The Infernal Machine Quotes

“Goldman found Kropotkin “ill and worn-looking, a mere shadow of the sturdy man I had known,” but still “gentle and gallant,” and eager to talk political philosophy with his comrades. He was resigned to the bleak reality of post-revolutionary Russia. All anarchists, he said, had “foreseen the dangers of Marxism and its theories.” Concentrating power in a revolutionary state would inevitably lead to the abuse of that power and a new kind of oppression that shackled the human spirit as effectively as the czarist regime had. Goldman later described the conversation in her memoirs:”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“AK-47s—but the general tactics of terrorism remain anarchism’s most enduring legacy. Could that legacy have been avoided? If Goldman and Kropotkin had fully renounced violence as a political tactic—if they had adopted the model of peaceful resistance that Mahatma Gandhi was so successfully developing in India during the same period—could they have managed to separate out anarchism from terrorism? Or was the propensity for violence a flaw that had been so deeply forged back in the original furnace of czarist Russia that it was impossible to extricate? For Berkman, Sofia Perovskaya’s plot to take the life of Alexander II clearly left too formative an impression for him to ever forswear the propaganda of the deed.”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“pervasive. What did survive from the anarchist movement, though, were the bombs. The guild system did not prosper as a blueprint for social organization in the twentieth century. But terrorism did. There were different”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“What did survive from the anarchist movement, though, were the bombs. The guild system did not prosper as a blueprint for social organization in the twentieth century. But terrorism did. There were different political philosophies—and religions—behind the attentats that followed in the wake of the anarchist movement, but the overall numbers are undeniable: a monstrous upward slope in terrorist violence that, for Americans at least, culminated in the 9/11 attacks. In 2014, the deadliest year in the history of global terrorism, almost fifty thousand people died in attacks around the world. And while that death toll is a small fraction of total human mortality, the psychological and political impact of all that violence carries a heavy weight. “A girdle of dynamite encircles the world,” Johann Most had announced after the death of Alexander II. Today the means of destruction are more varied—passenger”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“the United States, anarchism made a few isolated appearances in the national conversation in the decade that followed Berkman and Goldman’s exile. In 1920, a horse-drawn carriage loaded with a hundred pounds of dynamite exploded on Wall Street, killing forty people. The perpetrators were never identified, but they were believed to be members of the Galleanist anarchist group behind the 1919 bombing campaign. The sense of anarchism as a looming threat to the establishment had its final hurrah with the arrest, trial, and execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti several years later; after that, it was the threat”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“The sense of anarchism as a looming threat to the establishment had its final hurrah with the arrest, trial, and execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti several years later; after that, it was the threat of Soviet-”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“Goldman confessed to Berkman—whom she had begun calling Sasha, the diminutive form of Alexander—that her failed marriage had left her jaded about the institution itself. “If ever I love a man again, I will give myself to him without being bound by the rabbi or the law,” she vowed, “and when that love dies, I will leave without permission.” They were scandalous values for a woman to hold in the late 1800s, much less give voice to, but Berkman received them approvingly.”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. —OSCAR WILDE”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“After another clash erupted between striking workers and Chicago police at the Reaper Works in May of 1886, anarchist groups organized a rally at the city’s Haymarket Square as a memorial for the strikers killed by the police. Two thousand workers gathered to hear speeches by anarchist leaders August Spies and Albert Parsons. When the police moved in to break up the rally, an unseen assailant tossed a dynamite bomb at the officers, killing one immediately and maiming several others. Gunfire erupted; by the time the mêlée ended, seven officers were dead, along with at least four protestors. As many as a hundred others were injured in the riot. The Haymarket Affair sparked an immediate crackdown against the radical groups; Parsons and Spies were both arrested, along with six others, and accused of being accessories to the murder of the officer killed by the bomb. During the trial, key evidence was supplied by the lead Pinkerton undercover agent, Andrew C. Johnson, who claimed firsthand knowledge of the anarchists’ murderous plot. In response, Albert Parsons denounced the Pinkertons as “a private army…at the command and control of those who grind the faces of the poor, who keep wages down to the starvation point.” In the end, the jury sided with Johnson, and all eight were condemned to death. Four of them—including both Spies and Parsons—were executed, despite the fact that no evidence ever directly connected them to the infernal machine that had exploded during the rally. A fifth condemned prisoner committed suicide the night before the executions, detonating a dynamite blasting cap with his teeth in his prison cell.”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“In early December while they were enjoying a boisterous dinner with friends in Chicago, a reporter passed along a report that had just come down the wire. Financier Henry Clay Frick had died of a heart attack at his Fifth Avenue mansion at the age of 69.

Berkman took in the news with a wry smile and then proclaimed, "Deported by God.”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective

“There was still the matter of the $10,000 fine for the original crimes under the Espionage Act. For that she had to sign an affidavit testifying that she possessed insufficient financial assets to pay the fine.

The agent gave her a suspicious look. "You're dress is swell," he said. "Funny you claim to be poor."

"I am a multi-millionaire in friends," she replied.”
― Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective