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"Through their control over the hours we work, the wages we receive and the condition of our labor . . . the lords of Steel try to rule us as did the royalists against whom our forefathers rebelled. They have interfered in every way with out right to organize. . . . They have sent among us swarms of stool pigeons. . . . They have kept among us armies of company gunmen. . . ." When the speeches were over, a thousand workmen lined up, marched with wreaths to the graves of four of the Homestead dead of 1892. In their ears rang the chant of Patrick J. Fagan. U.M.W. district president: "Let the blood of these labor pioneers who were massacred here by Pinkertons in 1892 be the seed of this new organization in 1936.
And may the souls of the martyrs rest in peace. Amen." Terrorist. They did not speak his name, but an uneasy ghost hovered over the militants at Homestead last week. In 1892 Alexander Berkman was a naming young anarchist running an ice-cream parlor in Worcester, Mass. His partner in business and love was an equally radical young woman named Emma Goldman. They decided that Henry Clay Frick must pay with his life for the Homestead workers' deaths, prepared a bomb which fizzled out on a Staten Island meadow. Then Alexander Berkman got pistol and dag ger, went to Pittsburgh, forced his way into Prick's office, shot and stabbed him. The steelmaster recovered and the anarchist, grown suddenly famed as the No. 1 U. S. terrorist, went to prison.
He emerged 14 years later, bald, nearsighted, learned, his notoriety undimmed. As he went up & down the land preaching anarchism, the Press suspected him of performing or inciting almost every act of terrorism that occurred. Steelmaster Frick was said to have spent $10,000 per year having him watched. In 1917 he and Emma Goldman were arrested for obstructing the Draft, in 1919 ordered deported to Russia with 247 other Reds. Short time before he sailed, reporters brought him news of Henry Clay Prick's death, asked for comment. Said Alexander Berkman: "Just say he was deported by God."
Soon bitterly disillusioned with bureaucratic Russia, Anarchists Berkman and Goldman fled that country, became unwelcome world wanderers. Discovered in Paris in 1930, Berkman was deported to Belgium, later allowed to settle on the Riviera when he convinced French police that he was now only a harmless translator. Emma Goldman was 50 miles away in her villa at St. Tropez last week when, in his mean, fifth-floor flat in Nice, Alexander Berkman, obscure, outmoded, 65, wracked by uremia and with only $80 to his name, once more drew a pistol, this time used it to kill himself.