A Criminal History of Mankind (82 page)

It was the newspapers who were mainly responsible for Frank’s eventual conviction. They discovered that the public appetite for stories about the Phagan murder was insatiable; any new fact about the case would sell ‘extras’. If facts were lacking, they could be invented - like the story that the walls of Frank’s office were covered with photographs of nude girls. If they pointed in the wrong direction - for example the discovery that the bite marks on Mary Phagan were not made by Frank’s teeth - they were ignored. For over two years, the Phagan story went on selling newspapers, until the day in August 1915 when Frank was dragged from jail by a lynch mob and hanged on a tree near Mary Phagan’s home. Even then, public interest remained as strong as ever; there were several books about the case, and three movies. The death of Mary Phagan touched some chord of public morbidity, like the murder of Maria Marten a century earlier. But in Maria’s case, it was the brutality that shocked; in Mary Phagan’s, it was the thought of rape. It is something of an anticlimax to learn that the medical evidence showed the assault was never completed, and she remained a virgin.

It seems somehow symbolic that the Frank case occurred on the eve of the First World War. It was the war that swept away the last vestiges of the Victorian outlook, and introduced our modern age of violence.

In fact, the violence had been gathering for more than three decades.

REVOLT

On 1 March 1881, the tsar of Russia, Alexander II, was returning to the palace after an inspection of his troops. In his pocket he was carrying a document that he had worked out with his advisers: a tentative plan for some kind of Russian parliament - the first step towards the English style of representative government. Although Alexander had freed the serfs, socialist agitation was increasing, and in the previous year, an anarchist bomb had destroyed the dining room of the Winter Palace a few minutes before the tsar and his family came in for dinner. Now, at last, he was prepared to relinquish a little of his absolute power.

As a precaution, the carriage was returning to the palace by an unaccustomed route. Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion. The carriage rocked, and its door was blown in, but the tsar was unharmed. Shakily, he looked out, and saw a man and a boy lying in the road, both bleeding. Alexander was a kindly man; he got out of the carriage to see whether they were badly injured. As he did so, there was another tremendous explosion - so great that it smashed the windows many streets away. The tsar was hurled on to his face, both his legs shattered. The bomb had been made of nitro-glycerine enclosed in a glass ball, and it had killed the assassin and twenty bystanders. Fragments of bloody flesh hung from trees and lampposts. The tsar was rushed back to his palace; an hour later, he died.

The assassin belonged to a group who called themselves Narodniki, or the Party of the People’s Will. They were followers of the revolutionary Michael Bakunin - who had been Marx’s chief rival for leadership of the First International and had been out-manoeuvred by Marx. Bakunin, in turn, was a follower of Pierre Joseph Proudhon - Marx’s pet detestation and the man who invented the phrase ‘property is theft’. It was Proudhon, in fact, who had coined the word ‘anarchy’, meaning the opposite of hierarchy: no government. But as this came to be used as a synonym for chaos, its devotees preferred to use the form ‘anarchism’. Bakunin had died in 1876, a disillusioned and disappointed man - ‘a Columbus who had never seen his America’ as his friend Alexander Herzen put it.

The Marxists believed that socialism would come about of its own accord, as the rotten structure of capitalism collapsed. The anarchists were less optimistic. They were firmly convinced of the basic goodness of human nature, of man’s ability to live in peace with his fellows in an ideal world. But in the meantime, power was in the hands of kings and police chiefs. And, since they were determined to hold on to it, the only way to bring about the Revolution was to ‘remove’ these enemies of the people. Even the gentle Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had been converted to anarchism out of the goodness of his heart, had begun to preach bombs and bullets in the late 1870s: ‘A single deed is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets.’ And in the 1870s, the anarchists had made four unsuccessful attempts on crowned heads: two on Wilhelm I of Germany, one on the king of Spain and one on the king of Italy. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II was their first major success. It was also a signal for a period of total repression in Russia. The police swooped; revolutionaries were arrested by the dozen, and either hanged or thrown into the Peter and Paul fortress. Censorship was reintroduced. The new tsar, Alexander III, detested the very word reform, and made a determined attempt to put back the clock to the days of Peter the Great. But it meant that he became virtually a prisoner in his own palace. He died prematurely in 1894, and was succeeded by his son Nicholas II, who was to be the last of the tsars.

Anarchism arrived in America in the late 1870s, and the city where it found most response was Chicago, a minor trading post that had turned into a major city overnight with the wealth from blast furnaces and cattle stockyards. It was full of immigrants, and the new entrepreneurs, true to the methods of their British counterparts, paid starvation wages. (Even three decades later, conditions were still so bad that an accurate description of the Chicago stockyards in Upton Sinclair’s novel
The Jungle
(1906) shocked the whole nation.) The result was that the workers tried to form trade unions, the bosses tried to break their strikes with blacklegs, and Chicago was in continual industrial ferment. A German immigrant, August Spies, founded a German-language anarchist newspaper called the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
- Workers Times - and urged the workers to stand up for their rights. He became particularly embittered when his brother was shot dead by a policeman for ‘creating a disturbance’ at a picnic, and cried in his newspaper: ‘Revenge! Revenge! Workingmen to arms!’ There was mob violence on 3 May 1886, when police and strikers clashed in front of the McCormick Harvester Company, and the following morning, the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
announced that there would be a mass meeting in the Haymarket that evening at 7.30. By 8 o’clock, three thousand people had assembled, and were listening to an inflammatory speech by Spies, urging them to arm themselves to meet the aggression of government hirelings. When another anarchist began to shout: ‘Kill the law, exterminate the capitalists, and do it tonight,’ the police decided it was time to intervene. The police chief ordered the mob to disperse. At that moment, a large black bomb went whizzing through the air, hissing like a skyrocket, and there was an explosion that could be heard far away. The police began to shoot. So did the crowd. When the mob finally dispersed, the anarchists carrying away their dead and wounded, it was found that seven policemen had been killed by the explosion. The police swooped on the office of the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
and five men were arrested, including Spies. Two days later, the police located a bomb factory; one of the men they arrested claimed that the anarchists had planned to bomb all the Chicago police stations simultaneously. The bomb maker, Louis Lingg, was also arrested. In August, eight anarchists were tried; seven were sentenced to death, the other to fifteen years in prison.

The verdict was obviously a miscarriage of justice in the sense that no one knew who had thrown the bomb. Splinters removed from dead policemen suggest that it was of the same type as those manufactured by Lingg. But there was no proof that any of the eight had been in any way responsible for the deaths of the seven policemen. However, the jury was in no mood for this kind of legal hairsplitting; as far as they were concerned, the American way of life was being threatened by homicidal maniacs who were taking advantage of American freedom of speech. Lingg succeeded in committing suicide in his cell with a capsule of fulminate - the explosive that detonates a bullet - and four others, including Spies, were hanged the next day. Lingg had written with his own blood ‘Long live anarchy!’ in his cell. The two other condemned men had their sentences commuted to prison terms.

Now that anarchism had martyrs, the movement became more powerful. Their basic mythology - that rulers and ‘bosses’ were criminals who had robbed the working man - was pure ‘magical’ thinking, a thin rationalisation of the ‘xenophobia’ of primitive tribes. Their basic philosophy - that when the rulers had been murdered, men would live together in perfect harmony - was completely untenable. We have seen how the Fielding brothers halted the crime wave in eighteenth-century London with a few Bow Street runners and horse patrols, and how it instantly started up again when the patrols were withdrawn. But the anarchists insisted that police were only necessary because of poverty, and that as soon as the Revolution had destroyed all authority, there would be more than enough of everything for everybody; people would only have to go and help themselves from the goods taken from the rich. As to work, five hours a day would be enough to support everybody in comfort... No one even suggested that if everybody was allowed to help themselves, the warehouses containing the goods of the rich would soon be empty; that would have been regarded as a libel on the nature of the poor. But Bernard Shaw sounded a note of realism in a Fabian pamphlet when he asked how, if human nature was so perfect, the oppression and corruption had arisen in the first place.

Anarchist disturbances came to France in the early 1890s. On May Day 1891, three anarchists were arrested for taking part in a demonstration and badly beaten up by the police. At their trial, the prosecuting attorney demanded the death sentence - an absurd demand, since the men were only accused of incitement to violence. The judge was more reasonable; he acquitted one, and sentenced the others to three and five years respectively. In the following year, there was an explosion at the home of the judge, which demolished a stairway but fortunately injured no one. Two weeks later, the home of the prosecuting lawyer was blown up. A left-wing professor who was arrested after the first explosion - and no doubt subjected to the vigorous interrogation methods of the French police - admitted that he had planned the attack, but said that it had been carried out by a man named Ravachol. This Ravachol, it seemed, was already known to the police - not as a political revolutionary, but as a burglar and suspected murderer. His real name was Konigstein, and he was believed to have killed four people - an old man and three old women - in the course of robberies.

On the evening of the attack on the home of the prosecutor, a gaunt, bearded man in his forties had dinner at the Restaurant Very on the Boulevard Magenta, and talked to the waiter, a man named Lhérot, about the explosion - which no one yet knew about. When the same man came back two days later, Lhérot tipped off the police and he was arrested. But was he Ravachol? Fortunately, the police had a new method of identification, invented by a police clerk named Bertillon. He believed that certain measurements were unique - the circumference of the head, length of hand, foot and so on - and had talked the police into giving his system a trial. Konigstein-Ravachol had been briefly under arrest after the murder of an old miser at his hut in the forest, but released for lack of evidence: however, Bertillon had taken his measurements at the time. They now proved that this man who had talked of bombing was Ravachol himself. (As a result, Bertillon became world-famous, and his system was adopted by every major police force in the world - only to be replaced in a few years by fingerprinting.)

The waiter Lhérot talked a little too triumphantly about his part in the arrest; the evening before the trial, there was a bomb explosion at the restaurant, which killed the proprietor, Lhérot’s brother-in-law.

Ravachol himself was a figure who gave the French public nightmares. Born forty-two years earlier, he had become the breadwinner of the family when his father - named Koenigstein - had deserted them when his son was eight. Like Troppmann, he became devoted to Eugene Sue’s
Wandering Jew
, and its revelations of the wickedness of the Jesuits had turned him into an atheist. When he became interested in anarchism, both he and a younger brother were dismissed by their employer. He watched the family starve - his young sister died - and dreamed of revenge. He took up robbery to supplement his income. He felt no remorse about his four victims because, he said, they were ‘middle class’.

The explosion in the restaurant intimidated the judges, and they sentenced Ravachol to a prison term - although bombing was a capital offence. But when the police were able to produce evidence for the four other murders, Ravachol was tried again and sentenced to death. He cried ‘I shall be avenged!’

In November of that year, a bomb was found in the Paris office of a mining company that was involved in a strike; a policeman carefully carried it off to the local station, where it exploded, killing five. Paris, suddenly, was thrown into panic; restaurants suffered as no one dared to venture into one. There was a rumour that the anarchists intended to poison the city’s reservoirs. But many of the younger poets and painters revelled in all the excitement and declared their support for anarchism.

In December 1893, another embittered member of the unemployed, August Vaillant, who had been put out on to the streets at the age of twelve, threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies. It was a small bomb, intended to alarm rather than kill. A poet named Laurent Tailhade was enthusiastic, and exclaimed: ‘What does it matter about the victims if it is a fine gesture?’ The judges disagreed, and Vaillant was executed. A week later, a bomb exploded in the restaurant of the Gare St-Lazare, killing one and injuring twenty. Two more explosions in Paris streets killed only one passer-by; and when a bomb exploded in the pocket of a Belgian anarchist named Jean Pauwels, killing him, he was found to be responsible for the two street explosions. A bomb in the Restaurant Foyot put out the eye of the poet Laurent Tailhade. The man who was finally arrested and tried for the Gare St-Lazare explosion, Emile Henry, said it was aimed against the bourgeoisie who could afford to eat in restaurants.

On 24 June 1894, the president of France, Sadi Carnot, was driving in an open carriage through the streets of Lyons, where he was visiting an exhibition; he told the police to allow people to approach him if they wanted to. A young man holding a rolled-up newspaper stepped forward, then removed a knife from the newspaper and plunged it into Carnot’s stomach, shouting ‘Vive la revolution! Vive l’anarchie!’ He proved to be a young Italian, Santo Caserio. Carnot died soon after. Caserio was executed shouting ‘Vive l’anarchie!’

The anarchist scare in France ended abruptly. The government put thirty anarchists on trial, accused of conspiracy. The jury refused to be stampeded, and acquitted them all, except three burglars. This rational gesture deprived the anarchists of more martyrs and took the steam out of their propaganda. Besides, leaders of the movement, such as Kropotkin and Malatesta, were already beginning to doubt the wisdom of violence when it attracted undesirables like Ravachol. The French socialist movement became theoretical once again.

In America, two events helped to take some of the bitterness out of the anarchist struggle. The most articulate and passionate spokesman of revolution, Johann Most (who had been expelled from Germany for liberalism, then from England for praising the Irishmen who assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park, Dublin) suddenly announced that he had ceased to support ‘the propaganda of the deed’; he denounced a young anarchist named Alexander Berkman who had made an attempt to kill the manager of the Carnegie Steel Works during a strike. The denunciation may have been prompted by the fact that Berkman had supplanted Most as the lover of a young Jewish revolutionary, Emma Goldman; nevertheless, it influenced large numbers of American anarchists. Then the governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, re-examined the case of the Chicago, anarchists and announced that the jury had been ‘packed’ with men who were specially chosen to convict. Altgeld’s motives were also not entirely disinterested - he had a personal grudge against Judge Gary, who had been in charge of the trial. Altgeld was defeated at the next election; but his gesture helped to restore the good name of American justice, and to undermine the anarchists’ insistence that everyone in authority was a crook.

In Spain, it was a grimmer story. The Spaniards are strangers to moderation. In January 1892, there was a minor peasants’ revolt in Andalusia. Farm-workers marched to try and free four men who had been imprisoned for taking part in labour agitations ten years before; police broke them up and four ringleaders were killed by garrotting. In September 1893, the Spanish Prime Minister, Martinez de Campos, was attacked by an anarchist as he reviewed troops in Barcelona; two bombs thrown by a man named Pallas killed his horse and six people, but left him only bruised. Pallas was garrotted. Seven weeks later, two bombs were thrown in a theatre in Barcelona, causing panic and leaving twenty-two dead and fifty injured. The police now began to make indiscriminate arrests - the figure ran into thousands - and tortured suspects to extort confessions. Seven people confessed and were executed, including the man who had admitted the theatre bombing.

In June 1896, a bomb was thrown at a religious procession in Barcelona, killing eleven and injuring forty. The premier, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, ordered more mass arrests and torture. Four suspected terrorists were executed, seventy-six sentenced to prison terms. An account of the tortures published in a Paris newspaper caused an international outcry. In August 1897, Castillo was taking a holiday at a spa in the Basque mountains when he was approached by a pleasant-looking blond young man, who produced a revolver and killed him. Madame de Castillo hurled herself on him screaming ‘Assassin.’ ‘I am not an assassin,’ replied the young man gravely, ‘I am an avenger.’ He was in due course garrotted.