Berkman, Alexander

BERKMAN, ALEXANDER (1870–1936). Frequently remembered as the man who shot Henry Clay Frick, Alexander (“Sasha”) Berkman was a leading figure in the American anarchist movement in the early twentieth century. Berkman secured his reputation by serving as a committed activist and editor of two major anarchist periodicals prior to the World War I, Mother Earth and The Blast.

Berkman was born in Vilnius, Lithuania to a Jewish merchant family. Already interested in radicalism, he came to the United States in 1888 and quickly became known in anarchist circles. In 1892, after workers were shot at the Carnegie steel mills in Homestead, Berkman attempted to kill Frick, the chairman of Carnegie Steel. Frick, although wounded, made a speedy recovery. Berkman spent the next fourteen years in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, an experience he described in his classic account of prison life, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912).

Upon his release from prison Berkman resumed his activism. Together with his lifelong friend Emma Goldman, he became a leader of the American anarchist movement as a lecturer, organizer, and editor of Mother Earth. He continued to favor “propaganda of the deed” to hasten sociopolitical change. On July 4, 1914, a bomb intended for John D. Rockefeller’s mansion detonated prematurely in a Harlem Lexington Avenue tenement. Three anarchists who had ties to Mother Earth and the Ferrer Center were killed, along with a neighbor. Berkman was involved in planning the attack as retribution for the Ludlow massacre. In 1916–1917 Berkman published his own revolutionary journal, The Blast, in San Francisco, where he became enmeshed in the Mooney-Billings case. Although an indictment against him in the case was dropped, he continued to work for the defense.

During World War I Berkman organized antimilitarist demonstrations and lectures across the United States. After America’s entry into the war, Berkman and Goldman founded the No Conscription League. They were arrested in New York for violating the draft law and spent the next two years in prison. In 1919 Berkman and Goldman were deported to the Soviet Union. Initially enthusiastic about the revolution, Berkman quickly became disillusioned with Bolshevik leadership, sentiments he chronicled in The Bolshevik Myth (1925), one of the earliest critiques of the incipient totalitarianism in Soviet Russia. Berkman left Russia for Germany before moving in 1925 to France, where he lived the rest of his life. Working as an editor and translator, he continued to participate in political relief work and published his concise exposition of anarchist communism, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929). In 1936, suffering from prostate disease and chronic pain, Berkman committed suicide.

Alexander Berkman: Rebel and Anarchist. New York: Alexander Berkman Memorial Committee and Jewish Anarchist Federation, 1936.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Avrich, Paul, and Karen Avrich. Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Fellner, Gene, ed. Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader. Foreword by Howard Zinn. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004.

Books by or about Alexander Berkman. Internet Archive Website.