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Un-Made Men – Anarchy through the Steam –Kenneth Hite presents five fiendishly fantastic anarchist groups and six terribly terrific anarchists in this follow up to The Man You’re Looking At: A Who’s Who of Steampunk Spycraft.
In the steampunk era before World War One, the great criminal foe was not just the “Apache” gangs of thieves in Paris, or Jack the Ripper, or even a sinister mastermind like Adam Worth (the American-born model for Professor Moriarty). No, the Big Edwardian Bad was the anarchist movement of bombers, assassins, and subversives, lurking everywhere decent folk wouldn’t go and planning the overthrow of everything orderly and rational.
As one might expect from anarchism, the truth is considerably less clear, and not particularly well-ordered. Some anarchists were pacifists, some were freedom fighters, some were communists, some were libertarians, some were pamphleteers who sponsored criminals, and a good number of anarchists (it turned out) were police spies. In other words, you can have anarchist Good Guys like Emma Goldman (who had a lot of violent friends, but stuck to “propaganda of the word”) and anarchist Iffy Guys like Max Stirner (who believed that no human rights outweighed the use of force), and anarchist Bad Guys like “Ravachol,” the celebrity dynamiter guillotined in 1892, or Emile Henri, the classic trust-fund agitator who tossed a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris in 1894.
But the bottom line is this: lots of anarchists blew up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people. Anarchist bombing campaigns targeted Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere. Anarchist assassins killed Tsar Alexander II, President Carnot of France, two Spanish prime ministers, Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, King Umberto I of Italy, King Carlos I of Portugal, King George I of Greece, Prime Minister Stolypin of Russia, and President William McKinley, along with scores of governors, judges, and police officials. This was called the “propaganda of the deed.” Between 1914 and 1920, the anarchist Luigi Galleani and his followers set off bombs in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York again. (A 1919 bombing almost killed Franklin D. Roosevelt.) A Galleanist poisoned the soup of the Archbishop of Chicago and 100 of his guests in 1916. (A quick-thinking doctor administered an emetic; nobody died.) The Wall Street bombing of 1920 killed 38 people and wounded 400. So perhaps a little fictional demonization is not entirely out of line.
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