France, Alternative Libertaire AL #249 - Read: Frank Harris,
"The Bomb" (fr, it, pt) [machine translation]
If the disaffection for the demonstrations of May 1 will at least have a positive aspect,
it is the effort made, especially by libertarians to give new meaning to that date
mobilization of the labor movement. ---- The story of the martyrs of Chicago, eight
anarchists convicted of a bombing in Chicago in 1886, is now a little better known. Yet if
the innocence of those convicted is now consensus to the extent that memorial was
established by US authorities at the place of the explosion, there remains a mystery in
this case: the real bomber against the police never discovered. ---- Yet in 1908, the
American journalist Irish Frank Harris published a novel, The Bomb, in which he argued
that the culprit was a German immigrant Rudolph Schnaubelt. Better yet, this book is
Rudolph Schnaubelt who told his life including his short stint in Chicago, where he threw
the bomb at police officers to protect a meeting of strikers. So in January 2015, while
advocating terrorism back into fashion in the courts, the editions The Last Drop chose to
publish the first French translation of this novel.
It reveals the (over) life of the countless immigrants, especially Germans, then
populating a full American industrial expansion. Five of the eight convicts were born in
Germany, was the son of a German immigrant, and yet another was an English immigrant and
one was American.
Frank Harris, himself a journalist and Irish immigrant, therefore begins easily into the
role of Schnaubelt, cultivated young German, who launches an assault on an American dream
that turns into a nightmare few weeks. It is a shock to him to find out what working
class, largely immigrant, which he was almost completely foreign, who was raised in a
family of small relatively affluent artisans. The detailed account of the living and
working conditions of migrant workers, but also the construction of a workers' movement of
their own, to better understand the journey of one who chooses reluctantly violent action.
We meet these anarchists who then form the core of this movement. Anarchists rather
special in that it is difficult to understand what separates the socialists as they demand
the nationalization of a large part of the economy. The description Frank Harris made
their debates and their speech shows the gap between the political positions of these
libertarians and those of European anarchists, but also the intellectual ferment, the
frantic search for a new society and the enthusiastic proliferation new and subversive ideas.
One feels in every page generalized xenophobia in New York and Chicago, forcing immigrants
to hide their accent and live them, leaving them to the thank you of systematic police
violence. This novel is shocking, even for people who have a priori no interest in the
libertarian movement, provided, however, bear the pages describing the relationship of
Rudolph and Elsie, a touching disuse.
Renaud (AL Alsace)
Frank Harris, The Bomb, The Last Drop, January 2015, 300 pages, 20 euros.
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Lire-Frank-Harris-La-Bombe
