midafternoon just as strikers were preparing a fresh attack. Shouting to be heard over howls of “burn them” and “kill them,” the union officials argued that the strikers had killed plenty of Pinkertons already. To murder them all would only damage public support of the union and invite the military to intervene. It was time to declare victory and go home. Only grudgingly and in the face of overwhelming logic did the men agree.5
Yet the company, not the strikers, ultimately prevailed. On July 10, 1892, Pennsylvania governor Robert Pattison ordered all 8,470 members of the state militia to Homestead. They quickly drove off the strikers and surrounded the plant.6 Days later, Frick would restart the factory with scabs collected from around the country who were housed in a specially constructed dormitory on the factory grounds. It didn’t take long before the men of Homestead with hungry children at home began crossing their own picket line.
For Berkman, the bloodshed changed the rules of the game. This was no longer a contest to be waged by speeches and protests but by violence, starting with the top. Convinced that the more “radical the treatment … the quicker the cure,” Berkman decided that the best way to rally workers and to call attention to anarchism was an act of self-sacrifice. He must kill Frick. Murder, he believed, was a fully justifiable act. “The killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life,” he wrote. “To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.”7 And this would be no cowardly attack. Berkman would blow Frick up and give his own life in the process.
As was so often the case with anarchists, there existed a sizable gap between vision and reality. Neither Berkman nor Goldman knew anything about explosives and would have to teach themselves the fine and dangerous art of bomb making. Using instructions printed in Most’s Science of Revolutionary Warfare, they set up a crude lab in Mollock’s apartment, well aware that with any slip they might blow up half the building, including the children of their hosts. Goldman justified an obscene calculus. “It was for them that we were going to give our lives. What if a few should have to perish?—The many would be made free and could live in beauty and comfort. Yes, the end in this case justified the means.”8
Ultimately, the children and others in the building had nothing to fear. Berkman proved to be such an incompetent bomb maker that he could not get one to detonate even when he wanted to during tests on Staten Island. Clearly out of his depth as an explosives expert, Berkman hit upon a reliable but less spectacular plan. He would dispose of Frick the old-fashioned way: by shooting him. Then he would blow himself up with a nitroglycerin cartridge, thereby exiting this world just as his Haymarket hero Louis Lingg had done in his prison cell.
Knowing that Frick was looking for strikebreakers, Berkman decided to disguise himself as an employment agency executive and had business cards printed to that effect. With little difficulty he secured an appointment with his target at 2 P.M. on July 23, 1892, at his offices at the Chronicle-Telegraph Building overlooking Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. All he needed now was a respectable-looking suit, and of course, a gun. Broke, the couple could afford neither.
In an era when daily wages were measured in cents, Goldman turned to the only way she could think of to raise money quickly. The night of July 16, 1892, she shoehorned herself into high heels and what she considered to be seductive clothing and wobbled up and down New York’s Fourteenth Street, decidedly uneasy about what lay ahead. The inexperienced streetwalker fled from her first potential customer and might have abandoned the whole idea were it not for one kindly white-haired gentleman. Seeing that Goldman was a rookie, the man gave her ten dollars for nothing more than sharing a beer. With that, Goldman declared her career as a lady of the night over and returned home. Combining her take with a loan from a friend, Goldman and Berkman had all they needed to carry out the attack.
Arriving at Frick’s building on July 23, 1892, a little before two o’clock, Berkman climbed the stairs to the second-floor offices of the chairman and presented himself to a messenger boy. He watched anxiously as the door to Frick’s office was opened and he was announced. Peeking through the door, he could see there were not one but two men at the far end of the office, about twenty-five feet away. One was Frick sitting sideways in his chair, legs thrown over one arm. The other was John G. A. Leishman, vice chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, with whom Frick had just finished lunch at the Duquesne Club. “Frick is engaged. He can’t see you now,” the receptionist told Berkman. As if to leave, Berkman took a few steps toward the outer door, then turned on his heel, brushed aside the startled receptionist, and burst into Frick’s office. With his right hand, he reached for his .38-caliber bull-nose revolver.
For a frozen moment, Berkman, Frick, and Leishman stared at one another in stunned silence. Berkman was having trouble seeing his target, blinded by unexpectedly bright sunlight pouring through the office windows. And his shot could not waver. Convinced that Frick would be wearing body armor, he had decided to aim for the industrialist’s face, not easy for a rookie marksman firing a pistol at twenty-five feet. Steadying his extended hand, Berkman squeezed the trigger. The room shook with the report and Frick cried out in pain as he fell to the floor, bleeding from his neck. Berkman again aimed at Frick’s head, this shot hitting the other side of his neck. He was sighting for a third shot when Leishman reached him with a powerful tackle, knocking him to the floor and forcing the round to fire wildly into the ceiling. Again, Berkman attempted to shoot. This time, the weapon only lamely clicked without firing.
Outside the office window, passersby stopped in horror as they heard the gunshots and wondered what was happening in the important-looking office. Incredibly, despite taking two bullets to the neck, Frick remained very much alive—and strong enough to throw himself on Berkman. In a bizarre wrestling match, the three men struggled on the floor of Frick’s office, tearing at one another’s suits and fighting for control of the gun.9 Pulling one hand free, Berkman was able to reach into a pocket where he had hidden a dagger, which he thrust into the already gravely wounded executive’s back and legs.
The shots, the screams, and the fighting were easily heard down the hall where a carpenter was working in a nearby office. Taking a tool with him, the handyman burst into Frick’s office and he, too, threw himself on Berkman. Someone shouted, “Where is the hammer? Hit him, carpenter!” The first blow caught Berkman on the back of the head. Searing pain pulsed through his eyes. The carpenter was about to deliver a second blow when Frick shouted at him to stop. He wanted his attacker taken alive.
The men lay on the floor, gasping for breath, trying to process what had just happened. Frick was seriously hurt. Two gunshots and several stab wounds had left him weak and bleeding. But it wasn’t over yet. As Frick studied the face of his attacker, he noticed that he remained conscious and strangely appeared to be teething something. “What’s in his mouth, see what he’s chewing,” Frick shouted. Again, the men threw themselves on Berkman and pried his lips apart. Carefully slipping their fingers inside his mouth, they felt a strange object, a capsule of fulminate of mercury, an explosive strong enough to blow up everybody in the room.10
Frick had survived the initial attack, but it was far from clear how long he would last as several doctors carried him to a nearby office, including his personal physician Dr. Litchfield, who had also been lunching at the popular Duquesne Club. Despite tremendous pain, Frick refused anesthesia for two hours so he could assist doctors as they probed his body for the bullets. “There, that feels like it, Doctor,” Frick said, as one hunk of lead was pulled from his flesh.
While doctors cleaned his wounds, he dictated messages to Carnegie and his mother. When they were done, he demanded to be propped up at his desk so he could finish work from earlier in the day, completing a loan application and a press statement among other things. “This incident will not change the attitude of the Carnegie Steel Company toward the Amalgamated Association. I do not think I shall die, but whether I do or not the Company will pursue the same policy and it will win,” he wrote.11 He would live for twenty-seven more years.
If Berkman had hoped to inspire others to anarchism in the way that the Haymarket attacks had captured his imagination, he utterly failed. Anarchist newspapers around the country were unrelenting in their abuse, heaping scorn on Berkman for smearing the cause with a murder attempt. Nobody took more delight, nor concocted more outlandish attacks, than Johann Most. In Freiheit, Most disingenuously spoke against the “propaganda of the deed” and suggested that Berkman may have used only a toy pistol in his attack on Frick.12 In Goldman’s words, “hardly a week passed without some slur in the Freiheit” against her lover.13
Most’s charges enraged Goldman. Of all people, she would later say, none should have approved of a violent attack more than Most. She demanded proof of his charges. When Most ignored her, Goldman plotted to call her former lover out. At a speech Most gave during the height of his accusations, Goldman made sure to arrive in time to secure a seat in the front row, her hand resting on something under her long gray cloak. As Most took the podium, Goldman rose from her place in the audience and shouted, “I come to demand proof of your insinuations against Alexander Berkman.” Most mumbled something about a “hysterical woman.” With that, Goldman rushed to the stage and produced a whip, lashing his face and neck. As astonished as his audience at the sudden attack, Most fled, no doubt resolving not to cross Goldman again.14
Berkman’s attack may have failed on a number of levels, but it did succeed in one respect: It launched Goldman into the big leagues of radical agitators. During Berkman’s trial, the fiery young woman received almost as much publicity as the attacker himself as prosecutors correctly tried to implicate her as a coconspirator. They were unsuccessful, but all the attention helped create an intriguing new public personality that combined good looks with a hint of danger.
Goldman would soon tour the country, speaking at halls packed with supporters. She served a year at New York’s Blackwell Island Penitentiary for inciting a riot—though one never took place. And she would captivate the press. In one interview, she deftly charmed The New York World’s Nelly Bly—the intrepid reporter who won fame for herself and her paper by circumnavigating the globe in fewer than the eighty days it took the fictional Phileas Fogg. In a flattering portrayal, Bly wrote that Goldman, who arrived for the interview in a modest blue serge Eton suit, was an attractive woman who “did not show her 120 pounds.”15 Goldman told Bly: “I am satisfied to agitate, to teach, and I only ask for justice and freedom of speech.” Goldman was, Bly concluded, “a little Joan of Arc.”
Through it all, Goldman grew ever more passionate. Emerging from prison, she announced she was “determined to use every means in my power to spread my doctrine among the people.”16