The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century by Scott Miller

Author:Scott Miller [Miller, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780679604983
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-06-14T07:00:00+00:00

LUNCHROOM

Emma Goldman found herself in an unlikely place for an aspiring anarchist the summer of 1892—behind the counter of a lunchroom in Worcester, Massachusetts, preparing sandwiches and grilling pancakes. With Alexander Berkman and their friend Modest “Fedya” Stein, a photographer and onetime love interest, Goldman had transformed a ramshackle store into an attractive restaurant that bustled from breakfast until well into the evening.

Running a business didn’t exactly belong in the anarchist handbook, but Goldman longed to be liberated from the sewing machines she labored over in New York. With any luck, they would earn enough money to leave the United States, where, in Berkman’s view, even the typical farmer was a “small capitalist,” and return to Russia. With surprising pride for someone who disdained the American economic system, Goldman would later write about how their lunch parlor prospered, enough to quickly repay a $150 loan taken to get the restaurant started and to invest in a soda-water fountain and what Goldman found to be “lovely colored dishes.”1

One day in early July 1892, Goldman brought an ice cream to a customer who was relaxing with a newspaper. As she set the dish on the table, she sneaked a peek over his shoulder at the day’s headlines. Her eyes fixing on one, her face hardened. “Are you sick, young lady, can I do anything for you?” asked the customer as she leaned in to read. “Yes,” Goldman answered. “You can let me have your paper. You won’t have to pay me for the ice-cream. But I must ask you to leave. I must close the store.”2 In a place called Homestead, Pennsylvania, the revolution that she, Most, Berkman, and other radicals had long dreamed of seemed about to begin.

Perched on a bend in the Monongahela River seven miles upstream from Pittsburgh, dingy Homestead was home to Carnegie Steel Company’s most important and technologically efficient plant. Clanking and hissing day and night, every day of the year save Christmas and the Fourth of July, the works consumed a massive six hundred acres. When shifts changed each afternoon, some 3,800 exhausted people would pass through its gates, many confident that they were reasonably well paid by the standards of other plants. Yet few here knew anything other than misery and squalor.

The muddy river that flowed swiftly around the town was so full of pollutants, including sulfuric acid, that “no respectable microbe would live in it,” muttered one resident.3 Hundreds of smokestacks at Homestead and other nearby factories belched so much filth into the sky that the sun rarely penetrated what was a nearly permanent yellow haze hanging in the trees. In the meager town, as “squalid as could well be imagined,”4 which sprawled out up the hill from the factory gates, there were no paved streets nor a sewage system; most of the town’s eleven thousand residents had to relieve themselves at outdoor privies.5

Carnegie himself rarely visited the site, and with good reason. It didn’t fit the image he worked hard to create and maintain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.