Berkman A
ACHIEVEMENTS: Anarchist organizer and political author and editor.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: Birth-name: Ovsei Osipovich Berkman
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: 21 November 1870 Vilnius, Lithuania, part of the Russian Empire
3rd September 1728, in Birmingham, England.
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: 28 June 1936, Nice, France, age 66
DISCIPLINE: Anarchist writer and organizer
FIELD: social and economic revolution
LANGUAGE: Russian, English, German, French.
PARENTS: Father Joseph Schmidt Berkman, mother, Yetta Natanson.
SIBLINGS: one brother, Maxim
SPOUSE: none.
CHILDREN: none.
EDUCATION: Russian university.
MAJOR WORK: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). The Bolshevik Myth (1925) Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929)
LIFE AND TIMES:
Alexander Berkman was a Russian born anarchist and political thinker. Born to a wealthy merchant father, his uncle was Maxim Natanson, a leader of the Russian populist group, ‘People’s Will,’ and later a leader of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries.
Berkman was from an early age influenced by these Russian revolutionaries who fought for Russian freedom and equality and who were willing to sacrifice themselves for their ideals. Berkman left Russia for Germany in 1886, arriving in New York City in February 1888, not long after the trial and execution of the Haymarket anarchists, an event that had a lasting effect upon him, as it did for many anarchists and socialist of his generation.
Berkman soon became involved with the vibrant radical and anarchist movements of New York of this period.
It here that he first met Emma Goldman*. The two soon became lovers and companions, working together toward their ideal of anarchist communism, as it was best articulated by Russian anarchist thinker Kropotkin*.
It was during the 1892 Homestead Steel lockout and strike near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that Berkman and Goldman first came to public notice. At the time the two had been planning to travel back to Russian to take part in the revolutionary struggle there. However, when the lockout and strike at Frick*-run steel plant turned violent, and first Pinkerton detectives and then the state militia were called in to quash the union workers, Berkman and Goldman plotted to help the cause and to assassinate Frick.
On 22 July 1892 Berkman walked into Frick’s office and shot at Frick several times. As guards wrested him to the ground he also managed to stab Frick. Frick was not mortally wounded and recovered quickly.
Berkman was captured, put on trial and found guilty. Berkman refused, upon anarchist principles, to be defended by an attorney, and tried to defend himself, using the trial as propaganda for anarchism. Unfortunately, his inability to speak English at the time, and the professional witnesses used by the prosecution guaranteed his conviction.
The judge tripled the attempted murder charges, sentencing Berkman to 22 years. Berkman spent much of his prison sentence in solitary confinement, especially after a tunnel escape (planned by Goldman and other anarchists in 1900) was discovered. In total, Berkman served fourteen years before being released in 1906, thanks to a change in Pennsylvania commutation law.
Upon his release in 1906, Berkman adjusted to life outside prison, becoming editor of Goldman’s monthly magazine of anarchist politics, theory and literature: Mother Earth. Berkman became an important force in the U.S. radical and anarchist movement. In 1912 he published Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, which chronicled his experience, life, and theoretical, emotional and spiritual development while in prison.
The book is still regarded a classic of prison literature. During this period Berkman continued to work for anarchist and labor causes, helping to found and run the Ferrer Modern School in New York in 1910.
In 1914 he was involved in the protest against events during the Ludlow coal strike, in which women and children where shot and burned to death in their tents. The Ludlow Massacre, as it came to be know, mobilized radical and liberal forces against John D. Rockefeller, who owned the coal field. Berkman led the protest in New York and the free-speech fight in Tarrytown, the suburban village where Rockefeller has his home. The violent suppression of this free-speech protest led to a plot to bomb Rockefeller or his property. However, before the plot could be completed, the bomb accidentally exploded in a New York City tenement, killing three Russian anarchists and one bystander.
The following year Berkman left New York City and the editorship of Mother Earth, to travel to the west coast and work on the defense of two anarchists, David Caplan and Mathew Schmidt, under arrest and facing trial for conspiracy for the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing.
After traveling across the country on a lecture tour he arrived in Los Angeles, before settling in San Francisco in late 1915. In January 1916 he published the first issue of his “revolutionary labor paper” The Blast.
The paper immediately came under the gaze of the government authorities for its criticism of US involvement in Mexico, and its militant defense of labor during a violent struggle between labor and capital in California at the time. Then, following the 22 July 1916 “Preparedness Day” bombing, Berkman and Goldman were the first to come to the defense of labor organizers Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings.
In 1917 following the US entry into World War One, Berkman and Goldman organized the No-Conscription League, to protest forced registration and draft. They were quickly arrested and were among the first to be tried and convicted for protesting involvement in the war.
In the summer of 1917 they were each sentenced to two years in prison and $10,000 fines. Following their release from prison in 1919 they were deported in December, as the “Red Scare” led by Attorney General > Palmer* and Herbert Hoover gained momentum.
Berkman and Goldman left the United States for Russia to take part in what they saw as a great social revolution in their mother country. However, after cooperating with the Bolshevik government for some time, they became disillusioned with Bolshevik repression and imprisonment of anarchists and, following the Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921, they left the country.
Berkman and Goldman traveled through central Europe, searching for a place that would allow them to take up residence, they traveled to Stockholm and Berlin, before finally settling in France. In 1925 Berkman published The Bolshevik Myth, a record of his two years in Russia. He went on to publish Now and After: the ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929), a highly readable primer that explained the theoretical principles of anarchist communism.
ASSESSMENT: A major figure in the anarchist movement.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Alexander Berkman, anarchist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Falk, Candace, Pateman, Barry, Moran, Jessica, Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vols 1-2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003-2004
Avrich, Paul. The Modern School Movement. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Avrich, Paul. “Alexander Berkman” in Anarchist Portraits. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Burwood, Linnea Goodwin. “Berkman, Alexander.” http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00056.html. American National Biography Online.