Title: The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

Author: Steven Johnson

Completed: Sept 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Years ago I read Ghost Map by the same author and enjoyed his storytelling. This book appealed to me because of my growing interest in anarchist theory and fascination with the rise of national policing around the time of prohibition. It told a more complete story of Emma Goldman than other stories I’ve read about her. It’s also interesting that many of the early anarchists dealt with debate about when (if ever) violent acts are justified that came up in Force and Freedom just before the Civil War. Both groups eventually turned towards violence. The anarchists seemed more easily convinced that violence could help them achieve their goals, but in retrospect, may have convinced more people to oppose their message.

Highlights:

• The anarchists maintained that there was something fundamentally corrosive about organizing society around large, top-down organizations. Human beings, its advocates explained, oftentimes at gunpoint, had evolved in smaller, more egalitarian units, and some of the most exemplary communities of recent life—the guild-based free cities of Renaissance Europe, the farming communes of Asia, watchmaking collectives in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland—had followed a comparable template, at a slightly larger scale. These leaderless societies were the natural order of things, the default state for Homo sapiens. Taking humans out of those human-scale communities and thrusting them into vast militaries or industrial factories, building a society based on competitive struggle and authority from above, betrayed some of our deepest instincts.
• Nobel gave his invention two names. One was a variation on his earlier product’s branding, with an emphasis on its newfound stability: Nobel’s Safety Powder. But it was the other name that stuck: Dynamite.
• Kropotkin had embarked on the trip under the spell of Darwin’s recently published The Origin of Species, with its radical new account of natural selection operating through the competitive struggle for reproductive success, quickly paraphrased as the “survival of the fittest” by Darwin’s ally, the sociologist Herbert Spencer. But in the extreme conditions of Siberia, Kropotkin witnessed a different kind of struggle—not the struggle between different organisms but rather the shared struggle against the environmental conditions themselves. “Real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom under my notice,” he later wrote, “though I eagerly searched for them.” Instead, Kropotkin saw abundant evidence of a different kind of interaction: networks of cooperation among and between species, what Kropotkin would later call “mutual aid.”
• The Haymarket Affair sparked an immediate crackdown against the radical groups; Parsons and Spies were both arrested, along with six others, and accused of being accessories to the murder of the officer killed by the bomb. During the trial, key evidence was supplied by the lead Pinkerton undercover agent, Andrew C. Johnson, who claimed firsthand knowledge of the anarchists’ murderous plot. In response, Albert Parsons denounced the Pinkertons as “a private army…at the command and control of those who grind the faces of the poor, who keep wages down to the starvation point.” In the end, the jury sided with Johnson, and all eight were condemned to death. Four of them—including both Spies and Parsons—were executed, despite the fact that no evidence ever directly connected them to the infernal machine that had exploded during the rally.
• It is conventional wisdom—in the United States, at least—to say that we live in an unusually polarized political climate today. But measured against the landscape Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman encountered as young adults, even the much-lamented divisions of the Trump era look far less severe. The polar opposites might be louder now—thanks to the amplifiers of social media and cable news—but they sit on a much smaller globe of political possibility. Berkman and Goldman were living in a world where one side of the spectrum thought it was appropriate to execute people who objected to a seventy-two-hour week of life-threatening work—while the other side of the spectrum thought that we should abandon both governments and corporations and reinvent society along the lines of Swiss watchmaking collectives. Those were the distant poles of the debate. What we would now call the Overton window—the space of potentially valid political beliefs—was far wider than anything in American politics today.
• colossal failure for the workers. “After five months out on strike, they were forced to accept the company’s harshest terms, including a twelve-hour day and a wage cut of almost one-half,” the historians Paul and Karen Avrich write. “Pinkerton spies were installed in the mill, grievance committees were done away with, and workers’ meetings were banned. Total victory, as Frick had foreseen, lay with the company. He had proved that a modern corporation, combined with the authority of the state, could destroy the strongest union in America. Not until 1936 would another union emerge in the steel industry.”
• There was a noticeable absence among the twenty-one nations represented at the Rome conference in 1898: the United States of America. The lack of an American presence reflected more than just the geographical separation between the two continents. The notion of a trained detective versed in statistics and anthropometry serving as an agent of the law was simply a foreign idea to most Americans.
• Kroptokin sensibly began his counterattack against the social Darwinians with a close look at the biological record: the insect colonies, the deer, and the seabirds of Siberia. But by the time Goldman showed up for tea in Bromley, Kropotkin had moved on to sociology. The closing essays in Mutual Aid offered an extended paean to the triumph of the “free cities” of the medieval era, which were to Kropotkin the pinnacle of human social organization.
• The fundamental economic unit of the free cities was not the industrial corporation or the feudal estate; instead, the defining unit was the artisanal guild, the elective associations of craftsmen: carpenters, weavers, painters, jewelers, musicians, scholars. Grounded in useful labor and expertise, sustained through shared resources, the guilds and the free cities that contained them offered a golden ratio of individual liberty and communal belonging that echoed the ancestral hunter-gatherer communities, only now updated with technological wonders and achievements in art and architecture. That was the natural equilibrium that the hydra of state capitalism had demolished, with its vast hierarchies and deadening, robotic labor,
• The fixation with the guilds and associations of the medieval town is a quality of the anarchist movement that is little remembered today. What lives on is the image of the bomb-throwing terrorist, willing to kill innocent civilians in the name of some imagined revolution to come. But there was also a strangely quaint, nostalgic quality to the movement—most apparent in Kropotkin himself—a longing for a simpler, more pleasant form of life.
• Imagine a twentieth century where multinational capitalism is challenged not by a totalitarian, militaristic Soviet Union but instead by a sustained mass return to the guilds and small-scale industries of free cities. That may seem preposterous to us now, but it might well have been within reach, back in 1895.
• The body count from the infernal machines was a footnote compared to the violence of the factory system, after all.
• Goldman, dressed only in a kimono, found herself surrounded by a dozen police officers. At first she pretended to be a Swedish servant with limited English skills. The ruse initially succeeded. In an exchange that bordered on slapstick, one of the officers held up a picture of Goldman, demanding: “We want this woman. Where is she?” “This woman I not see here,” the diminutive Goldman protested. “This woman big.” After searching the apartment, the officers were on the brink of leaving when one of them stumbled across a fountain pen engraved with Goldman’s name. Even that clue was not sufficient for the cops to realize that the very suspect they were seeking was standing right in front of them. “By golly, that’s a find!” the lead detective declared. “She must have been here and she may come back.” Exasperated, Goldman finally turned to the detective and ended the charade. “I am Emma Goldman.” “Well, I’ll be damned,” he uttered in shock. “You’re the shrewdest crook I ever met.”
• Throughout his two terms, Roosevelt would petition endlessly for the creation of a proper national detective force, an American Interpol. Each time, Congress would rebuff him, wary of consolidating too much power in the federal government. Lawmakers argued that “spying on men and prying into what would ordinarily be considered their private affairs” went against the “American ideas of government.” Others maintained that a “central police or spy system in the federal government” would be “a great blow to freedom and free institutions.”
• In time, the young library clerk would make a name for himself in a different field. But the lessons he drew from the Putnam system—the unexpected power of systematized card catalogs and file cabinets—remained an animating principle in the mind of John Edgar Hoover for the rest of his career.
• on the morning of April 20, two National Guard units commanded by a Rockefeller deputy began laying down machine gun fire across the tent cities outside Ludlow. Some of the strikers managed to escape into the hills, while others huddled in underground bunkers that had been dug for precisely this situation. That night, the Guard swept into the tent city and set it ablaze.
• Berkman envisioned a procession that would follow Caron’s coffin through the streets of Manhattan, winding its way to the ultimate ceremony site in Union Square. But Arthur Woods worried that a funeral procession taking over a large swath of the city risked making martyrs of the would-be bombers. He and Mitchel were able to convince the board of aldermen to change the laws, making it a requirement that all parades receive police approval.
• There were an astonishing number of bomb-throwing anarchists in the world at that moment in history, but even when you added them all up, they were an asterisk next to the victims of the Triangle fire, or the Ludlow Massacre, and countless other industrial accidents or labor conflicts that characterized the era. The invention of dynamite had meant that the government and the corporations no longer had a monopoly on devastating violence. But they were still its greatest practitioners.
• Robert Moses had not yet streamlined the flow of automobile traffic between Manhattan and the suburbs of Long Island;
• Every country in Europe has recognized the right of conscientious objectors—of men who refuse to engage in war on the ground that they are opposed to taking life. Yet this democratic country makes no such provision for those who will not commit murder at the behest of the war profiteers. Thus the “land of the free and the home of the brave” is ready to coerce free men into the military yoke. We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, anti-militarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic governments.
• delivered by mail to the offices of Seattle mayor Ole Hanson on the morning of April 27, 1919. The war had ended six months earlier with the final armistice signed by Germany, but Hanson was in Colorado promoting the final Victory Loan campaign to raise money to support peacetime rebuilding in Europe. And so the Gimbel’s box was opened by an assistant who, in a stroke of enormous good fortune, happened to be holding the box upside down as he unwrapped it. The bomb inside the box had been wired with a detonation device similar to the one Erich Muenter had deployed in the Capitol bombing: rigged so that removing the top of the package would shatter a small vial of sulfuric acid, which would then drip down onto the dynamite caps and instigate the explosion. Opening the box the wrong way up inadvertently foiled the plan, causing the acid to spill out onto the floor and leaving the dynamite undetonated.
• the infernal machine at Attorney General Palmer’s home had been only one of nine explosives that had detonated that night. The anarchists had targeted a church, several judges, immigration officials, industrialists, a city mayor, and a state congressman. All the bombs exploded within minutes of the D.C. blast—in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and at suburban residences in Massachusetts and New Jersey. In the history of terrorism on American soil, only the 9/11 attacks compare to the June 1919 bombing campaign in the scope and complexity of the operation.
• the Editorial File System was a genuinely national database. In just two months, the Radical Division collected fifty thousand index cards documenting radical activity across the country. Hoover had weaponized library science in the service of subduing the revolutionary threat.
• On Saturday, September 28, Goldman was released from prison. She was transported to New York and brought to the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, where she secured a $15,000 bond for her release on the deportation order. There was still the matter of the $10,000 fine for the original crimes under the Espionage Act. For that, she had to sign an affidavit testifying that she possessed insufficient financial assets to pay the fine. The agent gave her a suspicious look. “You’re dressed so swell,” he said, “funny you claim to be poor.” “I am a multimillionaire in friends,” she replied.
• what you can never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep; born in a poisonous society which is falling apart, it is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations which are opening a breach in contemporary authority. It is everywhere, which makes anarchy elusive.
• The ideological battle of the twentieth century ended up being fought between three worldviews that all relied on top-down authority: state capitalism, state communism, fascism. In part because markets themselves have elements of decentralized order that command economies do not, much of the planet ultimately embraced the least centralized of the bunch. But a large-scale society truly organized around the lateral entanglements of mutual aid? The world never got to run that experiment.
• How would the twentieth century have played out if Kropotkin had been adopted instead of Marx as the founding father of revolutionary leftism? If the radical vision had not been central planning and the Gulag, but rather a return to the hill towns and watchmaking collectives of the free cities, only this time with clean drinking water and electricity?
• Kropotkin’s friends petitioned Lenin to temporarily release the anarchists currently imprisoned in Moscow so that they could pay tribute to the man who had long been anarchism’s most persuasive advocate. The bureaucracy responded with a declaration that there were no anarchists in Moscow prisons, a statement straight out of Orwell’s 1984.