This book traces how the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel (who went on to start the Nobel Prizes) led to the birth of the anarchist movement, which in turn led to the birth of the modern forensics-driven law enforcement agencies. Concentrating heavily on Emma Goldman and Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, this is mostly set in New York City.
I can say this was a highly researched, informative, not dryly written book that seemed to not be able to make up its mind about anarchism. Johnson simultaneously admires anarchism and its desire to have Governments replaced with Union-held Guild Cities, and believe it was a naive, bloodthirsty movement that sowed the seeds of its own destruction. This is covered in a kind of circuitous path; Johnson would start to make a point, meander off into a tangent about another subject, and then pick up the original point twenty or thirty pages later. The police meanwhile, are shown as a bunch of neanderthal brutes on the take until two or three good men drag them kicking and screaming into honesty and decent police work. No one escapes this book completely unscathed; the police are corrupt, Hoover was pencil pusher given too much power (true), Berkman was a weak, undisciplined, unpragmatic statutory rapist, and both Emma Goldman and her mentor Peter Kropotkin are singlehandedly responsible for the death of the Anarchist movement in the US because they were too much unlike Gandhi. What a has to do with b I don’t know, but Johnson sticks to that point hard.
You will also read a lot about how every Anarchist bombing is equal in the scale of terror and horror as 9/11. I could understand one event (the spate of bombings in 1919, for example), but every single one? We’re stretching a bit there, in my humble opinion.
Two of the biggest focuses of Goldman seem to be her strong lack of desire to curb her opinions (nor should she have had to) and her views on “free love” (great apparently for Berkman, disapproved of in Goldman). Her interview with Nellie Bly, another powerhouse of womanhood at the time, is given a passing reference, as is Emma’s attendance of a lecture by a young Freud. Which I know is not necessary in a book about anarchism and modern policework, but when the book seems to be 1/3 anarchy, 1/3 modern detectives, and 1/3 Goldman, you start expecting a deeper dive.
Though Bly, Freud, Berkman, Nobel, Hoover, Goldman and Kropotkin are not the only famous names mentioned here; you also get Teddy Roosevelt, Rhinelander Waldo (Ragtime connection for the win!), Margaret Sanger, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Louise Berger, J.P. Morgan, Alexander Hamilton’s great-granddaughter (who marries Arthur Hale Woods, one of the people responsible for the Modern Detective), Carnegie, Frick, FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Darwin, Marx, Maxim Gorky, Rockerfeller, Palmer Mitchell, Lenin, Trotsky, Eugene Debs, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zion, the Rosenbergs, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Johnson crams so many people into a who’s who spiderweb that I never knew connected this closely.
I don’t regret reading this book (as much as it seems that I’m denigrating it), I just also can pick out the few things I found problematic. It has reawoke the plan I have to visit Chicago the next time I drive out to the West Coast and see Emma Goldman’s grave; it’s near the memorial to the Haymarket riots (something else mentioned in this book), and Belle Gunness, “Butcher of Men”. Because when you have a mother with a degree in History with a minor in Women’s History (which she got by writing a partial thesis on Emma Goldman) who handed you countless books in your youth about the labor movement and anarchism, and imparted to you a fascination with visiting famous gravestones (that started with Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC and Clover Adams’ grave), that is a perfectly natural plan for a vacation.