Just before their ship sailed from New York, Goldman happened to come face to face with a young man then up-and-coming in federal law enforcement. “Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” the man, J. Edgar Hoover, asked her. Not one to be nonplused, Goldman replied, “Oh, I suppose you have given me as square a deal as you could. We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
This well-researched book by Johnson, the author of numerous best sellers, including “The Ghost Map,” proceeds along dual tracks. One follows Goldman, Berkman and an array of other anarchists who may be unfamiliar to latter-day readers, including yet another Russia-born theorist, Peter Kropotkin. The other track limns the rise of a federal bureaucracy committed to beating back the perceived threat to order. As Johnson shows, the effort relied significantly on advances in police procedures that are now taken for granted but were nascent at the turn of the last century, be they fingerprinting, wiretapping or a more expansive concept of police professionalism.
There are lots of people to keep track of; mercifully, early pages offer a cheat sheet listing the book’s major characters. Among them are important law-enforcement figures like Joseph Faurot, a fingerprinting pioneer; Arthur Hale Woods, who strove to modernize the New York Police Department; Joseph Petrosino, an Italian-born police officer who fought organized crime and was shot to death in Sicily in 1909; and Owen Eagan, a New York Fire Department inspector who defused some 7,000 bombs, losing a few fingers along the way.
Johnson lays out the worlds of the bombers and their pursuers in admirable detail and with sturdy prose graced by an occasional light touch, as in his discussion of Reaper Works, a manufacturing company with an unenviable record of worker deaths and injuries. “The indirect evidence suggests that the (grim) Reaper Works was aptly named,” he writes. Some readers, though, may have trouble keeping track of an array of Russian names and of exactly what year is being discussed. There is, too, an unfortunate reference to Julius Rosenberg, who was executed in 1953 with his wife, Ethel, after both were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union; his first name was not Charles.
Still, we are taken skillfully through a stunning procession of horror, much of it barely remembered in the fog of more recent terrorist acts, none more devastating in our blood-soaked history than the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Bombing plots at Haymarket Square in Chicago and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and outrages like the Ludlow massacre — the Colorado National Guard’s killing of striking coal miners and their families — are but a few of the episodes recounted.
