Ed Simon Considers the Life Alexander Berkman, Anarchist, Would-Be Assassin, and 19th-Century Luigi Mangione
By Ed Simon
Outfitted in a gray suit and white tie purchased at Kaufmann Brothers department store and with a calling card featuring the pseudonym “Simon Bachman,” ostensibly a New York employment agent, the twenty-five-year-old Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman stood outside of Pittsburgh’s Chronicle-Telegraph Building on a warm summer day in 1892. He was waiting for industrialist Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the recently consolidated Carnegie Steel Corporation, to return from his daily card game at the Duquesne Club.
In Berkman’s pocket was a 38-caliber, short-barreled revolver. In the other a twelve-inch dagger. “The history of the world is on my side,” muttered Fyodor Dostoevsky’s anarchist Kirilov in Demons, and no doubt Berkman shared similar sentiments.
Except Kirilov wanted to die for the brotherhood of man, while Berkman believed that he had to kill for the same. Yet so nervous was the bookish and bespectacled Berkman that he clumsily bumped into Frick as the former got off the elevator, nearly dropping his revolver.
