Arguing that the 1848 revolutionaries had been too weak-willed, he insisted on the need to kill ‘all the representatives of the system of violence and murder which rules the world and lays it waste’. By these grim lights, ‘the most warm-hearted of man of the French Revolution was – Robespierre’. The spirits of Babeuf and Buonarroti inspired his hope that ‘History will judge us in accordance with this, and our fate will only be determined by the use we make of our victory, not the manner of gaining it over enemies, who have banished every humane consideration from the world.’ It was now a matter of ‘rooting out’ the tyrant’s ‘helpers’, who, like the disarmed bandit or the captured tiger, are ‘incurable’. The entire people were to help identify and kill these aides of tyrants. Heinzen added aphoristically, ‘the road to humanity lies over the summit of cruelty’.
In the writings of Heinzen, the ancient doctrine of tyrannicide was amplified into one of modern, indiscriminate terrorism. Although he never terrorised anyone, he had a fertile imagination as a writer. Putting himself in the shoes of a future reporter, he imagined a series of terrorist killings. A royal train snaking around an Alpine precipice would be hurled over the edge by a massive explosion caused by a revolutionary laying a thimbleful of ‘fulminating silver’ on the track. Another fictional report had revolutionary guerrillas armed with heavy guns which would emit showers of poisoned shot. A third had Prussian soldiers fleeing from iron tubes that fired showers of molten lead; but as they retreated they stepped on pressure mines set beneath the pavements. Other psychopathic reveries included the use of poisons delivered in every conceivable manner from pinpricks to glass bullets. Copper explosive balls would blast every palace, and all those, from cleaners to kings, dwelling within them. One day ballistic missiles and mines might be powerful enough ‘to destroy whole cities with 100,000 inhabitants’.
These were the violent fantasies of a life that settled into agreeable domesticity after the initial difficulties of exile, for in October 1850 Heinzen and his family returned to New York. He reverted to editing and lecturing, settling in Louisville, Cincinnati, and finally back in New York, where the family’s chronic money troubles were partially alleviated by Mrs Heinzen’s millinery and needlework trade. In early 1860 they moved to Boston, where they lodged for the next twenty years in the home of a fellow radical, a Polish woman doctor who founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children. There Heinzen enjoyed something like peace of mind, tending his garden and growing vines to remind him of his native Rhineland. Having enjoyed robust health all his life, in late 1879 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and slowly died.2
Heinzen’s younger German contemporary Johann Most was more a man of action than a theoretician. For anarchists of his persuasion, violence was attractive because it was unencumbered with theories that seemed designed to frustrate action. It hardly needs to be said that many anarchists – notably the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy – were opposed to violence, thinking there were other routes to the federalism and mutualism their creed desired.
Born in 1846 in Bavaria, Most experienced terrible facial disfigurement at a young age when a disease resulting from parental neglect was treated by incompetent surgeons. He became a bookbinder as well as a committed Social Democrat, being sentenced in Austria in 1870 to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. He had played a leading role in a rowdy demonstration before Vienna’s parliament building. This was the first of many spells in jail that Most underwent on two continents; like Kropotkin, he became something of an authority on comparative penology. After his early release, he caused further provocation by going about with a group of ‘Jacobins’ threatening the extermination of ‘mankind’s’ enemies.
Deported to Germany, Most quickly became one of the leading figures in the Social Democratic Party. In 1874 he was elected a member of the Reichstag, which he attended by day, while editing socialist newspapers at night. His rhetorical intemperance meant that the sergeant at arms frequently had to eject him from the chamber where even his own comrades dreaded his interjections. In 1874 he was sentenced to eighteen months in Plötzensee prison for inciting violence during a speech commemorating the Paris Commune. In 1878, Bismarck’s introduction of anti-socialist laws, following two failed attempts on the life of the Kaiser, meant that Most had to flee abroad. He chose England; as the Berlin Political Police claimed, ‘The whole of European revolutionary agitation is directed from London,’ in ominous anticipation of the delusional laxities of contemporary ‘Londonistan’. Most founded a paper, called Freiheit, whose revolutionary stridency embarrassed German Social Democrats trying to negotiate the twilight of legality and illegality that Bismarck had consigned them to by allowing them a presence in the Reichstag while suppressing their larger organisation and its propaganda organs. The German Social Democrat leadership began to mock Most as ‘General Boom Boom’, slinking about London with his red scarf and wide-brimmed black hat, a dagger in one hand and a pistol in the other. The Party leadership duly expelled their erstwhile comrade, who reacted by moving from being a socialist revolutionary to an anarchist-Communist under the influence of people he met in London, though his grasp of anarchist theory was shaky as he did not have French. He became a convinced advocate of ‘propaganda by the deed’ or as he vividly put it: ‘Shoot, burn, stab, poison and bomb’. In England, his intemperance was ignored – much to the annoyance of foreign authorities – until he responded to the assassination of Alexander II (‘Triumph, Triumph’) by calling for the death of ‘a monarch a month’.
At the instigation of a German teacher shocked by his paper, Most was arrested and charged with seditious libel. Convicted by an English jury, he was sentenced to sixteen months’ hard labour, which he served at Coldbath Fields in Clerkenwell on the site of what is nowadays the Mount Pleasant Royal Mail sorting office. Despite being in solitary confinement, he managed to write articles for Freiheit with the aid of needles and lavatory paper which were smuggled out of the prison. The paper contrived to celebrate the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin – ‘We side with the brave Irish rebels and tender them hearty brotherly compliments’ – a stance that led to police raids on the temporary editors and the impounding of their typesetting equipment. Upon his release from prison, Most resolved to take himself and Freiheit to America. He sailed for New York in December 1882, quickly setting himself up among the foreign radicals huddled together in the slums of the East Side. Schwab’s saloon was where Most held court, with a bust of Marat glowering from amid the bar’s rows of bottles glinting in the gaslight and the fug of cigar smoke. In this milieu, with its cacophonous revolutionary talk in German, Russian and Yiddish, the bushy-haired and bearded Most would meet ‘Red’ Emma Goldman, an uneducated seamstress of Russian Jewish origin who fell in love with the short and grim veteran revolutionary.3
The violence of American labour disputes in the 1870s and 1880s was visceral in the smudge-like cities where vast impoverished immigrant populations speaking a Babel of tongues seemed like a threatening alien race to comfortable native elites. Wage cuts, layoffs and mechanisation were every employer’s solution to downturns in profits. Strikes were met with extreme violence, reminiscent of a modern banana republic. In Pennsylvania, militant miners of Irish extraction nicknamed the Molly Maguires shot it out with the strike-breaking Pinkerton Detective Agency and ten of the former were hanged. During major emergencies when club-wielding or pistol-firing police or militias proved inadequate to quell violent disorders that arose during strikes, sun-burnished regular infantrymen were given a break from annihilating the Sioux. For weren’t alien anarchists the white equivalent of anarchistic Apaches or ravening packs of wolves?
The press contributed to an atmosphere of hysteria. In Chicago, newspaper editors openly called for the throwing of grenades into the ranks of striking sailors or advocated lacing the food dispensed