Gary L. Doebler

a review of

Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, by Gene Fellner, Four Walls Eight Windows, P.O. Box 548, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 354 pp.

Historians don’t often agree on much, but for as long as I’ve been reading and learning about the life of Alexander Berkman, authors of books on anarchism and related subjects who make some mention of Berkman have decried in the same breath the lack of scholarship devoted to him.

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Related story: “Tony” Revealed, Fifth Estate #377, March 2008

On July 26, 1900, officials of Western Penitentiary in Woods Run, Pennsylvania, discovered a tunnel which zigzagged some three hundred feet from the basement of the red brick house of 28 Sterling Street, which bordered the southern wall of the prison, to a point just inside the east wall. A superlative feat of engineering, the underground passage was equipped with an ingenious ventilation system as well as an electric warning device.

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Monument to the anarchist Haymarket martyrs, Waldheim Cenetary, Chicago

Last issue, the Fifth Estate announced a ceremony where the famed Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago was to be declared a federally designated National Historic Landmark. Unbeknown to us, there had been intense agitation by local anarchists against this. G.L. Doebler attended the dedication ceremony and his report makes clear why the opposition was so intense.

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I would like to invite your participation in an event that will remember Alexander Berkman on the centenary of his attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Strike of 1892. This will not be an event glorifying the assassination of individuals as a political method, a technique Berkman himself came to question long after his attentat against Frick. Rather, the purpose will be to remember Alexander Berkman—the person, the author, the radical—on the 100^th anniversary of the most important day of his life.

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Anarchist Alexander Berkman was sentenced to serve twenty-two years in prison for his attempt to shoot robber-baron Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead miners’ strike. While in prison, a plot was hatched to break him out. Who was the key figure involved in Berkman’s attempted prison escape?

Western Pennsylvania Warden Wright looks on as workers uncover the tunnel intended for Alexander Berkman’s escape (graphic by Rodrigo Quast)

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