At one point, an official told Ferrer he had read some of his writing on the Modern School. A junior military officer, given less than a day to review Ferrer's brief, served as defense. The prosecution, said William Archer - a pro-Ferrer British journalist who wrote about the teacher's death for McClure's - failed to call any witnesses. Eight years later, he found himself accused of sedition. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, an anarchist, had opened a progressive grade school in Barcelona with the goal of cultivating free thinkers. Two years earlier, in a trench outside a fort in Catalonia, Spanish monarchists executed the founder of the first Modern School. While the children of the day school took their lessons and played in a nearby park, they waited, hidden, to see if something would turn up. So the cops staked out the Modern School, their best and most concrete lead. The four plotters, other anarchists readily admitted, had recently attended lectures at the school. The administrators of the day school claimed to know nothing about the bomb. The Ferrer Center had an adult education program, yes, but it also taught grade-school age children. What in the world was going on at that school?Īssociates of the Ferrer Center swore over and over that the school had had nothing to do with the attack. All four had attended courses at the Ferrer Center, an alternative school in Harlem, as part of its adult education program. The police, who had a history of clashes with the I.W.W., kicked off their investigation by interrogating Berkman and Berger, who claimed not to know anything about the plot.Īs police sifted through the evidence, they noticed a link between the dead radicals. agitators and their women sympathizers were killed as a result of the explosion seems little short of miraculous in view of the extent of the ruin wrought by the dynamite," wrote the Times reporter. She didn't get much sympathy from the press. Now she stood next to Berkman and her colleagues, gazing up at her demolished home. A member of the Anarchist Red Cross and an editor of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Bulletin, Berger had lent the five anarchists her apartment while they built their bomb. The bomb peeled the top two floors off the building, exposing to a crowd of onlookers what remained of the apartment of Louise Berger. He was on holiday in Maine.īerkman and other members of the anarchist community raced uptown to see what had happened. Rockefeller had not even been in his Tarrytown, NY, house. This time, obviously, the attempted murder - if it really was an attempted murder - had failed even more profoundly. But Frick lived, and Berkman spent 14 years in jail. In 1892, during a labor dispute in Pittsburgh, Berkman had shot the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and then stabbed him with a steel file. leader (and dandy) who was based in the city. This man from out of town, whose name turned out to be Mike Murphy, went straight to the office of Alexander Berkman, an anarchist and I.W.W. Policemen, who clashed frequently with members of the Industrial Workers of the World and suspected them already in the blast, didn't recognize him. Dazed, he wandered out of the building and down the street. At 9:17, he was not in the apartment with them they were dead, and the blast had blown him and the bed he was lying in two floors down, from the top floor to the fifth floor of the new-model tenement. Instead, four students had killed themselves accidentally.Īt 9:16 that morning, a fifth man had been in the apartment with them. Official sources reported that the bomb had been meant for John D. On July 4, 1914, anarchists from the Modern School in New York set off a bomb in a Lexington Avenue apartment building. Stories varied. Berger (third from left) and Berkman (right) view the wreckage of the bombing.
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