The Anarchist Agitator Andrej Klemenčič: A Biography

From The Transmetropolitan Review

 

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I: An Historical Introduction

Andrej Klemenčič is an anarchist that you’ve never heard of. After he allegedly died in 1908, not a single obituary was written for him in any anarchist periodical. By the 1930s, the only traces of his existence were some old newspapers and tattered copies of The 1905 Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, a verbatim transcription of the debates and resolutions that shaped the initial IWW. Among the founders listed in this text was Andrej Klemenčič, identified as the mysterious A. Klemensic.

A first hardcover edition of the Proceedings was printed in 1905 by the Socialist Labor Party through their New York Labor News Company imprint, and this red covered edition would sit on many radical shelves over the next decades, slowly gathering dust. By the time it was republished in 1969, there were few who remembered Andrej Klemenčič, given most of his comrades were dead.

It wouldn’t be until 1995 that anarchists began to reconstruct his story. That year, Paul Avrich published his seminal Anarchist Voices, a collection of anarchist oral histories transcribed over the past three decades just as the older generation was dying out. Back in 1974, Avrich interviewed Radium LaVene, aka Radium Levin, who was raised in the anarchist Home colony near Tacoma, Washington, a place Andrej Klemenčič helped found.

At the time of the interview, Radium LaVene was living in South Central Los Angeles at 536 West 89th Street, and he told Avrich that, when he was a child, his father Nathan had a cleaning store in Tacoma, and Andrew Klemencic worked for him as a tailor. He was bald, middle-aged, and lived in Tacoma. Radium went on to describe Andrej as one of the most active anarchists at Home, but aside from that, he had nothing else to say, not even about Andrej’s alleged death in 1908.

Avrich provided a few more details in his footnote: Andrew Klemencic, Slovenian-born anarchist tailor. He was a delegate to the founding convention of the IWW, held in Chicago in 1905. Fluent in several languages, he wrote widely for the anarchist press. This would remain the bulk of the known information on Andrej until the year 2002 when French historian Michel Cordillot published La Sociale En Amerique: Dictionnaire Biographique Du Mouvement Social Francophone Aux Etats-Unis (1848-1922), a dictionary of French radicals in the United States.

While many of the facts have been proven to be in error, Cordillot established that Andrej left his native Slovenia in the 1890s and began an extraordinary journey which led him to Hawaii and then Pueblo, Colorado. Cordillot only recorded that Andrej wrote for Le Tribune Libre, a French anarchist newspaper published in Pennsylvania, and for whatever reason, he was unaware that Andrej also wrote extensively for Les Temps Nouveaux, the largest French anarchist newspaper of that time period.

Cordillot never found a death-date for Andrej Klemenčič, so he left that part blank in his dictionary. Candace Falk of the Emma Goldman Papers seems to have missed Cordillot’s dictionary when she mentioned Andrej in the 2005 volume of her Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years. In her simple entry, Andrej is described as a member of the IWW before this simple sentence: Al Klemensic, longtime contributor to Free Society from Colorado.

The renaissance of Andrej Klemenčič research truly began in 2015 when anarchist historian Kenyon Zimmer published his ground-breaking Immigrants Against the State, where all of the existing facts on Andrej were combined with Zimmer’s new research. He established that Andrej lived in San Francisco in 1898 before sailing to Hawaii, and Zimmer is the first to cite Andrej’s article The Labor Movement in San Francisco, an overview of that city’s anarchist scene in 1898. Additionally, Zimmer identified Andrej’s French writings in Les Temps Nouveaux, citing them as proof of Andrej’s anti-colonial viewpoint.

These are the main texts through which contemporary anarchist researchers have come to know Andrej Klemenčič. However, there’s never been a full-length English-language study of Andrej’s life, nor have the historical findings of the past decade been integrated into a singular text. To that end, we now present the full biography of Andrej Klemenčič, the immigrant agitator who first brought anarchism to the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

II: Tri(este) Kosmatih Medvedov

According to Slovene historians, Andrej was born on November 30, 1867 in the town of Spodnja Šiška, just north of Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the time, Spodnja Šiška was still its own municipality and not yet subsumed into the greater Ljubljana metropolis, as it is today in 2025.

Andrej was born into a poor family of workers. His father, Andrej, and his mother, Jera, sent him out to find a job at a very young age, and before the age of ten he was a tailor’s apprentice. According to some sources, Andrej Sr. was an alcoholic bourgeois, while his mother Jera was a devout, submissive Catholic who did nothing as her husband gambled away their property, leaving the family destitute.

This background sheds lights on how Andrej developed his distaste not just for religion, but also the so-called justice system of the Empire. Allegedly, young Andrej walked all the way to Vienna to try and press charges against the wine merchant who won their property, although the courts refused to help, and Andrej was consigned to the life of a tailor’s apprentice within the Empire.

As he would later explain, the Austrian empire is divided into two important races: the Germans and Slavs. The latter are divided into several nationalities, as, for instance, in the North are the Czechs, Hanaks, Poles, Russians and Ruthenes; in the south are the Slovens and the Slavons. Each of these nations has a distinct literature and tongue, although they spring from the same aborigines. He would further elaborate that there are about 10,000,000 Germans, 18,000,000 Slavic, 1,000,000 Italian and a few hundred thousand Romani inhabitants in the empire. With this sentence, Andrej became one of the few anarchists of his time to refer to the Romani peoples by their actual name.

In 1879, when Andrej was twelve, a massive wave of unrest swept through the Empire, including the Slovenian cities of Ljubljana and Trieste, and as Andrej would recall in 1906, anyone who still remembers the demonstrations for socialism in Ljubljana and Trieste in 1879 and the following four or five years, can tell you today that our agitation was purely on economic-revolutionary grounds.

Andrej also recalled how I was 12 years old when I commenced to travel in Austria, and he appears to have left Ljubljana for Trieste in 1879 where he witnessed the above-mentioned demonstrations. After that, sometime in early 1880, young Andrej crossed the small Gulf of Trieste and settled in the ancient Italian water-city of Venizia, where he worked in an unknown tailor shop. Just within sight of Trieste, red-tiled Venizia had been a center of high-fashion for centuries before Andrej arrived, and he quickly learned valuable skills that would serve him greatly in the future.

It appears that young Andrej tailored his way across Italy, first to Firenze, then to Genoa, and he may have been fleeing Imperial repression in Trieste, although that remains unclear. What is known is that Andrej continued his journey to the French city of Lyon, and after tailoring there for some time, he crossed the mountains into Switzerland and plied his trade in the lakeside city of Geneva. From here, Andrej made his way to rebel Paris, a growing anarchist bastion.

It remains unclear when Andrej became an anarchist, but as he later wrote, his wave of Slovenian radicals was influenced by [Die] Zukunft from Vienna and Freiheit from London and various fliers from Geneva, printed in the Italian language. While the Zukunft newspaper was socialist, Freiheit was founded in 1879 by Johann Most and fully anarchist in content. As you’ll soon see, these origins would stick with Andrej, allowing him to navigate both spheres.

Andrej left Paris and tramped across France, first in Amiens, then in Lille. His journey took him across the northern border into Belgium where he stayed in Brussels and then Antwerp, presumably working as a tailor. Sometime around 1885, eighteen year-old Andrej returned to Paris, where it’s unclear if he associated with any of the local anarchists, although by 1886 he was living in London.

Andrej learned English while he was in London, complimenting his documented knowledge of Slovenian, French, German, and Italian. He lived in England for around a year, but his twentieth birthday now loomed on the horizon, along with his mandatory military service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had he become a deserter, Andrej would have been permanently exiled from not just Slovenia, but the entire Empire, from Transylvania to Bohemia and down to the Italo-Swiss Alps.

This is likely why Andrej returned to Slovenia in 1887, and after learning how to shoot modern weapons, it appears Andrej was assigned to teach foreign languages to Imperial officers rather than be sent to recently occupied Bosnia or Herzegovina, where he and his fellow conscripts would have roamed the streets looking for Muslim or Bosnian rebels to shoot. This was a good move on Andrej’s part, it could have even saved his life, and he passed his two years as an Imperial soldier teaching officers how to speak French and English, which was all the rage among the Austro-Hungarian nobility.

When his military service was over in 1889, twenty-one year old Andrej couldn’t find any tailoring work in Ljubljana, so he moved back to Trieste, a largely Italian port city. Today it’s part of the Republic of Italy, but back then it was at the edge of a giant Catholic Empire which had fought the Italian Republicans for many decades. When Andrej returned in October 1889, Trieste was a vast commercial and industrial hub, an economic behemoth staring down its secular Italian opponent, and it was precisely this aspect of Trieste that Andrej set out to disrupt.

III: Bog Te Nima Rad(ical)

Andrej found work at a shop run by three tailors, and one of them was Tomaž Torkar, who took Andrej under his wing. To make extra money, Andrej also clerked for the railway at night, but he devoted more and more time to political organizing with Tomaž, and together they embarked on a plan to not only start a radical newspaper, but to organize all the tailors in Trieste.

To accomplish this, Andrej joined the Confederazione Operaia, or Worker’s Confederation, its Italian name reflecting the majority population of Trieste. Sometime in early 1890, Andrej was put in charge of the confederation’s Slovenian section, which quickly grew under his council, and he became an active speaker across Trieste, riling up the workers for a mammoth May 1 demonstration.

Andrej later described being a speaker on May 1, 1890, in Trieste, Austria, witnessing the tremendous enthusiasm that stirred up the hearts of proletaires present at that memorable public garden open air meeting. The masses were ready to act. Nothing was too radical for them. Anarchist literature was at a premium. I was thrilled with fervor and courage at the magnitude of the rousing display in this awakening for the manifestation of a new life, and the readiness to “take our rights” as the creators of all wealth was stern and impressive.

Andrej was 23 years old when he lectured the crowd that May Day in Trieste, and his agitation had only just started. On July 13, 1890, he organized a massive worker’s meeting that would soon embark on several initiatives, one of them being a radical bi-weekly newspaper. Andrej enlisted the help of his fellow tailor Tomaž Torkar, and he also enlisted one Ludvik Zadnik, who moved to Trieste to help print.

When he wasn’t giving multiple speeches across Trieste, Andrej was busy gathering the funds and material to make their paper a reality, and the first issue of Delavski List, or Worker’s Rag, was published on October 2, 1890. While there are no copies of that first issue currently available on the internet, the October 16 issue reveals that Andrej wasn’t just writing and printing in this period, he was also helping to lead a tailor’s strike across Trieste.

Delavski List was a single sheet, four-page newspaper, and for that October 16 issue, Andrej wrote a two page article titled Coal and Mines, describing the industrial development of Slovenia, the death of its former agrarian and artisan economy, as well as the choke-points in this new network. Andrej reminded the reader, during the coal miners’ strikes in northern England, it was seen that few factories had more than a week’s supply of coal; some factories had to stop work for quite a while due to a lack of coal. In other words, if workers could block coal shipments, they could shut down factories.

On the last page of that October 16 issue, Tomaž Torkar wrote a report-back for an October 12 tailor’s strike meeting at the Hotel Europa in Trieste. Over a hundred tailors gathered to elect their strike representatives, and Andrej was elected secretary, after which the speeches and debates began. Not every tailor at this meeting wanted to join the Confederazione Operaia, and as Tomaž recorded, the call to join was not unanimously accepted.

Tomaž Torkar signed this report-back under his full name, while Andrej signed his own article under the acronym A.K., which he used off-and-on for many years. Aside from a front-page article signed by the mysterious n, the remaining five articles are unsigned, although most sources agree that Andrej is likely the author. Among these unsigned articles were The Rise of the Workers’ Party in Austria, To the Labor Movement, as well as the recurring columns Miscellaneous News, Political Review, and About Societies and Meetings.

With seemingly boundless energy, Andrej also wrote a novel during this time period, Hiša št. 67 v Spodnji Šiški, or House No. 67 in Spodnji Šiški, a chronicle of his family and what led to their downfall. The only known copies are currently in a Slovenian archive and have never been digitized, but hopefully one day this will happen, allowing us further insight into this hyper-literate agitator.

Details on what Andrej did in Trieste grow murky through the winter of 1891, and there are no extant issues of Delavski List to provide any clue, but it’s known that the Confederazione Operaia was dissolved by the Empire on March 16, 1891 for alleged election interference and Andrej was thrown into prison, likely because he agitated against voting. Andrej wasn’t locked up for very long, seemingly just a few days, but before his arrest Imperial spies were shadowing his every move, so he wisely fled Trieste upon his release from prison.

Accounts differ on where Andrej went. Slovenian sources claim he moved to the Italian border town of Gorizia before returning to Trieste, while French sources claim he went south through Croatia and the Balkans before crossing the sea over to Italy. In any case, all sources agree that Andrej ultimately found his way to Switzerland, and Andrej himself described giving a speech there on May 1, 1891. As he described, it was my lot to run up against indignities and ostracism which was meted out from the “party socialists” in Switzerland in consequence of my “May Day” address at the cathedral in Chaux de Fonds, 1891.

No matter where he went, Andrej was an anarchist agitator, and he arrived in Chaux-de-Fonds on April 6, 1891, where he immediately joined the tailor’s union. This union elected Andrej to be the speaker for their May Day demonstration, and his speech was so popular that Andrej soon traveled south to Italy where he continued his agitation. Unfortunately, his speeches were too incendiary and Andrej was expelled from the Republic of Italy. Back in Switzerland, he sought refuge in Saint Imier, the small Juran village where the Anarchist International was founded twenty years earlier.

Among the town’s anarchist watchmakers, Andrej caught the attention of the authorities for his agitation and found himself expelled from Switzerland, forcing him to seek refuge in Paris. Exiled from his homeland, exiled from every country on his path, Andrej now dived headfirst into the most militant period of anarchism France had ever seen.

IV: Ni Dieu, Ni Maitre, Ni Problème

To be clear, little is known about Andrej’s previous trips to Paris, roughly between 1881 and 1885, and he may have met several anarchists. Regardless, through his later writings and correspondence, we can narrow down who Andrej likely met in Paris when he returned in 1891. Among these anarchists are Émile Pouget, publisher of the anarchist paper Le Père Peinard, and Jean Grave, publisher of La Révolte, which was the largest anarchist newspaper in France and co-founded by Pytor Kropotkin.

The Paris that Andrej arrived at in 1891 was gripped with tension after a massacre of strikers in Fourmies, a May Day shoot-out in Clichy, and the subsequent arrest of three anarchists, who now faced the guillotine. In retaliation, a dynamite-bomb was placed outside the hotel of the Marquis de Trévise which blew a hole into its side. This would be the start of a long anarchist bombing campaign, and Andrej arrived shortly after it began.

As mentioned above, La Révolte was the largest French anarchist newspaper, and among its writers in 1891 were Oscar Wilde, the anarchist playwright, Élisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer, and Zo d’Axa, the individualist anarchist. Their texts appeared in the Literary Supplement which was slid into the center of each La Révolte, accounting for half the content. Aside from various features, the rest of each issue was devoted to anarchist news from France and across the globe, all penned by Jean Grave, who left these news entries unsigned.

According to some sources, Andrej traveled to Amiens sometime in the fall to give a lecture alongside Sebastian Faure, the now-disgraced anarchist educator who preyed on his students. A notice was printed in the December 13 issue of Le Père Peinard announcing that Faure would speak in Amiens that night, with another lecture to follow on December 29. Some sources claim that after Andrej spoke at the December 13 lecture he was quickly deported to the United States, and it appears that he sailed into New York City sometime in January 1892.

V: Biting The Big Apple

Once again, we know that the young Andrej Klemenčič was highly influenced by Freiheit, the German anarchist newspaper published by Johann Most. Andrej likely sought out Johann when he arrived in New York City, given that Freiheit was now published there. Like many other immigrant anarchists, it’s highly probable that 24 year old Andrej strolled right into the Freiheit office on William Street, just within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge.

During her first visit to the Freiheit office in 1889, Emma Goldman described taking the metro into what is now the Financial District and how the train was passing narrow streets, the dreary tenements so close by that I could see into the rooms. The fire-escapes were littered with dirty pillows and blanket and hung with laundry streaked with dirt…in an old building, up two dark and creaking flights, was the office of the Freiheit. Several men were in the first room setting type. In the next we found Johann Most standing at a high desk, writing.

Andrej arrived while Johann Most was imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island for speaking alongside Lucy Parsons during a Chicago Martyrs commemoration. It’s likely that Andrej was at the festivities surrounding Johann’s release from prison on April 18, 1892, just as it’s likely he attended the May 1 demonstrations in Union Square where Johann spoke to the crowd from a wagon that was festooned with a red flag alongside his comrade Emma Goldman. This would’ve been the first time that Andrej could have met Emma, and as you’ll see, it’s likely that he did.

Unfortunately, a schism had occurred in the German-speaking anarchist scene, with Emma Goldman and her lover Sasha Berkman splitting from Johann, although they all closed ranks in solidarity after Johann and Lucy Parsons were arrested. Emma and Sasha had fallen in with the Autonomie group centered around the Der Anarchist newspaper, and this crew of Autonomists was certainly on the outs with Johann and the Freiheit when Andrej stepped off the boat.

This schism between Der Anarchist and Freiheit went all the way back to Chicago, when the first Autonomist group was established in 1885. Among its members were George Engel and Adolph Fischer, and they established the first Der Anarchist, an anarchist newspaper with no listed editors or publishers, rejecting the cult-of-personality they accused Johann of fostering. Only four issues of Der Anarchist were published before the Haymarket Affair sent George Engel and Adolph Fischer to the gallows alongside the other Haymarket Martyrs, all executed on November 11, 1887.

Der Anarchist was discontinued until 1889 when Claus Timmermann revived it in Saint Louis, eventually moving it to New York City in 1891. While he was there, Claus grew close with Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman, becoming part of their circle, and Emma described Claus as a likable fellow and entirely trustworthy [with] considerable poetic talent. As you’ll see below, it’s highly likely that Andrej knew not only Claus Timmermann, but also Emma Goldman.

Andrej would only make two known references to his time in New York City, the first which is him recalling a small address of mine which I delivered five years ago in the “New York Arbeiterbund.” What are the boys doing there now? I tell you friends in the East, it is high time to quit your hair splitting philosophy in your groups. Not only does this quote reveal that Andrej was in New York City in 1892 lecturing to German-speaking anarchists, it indicates that he may have been annoyed with all the infighting between Freiheit and Der Anarchist.

The second reference Andrej made to his time in New York City was even more specific. Over a decade later, Andrej recalled, I wrote to New York, to the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund group, and comrade Masur gave me [a Portland comrade’s address]. This Masur is none other than Carl Masur, editor of Der Anarchist and a member of the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund. This group met every Sunday at a tavern called Zum Groben Michel, or Tough Mike’s, and was the headquarters of the local Autonomists, including Emma and Sasha. Based on the above quotations from Andrej, it appears he lectured at Tough Mike’s.

Given that Andrej knew Carl Masur from his time in New York City, it’s likely he knew some of its other editors like Claus Timmermann and Sepp Oerter, also members of the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund, which included Emma and Sasha in its ranks. Regardless, all of these anarchists would soon become embroiled in an anti-anarchist witch-hunt when Sasha, one of their fellow Autonomists, shot and then stabbed a steel-baron.

VI: Can You Please Pay Attentat?

Although she spoke at the May 1, 1892 demonstration in New York City, Emma Goldman was living with her lover Sasha in Worcester, Massachusets, where they ran an ice cream shop that made no money. Describing this time period, Emma’s former comrade Helene Minkin wrote, I liked [Emma] a lot, with her beautiful blond hair—almost like gold—her beautiful blue eyes, and her pleasant, friendly smile. When she lived with the crew, Helene remembered that, after we had eaten supper and washed the dishes, Emma would recite for us from Freiligrath’s “Revolution,” the last line of which is, the day grows hot, oh Babylon! ‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees.This was the type of life Emma and Sasha were living when a strike broke out at the Homestead steel works outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, filling their young hearts with rage.

The strikers were demanding shorter hours and a modest wage increase, but Carnegie Steel was demanding they accept a lower wage. Under the orders of Henry Clay Frick, henchman for steel-baron Andrew Carnegie, around 800 steel workers were fired from the Homestead plant on June 28, 1892. The very next day, a strike committee was formed and the steel plant blockaded by the workers, all of whom were members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.

In the early morning of July 6, under the orders of Frick, two barges filled with hundreds of Pinkerton private mercenaries traveled down the Monongahela River to crush the Homestead blockade, although the strikers had been warned, and an epic gun battle commenced at dawn that lasted nearly twelve hours. By the end, the strikers were shooting cannons, throwing dynamite, and driving flaming box-cars at the Pinkerton barges.

Several were dead on both sides by late afternoon, but the Pinkertons were pinned down, and at 5 PM they surrendered. Their barges were set on fire and the Pinkertons forced to march through a gauntlet of what the New York Times called an uncontrollable mob of women, who not only used their fists, but clubs, stones, bricks, broomsticks, mophandles, and any missile upon which they could lay their hands. After having that shit kicked out of them, these Pinkertons were loaded on a train and shipped out of town, leaving the Homestead plant in the hands of the strikers.

All at once, the entire country lit up with joy, for back then Father Was Killed By A Pinkerton Man was a common folk song, and now these Homestead strikers had stood up to them and won. Homestead Day was proclaimed in Chicago by a crowd of 90,000 who donated $40,000 to the strikers, just as more funds poured in from across the US. However, behind this jubilation, Frick and Carnegie were planning their counter-attack, and soon the Pennsylvania National Guard was mobilized to crush the uprising.

These troops arrived at Homestead on July 12 and placed the community under martial law. They quickly began to evict families from company houses and protected the scabs sent by Frick to open the plant. The metal-worker’s union was unable to withstand this assault, and despite all the money and goodwill still pouring in, the strikers were slowly crushed under the bayonets of the National Guard. It was during this bleak moment that Sasha Berkman set out to kill Frick.


Sasha

When the strike first started in late June, Sasha and Emma closed their Worcester ice-cream shop and traveled to New York City, determined to aid the strikers. They immediately went to 340 East 5th Street, the apartment of Frank Mollock, another Autonomist, and they soon met with Claus Timmermann, Sepp Oerter, and his brother Fritz Oerter, all Autonomists and editors of Der Anarchist, as well as members of the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund, which met just down the street from Frank Mollock’s at Tough Mike’s.

These are the people known to have met with Sasha and Emma before July 6, but there are several others who remain anonymous, and Andrej Klemenčič could have been one of them. At the time, Andrej was 24, Emma was 22, and Sasha was 21, all of them immigrants who could speak German. Andrej had just been in rebel Paris when the anarchist bombing wave began on May 1, 1891, and since he’d left, the legendary Ravachol had blown up the houses of Parisian judges. Ravachol was captured that March and his trial was ongoing when the Homestead strike broke out, and it’s highly likely that Andrej, Emma, and Sasha had Ravachol on the brain.


The capture of Ravachol

Before July 6, it appears that Sasha and Emma were planning some simple agitation and penned a leaflet for distribution among the strikers, but after the gun-battle in Homestead and the defeat of the Pinkertons, it was Sasha who volunteered to assassinate Frick. He initially wanted to use a bomb, so one of Sasha’s mysterious comrades gave him twenty pounds of dynamite, although Berkman couldn’t design a usable device, so he opted instead for a revolver and dagger. At this point, Sasha would have learned that Ravachol was guillotined on July 11, and he set out for Pittsburgh on the evening of July 13, 1892.

Berkman had two contacts in Pittsburgh, both of them German anarchists who were loyal to Johann Most. Despite these allegiances, Berkman went straight to the door of Carl Nold and Henry Bauer, knowing they recently attempted to agitate in Homestead. On July 7, the day after the shoot-out, Carl and Henry were handing out leaflets advocating armed direct action when the police detained the agitators, took them to the edge of town, and told them to never come back.

When Berkman showed up at one of their Alleghany City apartments on the morning of July 14, they had no reason to trust him. When they reached out to Johann Most, he called Emma and Sasha dangerous and suspicious individuals, but Nold and Bauer decided to trust Sasha, given both had been drifting into the Autonomist camp anyway. Sasha stayed with them from July 14 to 21, but he was sorely lacking in funds, possessed only a home-made knife, had yet to buy a revolver, and the only reason he arrived in Pittsburgh alone was because his comrades could only afford a single train ticket.

While her lover Sasha waited in Pittsburgh, Emma tried to raise money in New York City, and she borrowed five dollars to buy a nice to dress in the hope of making more money as a prostitute. As she harshly told herself, Sasha is giving his life, and you shrink from giving your body, miserable coward! However, this famed attempt at street-walking on July 16 led a kind dandy to tell her she didn’t have the knack for being a prostitute, you haven’t got it, that’s all there is to it. He handed Emma $10 and told her to go home, which she did, at least according to her autobiography, and the next day she wired her sister for $15, allowing her to send Sasha $20 and pay back the $5 she borrowed for the dress.


Emma

After sending Sasha the money on July 17, Emma recalled, I grew restless and aimlessly walked about in the July heat, spending the evenings in Zum Groben Michel, the nights at Sach’s cafe. Both of these were Autonomist anarchist hangouts, and from July 17 to the 23, it’s highly likely that Emma crossed paths with Andrej, given he was there. Regardless, despite her involvement, Emma had no idea when Sasha was going to commit his attentat, and she was stuck in an agonizing wait.

Emma would later explain how it was the psychological moment for an Attentat; the whole country was aroused, everybody was considering Frick the perpetrator of a coldblooded murder. A blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy’s ranks.

After receiving Emma’s money, Sasha bought a new suit, fake calling cards depicting him as a scab recruiter, and a cheap .38 bull-dog revolver. While he’d been waiting for the money, Sasha staked out Frick’s house but determined it was too well guarded, ultimately deciding to kill Frick at his downtown office building. With his bull-dog revolver and hand-made dagger, Sasha began to visit Frick’s office, first on July 19, when he was told Frick was out. He came back two more times until finally spotting Frick coming back from lunch on July 23, 1892.

Sasha went up to his office, shot Frick in the shoulders and then shanked him three times around the abdomen before a carpenter hit Sasha with a hammer. Somehow, Frick survived, and by the end of the day, Sasha was in prison, although his cousin Modest Aronstam, or Modska, still had Sasha’s dynamite, and he set out to finish the attentat. Modksa, Sasha, and Emma were in ménage à trois, or thruple, as they say 2025, and loyal Modska went to go blow up Frick’s house. However, on his way, Modska saw a newspaper headline claiming Sasha had accomplices, so he dumped the dynamite in an outhouse and met up with Emma in Rochester, Massachusetts, as they’d previously arranged.

They first suspected a snitch, and apparently the Austrian consul had placed a spy in the Autonomist ranks, who alerted his superiors that Berkman likely had accomplices, who then told the Pittsburgh police, who then sold this story to the journalists. If the spy had known it was Emma and Modska, both of them would have been arrested immediately, although they both acted out of an abundance of caution and called off the attentat.

Emma was still in Rochester on July 25 when the Pittsburgh police arrested Carl Nold for harboring Sasha. That same day, police in New Jersey arrested Frank Mollock for sending letters to Sasha in Pittsburgh, while the next day they arrested Frank Bauer for associating with Sasha. All of these anarchists were jailed in Pittsburgh, and Emma stayed in Mollock’s empty apartment before moving in with her grandmother.

For the following months, Emma spent much of her time at Tough Mike’s, the address Sasha used to write her from prison. Once again, this Zum Groben Michel tavern was the headquarters for the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund, of which Andrej was a member. Emma and Andrej likely crossed paths in these months following Sasha’s attentat, and despite the heavy repression, neither Emma or Modska were ever suspected of directly helping Sasha.

As the late Paul Avrich and his daughter Karen Avrich wrote in their Sasha and Emma, none of the New York City anarchists who likely helped Sasha were formally arrested, much less indicted and imprisoned—not Timmermann, nor the Oerters, nor their friends. Mollock, of course, had been briefly taken into custody, but soon after was set free.

As far as Andrej Klemenčič is concerned, he only publicly wrote of Sasha Berkman once. The attentat had not been understood by the Homestead strikers, Sasha was widely condemned, and some blamed him for the ensuing repression of Homestead, as opposed to the National Guard, Frick, or Carnegie, who were actually responsible. This appears to have left quite a mark on Andrej, and over a decade after Sasha’s attentat, he had only the following words to offer on the subject:

To my mind it would be a great benefit, and conducive to thought and reflection, for the individual of a revengeful and violent character to mix with, and study closely, the crowd for which he may be willing to risk his liberty or even his life…In times of comparative peace, education is more urgently needed than violent examples. The case of our comrade, Alexander Berkman, bespeaks plainly that the intention of his action was not understood by those for whose particular benefit it was intended, because of the lack of proletarian education.

VII: Tout…Le Monde…Deteste La Pinketons!

It’s documented that Andrej Klemenčič was in New York City for most of 1892, and the only texts he possibly wrote during this time period can be found in the anonymous US news items printed in Le Père Peinard and La Révolte, the main anarchist newspapers of France.

For example, the May 1 issue of La Révolte ran a short but original US item: On April 14, a bomb was found on a bench in a New York Metropolitan train station. Upon examination, it was found to be a tin can wrapped in paper. The can was 8 inches long and 4 inches wide. A fairly long fuse was fitted inside. This original item indicates that the US correspondent for La Révolte was likely in New York City, given the lack of attribution.

That spring, the pages of La Révolte were filled with words about Ravachol, now facing trial and ultimately the guillotine, but US news items continued to be printed, and in the May 15 issue, the US correspondent reported that our friend Johann Most has finally been given a precarious freedom, because obviously the bourgeois who, under many reasons and pretexts, have already subjected him to nine years in prison, are on the lookout for a new opportunity to lock him up.

This entry included an extended quotation from Johann on propaganda of the deed, much of which is extremely prescient, given it was printed months before Sasha’s attentat. Johann wrote, in part, any act with a useful effect must be welcomed with approval by a considerable part of the proletariat. If this is not the case, or even if the act provokes the aversion of the proletarians on whom it should act, then the result is the opposite of that which was sought; instead of gaining adherents, it repels those who approached us; instead of being a propulsive act, it becomes a repulsive act.

The June 25 issue of La Révolte featured a review a several German language anarchist newspapers in the US, including Freiheit, while the July 1 issue featured reviews of the Spanish anarchist El Despertar and the Italian anarchist Il Grido Degli Opressi newspapers, both based out of New York City. While the mention of these two New York City papers doesn’t prove that Andrej was La Révolte’s US correspondent, an entry in that July 1 issue’s Petite Correspondance column definitively reveals that Andrej was in correspondence with the editors.

On that July 1 issue’s back page, Jean Grave wrote, André Klemencin [sic], Paulet cannot answer your question (not having your address) it arrived in Amiens when he was in prison, remaining the property of the investigating judge: your brother is still in Amiens. This was presumably François Paulet, a well known anarchist agitator from Amiens, who was arrested there on April 22, 1892 along with every other organizer of the upcoming May 1 demonstrations, all charged with being an association of malefactors.

Meanwhile, by the July 23 issue of La Révolte, Ravachol had been guillotined and the editors ran several articles regarding his fate, but in the back pages was also a news entry from the US regarding the Homestead Strike and its military suppression. As the correspondent explained, the government sent 6,000 soldiers to restore bourgeois order. And, with unparalleled roguishness, they chose the Negro regiments, even though they knew that a knife-wielding war between whites and blacks was about to break out in the United States. Unfortunately, this correspondent was accurate in their prediction, and the Homestead strikers later engaged in race-riots against the local Black population.

The correspondent went on to describe how twelve non-Unionists were found massacred in a ravine. The strikers blew up a large section of the railway to prevent the arrival of troops and non-unionists. They also tried to rob the bank. The country is in the midst of revolt. Thereupon the United States government sent eight more companies to the scene; a state of siege was proclaimed, and the last order from the ministry was: Shoot on the spot anyone caught damaging the railway or the telegraph. It’s like in Russia, like in Paris during Bloody Week.

This article had just been printed in the July 23 issue of La Révolte when Sasha attacked Frick, although another article appeared the July 30 issue entitled Revenge In Pittsburg. While several details are factually inaccurate, this article reveals that after Sasha was knocked out by the faithful dogs, covered in blood, he was dragged by the mastiffs into the street, to the cries of other mastiffs: “Hang him! Shoot him!” while the strikers shouted: “Serves the brute right! What a pity you didn’t kill him!”

The next day’s Le Père Peinard was released to the public, and it included an article entitled American Mayhem. Le Père Peinard was famous for its working class slang, and the first line of this article were literally, bruh, I gotta lot to tell you about the Homestead strike. American Mayhem is perhaps the greatest text related to Homestead, largely because of its humor. Beyond its descriptions of the uprising and its subsequent repression, the author eviscerated the strike leaders, firmly stating that we don’t need leaders, and that if the people want to get their own way, they should tell these scoundrels to go to hell. Good heavens, we should know better: how many times have the people already been punished for listening to these idiot bastards!

When Sasha’s attentat came up, the author correctly described Sasha as a rich son, or riche fieu, using the Picardy slang fieu for son. Only someone close to Sasha would have known that he was in fact born to a wealthy family of merchant Jews allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement and settle in Saint Petersburg. Sasha grew up with servants in a giant house, and even after his father died and the family was forced to leave Saint Petersburg, he remained well-off until sailing for the US in February 1888, where he experienced four years of poverty.

Again, only someone close to Sasha would have known these details of his past, making it possible the author was Andrej, However, Émile Pouget, editor of Le Père Peinard, was the driving force behind the paper’s slang humor, and he appears to have freely edited every article he published, adding the standard expletives, curses, and filthy words. Beyond this, the article has too many specific details to have been solely written by Émile Pouget, and he likely edited Andrej’s dispatches.

Despite the death of Ravachol and the mounting repression in France, the following August 6 issue of La Révolte featured another front-page article on Homestead titled The True Meaning of the Events at Homestead. Not only did this article cite Der Anarchist, it ended by calling on the reader to eliminate the exploiters using dynamite, the rifle, and the kick or the punch. Immediately after this article were extracts from German anarchist newspapers, including Freiheit, and the majority of that front page was dedicated to the US, not France.

The correspondent wrote that July 6th—as Freiheit rightly said—will live in the annals of the grand struggle. No fixed plan, just the revolutionary instinct of the masses was enough to deliver the great battle which recalls the battles of the Commune and will be repeated, one day, almost everywhere. Further on, the correspondent claimed that the American worker, who is already arming himself, who is already armed to a certain extent, has understood firsthand how necessary it is for everyone to arm themselves in this society.

This author claimed that Sasha Berkman saved the lives of the arrested Homestead strikers. According to them, Berkman alone, by striking higher and more directly, will save their lives. For he is now the intended victim [of the state]. He and other local anarchists, already arrested, are now prosecuted for murder and conspiracy.

Weeks later, Johann published an article in the August 27 issue of Freiheit where he acknowledged that while Sasha may have been heroic, his attentat was a total failure. On the same day this criticism of Sasha was published, the entire front page of the August 27 issue of La Révolte was devoted to an article titled The Civil War in the United States which was most likely written by Andrej Klemenčič, as well as a follow-up for the September 3, 1892 issue of La Révolte.

That September 3 issue also carried a brief extract from Freiheit, along with a letter from Enrico Malatesta, but there was no further mention of events in the US. Given the trans-Atlantic delay, US mail arrived a week late, and it appears that the August 27 issue of Freiheit arrived in Paris sometime after September 3. Upon learning that Johann Most denounced Sasha’s attentat, Jean Grave and La Révolte entered the schism on the side of Sasha Berkman. Because of this, the front page of the following September 10 issue carried an article titled The Act of Berkman, likely written by Andrej.

VIII: Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now?

In The Act of Berkman, the author briefly summarized Johann’s denunciation of Sasha before launching into a critique of Freiheit’s editor. As they wrote, Berkman acted in accordance with the spirit of revolt that is now arising among the workers, and which the anarchist press in all languages has always considered the best sign of the awakening of the masses. Berkman has done more to spread anarchist ideas among the masses who don’t read anarchist newspapers than through all possible writings.

As the author boldly stated, Sasha proved that our Chicago martyrs were not the last Mohicans of the anarchist movement in America. In conclusion, the author informed the reader that, needless to say, the other two anarchist newspapers in the United States, Der Anarchist and Solidarity [do] not share Most’s opinion. Both continue to publish excellent articles highlighting the importance of Berkman’s act.

Despite the animosity, La Révolte continued to print extracts from Freiheit just as they had since 1888, although back in New York City, the schism was widening. Emma later recalled that the feud between Most and our group continued. Hardly a week passed without some slur in the Freiheit against Sasha or myself. Emma responded to Johann’s August 27 article with her own September article in Der Anarchist, boldly defending her lover and comrade.

The October 1 issue of La Révolte featured another of its recurring Review of German Language Journals, and in a comradely spirit, Freiheit was still quoted from. However, the author directly attacked Johann Most and devoted the bulk of the column to the contents of Der Anarchist, including the full text of the August 20 letter that Sasha wrote to Emma from prison. As he explained, I carried out my deed as a dedicated egoist, as an Anarchist, as a revolutionary…I do not expect any justice from people who enslave us and reduce us to the level of animals.

In that October 1 issue’s US news entry, the author wrote that our comrade Berkman has just been sent before the Pittsburgh Assize Court and found guilty of “six crimes!” Ah! If only the judges there, as villainous as ours, could hang him six times! He defended himself valiantly, not by apologizing but by accusing. So he was sentenced to one year of hard labor and 21 years in prison.

There was another short US entry in the October 8 issue which falsely claimed that the Homestead Steel Works had shut down, but buried on the last page of that issue’s Petite Correspondance column is an entry from the Belgian anarchist Desiré Joseph Pauwels. As the item read, Comrade Desiré Pauwels informs his friends and correspondents that his new address is 45 W. 17th Street, New York City. At the time of this writing, no historians have ever placed Desiré in New York City in late 1892, with most seeming to believe he was in Switzerland.

Desiré was a committed anarchist who’s wife left him because of his beliefs, taking their daughter with her. He became part of the Montmartre anarchist scene and befriended Ravachol, along with Auguste Vaillant, who will appear again in this narrative. After the Paris riots of May 1, 1891, Desiré was wanted by the police and found shelter with the anarchist Paul Reclus, although he was soon arrested and expelled back to Belgium. He returned in 1892, only to be expelled again, allegedly to Switzerland, although possibly also to New York City.

While the above entry in La Révolte makes it appear that he was living in New York City in September and October of 1892, this could have also been a diversion, or counter-intelligence. As editor Jean Grave would later write, Desiré was a good comrade, sincere and known by all of us. Given the role he would soon play, it’s notable that Desiré was possibly in New York City at the same time as Andrej Klemenčič, who also knew Jean Grave from his time in Paris.

By the October 22 issue, there had been no more US news entries in La Révolte, although that Petite Corresponance column carried the following entry: Klémencic.—Nicolet acknowledges receipt of the 5 francs and sends you his regards. This Nicolet was likely the French anarchist Jules Albert Nicolet, although there’s no mention of where Andrej sent the money from.

While the US columns in La Révolte dried up, the October 23 issue of Le Père Peinard featured an article entitled The Homestead Strike, likely written by Andrej Klemenčič. It briefly explained how the trials against the Homestead strikers had begun, after which the author stated that a large carcass that we never try to kill is meat-sack Carnegie. Just think, he’s so loaded with millions it’d be worth attacking the President of the Republic. The article ends with the recommendation to get hold of the 170 million that Carnegie stole from the people.

A week after this was published, La Révolte released their October 29 issue, which included a reprint of another letter Sasha wrote to Emma from prison. As he told Emma and his readers, you who know who your enemies are, don’t let yourselves be hindered by my sentence from continuing to agitate and spread the teachings of Anarchism until all people are free. Believe me, dear friends, I don’t feel the least bit unhappy. I have the peace of mind of having done right.

The following November 5 issue featured only extracts from Der Anarchist, Freiheit, and other German anarchist newspapers for its US news, as well as the recurring Review of German Language Journals. This trend continued through November, although the November 19 issue’s US news column was a short, original entry about the tragic death of David Edelstadt, the anarchist poet. David had been close with Emma and Sasha, and his obituary quickly appearing in La Révolte speaks to the author’s connection with that crew.

There wasn’t a single bit of US news in the November 26 issue, nor for the following issue. However, the December 11 issue featured a summation of a recent Freiheit article, while their US column featured a single entry from New York City about the anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino and the new Italian paper he founded, Il Grido Degli Opressi. As should be clear, the only US news items being printed in La Révolte at this time were about New York City, and they were becoming sparser. However, the only US news in the December 18 issue was from Chicago, and as you’ll see, Andrej was likely not in New York City on December 18, 1892 when Emma Goldman walked into an anarchist meeting at 98 Forsyth Street.

Johann Most was the speaker, and as Emma later recalled, I sat in the first row, close to the low platform. My hand was on [the horsewhip] under my long, gray cloak. When [Johann] got up and faced the audience, I rose and declared in a loud voice: “I came to demand proof of your insinuations against Alexander Berkman.” There was instant silence. Most mumbled something about “hysterical woman,” but he said nothing else. I then pulled out my whip and leaped towards him. Repeatedly I lashed him across the face and neck, then broke the whip over my knee and threw the pieces at him.

At the time, Johann Most was the most feared and famous anarchist in the world, a boogeyman shared between the US and Europe. However, after the night of December 18, 1892, it was Emma Goldman who became the most famous anarchist on earth. A tiny Jewish woman horse-whipping the most dangerous man on earth sent shock-waves not just through the anarchist world, but the late-Victorian world itself, going on to influence the Suffragettes, one of whom horsewhipped Winston Churchill. Emma’s act was transcendent on many levels, and it paved the way for the anarchist women soon to follow in her footsteps.

Meanwhile, US news in La Révolte continued to be sparse, although occasionally an extract from Der Anarchist would be printed, as in the January 6, 1893 issue. It’s likelythat Jean Grave was composing these extracts, and it wouldn’t be until January 16 that another US entry appeared. This column announced a new anarchist paper in Portland, Oregon called Freedom, about which almost nothing is known, as well as informing the reader that Il Grido Degli Opressi moved its headquarters from New York City to 75 Illinois Street in Chicago.

The US news column in the January 21 issue also featured an item from Chicago, although the column remained sparse that winter, mostly just extracts from other papers. When an original entry did appear, as in the February 25 issue, it was an announcement that Il Grido Degli Opressi had moved to 200 East Van Buren Street, which was also in Chicago.

The US entries appear to change later that March and it seems Andrej stopped being a correspondent for La Révolte around this time. La Révolte didn’t print a single piece of US news for the whole of May, while the only original US item printed that June concerned the display of a Krupp artillery canon at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. In the July 8, 1893 issue, there are two extracts concerning Chicago, both of them from El Perseguido, an anarchist newspaper printed in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The last French article that Andrej appears to have written from Chicago was mailed to Le Père Peinard for its July 9 issue. Entitled The Survivors of Chicago, the article is another hilarious entry filled with curse words, including the ever-present nom de dieu, which literally means name of god, although it more accurately translates to fucking fuck, given how blasphemous it was at the time. In this riotous language, the author explains how the surviving Haymarket prisoners were released in Chicago, something they never thought would happen.

Given all the facts, it appears Andrej was in Chicago for the founding of the American Railway Union on June 20, 1893, with the socialist Eugene Debs as its president. Andrej also would have been there for the dedication of the Haymarket Martyrs statue in the Waldheim Cemetery, a statue which still stands today in 2025. In all likelihood, Andrej was at both events.

At that point, Andrej had been in the US for over a year and still not been expelled, unlike every other country he’d lived in, and as he likely wrote, hey brainiac, it’s not in France that the doors of the penal colonies opened [for the Haymarket prisoners]. It’s in a fucking country that, like a bitch, gives points to all the rich people and all the rulers of the world: in America, in Chicago! In regards to John Altgeld, the governor of Illinois who pardoned the prisoners, the author wrote, you should’ve seen how [bourgeois journalists] were looking at the governor of Illinois! They almost called him an anarchist and demanded that he be executed by electricity.

Andrej would not appear in Le Père Peinard through the rest of 1893, nor would there be any US news. While there would be occasional US news in La Révolte, it was infrequent, bore no similarities to the previous correspondent’s writing, and was no longer centered on New York City. Regardless, there was no further mention of Andrej in either paper, nor were there any US feature articles that bore his literary hallmarks, and it appears that he stopped writing for the French anarchist press sometime before July 9, 1893, when he left Chicago for the distant industrial town of Tacoma, Washington.

IX: Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

According to Andrej, I arrived in Tacoma, coming from Chicago, in July 1893. This sentence is the only known reference to Andrej’s time in Chicago, and after arriving in Tacoma, there’s little record of his activities. Over a decade later, Andrej would write in the Italian anarchist Cronaca Sovversiva newspaper that in the summer of 1893, having arrived in Tacoma, Washington and found terrible poverty, I set about spreading the idea and principles of anarchist communism.

However, back in Paris, an anarchist named Auguste Vaillant decided to attack the French government itself, and on December 9, 1893 he threw a bomb packed with nails into the Chamber of Deputies, wounding himself and several politicians. Although he intended only to harm the politicians with the nail shrapnel, Vaillant was later sentenced to death on January 10, 1894.

Five days after Vaillant’s attack, on December 14, 1893, Andrej Klemenčič walked into the Superior Court of Tacoma and applied for US citizenship, although he listed his first name as Andrew. This is the first known appearance of his name within the US, and it’s likely that Andrej heard of Vaillant’s bombing before he submitted his citizenship application. On top of this, Andrej appears to have already opened his own tailor shop in Tacoma, and after those tense months in New York City following Sasha’s attentat, Andrej was now making his grand debut as an official citizen and business owner who went by the name Andrew. However, it’s notable that he made this debut in Tacoma, the opposite side of the continent from Tough Mike’s and the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund.

Repression from Vaillant’s bomb was soon to follow, and on January 1, 1894, the Parisian police raided the offices of Le Père Peinard, with that series running its last issue on January 21, 1894. It’s editor, Émile Pouget, would eventually flee to London where he temporarily restarted the paper, and it’s seems Andrej knew of these developments. While the repression in Paris also affected La Révolte, the paper continued to run for a few more months until the government shut it down, with the last issue published on March 11, 1894.

La Révolte was banned following the February 12 bombing of the Café Terminus in Paris, an act carried out by Émile Henry, a young anarchist who was well known around the city. Émile threw his bomb to avenge Vaillant, who was recently guillotined, and after Émile was captured, the anarchist Desiré Joseph Pauwels attempted to avenge him by blowing up a Paris church on March 15, although the bomb detonated prematurely and killed Desiré. As you’ll recall, La Révolte had listed Desiré as living in New York City at the same time as Andrej.

Speaking of Andrej, all of this was happening while he tailored in Tacoma, a city few of his Parisian comrades had heard of. It’s possible he felt helpless, unable to act in solidarity with those suffering repression in France, but he soon found an outlet for his rage. As he later wrote, there was no English-language anarchist periodical in the United States at the time; I therefore propagated the Twentieth Century, the best socialist publication, and the day I read there the story of the unemployed movement organized in Massillon, Ohio by Coxey to march on the capital, I convinced my friends Funk and Gantwell to do the same in Tacoma. And, my goodness, in a very short time, we managed to organize more than a thousand die-hards.


Coxey’s Army detachment in Seattle, Occidental and Weller Street

Unlike the tens of thousands of others who joined Coxey’s Army on its epic train-hop to Washington DC, Andrej appears to have simply helped provision the Tacoma detachment. As he explained, our attitude, frankly anarchist and revolutionary, meant the big trading houses never dared to refuse our delegations the products requested of them; we therefore loaded the goods onto carts to distribute them later according to everyone’s needs.

In May 1894, the Pullman railroad strike broke out in Chicago and then spread across the US, sparked by Eugene Debs and the American Rail Union. It was an armed uprising, the closest the county had come to an insurrection since the 1877 rail strike. While the arson, expropriation, and gunfire was intense on the east coast, the west coast remained relatively calm, and as Andrej recalled, in a large meeting, I proposed taking possession of the rail-line between the unemployed and the strikers. But I quickly realized that neither the leaders nor the masses were ready to take advantage of the weakness of these capitalists ruined by their unbridled speculation [the 1893 economic collapse].

Word of Andrej’s daring spread among the working class of Tacoma, which was mostly racist. The local labor unions had risen to power through anti-Chinese demagoguery, and in 1885 they organized a pogrom which destroyed Tacoma’s Chinatown and drove every Asian person from its borders. By the time Andrej arrived, many working people in Tacoma had come to realize it wasn’t the Chinese who were the cause of their misery, but capitalism itself, although it was too late for Chinatown. Among these semi-enlightened workers were a scattering of radicals, and one day a local socialist walked into Andrej’s downtown tailor shop at 1542 Railroad Street.

Andrej would later write, I met Oliver Verity who, having heard about me, came to see me in my tailor shop. He made a very good impression on me, thanks to his energy, and I noticed his enthusiasm for the colony he had just founded five leagues away, with George Allen, A. Kruiger, and Frank Devore. He explained to me that the colony was socialist, along the lines of the Ruskin colony in Tennessee. I refrained from any objection that day.


Oliver A. Verity

While he got some dates wrong, Andrej appears to have met Oliver Verity in late May 1894, shortly after the Glennis socialist colony was established that April. As he recalled, in June, I made my first visit to the Glennis Colony and immediately attacked the authoritarian and despotic socialism of the colonists who had assembled in a large room to listen to me. No one could deny the justice of my attacks, but they were rather dissatisfied with my attitude!


Glennis, Washington schoolhouse

As he continued to narrate, I slept at Verity’s and the next day at lunch the discussions started again. [George] Allen asked me what I proposed in place of their regulation—Nothing, I replied.—But, he told me, that is not socialism. “Perhaps not,” I said; but for sure, it is anarchism. Poor comrade! He ended up turning his back on me in anger, saying that in America, where we had freedom of voting, we didn’t need European anarchists to come and disrupt business there!

Officially called the Glennis Cooperative Industrial Company, this socialist colony consisted of 160 acres just south of Tacoma on the road to Eatonville, near what is still called Clear Lake. Unlike every other socialist colony in Washington State, the socialists of Glennis weren’t racist, they were just overly fond of meetings. Oliver Verity would later describe what he called the desire of many at Glennis to make by-laws restricting others from doing things that in reality were private matters, causing so many meetings which were noisy and bred inharmony.

While Andrej was in Glennis, the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio stabbed the French president in the heart on June 23, 1894. This attentat caused the repression to massively escalate across France and anarchism was all but made illegal under the wicked laws. It’s likely that Andrej learned of this sad development, just as he soon learned of the Pullman Strike’s defeat, but rather than despair, Andrej did what he did best: agitate.

While the residents of Glennis continued with their efforts, Andrej remained busy in Tacoma. As you’ve seen, he agitated during the march of Coxey’s Army and the Pullman Strike, but sometime in the summer of 1894 he began to organize an anarchist newspaper. As he recalled, I joined forces with comrades Davis, Clark, Funk, and Rotschek to publish an anarchist organ. Of all these anarchists, we only have information on Emanuel F. Rotschek, and he’ll appear again in this narrative.

In their efforts to organize an anarchist newspaper, Andrej got in touch with his comrades on the east coast, and as he recalled, I wrote to New York, to the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund group, and comrade [Carl] Masur gave me Spahn’s address in Portland, Oregon. This one, with whom I got in touch, told me that the same project was being pondered in Portland just as we were in Tacoma, and that Comrade [JH] Morris already had a small printing press at his disposal. We therefore stood in solidarity with them to ensure the existence of the Firebrand.

X: For the Burning Away of the Cobwebs of Superstition and Ignorance

As you’ve read above, when Andrej wanted to start an anarchist newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, he first wrote to his comrade in the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund, the same group to which Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman belonged. This comrade, Carl Masur, put Andrej in contact with the small number of anarchists in Portland, which was about 150 miles south of Tacoma.

The earliest known anarchist group in Portland was centered around a newspaper called Freedom, released in 1892 by the Freedom Publishing Group. The first known reference to this paper is found in La Révolte, where it was connected with someone known as Comrade Daermig, about whom little is known. According to Candace Falk, the other anarchists connected with this paper were Henry Addis, JH Morris, and Mauritz Linden. Many years later, Henry would recall that Freedom’s subscription list was the foundation of the Firebrand’s circulation. Surely enough, Freedom lasted less than a year, and when Henry and JH decided to start a new paper, they called it The Firebrand.

However, it took some time to set up a new paper, so in the meantime Andrej brought to Glennis one H. Addis, from Portland, who, although he was not yet an anarchist, made good propaganda there. A real camaraderie was born between most of the colonists and me and they insisted so much that, in December [1894], I was accepted as a member of the colony, but on the condition that I would not be subject to their regulations.

During this time period, Andrej was in correspondence with his comrades in Europe, and proof can be found in the first issue of Le Père Peinard printed in London. Now a monthly, that September 1894 issue was in booklet form, although it carried the familiar Petite Correspondance in its back pages. In one of the entries, we find this: K. Tacoma. For the first time since his days at Delavski List, Andrej was using a form of his real name in print, highlighting the total anonymity he practiced from 1891 to 1893, when he applied for US citizenship, which was still pending in 1894.

Andrej sent another correspondence to Le Père Peinard in time for the now bi-weekly December 15, 1894 issue, likely along with a donation, given the dire straights of the paper and Andrej’s healthy income from custom tailoring. However, despite all the aid, editor Émile Pouget printed the last of the London series on January 1, 1895. While he made plans to return to France, his comrade Andrej Klemencic was preparing for the launch of The Firebrand, the second anarchist newspaper in the Pacific Northwest.

The first issue was published on January 27, 1895, featuring articles from Lucy Parsons, Henry Addis, Mary E. Squire, and Viroqua Daniels, among others, although none from Andrej. It appears that he was busy organizing a launch event for The Firebrand in Tacoma, and as he later recalled, in January 1895, through the Habet literary society, a debate was organized between H. Addis and the socialist Laurent Grondlund, where our ideas demonstrated the strength of their logic.

The Firebrand carried the subtitle For the Burning Away of the Cobwebs of Superstition and Ignorance. The paper cost 50 cents a year, printed meeting announcements for free, and had an initial print run of 1,000 copies per issue. Only the first issue is available on the internet, and Andrej didn’t write for it. He may have written several articles from issue No. 2 to No.9, but unfortunately none of them are available. We find Andrej’s first known Firebrand article published in the tenth issue, released on March 31, 1895 and titled The Glennnis Co-Operative Industrial Colony, his first known English language article.

Andrej explained how the colony was set up with all the paper constitutions, laws, officers, and other red tape customary with ambitious schemes that place one man in authority over his fellows and call it co-operation. I do not mean to belittle this or other attempts to solve the bread-and-butter problems. The results show that these men were honest and earnest.

Andrej then reproduced a letter from colony member Oliver Verity, who explained that Glennis now had twelve families on the land, and we have 6 cows, 4 horses, 26 hogs, 150 head of poultry, 2 wagons, etc., etc. Each family occupies their own home. Vegetables, which are in abundance, we take according to our wants; groceries, which are scarce, are divided per capita. At the end of the article, Andrej signed it as A. KLEMENCIC, marking the first time this cautious immigrant used his full last name in connection with a text, something he never did even in Slovenia.

Andrej didn’t write any more articles during the spring of 1895, although his comrade Henry Addis mentioned him in several Firebrand dispatches. For example, in the April 21 issue, Henry wrote an article titled Radicalism in Tacoma and explained that there is a strong under current of radicalism in Tacoma, although it does not come to the surface as much as in Portland. Public free discussion meetings are not as numerous as in Portland and the work of propaganda is going on and radical sentiment permeating all stratas of society. However, his comrade Andrej was pushing the propaganda of anarchy among the workingmen.

As an example of this propaganda, Henry cited an April 15, 1895 meeting at the Economy Hall in Tacoma where Andrej started the discussion in a rousing speech in favor of labor exchanges, worker run hiring-halls where a living-wage was established by the workers themselves. Henry also spoke at this meeting and announced that on April 26 we will hold another meeting at the same place, and a lively time is expected.

Meanwhile, Jean Grave and his Parisian comrades were finally free of legal troubles, and on May 4, 1895, they published the first issue of a new anarchist newspaper, Les Temps Nouveaux, literally The New Times, but closer to The New Age. It began as a four page paper, the back half largely dedicated to international news, and Kropotkin was a notable contributor to its first issues. By the May 25 issue of The Firebrand, both Les Temps Nouveaux and Émile Pouget’s new Le Sociale newspaper were listed in its recurring Anarchist Journals column.

Andrej likely mailed the first Firebrand to Paris, and in the June 1, 1895 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, Jean Grave printed an advertisement and extract from it. While this entry didn’t mention Andrej, it noted the paper was run by Henry Addis and comrades from different countries. It’s likely that each issue of The Firebrand was mailed to Jean Grave in Paris for the entirety of its print run.

In the June 2 issue of The Firebrand, Henry Addis wrote an article entitled The Work of Propaganda where he described anarchist activity in different Pacific Northwest cities. In his section on Tacoma, he wrote that his comrade Andrej had, in less than eighteen months, started such a wave of anarchistic sentiment that a goodly number of persons are avowed anarchists, while many more seemed “almost persuaded.” The Glennis Co-operative Colony has, through his interest in its welfare, and his exposition of anarchist principles, become much nearer an anarchist settlement.

According to his recollection for the Cronaca Sovversiva, it was around this time that Andrej was admitted to [Glennis] as a free member, because at a plenary meeting of the colony it was decided that the colony’s regulations didn’t apply to me; therefore, I was left with complete freedom, because tobacco, wine and spirits were prohibited there, and even free love was unknown. From this statement, it seems likely that Andrej not only smoked tobacco and drank alcohol, he practiced free love.

In the July 21 issue, Emma Goldman wrote her first article for The Firebrand, a call for funds to support Sasha Berkman, who is languishing in a dark, musty cell, shut away from his friends and from the world, never enjoying a stray beam of sunshine; still dreaming of a dawn of perfect freedom, and a day when labor will no longer be crushed beneath the iron heel of wealth. For behind his prison bars his big warm heart still throbs with the hopes and fears of the downtrodden.

In that issue same, Andrej donated $2.50 to The Firebrand, or almost two days’ wages, while in the August 3 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux there was another entry for K., from Tacoma, and it’s likely Andrej sent money to his comrades in Paris, just as he likely contributed to Sasha. He didn’t write anything for either paper during the summer of 1895, but he was busy organizing the Tacoma Labor Exchange, which came into being by September 1895. It’s unclear who he organized this with, but the organization had an entire building at 1522 C Street, just blocks from Andrej’s tailor shop.

While he was busy organizing, Andrej also sent $2.50 to The Firebrand in July, just as he likely sent a similar amount to Les Temps Nouveaux at the beginning of August. It was only after getting the Tacoma Labor Exchange up and running that Andrej wrote another article. Unsurprisingly, it was dedicated to the newly opened exchange, and as he wrote, the labor movement is quiet here as there are hardly any political gatherings in the different clubs.

He went on to state, the most important thing for us is to know each other, and propagate the spirit of solidarity, and show to suffering mankind our common interest in production and distribution. We know that the great mass of the people fear the social revolution, and their cowardice makes them grasp any kind of makeshift in order to avert cataclysm,—but there still remains the pressing necessity of the overthrow of our useless institutions, to be accomplished by us or the next generation. Co-operation in Labor Exchanges gives us a fine opportunity.

This short article ended with a call announcing that all those interested in co-operation are cordially invited to call at our regular meetings Tuesday nights. Special invitation is extended to all Anarchists to attend the discussion on “How best to accomplish the dissemination of Anarchist-Communism among the laboring men.” However, unlike his previous article, this one was signed A.C., and it appears that Henry Addis didn’t know Klemencic was spelled with a K, not a C, something which was corrected by the following October 6 issue, when A.K. from Tacoma donated 50 cents to The Firebrand, likely along with this correction.

In the October 13 issue, Andrej described an October 7 debate he had with a socialist named Mr. Gronlund, who preached government ownership of transportation and communication and State work for the unemployed. In contrast, Andrej spoke on the futility and humbuggery of political reform. If individuals are able to guide themselves they do not ask anybody to lead them; and if they cannot distinguish good from bad how are they capable of selecting the man to represent their interests? In the same issue, it was revealed that Andrej sent $1.00 to the Firebrand along with his article, although he sent only 50 cents by the next issue.

A month later, The Firebrand reprinted an article Emma Goldman wrote for The Torch of Anarchy newspaper in London, generally known as The Torch. Reprinted in the November 17 issue, her article The Conditions of the Workers of America briefly summarized the major problems in the US, and in a passage far ahead of its time, Emma wrote, the only true Americans were the native Indians, a kind and peaceful lot of people, who were cruelly robbed of their land and happiness by the ancestors of those who now rule the country. I should think myself disgraced had my ancestors been amongst those who mercilessly slaughtered the Indians wholesale, pretending to do so in the name of civilization.

During this time, Andrej wrote nothing for the Firebrand and sent only a 50 cent donation that November, while his anarchist mother Mrs. M. Wilson of the Tacoma Victor House sent another 50 cents for the January 12, 1896 issue. Meanwhile, Andrej was busy helping his comrades at Glennis, and as he later wrote, it was earlier that June when there the first dissensions in the colony between socialists and anarchists at Glennis emerged, and as he wrote, in September we declared the socialist colony bankrupt, and in December we built a boat to explore the islands and coast of Puget Sound.

In his account for the Cronaca Sovversiva, Andrej would add that Glennis comrades finished building a boat in the woods and transported it on wheels to Tacoma to begin a search for land towards the creation of a future anarchist colony, according to my fundamental ideas, which were: to hold the land of the colony in communal use, but to cultivate it individually or communally, according to the settlers’ inclination.

According to Andrej, once the boat was finished it left on January 13 and on the 27th Oliver Verity, G. Allen, and Frank Odell landed on Joe’s Bay, 25 kilometers from Tacoma. It appears their journey took two weeks as they scouted locations for an anarchist colony, camping at different spots each night, and on the way to their future Home, it was likely they met the natives who still canoed through their Salish Sea every day. As far as anyone knows, there was never an indigenous village where these anarchist colonizers chose to settle, the closest tribe lived six miles to the north, and when these three anarchists stepped off their boat, all they could see were trees.

XI: Home, Sweet Home

Andrej didn’t join his comrades on their journey, he merely helped build the boat, and it appears he remained in Tacoma for much of this time. His comrades from the Radikaler Arbeiter Bund sent $5.00 to The Firebrand for its January 19, 1896 issue, while Andrej sent an article for its February 2 issue, although it was largely an extract from the January 5 issue of La Sociale, the new anarchist newspaper of Émile Pouget, who Andrej was clearly in contact with. La Sociale did have a US correspondent that wrote news entries about Chicago, Saint Louis, Kansas, and train-hoppers, although none of them were written by Andrej.

At the time, he was likely helping his comrades’ families move to their anarchist colony out on Joe’s Bay. According to Andrej, on February 10, the families of these comrades landed, without money or food, in the virgin forest. Wood had to be cut down to exchange for food in Lakebay, the neighboring town. Thus was born the anarchist colony of Home.

Before this happened, Andrej wrote a short update of all that had happened since he arrived in Tacoma, and he mailed it to Les Temps Nouveaux sometime before February 10, 1896. The anarchist Home colony wasn’t mentioned in this dispatch, but Andrej wrote that in Tacoma the anarchist conception is here a great success and, in short, our ideas have a better chance of succeeding here than anywhere else in the world I’ve had the opportunity to travel, because the people are very intelligent and are now in dire poverty, especially in the American Northwest.

This was the first article Andrej wrote for Les Temps Nouveaux, but like all his writing for La Révolte, this text was also unsigned. It appears that this article arrived in Paris on February 22, when its arrival was announced in that issue’s Petite Correspondance column, sent by K., from Tacoma. In the following February 23 issue of La Sociale, we find an entry in the Petite Poste column that reads: (F. LeMans; S. Albi; K. Tacoma, par Temps Nouveaux). It’s unclear what he sent to Émile Pouget, but it likely included a donation, just as it implied Andrej was affiliated with Les Temps Nouveaux.

A week later, in the February 29 issue, Andrej’s article on Tacoma was published as the US news entry in Les Temps Nouveaux, and he would soon write again for Jean Grave. However, Andrej wrote no articles through the month of March and contributed only 20 cents to The Firebrand, the rest of his extra money likely going to Home, where his comrades were buying lumber to build three houses, one for each of their families.

Andrej’s next article, appearing in the April 12, 1896 issue of The Firebrand, was simply an extract from Les Temps Nouveaux regarding the arrest of Pyotr Kropotkin in Paris, and he wrote nothing further that April, likely devoting his spare energy to helping build the first houses of Home. He wrote again for the May 3 issue, a theoretical article titled Why Vote?, and in this text Andrej broke down exactly why voting was bad.

As he explained to the reader, it is impossible for me to think of the possibility of a government without an “opposition.” It is very essential to the security of the government to have the opposition, in order to keep up the ceaseless hope for reforms which never come. Andrej went on to state that if the masses would stop voting, the stump speaker could no more boast about majority rule, because they would be backed up only by politicians, and the politicians are deservedly despised, at least here in Tacoma. The hog would then drown in its own dirt.

In conclusion, Andrej believed that the dilemma is simply this: government or Anarchy; if you vote you are sure to keep up the government. If you stop voting and advocate production and distribution on the basis of mutual cooperation without imposing authority, all justice loving people will sympathize with you and gradually evolve to the ideals of a free society, which we are advocating, but it is illogical to wish Anarchy and vote for government. After signing this latest article A. Klemencic, as he had been for several issues, Andrej didn’t write again for nearly two months.

In the meantime, his comrade Emma Goldman was avidly reading each issue of The Firebrand she received in New York, and when Henry Addis wrote on April 26 that in order to give news of the movement it must be sent in by comrades, Emma did just that. On May 24, her reply was printed in The Firebrand, providing readers with an update on recent anarchist propaganda, and as she sadly remarked, I cannot say we have an Anarchistic movement of any importance in the east, but I am confident we could work one up if there were people both able and willing to participate in the work.

In addition to summarizing her recent lecture tours, Emma informed the reader that the circulation for Les Temps Nouveaux had just reached 18,000, while the circulation for La Sociale was now at 20,000. Notably, she also explained that her New York City comrades were still meeting at Tough Mike’s, where they composed an Anarchist May Day manifesto of which several thousand were distributed. Once again, Emma asked for funds to aid Sasha Berkman, claiming we will need about $1000.

Andrej wasn’t involved in the editorial decisions of The Firebrand, given he was busy in Tacoma, but he likely facilitated Emma’s writing for the paper. When he finally returned to print in the July 19 issue, his text once again centered on the dangers of voting, and he asked the reader, what would you think of a man who had a toothache and wanted to change hats in the hope of alleviating the pain? This tooth-ache is the State, and the governments are the hats we are continually changing.

Unfortunately, the following July 26 issue of The Firebrand contained a letter from one P. Franco, who insinuated Emma had misspent the funds raised for Sasha. The inclusion of this letter was justified by editor JH Morris, who wrote that since we have published appeals for the fund it seems to us only fair, though we regret the occasion, to publish objections to the raising thereof and questions as to the disposal of moneys already obtained. It is unlikely that Andrej had any direct influence on these editorial decisions, and Emma was understandably furious.

She responded in the following issue, stating that the publishers of the Firebrand certainly have a right to publish whatever they please, but they have no right to publish any accusations without knowing whether they are false or true. She then went on to refute the allegations and claimed that any further questions should directed towards Charles Schneider in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, given he was the treasurer of the defense group to whom Emma had already listed. While this certainly created animosity between Emma and editors of The Firebrand, she’d soon write for the paper again.

Andrej also wrote for The Firebrand that summer, an anarchist analysis of Tacoma politics entitled Mixed Pickles which appeared in the August 9, 1896 issue. In the back pages, Andrej was also listed as contributing 90 cents to help the Firebrand acquire a new printing press. A month after this, K. from Tacoma made another appearance in the Petite Poste column of La Sociale, although he wrote no article for that September 20 issue. Andrej didn’t write another full article until the October 4 issue of The Firebrand, when he announced a massmeeting, entertainment and ball that he organized for Germania Hall in Tacoma, set to take place on October 17.


Germania Hall

In the report-back he wrote for the November 1 issue, Andrej was disappointed and complained that we got only about a couple hundred persons present who were mostly my personal friends. Of course, we failed to reach the masses, the ones which are on the fence, that just don’t exactly know what to do in the present agitation. One thing is sure now here in Tacoma, that we are able to arrange as fine and interesting entertainments as any one of the secret societies in this locality. To cap off the disappointment, the event only raised $2.00 for the Firebrand printing-press fund.


Germania Hall (across E Street from church)

Not to be discouraged, Andrej announced in the November 15 issue that the local “Firebrand family” will have a social entertainment Saturday Nov. 21, at our mothers place (Mrs. Wilson of the “Victor House,” South E. St. between 19th and 21st street). Comrade Klemencic will deliver a lecture on “Individual Initiative.” Most importantly, he revealed that in the dining parlors will be served free lunch to every one present at the intermission of dancing. Every Firebrander is invited to bring along his friends. Admission will be 15 cents a person, for the benefit of Anarchist propaganda.

That same issue carried a short analysis Andrej wrote on Washington State politics, built around an extract from the Seattle-Post Intelligencer. The following November 22 issue also featured more of Andrej’s political analysis, this time focusing on the Tacoma murder of Dr. James S. Wintermute at the hands of Samuel Tucker, a poor worker that Wintermute owed money to. Andrej summed it by writing, Tucker made you understand that you cannot humbug the people all the time. If you cannot get wise by honest reflections about the times, we will have to use revolver injections to suit the times.

A few weeks later, the familiar K. from Tacoma appeared once again in the December 5, 1896 issue of Le Père Peinard, which had been resurrected after the closing of La Sociale. A week later, K. from Tacoma appeared in Les Temps Nouveaux, although neither paper printed any of his articles, and it’s unclear what he sent to Jean Grave and Émile Pouget. However, it was at this time that Andrej began his international anarchist news column in The Firebrand.

The first incarnation appeared in the December 13 issue and was titled Echoes from our Exchanges, implying the news came from Andrej’s international correspondents. News from Italy, Peru, Bohemia, Hong Kong, France, Spain, and Argentina appeared in that first installment, a variety which continued for all the years that Andrej wrote these news columns.

Andrej also organized another weekly meeting, and as he announced in the December 20 issue, we have started an Independent Educational Club, at 1927 E St. There will be delivered every Sunday night at 7 o’clock a lecture on some subject concerning the welfare of mankind, by one of the members, which will be followed by a free discussion. This meeting was regularly listed on the back-page of The Firebrand and took place at the above-mentioned “Victor House,” which was run by the enigmatic Mrs. Wilson, about whom little is known, although Andrej did refer to her as mother of Tacoma’s fledgling anarchist movement, and she is known to have later visited Home in September 1898.

Andrej continued his international news columns through January 1897, and after writing about the repression in Spain multiple times, he published a feature article in the January 31 issue titled The Barcelona Martyrs, which explained the repression that followed the Corpus Christi bombing in Barcelona on June 7, 1896. The attack was attributed to anarchists and over 400 were arrested, with several tortured into false confessions which they later recanted at trial, as revealed by Andrej in his article, which summarized extensively from Les Temps Nouveaux and Le Père Peinard.


Corpus Christi bombing, Barcelona, 1896

Over a century before the slogan solidarity means attack became enshrined in anarchist culture, Andrej gave the following recommendations for showing solidarity with the Barcelona Martyrs: take a big lump of sulphur and light it at the door of the Consular’s office. That will poison the whole neighborhood with the stinking smell. One man can do it and not risk much either. If there are more boys they can “mob” the Consul and give him just as good a licking as our comrades got in Barcelona.

That same issue also ran an opinion piece from Andrej, who believed The Firebrand should be kept at the same price of 5 cents an issue, or 50 cents a year. In response, the editors in Portland announced that we have concluded to discontinue all subscription price, and from now on will credit all receipts to propaganda fund. We will try it that way for a while and see if we succeed in that manner. Now, it remains for the comrades to show their faith and zeal by collecting and sending in funds, just as we have shown ours by discarding all price for The Firebrand. Through this exchange, we can see how influential Andrej’s opinion was among the Pacific Northwest anarchists.

And then, just over three years after he applied, Andrej was granted US citizenship on February 2, 1897. This event took place at the downtown Tacoma courthouse and witnessed by his old friend Emanuel F. Rotschek and one Angus McLellan, about whom little is known. On that day, Andrej legally swore to support the Constitution of the United States of America, and that he doth absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign Prince, Potentate, State or Sovereignty whatever, and particularly the Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary. With this new-found citizenship, Andrej immediately got rowdy.

In the February 14 issue, Andrej announced that the Independent Educational Club, which met at the Victor House of Mrs. Wilson, felt it a duty to express sympathy towards all the unfortunate individuals who are under the rule of the Spanish vampires. There will be a mass meeting of the people of Tacoma to bring forth an address to the Spanish “Premier” who calls himself Canovas, setting forth the feelings of this community and protesting against his cruel and inhuman conduct.

The event took place that day at the corner of Pacific Avenue and 12th Street, right in the heart of downtown. Andrej recounted that the event was fairly well attended, considering the chilly and misty weather. There was at least 300 citizens present to listen to the denunciation, by A. Klemencic and F.C. Clarke, of the Spanish government. Februaries are certainly chilly in Tacoma, but after listening to Andrej speak, the crowd joined him in desecrating and then burning a Spanish flag. After that, they all consented to Andrej’s speech being mailed to Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain.

While this was happening in Tacoma, the anarchists of Home, now numbering over 20 residents, had organized to publish their own monthly newspaper, The New Era. It was edited by Oliver Verity and printed at Home by him and his family, costing 10 cents per year. It was announced in the April 4 issue of The Firebrand, while the April issue of The New Era featured an advertisement for The Firebrand, as well as a reprint of a Henry Addis article. It’s unclear how much Andrej was involved in assisting with The New Era, but it certainly marked a new stage in Home’s evolution.

Andrej continued his international news column in the weeks ahead, although he depersonalized the title to Echoes from Foreign Countries, which no longer implied a network sending him news items. One of his entries on the Hamburg longshoreman’s strike became a feature in the March 21, 1897 issue of The Firebrand, while another feature on Spain was printed in the April 4 issue.

Andrej wrote another analysis of Washington State politics in the April 18 issue, but after that he appears to have left Tacoma, the place he called home from 1893 to 1897. It’s unclear what happened to his tailor shop at 1542 Railroad Street, or when he last visited the Home colony, or what ultimately happened to the Labor Exchange and Independent Educational Club he helped found, but what is certain is that Andrej left the City of Destiny sometime in April of 1897 and appeared a month later in San Francisco, California, headquarters of west coast anarchism.

XII: Hello, Frisco, Hello

By the time Andrej arrived in San Francisco, the anarchist movement had been well-established for over a decade. There were certainly anarchists in San Francisco before the 1880s, including Mikhail Bakunin in 1861, but it was only in 1885 that anarchism began its explosive growth, starting with the formation of the Coast Sailor’s Union, founded on March 6 by the anarchist Sigismund Danielewicz. Thanks to this union, anarchists could easily secure access to destinations around the world, given they controlled the sailor’s hiring halls. However, just like Tacoma, the labor movement in San Francisco was thoroughly racist, and the anarchists were certainly a minority.

One of the earliest mentions of San Francisco in the pages of La Révolte was the February 24, 1889 issue, where Jean Grave reprinted a French translation of a mainstream US article from the Arbeiter Zeitung, a short-lived newspaper established in San Francisco by the racist socialist Paul Grottkau, a bitter opponent of Johann Most, whose Freiheit was also quoted from in that issue. The first known San Francisco correspondent appears in the December 21, 1889 issue’s Petite Correspondance column, where a certain H. from S. Francisco is listed.

It was in December 1889 that Sigismund Danielewicz began publishing The Beacon in San Diego and then moved it north to San Francisco where it became that city’s first anarchist newsapaper the only English language anarchist periodical in the US. In 1890, the local anarchists met at the Beacon office near downtown on 319 5th Street every Sunday. Given that Sigismund was fluent in English, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, and German, it was likely a motley crowd. On top of this, the Beacon office also featured a barber shop and laundry service, as well as a reading room for all the comrades.

By the May 17, 1890 issue of The Beacon, an advertisement for La Révolte was featured in the back pages, implying it was being read among anarchists in San Francisco. To make matters clearer, the June 21 issue of La Révolte featured two short US news entries, one of which announced that the Beacon had resumed publishing in San Francisco, as well as listing its 319 5th Street address. Over the next year, The Beacon would publish anarchist voices like Lucy Parsons, Lizzie Holmes, Ross Winn, Dyer D. Lum, and Clara Dixon, who would become assistant editor of the paper in 1891.

The Beacon ceased publication in the summer of 1891, although Clara Dixon and Harry C. Cowell started the l‘Enfant Terrible anarchist newspaper in the fall of 1891, as announced in the February 12, 1892 issue of La Révolte, although Clara’s paper lasted only several issues and was discontinued by the spring of 1892. Clara and Harry remained in San Francisco, as did Sigismund Danielewicz, and four years later, in the March 8, 1896 issue of The Firebrand, we can see that Sigismund donated 50 cents in the Receipts column, although they spelled his name Danielevicz.

In addition to Sigismund, several other San Francisco anarchists donated to The Firebrand, most notably the Alleanza Socialista-Anarchica, which sent $2.00 for the July 19, 1896 issue. The Alleanza was an anarchist group established in San Francisco earlier that March by the traveling anarchist bard Pietro Gori and his comrade Bianca Gaffe, a Swiss anarchist organizer who was behind all the logistics for Gori’s talk in San Francisco.


Bianca Gaffe, upper left, Pietro Gori, upper right

The Alleanza would donate another $2.00 to The Firebrand for its September 27 issue, and it’s clear that anarchists in San Francisco were well aware of The Firebrand. Beyond this, the paper also featured an advertisement for the Anarchist Headquarters, the name for the German-speaking anarchist club at 1232 ½ Folsom Street, which was open every night from 7 to 10. This headquarters also donated $3 in the February 28, 1897 issue and $4 in the March 21 issue, but it’s in the April 25 issue that the front page of The Firebrand was devoted to a speech that Sigismund Danielewicz delivered to the Anarchist Headquarters of San Francisco. Along with this speech came $2.00 from Anarchist Headquarters, as well as another $2.00 from the Alleanza. It’s highly likely that Andrej attended Sigismund’s lecture at the headquarters, given he left Tacoma in early April, and his first text from San Francisco appeared in the May 9 issue of The Firebrand.

His dispatch was titled The Labor Movement in San Francisco, and he explained, as my Tacoma friends as anxious to know of my doings in the western metropolis, I feel obliged to them and give them a small sketch of what I see in my surroundings. My time is very limited, as it is just now the busy season in my trade, and beside this I have also to pay some attention to my lady companions which is harder, of course, than to take care of myself, but I suppose that I will settle down soon. These opening sentences possibly shed light on Andrej’s sexuality, implying he was straight, non-monogamous, and already tailoring somewhere in San Francisco by May 1, 1897.

Andrej went on to describe the Latin Quarter headquarters of the Alleanza, which was visited by quite a good lot of determined men and women, and Andrej elected to keep its location secret aside from writing that it was situated in the middle of the Italian and French part of the city. Among the anarchist women he met there was Bianca Gaffe, co-founder of the Alleanza, whom he described as a very forcible and logical speaker, especially in French and Italian, but also in English. She is well received and appreciated. Andrej also listed the Firebrand writer Mary E. Squire, who had recently moved to San Francisco and was dreaming day and night how to start in the Golden Gate city another periodical. Last but not least, Andrej mentioned the Anarchist Headquarters, center of the German anarchists.

After this May 9 article, Andrej didn’t write again for nearly two months, clearly busy with the spring tailoring season. Aside from those listed in the above article, it’s unclear who Andrej was associating with, although both La Révolte and Le Père Peinard had several French correspondents in San Francisco, among them Gaston Lance, who likely met Andrej during this time period.

It was around this time that a down-and-out anarchist printer named Charles Govan was in a San Francisco saloon where he found a copy of The New Era from Home. Seeing its call for printers to come live at Home, the alcoholic Charles soon quit drinking and made his way north to the anarchist colony. The New Era had a very small circulation, the chances of Andrej leaving a copy in a saloon are high, and were this true, he’d be directly responsible for Charles Govan moving to Home.

Meanwhile, Andrej found time to write another article for The Firebrand, and in the June 27 issue, his May 4th 1897 in Spain was published, narrating the execution of the Barcelona Martyrs. While the first half of the article was devoted to this tragedy, the second half suddenly shifted locations to the Bazar de la Charité, an annual event at 17 Rue Jean-Goujon in Paris where the ruling class of Europe bought extravagant items for charity. It was precisely on May 4, 1897 that this Bazar caught fire and burned to the ground, killing 126 people, including Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, Duchess of Alençon and sister to the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In his article, Andrej wrote that the wife of the Spanish ambassador and sister of the empress of Austria were roasted to death in company with a hundred more victims representing the “fine fleur” of the catholic aristocracy. The Spanish ambassador can remember the indignation massmeetings, the menaces and protests which the Parisian workmen held in favor of the imprisoned in Barcelona. All the reply the workmen obtained was they were dispersed by the mounted police with drawn swords, as the French government went right along hand in hand with the Spanish Inquisitors. The fire in the Rue Jean Goujon was a purifying one.

As is well known, the aristocratic men trampled the women as they tried to escape, accounting for the large number of women killed, and after explaining this for the reader, Andrej went on to write, you could see again the Parisian workmen go and help the distressed plutes, but can you show me in French history one instance where the plutes would help the distressed workmen? Never! If they only dare to demand bread they are sure to be met with lead. No plute ever tried to rescue the Spanish Anarchists from the jail, and there you have it now, eye for eye and tooth for tooth.

This is possibly the only text from that time period where an anarchist insinuates that the Bazar de la Charité fire was a deliberate attack against the catholic aristocracy which murdered their comrades in Barcelona. It did occur on the same day the Barcelona Martyrs were executed, with the flames spreading in Paris just hours later. However, as Andrej correctly noted, it was poor workers who rushed to rescue the rich women still stuck inside, just as they helped the injured out on the street. While the hit 2019 mini-series Le Bazar de la Charité depicts one of these poor workers as an anarchist who is later accused of starting the fire, this had no basis in reality, and Andrej is seemingly the only anarchist to connect the fire with the Barcelona Martyrs.

After publishing this article, Andrej resumed his international news column in The Firebrand that July, just as he published a short article on a fallen aristocrat who starved to death in San Francisco. The Anarchist Headquarters sent $5.00 to The Firebrand for the July 11 issue, while the Alleanza donated $3.25 for the July 25 issue. In that same issue, Andrej translated a letter from the surviving anarchist prisoners of Barcelona, who expressed the hope that other groups and isolated individuals will do all they possibly can to assist our surviving Spanish comrades, who are in great need.

That July 11 issue also carried an eight page supplement titled The Modern Inquisition of Spain, which was inserted into the middle of each issue. This supplement contained many reprints of articles related to the Barcelona Martyrs, including a final letter from Antoni Nogués, one of the five executed anarchists. It was printed at Allied Printing in Philadelphia, which was affiliated with the local Trades Council, and had its official union label printed on the back. To this day, The Modern Inquisition of Spain remains the most comprehensive English text on the Barcelona Martyrs.

Amid all this focus on Spain, the latest Emma Goldman article appeared in the July 18 issue of The Firebrand, although it had nothing to do with the Barcelona Martyrs. Simply titled Marriage, this article was the first of Emma Goldman’s immortal texts and is still printed today in the Dover Thrift and AK Press editions of Anarchism and Other Essay, although now bearing the title Love and Marriage. In this historic text, Emma declared, I demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to love whomever she please, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.

Meanwhile, Andrej devoted much of his time agitating against the murders in Barcelona, but he also organized a donation of 27.30 francs to Les Temps Nouveaux, courtesy of Anarchist Headquarters. He mailed in this donation for the August 14, 1897 issue along with a short article he wrote on the US, and he opened it by declaring that anarchist propaganda in the West of the United States has gained a firm foothold in several cities. He also caught up his French readers on the situation at Home, explaining that the comrades of Glennis had left their Social Democratic organization and are at Lake Bay Wash, on the seashore, twenty miles from Tacoma. They have set aside their laws and have openly declared themselves Anarchists. They have set up a press and are publishing The New Era, which appears monthly, but they hope soon to make it weekly.

After briefly describing the comrades in San Francisco and their Anarchist Headquarters, Andrej ended the article by declaring that the population is ripe everywhere in the West to receive new ideas. He mailed this short article to Paris sometime in early August, and while it was in transit across the Atlantic, an Italian anarchist named Michele Angiolillo stalked the Prime Minister of Spain at a health spa before assassinating him with three shots from a pistol on August 8, 1897. Just like thousands of other anarchists, Andrej was ecstatic at the news.

XIII: If You Like Piña Coladas

In the May 8, 1897 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, editor Jean Grave placed the following sentence in the Petite Correspondance column: Comrade Angiolillo is asked to send his family news of himself. At the time, Michele Angiolillo was living in London, although clearly his family had no idea where he was, and when they wanted to find out, they contacted Jean Grave, who put the request directly into his paper. All this to say, Michele Angiolillo and his family were close with the main editor of Les Temps Nouveaux, one of the papers that helped break the silence on the atrocities in Spain.

Michele was working in Barcelona as a printer when the 1896 Corpus Christi bombing took place and several of his anarchist comrades were among the 400 arrested. Fearing he’d be next, Michele fled to France, was expelled to Belgium, and then ended up in London where he worked as a printer through the spring of 1897. Weeks after the notice from his family was published in Les Temps Nouveaux, Michele attended a massive demonstration on May 30 in Trafalgar Square where 10,000 people gathered to denounce the Spanish atrocities and commemorate the Barcelona Martyrs.

Some of the tortured victims spoke at the demonstration, and a few days later Michele met with two of them. As the anarchist Rudolf Rocker would recall, that night when [Francisco] Gana showed us his crippled limbs, and the scars over his entire body left by the tortures, we understood that it is one thing to read about such matters, but quite another to hear about them from the very lips of the victims…We all sat there as if turned to stone, and it was some minutes before we could utter a few words of indignation. Only Angiolillo said not a word. A little later, he suddenly rose to his feet, uttered a laconic goodbye, and abandoned the house…This was the last time I saw him.

Sometimes after this, Michele made his way to Paris where he met with Ramón Emeterio Betances, a Puerto Rican insurgent who attempted to coordinate rebellion against the Spanish Crown in the Philippines, Cuba, and his native Puerto Rico. It’s unknown exactly what Michele and Ramón discussed, or who else was involved, but Michele soon traveled south to Bordeaux and eventually crossed the Spanish border, making his way to Madrid sometime in late July 1897. After tracking the Prime Minister to a bath resort in Mondragón, Michele shot Antonio Cánovas del Castillo three times as revenge for the Barcelona Martyrs.

Anarchists across the world celebrated this act, including in print, but in the weeks following the assassination, not a single article of The Firebrand was dedicated to Michele’s attentat, nor did Andrej write anything about it. The only information regarding Andrej’s activities came from Abraham Isaak, an editor of The Firebrand, who wrote a short entry on San Francisco for the September 5 issue.

As he explained, the comrades in San Francisco are active in helping along the propaganda. They raffled a quilt, donated by Mrs. Waisbrooker, for the benefit of The Firebrand, collected some money for the Spanish comrades in exile and for the German Anarchist papers; Mrs. Squire makes speeches on the streets; Comrade Klemencic will lecture October 19, before the Karl Marx Educational Club, on “Anarchist Communism vs. Social Democracy.” It’s likely that Andrej sent Abraham the letter which this report-back was based on, given that September 5 issue also featured a 50 cent donation that Andrej sent from San Francisco.

Aside from the above lines, there was little mention of Spain in The Firebrand for over a month, and when the editors finally addressed Michele’s act in the September 19 issue, they were merely reprints from other sources. It appears that no one involved in The Firebrand wanted to directly write about Spain, especially after the incendiary propaganda they’d been publishing against the Crown’s atrocities, although this playing-it-safe strategy didn’t matter very much in the end.

On September 17, as he went to drop that Firebrand issue off at the post office, editor Abner J. Pope was being surveilled by the police. Henry Addis and the Isaaks were off picking hops to make extra money, so Abner was alone when the US Marshals arrested him. The September 17 issue of The Firebrand was banned from being mailed across the US for publishing obscene material. The following September 26 issue was also banned, and this would ultimately be the last issue of The Firebrand ever published. At the end of its run, The Firebrand had a print circulation of 3,000.

As you’ve seen, the true reason for the suppression of The Firebrand was its support of the Spanish anarchists and condemnation of the Spanish Crown, the obscenity was just an excuse. Starting in the June 9, 1895 issue, The Firebrand had run ads for El Esclavo, the Cuban anarchist newspaper from Tampa, Florida, as well as El Despertar, a periodical run by the anarchist Pedro Esteve in Brooklyn.

Unlike the Firebrand, the editors of El Esclavo didn’t hesitate to print front-page articles praising the heroic act of Michele Angiolillo. Ever since the Cuban Insurrection broke out in 1895, the US government had turned a blind eye to anarchists smuggling guns, money, and aid to their comrades in Cuba, all of which helped fuel the explosive anti-Spanish rebellion where entire plantations were burned to the ground and soldiers ambushed on the streets. However, after the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister, the US government needed to appear neutral to the Crown.

For this reason, El Esclavo and The Firebrand were banned that September, but another casualty was The New Era of Home, Washington. Although only the first three issues are currently available, The New Era appears to have run up to September 1897, as it was still listed in the final issue of The Firebrand. Beyond this, Andrej referred to New Era in his August dispatch to Les Temps Nouveaux, just as Abraham Isaak referenced it in his September 5 dispatch on San Francisco. By all accounts, it appears The New Era was suppressed by the Post Office for allegedly sending out too many unpaid copies, which was the easiest excuse to suppress the paper.

Meanwhile, the October 30 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux featured a short US news entry regarding the government’s suppression of The Firebrand, explaining that the pretext given is not, as one might imagine, “the crime of condoning or inciting murder, pillage,” etc. No. This arbitrary measure was taken because of articles on marriage! It is amusing to see the defenders of a society based on prostitution and immorality become the protectors of “public morality.”

This was followed by the October 31 issue of Le Père Peinard, where part of the US news column was devoted to the Firebrand. As the author explained, in recent weeks, a slick little duckling, The Firebrand, published in English, was suppressed and its editors sent to the slammer. Why? I won’t ask you a riddle, people, because you’d never guess! I’m telling you: The Firebrand is being prosecuted for INDECENT ASSAULT…FOR PUBLISHING A SUPPLEMENT GIVING DETAILS OF THE TORTURE ENDURED BY THE INNOCENT PEOPLE OF BARCELONA.

Abner J. Pope, Henry Addis, and Abraham Isaak were all arrested as editors of The Firebrand, although Abner ultimately served four months while the others paid bail and were released, something Abner refused to do on principle. Upon his release, Abner moved north to Home where he lived the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Abraham and his family took what remained of the Firebrand defense fund and moved south to San Francisco sometime in late October or early November.

Rather than fund their new lifestyles, this money was used to launch a new paper, Free Society, and its first issue was published on November 14, 1897, less than two month after the Firebrand’s demise. While Henry remained in Portland to help his comrade, Abraham and his large family moved into a house at 13 Oak Grove Avenue, which soon became a gathering spots for the local anarchists, among them Andrej Klemenčič.

XIV: We Built This City

Andrej resumed his international anarchist news columns in Free Society, this time naming it News From Everywhere, a play off the utopian anarchist novel News From Nowhere by William Morris. Free Society was mailed to previous subscribers of The Firebrand, the subscription price was still 50 cents a year, and the first issue was mostly a reprint of the previous Firebrand suppressed by the government and offered little insight into what actually caused the paper the end.

Abraham Isaak had been ordered to shut down The Firebrand, but he was still walking a fine line by starting Free Society, which was essentially the same paper. To confuse the postal authorities, the initial subtitle of Free Society included the phrase successor to the Co-Operative Age, a paper which or may not have existed, and this was enough for them to continue printing, albeit with the full title of Free Society: An Advocate of Communal Life and Individual Sovereignty.

One new feature in that first November 14 issue was Andrej’s column, which informed the reader that for various reasons the notes in this department are nearly out of date locally, but will probably be of interest in general circles. Andrej wrote another news column for the following November 21 issue, and it was here that Free Society finally explained what happened to the Firebrand with a front page story titled A True Story of American Officialism.

The majority of the article was a short history of the paper and a letter from Henry Addis explaining how the government detained them and kept Abner J. Pope locked in jail. After this letter, the editors provided extracts from various mainstream newspapers, all supporting the anarchists and condemning the government.

One extract was from the New Dispensation monthly in Corvallis, Oregon, where the author wrote, the burden of the Anarchists’ offense, as far as I can learn, was the publication of an account of the tortures inflicted by the Spanish inquisition on the Barcelona prisoners. This was displeasing to the Spanish authorities and to some folks of a similar kidney in this country, so a charge of mailing obscene literature was set up as a peg to a persecution on.

Another extract came from The Cleveland Recorder, a mainstream Democratic newspaper, and the author explained that the objectionable matter was a supplement containing letters from victims of Canovas’ malignity at Barcelona, in which was described in plain, but for the purposes, entirely decent language, the almost nameless torture which those men endured. That explanation we were unable to credit. We felt obliged to assume that the postal authorities are endowed with some degree of common sense. However, it appears that the accused themselves do not definitively know of what they are accused. They can only surmise that the prosecution may rest upon the Barcelona supplement, Walt Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for Me,” or upon a letter from a woman contributor.

Similarly, that issue contained a short item from Abraham Isaak explaining that The New Era of Home was suppressed for sending out too many unpaid copies. The authorities could not legally find fault with the paper, as it did not contain “obscene matter,” so it investigated the subscription book. This is the only reference to the first police raid that the anarchists of Home were forced to experience, all of it because the Spanish Crown put pressure on the US government to crack down on the anarchists.

Despite being thoroughly in the government cross-hairs, Andrej continued on his merry way, and as reported in that November 21 issue, the whole Free Society crew went to the Chicago Martyrs memorial being held by the San Francisco socialists on November 11. Outside the hall, the anarchist crew handed out copies of the first issue but were ordered to stop by the socialists, who called a cop. After being threatened with arrest, the anarchists eventually left, but only after distributing 600 newspapers to the crowd, which did much to open the eyes of some of their followers.

Among the crew that night was Andrej Klemenčič, and after the cops chased them off, Comrade A. Klemencic addressed a large and enthusiastic audience at the corner of Grant avenue and Market street, taking for his subject “The Ideas and Tactics of the Murdered Anarchists.” The speaker’s address did much to dispel the old-established ideas regarding the sacredness of property rights. He will speak again this (Sunday) evening at the same place, and we hope all the comrades in the city will do all they can to make the meeting a success.

It’s unclear how that second street meeting went, but Andrej wrote another news column for the November 28 issue, as he would for the following issues. This was the first time Andrej lived in the same city as the newspaper he was writing for, at least since his days in Slovenia, and it allowed him to contribute regularly. Meanwhile, Free Society was branching out, with a regular distro point established at the Paper Covered Book Store at 1203 Market Street. In addition, the crew formed a cigar maker’s union and sold their New Ideal brand five-inch Spanish Londres cigars, twelve for a dollar. At that point, Free Society was printing 4,000 copies per issue at the cost of $33 per week.

Andrej wrote a comprehensive analysis of the Austrian Empire for the December 12 issue of Free Society, and in this text he became the first known anarchist to refer to the Romani people by their actual name. In the December 17 issue, Andrej printed an article entitled The S.L.Popes, which consisted of his exchange of letters with the local Socialist Labor Party leaders, asking if they would debate him and other anarcho-communists. The socialists refused, so Andrej declared, I will deliver the lecture on Anarchist Communism vs. Social Democracy in the near future. In the next issue of Free Society will be advertised the time and place for the meeting.

This advertisement appeared in the December 26 issue, announcing the event to take place on December 30 at the Friendhsip Hall in the Pythian Castle on 900 Market Street, to begin promptly at 8 PM. After reminding the reader that the socialists called the cops on them for handing out newspapers, the author then wrote, we wish to emphatically state that we do not fear [socialist] literature and the offered to allow socialists to sell papers at their event. However, as they made clear, we don’t expect many of the Statists at this meeting, as they do not belong to the class of people who read both sides. One little creed is all they can see.

This lecture appears to have gone extremely well, given that four more lectures were announced in the January 9, 1898 issue, all of them related to labor unions. This announcement also revealed that Andrej had joined the local Journeyman Tailors’ Union, and his upcoming February lectures were meant to create an anarchist inroad through the racist San Francisco labor movement. The following January 16 issue featured the full text of his December 30 lecture, entitled Anarchy vs. Statism, and at the end the editors appended a comment stating that the State Socialists present at Comrade Klemencic’s lecture were unwilling to discuss any of the points raised.

Meanwhile, Free Society made its way to Paris, being listed in the December 25 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux. At the same time, Free Society began listing The San Francisco Italian Anarchist Club in its back-page column of anarchist spaces. This club met every Saturday night at 111 Trenton Street in the Latin Quarter, which was also the home of Bianca Gaffe, the Swiss anarchist and friend of Andrej. Her group donated $3.55 to Free Society in the January 16 issue, the same issue which revealed that Andrej wanted his friend L. Goazion in Pennsylvania to send him five copies of the La Tribune Libre newspaper, the same paper for which Andrej and Bianca Gaffe would later write.

This short item in the Letter Box column also revealed that Klemencic lived at 15 Monroe Street on Nob Hill, although the street name has since been changed to Dashiell Hammet Street. Curiously, the same Letter Box column contained an item written in Slovenian. Addressed to the Group “Svornst,” the brief message read simply:Hello Czech Republic, thank you for the money sent. At the time, there was no Czech Republic, just a territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Andrej wrote more news columns for the following issues, as well as penning a short piece in the January 30 issue entitled A True Defender of Liberty, which was a defense of his comrade Abner J. Pope, who one anarchist accused of playing the martyr. That same issue also revealed the editors had on hand about 100 copies of the “Barcelona supplement” to the Firebrand which was at first one of the charges upon which the Firebrand publishers were arrested. In that issue’s Letter Box column, another Slovenian item was published which read: “Governmentless” Group, New York—Received money and letter sent. Additionally, that issue of Free Society also revealed that Sigismund Danielewicz donated 25 cents to the paper, implying he supported it.

Andrej held the first of his four lectures in the Templar Hall of the Pythian Castle, with the inaugural February 4 lecture titled Labor Unions as They Are and as They Ought to Be. There was no report-back for this lecture in the February 6 issue of Free Society, although Andrej’s news column appeared as usual, as did a $1.00 donation from Bianca Gaffe’s group of Italian anarchists. Less than a week later, Andrej delivered his second lecture at the Pythian Castle.


Pythian Castle

It was only in the February 13 issue that a report-back of Andrej’s first lecture appeared, and in a short item penned by Abraham Isaak, we learn that the meeting held by Comrade Klemencic, February 4th, was well attended by intelligent labor union men and others. The speaker made himself not quite clear on all points and consequently had to bear some severe criticisms during the discussion which followed the speech. All that were present seemed to take great interest in the discussion, and it is hoped that the meetings, which Comrade Klemencic started on his own initiative and expense, will give an impulse to a more radical labor movement in this city than we had so far. In his concluding speech, the speaker answered all criticisms quite satisfactorily.

In the following February 20 issue, we learn that Charles Govan, the printer who found The New Era in a saloon, had not only been working with Free Society, he was leaving the paper to move to Home with two other comrades. This issue also contained an item on the Journeymen Tailor’s Union of America, which Andrej was a member of, and this union had a October 1, 1898 deadline for shop-owners to accept their demands of abolishing take-home piece-work. Below this item was a report-back from Andrej’s second lecture, entitled Labor Unions and the General Strike.

As the author of this item explained, Andrej showed quite clearly the uselessness of the leaders in the labor movement, and the reasons for the failure of the majority of strikes. Quite a lively discussion followed, but most of the critics ignored the subject of the lecture altogether. The meetings so far have been well attended and we look for good results from them. A similar report-back for his third February 18 lecture on Labor Unions in a Future Society appeared in the February 27 issue, and the author wrote that Andrej was very logical and made several good points. An interesting discussion followed.

Meanwhile, far away in Cuba, the anarchists and rebels were still fighting against Spain, although they were certainly bitter at the US government, which had cracked down on their smuggling after Michele Angiolillo killed the Prime Minister. The Cuban Insurrection was growing so intense the USS Maine warship was sent to Havana to protect US interests, and it was here that the Maine mysteriously exploded on February 15, 1898, signaling the transition to a violent new era.

XV: San Francisco Blues

Most sources believe that the cause of USS Maine explosion was an accidental munition blast which led to the death of 261 sailors in the US Navy. Spain had no incentive to destroy a US warship, nor did the majority of Cuban insurgents, who initially viewed the US a benevolent helper. An anarchist may have wanted to blow up the Maine, although it’s unclear how they would have accomplished this. In any case, the cause remained a mystery, at least until William Randolph Hearst took the stage.

Known in San Francisco simply as Willy, this newspaper-baron was heir to the vast Hearst gold fortune and disobeyed his late-father by dabbling in the press. After the Maine exploded, Hearst railed against Spain and implied they were behind the attack. At the same time, Hearst’s rival Joseph Pulitzer called for the US to force Spain to grant Cuba independence as atonement for the explosion. It was in Pulitzer’s New York World that the anarchist Emma Goldman first rose to national fame, and it was the World which helped trigger the downfall of the anarchist’s hated foe, the Spanish Empire.

A philosophical article on the Maine explosion appeared in the February 27 issue of Free Society, while Emma Goldman told a Pittsburgh journalist that the explosion was the the act of an individual or a subject, and the nation cannot be held responsible. Spain should be no more called to account for the act of an unauthorized person any more than that the United States should be held responsible for the killing of a king by one of its citizens.

A few days later Emma told another journalist, there is talk of war between America and Spain. I am not allied with either country, but I tell you it is unsafe, even dangerous, for America to war with any nation. During this time period, all of Emma’s lecture stops were regularly advertised on the back-page of Free Society, testifying to her close relationship with the paper.

Andrej paused his writing for Free Society in this time period, although he donated 50 cents to Free Society for its March 13, 1898 issue. There was no report-back for Andrej’s final lecture, and he was likely busy organizing tailors in San Francisco. On March 7, the local Journeymen Tailor’s Union held a mass-meeting at 102 O’Farrell Strret, and as reported in the local San Francisco Call, it took place for the purpose of strengthening the ranks of the newly formed tailors’ union.

Sometime at the end of March, Bianca Gaffe organized an entertainment given [by] the comrades of this city for the benefit of the Anarchist press [which] yielded a net profit of $22.65 which was divided as follows: Free Society, $8.00; La Questione Sociale, $5.00; L’Agitazione, $5.00, and the rest will be sent to Les Temps Nouveaux and Libertaire. Comrade Gaffe collected also over three dollars for the families of the imprisoned comrades in France.

This was reported in the April 10 issue of Free Society, where it was also announced that Emma Goldman was expected to arrive on the Pacific slope the 20th of this month, and to deliver Anarchist lectures in any locality desired. Various contacts for the different regions were listed, and one of the Washington contacts was the mysterious Mrs. M. Wilson of the Victor House in Tacoma, while another was Oscar Verity at Home. As that announcement stated, the comrades of California are requested to correspond with A. Klemencic, 15 Monroe, San Francisco, with a view to arrange meetings in their localities. In other words, Andrej was the main organizer for Emma’s lecture stops in California, and Bianca Gaffe quickly raised $2.70 among the Italian group to help him along.

Emma arrived in San Francisco on April 24, just three days after the US declared war on Spain. As reported by Abraham Isaak in the May 1 issue, four meetings were preliminarily arranged [for Emma] before we went to press. Further down, Abraham wrote, war is declared! The Cubans will be free! Yes, war is declared, but the Cubans will not be any more free than they were under Spanish rule, and only deluded ignoramuses can believe for a moment that the object of the United States government is to free the Cubans. It is the mortgage, the bonds that must be secured. As had already been reported in Free Society, it was arch-banker JP Morgan who owned this Spanish debt.

On May 1, 1898, all the San Francisco comrades joined the main May Day celebration at Harbor View, which back then was a giant open field, although now it’s the insufferable Marina District. As reported in the May 8 issue of Free Society, at the celebration dancing, singing, games, sports and merrymaking of all kinds were the order of the day. Men, women and children of different nationalities and races were seen harmoniously commingling and making the fleeting hours of joy and pleasure as profitable as possible. Of the three main speakers that day, one of them was Emma Goldman.


Harbor View (now Marina District)

However, on that same May 1, 1898, a squadron of US Navy ships annihilated the Spanish fleet off the shore of Manila in the Philippines, thereby capturing the harbor. The Navy then transported rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo from his exile in Hong Kong back to his native land, hoping to spur further rebellion against the Spanish who controlled the mainland. All of this was happening while Emma Goldman was visiting with her comrades in San Francisco.

In addition to her May Day speech, Emma delivered four other lectures by May 8, and as explained in that day’s issue, if she were to discontinue now, her work would be well done. Such enthusiasm has been displayed by her audiences; and such interest has been manifested in her lectures that Emma Goldman seems to be discussed everywhere. During her San Francisco lectures, the various subjects were as follows: Patriotism, The Basis of Morality, Charity, The New Woman, The Aim of Humanity, Authority vs. Liberty, Trade Unionism, and The Absurdity of Non-Resistance. In total, Emma gave eight lectures before leaving San Francisco on May 10 for further stops in San Jose and Los Angeles.

In her autobiography, Emma Goldman painted her San Francisco visit in rosy colors. As she recalled, her stay was most interesting and delightful. It enabled me to do the best work I had accomplished till then, and it brought me in contact with many free and rare spirits. The headquarters of anarchist activity on the Coast was Free Society, edited and published by the Isaak family…Even the children co-operated in the undertaking, often working eighteen hours a day, writing, setting up type, and addressing wrappers. At the same time they did not neglect other propagandist activities…Their children were their equals; their right to disagree, to live their own lives and learn, was unquestioned.

Emma remembered that, notwithstanding nightly lectures in San Francisco and adjoining towns, a mass meeting to celebrate the first of May, and a debate with a socialist, we still found time for frequent social gatherings jovial enough to be disapproved by the purists. But we did not mind it. Youth and freedom laughed at rules and strictures, and our circle consisted of people young in years and in spirit. In the company of the Isaak boys and the other young chaps I felt like a grandmother—I was twenty-nine—but in spirit I was the gayest, as my young admirers often assured me. We had the joy of life in us, and the California wines were cheap and stimulating. The propagandist of an unpopular cause needs, even more than other people, occasional light-hearted irresponsibility. How else could they survive the hardships and travail of existence? My San Francisco comrades could work strenuously; they took their tasks very seriously, but they could also love, drink, and play.

At the time, Andrej was 30 years-old, while Emma was almost 29. Thus far, Andrej had organized a good lecture tour for Emma, but he was also writing, this time for Discontent, the new paper from Home which debuted on May 11. A short entry about San Francisco appeared in that issue explaining that Emma Goldman was recently in San Francisco, where she delivered a series of lectures. Comrade Klemencic engaged a hall and gave the S.L.P. folks notice of the first meeting, requesting them to make the announcement at their meetings, but, of course, they did not do so. Andrej wanted this new Home paper to succeed, and for the second May 18 issue he donated $5 to Discontent’s general fund.

In the May 22 issue of Free Society, Andrej’s name began appearing under a small back-page item titled Emma Goldman’s lecturing fund on the Coast. By that issue, the fund was at $41.95, and Klemencic humorously donated 5 cents in the May 29 issue to bring the total to an even $42. Of the expenses listed, $5 was sent to Oliver Verity to secure a hall in Tacoma, $2 was spent on handbills, and Emma had to use $15 to rent a hall in Los Angeles, as no one there was brave enough to host her. Meanwhile, Bianca Giaffe and the Italian anarchist group raised $4 for Free Society itself, the paper where all of these items were being printed. The weekly meeting at her house stopped being listed in Free Society, but another meeting soon took its place.

While she was in San Francisco, Emma helped found the Social Science Club, and as reported in the June 12, 1898 issue of Free Society, the group has met twice, since she left, on the corner of Sixth and Market streets (No. 1191 Market). The attendance has been small, but the discussions on various topics were lively and it is hoped that the meetings, which take place every Monday evening, will finally attract all those that are interested in the social movement.

In the meantime, Andrej stopped writing for Free Society and shifted his energy over to Discontent. He mailed them an article for their June 1 issue titled Revolution In Italy, an overview of the Fatti di Maggio, an insurrection in May 1898 that started in Milan and spread across Italy. In that same issue he published an article titled Anarchist Agitation In San Francisco, clarifying that the S.L.P. hadn’t refused his request to announce Emma Goldman’s lectures, they refused Peter Isaak, eldest son of the Isaak family. At the end of the article, Andrej explained that a collection was taken up for the benefit of the families of the insurgents in Italy, which amounted to $13. On top of all this, Andrej was able to donate $10 for that issue of Discontent.

Andrej wrote another Italian article for the June 15 issue, this one stating that the battle for the emancipation of the laboring people from wage slavery will have to be fought in the workshops and streets by the working people themselves, and NOT by their representatives in the congress. In the present warfare they will undoubtedly discover two points of vital importance for their self-preservation: 1. In arming themselves. 2. In organizing efficient propaganda in the troops to make them unsafe for governmental service. However, for this issue, Andrej could only donate 25 cents.

It’s likely that Andrej spent much time with Bianca Gaffe, the Swiss anarchist fluent in French, Italian, and English, and his article in the June 29 issue certainly reflects this. Entitled Switzerland, the Model Republic, Andrej reprinted a flier from the Genova International Club before listing the many injustices committed against anarchists by the Swiss state, namely against the Italian insurgents who attempted to flee repression into their country. Switzerland was very much on Andrej’s mind in the middle of June 1898 when he suddenly left San Francisco and sailed across the Pacific to Yokohama, Japan.

XVI: Honolulu City Lights

In her autobiography, Emma Goldman dropped a clue about what else she was doing in San Francisco during her May lecture tour. As she later wrote, America had declared war with Spain. The news was not unexpected. For several months preceding, press and pulpit were filled with the call to arms in defense of the victims of Spanish atrocities in Cuba. I was profoundly in sympathy with the Cuban and Philippine rebels who were striving to throw off the Spanish yoke. In fact, I had worked with some of the members of the Junta engaged in underground activities to secure freedom for the Philippine Islands.

The Philippine Revolution broke out in August 1896, lasting through the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, and as mentioned above, Emilio Aguinaldo was smuggled into the Philippines by the US on May 19, 1898, who cynically wanted Aguinaldo’s revolutionaries to be the vanguard troops against Spain. By June 12, the rebels had effectively crushed the remaining Spanish troops, with the survivors retreating to Manila, which was then put under military siege by the insurgents.

This was roughly what transpired in the Philippines while Emma Goldman was in San Francisco, and as she later wrote, I had no faith whatever in the patriotic protestations of America as a disinterested and noble agency. With this sentiment in mind, it appears Emma Goldman organized to send weapons and aid from San Francisco to the Philippines, and one of the people who seems to have helped her was none other than Andrej Klemenčič.

Back in 1892, Emma and Andrej met in New York City when the police were surveilling her and the other Autonomists. Meeting in this state of tension established a solid basis of trust between them, with Andrej later organizing her California lectures, and so forth. Emma left San Francisco for Los Angeles on May 10, but she returned for several days, and this late-May visit would have been the last time Emma and Andrej could have seen each other. Within a week of Emma boarding a train for Portland, her comrade Andrej was sailing for Japan.

Andrej likely had an easy time finding passage on a deep-water ship crossing the Pacific, given his anarchist comrade Sigismund Danielewicz founded the Coast Sailor’s Union, one of the most powerful on the west coast. Both the Firebrand and Free Society featured extracts from the union’s Coast Seamen’s Journal newspaper. In addition to his connection with the sailors, Sigismund had worked and organized in Hawaii, making a lifelong enemy of the sugar-barons who seized control of the Hawaiian Islands in 1893.

From 1880 to 1885, Sigismund lived between San Francisco and the port of Honolulu on Oahu Island. The only known portrait of Sigismund is a photo he took of himself in Honolulu and mailed to his San Francisco comrades on December 15, 1884. The year before, Sigismund had been elected president of the Hawaiian Workingmen’s Union, and it was precisely in 1883 that the sugar-barons began to import more Chinese and Japanese workers who they paid a quarter of what they had to pay native Hawaiians or poor whites. There’s little documentation of Sigismund’s time in Hawaii, but he’s known to have lived in Honolulu, and this appears to be where he told Andrej to go first.

As stated above, Andrej sailed from San Francisco in early June 1898 and stopped in Hawaii, likely in Honolulu. After that, he crossed the Pacific and landed in Yokohama, Japan near the end of June. The July 13 issue of Discontent then listed Andrej as an official agent of the paper, listing his address as 75 Eagle House in Yokohama. It’s unclear how long Andrej was in Japan, or if he went anywhere else, but in any case he was back in Honolulu by July 15, when he finished writing an article for Discontent, which he sent along with a $1 donation.

While this article was in transit to the backwoods of Home, the insurgents in the Philippines seized everything but Manila and proclaimed their independence on June 12, with a revolutionary government established on June 23. A week after this, the US landed its first troops on the mainland of Luzon Island, worried that the Filipinos would capture Manila without them. The siege of the capital was ongoing when Andrej mailed his first Hawaiian article to Home, although its contents dealt with the US invasion of a different land.

His article arrived just before the August 10 issue of Discontent went to print, along with his $1 donation. It was in the following August 17 issue that his Hawaiian Statesmanship article was published. Andrej explained how Sanford B. Dole staged a coup in 1893, deposed the Queen of Hawaii, reduced the voting pool, and had his white friends elect him President of Hawaii until 1900. Their ultimate goal, as Andrej wrote, was to ask for US annexation in the name of the “Hawaiian people.”

Andrej was at the cutting-edge of history in writing about the specter of US annexation, which loomed more ominously now that US troops were on Filipino soil. As he wrote of the Hawaiian population, some of them thought that a republican form of government would be better than a monarchy, but did not care to be mixed up in the affair, and the rest did not give a snap either way. But many have since had their eyes opened and are now making a demand for reforms in order to better their condition, and, undoubtedly, they have the instinctive feeling that they can more easily evolve toward a free society by being independent than by being under the control of a government 6,000 miles away.

Andrej also wrote another article, although this one he mailed to Paris, and in the August 20, 1898 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, his article The Hawaiian Islands was printed. It was much more informative than his article for Discontent, and as he told his French readers, the soil is excellent, everything that is sown there grows wonderfully. In the forests, which are not infested with poisonous beasts, there are many fruit trees in full yield. The temperature, in spring, is a little warm, but does not exceed the average heat of summer in southern France. There are about 30,000 natives in the islands today, 6,000 mestizos, 24,000 Japanese, 21,000 Chinese, 15,000 Portuguese and about ten thousand English and Americans. Honolulu and Hilo are the main cities, one with 30,000, the other with 12,000 inhabitants.

After briefly summarizing the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy, Andrej stated that annexation of the islands to the United States is likely, but the population would like independence. In any case the present regime is about to be overturned. After this prescient prediction, the editors of Les Temps Nouveaux reprinted a July 10 letter Andrej sent about his past years of activity in the Pacific Northwest. As he sat there in Honolulu writing to his comrades, Andrej was also thinking of Home.

Andrej wrote, the colony has about fifteen families, all American, and publishes a weekly newspaper, the Discontent. It has a press and everything necessary for printing. He closed this letter by stating that, generally speaking, our ideas are making great progress in the American West. Comrade E. Goldman, who was recently on the Pacific coast, gave lectures in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland. Everywhere she stirred up ideas and made a profitable agitation. Andrej also provided his Honolulu mailing address in this article, although it was simply Box 800 at the downtown post office.

While these first Hawaiian articles were printed in August, both were written in mid-July. Similarly, Andrej wrote another article for Discontent which he signed on July 25, although the article wasn’t printed until the August 31 issue. Entitled The Annexation of Hawaii, this short entry was also ahead of its time in declaring, everything that is noble and human loses all its beauty where missionaries and lawyers find their way to represent god and law. The social foundation of the Hawaiian people is pure communism, so you can imagine how every new law causes greater dissatisfaction in the ranks of those who are opposed to private ownership.

News traveled slowly from Washington DC to Honolulu, first across the telegraph to San Francisco where it was then printed and shipped by boat on a week’s cruise to Hawaii. Because of this delay, Andrej was late in writing about the vote to annex Hawaii, which was passed and then signed into law by President William McKinley on July 7, 1898.

Queen Lili’uokalani formally protested this annexation, claiming her people’s land had been stolen, but the politicians in DC didn’t care, prompting Andrej to write, I must admire the resignation of these so much wronged people, but I wish they would enter the ranks of the strugglers for liberty and defy wage slavery and everything else that is connected with it…If the Hawaiians want to see freedom and happiness they must reject authority and stick to their natural rights on the basis of mutual cooperation.

XVII: From Here To Eternity

The true motivation for the US annexation was the desire to create a naval base for operations in Asia. Within a month of annexation, numerous US Navy ship were clogging the harbors, including the port of Honolulu. The majority of these boats were transporting soldiers to the Philippines, and despite the Spanish Army being on its last legs, the US clearly had a larger invasion in mind, and few anarchists were in a better position than Andrej to observe this naval military buildup.

While other anarchists like Sigismund Danielewicz were donating money to Free Society, it appears Andrej wanted to dedicate his writings to Discontent from Home, the anarchist colony he helped found. Sometime around August 12, Andrej wrote an article for Discontent entitled Items From Hawaii, which appeared over a month later in the September 14 issue. This is the first article where Andrej made use of his location to supply the wider anarchist network with intelligence on the US naval buildup in newly-annexed Honolulu.

For example, Andrej explained how, according to the official report there were 65 “boys in blue” sacrificed in the local hospital on the altar of “Old Glory,” all the result of being overcrowded and underfed. On the transport Pennsylvania, Company B, from Butte City, Mont., refused the food served them; result—all the under officers were reduced to the ranks, but they got “extra meals” in that camp. On the transport Peru there was a very animated agitation against embarking for Manila, but the scheme was abandoned as there were too many “patriots” on board.

In regards to this anti-war mutiny, Andrej observed that 27 of the discontented stayed here and said to their friends: “If it is necessary to be shot for ‘Old Glory’ we are willing to be shot here, but we refuse to be tortured on board the transport first and then shot for the benefit of schemers in politics and contracting war-supply furnishers.” There was not a newspaper in town that said a word about the young rebels. Several of the boys went on board the next expedition and some returned to San Francisco on various pretexts.

Andrej ominously noted that we will now have here a garrison of more than 1,500 to “watch” “Old Glory,” or better say, to sustain the local wholesale robbers. I suppose this will be the final step in the civilization of the natives; where the bible failed, the bayonet will succeed. In addition to this naval intelligence, Andrej heavily focused on the native Hawaiians, and harking back to the initial religious colonization of Hawaii, he wrote, the missionaries and their henchmen have finally got what they wanted—they have turned over to the politicians of the United States the job of robbing the people “legally.” If the missionaries would only be a little honest with themselves they would have declared long ago that the natives in this land have a nobler conception of ethics than the hypocritical “bible traders.”

There were no books Andrej could have read in 1898 that would have stated anything similar to the natives in this land have a nobler conception of ethics than the hypocritical “bible traders.” As you will see, it appears Andrej spent much time among the indigenous, leading him to write that communism is the ideal of the natives, which was and remains true, more or less. Put simply, Andrej was part of a small minority of white people on the Hawaiian islands who weren’t racist, and he was one of the few to ever write anything accurate about the natives.

Around the time Andrej wrote this article for Discontent, he also wrote another article for Les Temps Nouveaux dated August 12, 1898. Like the previous dispatch, this one was also titled The Hawaiian Islands, and it repeated much of the military intelligence from the Discontent article, although in its opening sentence Andrej wrote, the islands are now annexed to the American government. Admiral Miller, of the battleship Philadelphia, has been here two weeks, but he has not yet hoisted the United States flag.

Unlike the Discontent article, Andrej described some of his anarchist agitation in Honolulu, such as how, on two separate occasions, despite the hostility of patriots and officers, I was able to speak in the street against the war, the Church, and the State. On a darker note, Andrej remarked that transported soldiers are always, according to the native customs, received here with the greatest hospitality. And naturally many of them thank us by raping the women and committing all kinds of brigandage. To top it off, Andrej noted that some sugar plantation stocks have risen by 300% over the past two years.

Just as he finished writing this article on the US colonization of Hawaii, the US colonization of the Philippines rapidly escalated. It was precisely on August 12, 1898, that the US began its sacking of Manila, although the Filipino insurgents disobeyed the US and sent its own troops in to the city. Once the Spanish surrendered, President McKinley ordered his Army to kick out the native insurgents and prevent them from militarily controlling the capital. This move was bitterly resented by the Filipinos, who held onto their seized sections of Manila, although by September 15 they agreed to withdraw. Meanwhile, the Spanish were no longer in power, and for the first time in over 300 years, the natives had a brief moment of freedom, however tenuous and fleeting.

Andrej wrote nothing of these developments in his next article for the September 28 issue of Discontent, which focused on the radical educator Edward H. Parker and his visit to Hawaii. At the time, Hawaii had a radical education system (by Victorian standards), although it was soon to be snuffed out by the new federal government. Andrej’s focus on education during a military buildup certainly sheds light on his values, and as he closed that article, the education of the child is one of the most important features in human life, and if we give more attention to education we cannot help but influence the teachers, as well as the pupils, for a higher conception of manhood and womanhood.

Andrej also sent a shorter Hawaiian item to Free Society for its September 25 issue, writing to the editors, please warn the reader of Free Society who may hope to find an Eldorado here. There is a very poor chance for a white man to make a living here, unless he wins the patronage of the parsons. Andrej concluded this two paragraph item by imploring the reader, try to spread our papers, pamphlets and books and we will soon have a movement in every town. I do not belong to any organization, and yet I am traveling from country to country, and tramping from city to city propagating the idea of freedom.

Andrej signed this item from Honolulu, and in the back page of that issue, we can see that Sigismund Danielewicz donated 25 cents to Free Society. Sigismund continued to donate in subsequent issues, just as Bianca Gaffe and the Italian anarchist group of San Francisco not only donated $4 for the October 23 issue, they raffled Pietro Gori’s picture and the proceeds were divided as follows: Free Society, $4; Tribune Libre, $2; La Questione Sociale, $2; Il Messagiero, $2.

Meanwhile, in the October 22 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, Andrej wrote the greatest article of his time in Honolulu. Titled Economic and Social State of the Hawaiian Natives, this article reveals the Hawaiian natives to be fully human rather than racist caricatures, as they were commonly depicted at the time. As he succinctly put it, economically they are communists and have retained their preferences for communism to this day, despite the corruption of private property introduced into the country with the missionaries. The natives are very sensitive to the beauties of nature. In their visits or during their walks, they like to adorn themselves with garlands of flowers and greenery. A garland, for them, is a gift of friendship and welcome. Very gifted for music, they have in Honolulu a music that would not be out of place in a first-rate city in America or Europe. They also like dancing.

It’s highly likely that Andrej spent significant time with the natives, allowing him various insights into their culture. As he described, their main crop is taro, an aquatic plant with which they prepare poi, a kind of dish that is for them like polenta for the Lombards. They especially like fish and pork. But they also eat beef and mutton, which they cook in stews. Their vegetables are potatoes, onions, tomatoes and carrots. As for fruit, they have pineapples, coconuts, guava, mangoes and several kinds of nuts. They drink a kind of bitter tea, an infusion of a native plant, kava, whose taste is harsh but pleasant.

In regards to their communal way of life, Andrej explained that many Hawaiians come to work in the city in order to obtain some desired object. Then, having acquired the object, they return home and for a few days enjoy themselves, for their needs in general are very minimal. Although they rarely have enough food in advance for a week, they are always affable and very generous with their fellow men. Whether one comes to offer them or ask them for something, one is always welcome in their home, without distinction of race, and they are always ready to share with everyone what they possess.

While many natives had been caught in the gears of civilization, Andrej wrote that many also, distrusting civilization, have retired to their straw huts where they still enjoy a certain independence. All the furniture of a hut consists of a few mats, to lie on, blankets, a pot going on the fire, a terrine to prepare the “poi,” a few dishes and a can to put the water in to heat. The fish is cooked in a kind of leaf found everywhere in abundance… Often three or four families pool their affairs and interests in common, getting along very well, even in the neighborhoods of Honolulu. The life of the Hawaiians, in short, has much nobility.

The article also briefly provided a history of Hawaii’s colonization from the first missionaries up to the recent US annexation. As he closed the article, Andrej wrote, the American policy anxiously awaited by many will be yet another disappointment. Because the people, reduced to about 30,000 souls, martyred, victims of their generous hospitality and extreme patience, have little to expect from them except blows from rifle butts if it happens any ideas of justice and vengeance should animate them. These words would prove sadly true, and Andrej’s article remains of vital historical insight.

Andrej didn’t write anything through November 1898, but he did mail a Hawaiian news column to Discontent for their December 28 issue. The first item regarded the navy transport ships stopping in Honolulu on their way to the Philippines, and according to Andrej, dozens of soldiers were arriving from San Francisco near-death from typhoid fever. As he cynically wrote, almost every day a military funeral passes my shop. Hurrah for Uncle Sam’s expansion.

From this quote, we can gather than Andrej opened his own tailor shop somewhere in Honolulu. Additionally, Andrej sent $3 to Discontent, and in the Receipts column this donation was listed as Collection among Coolies, Honolulu. The word coolie was originally a Hindi word for laborer, and thanks to British colonialism, it became applied to all Asian workers. In his Hawaiian news column, Andrej also reported on Chinese and Japanese coolies, just as he reported on some “white labor” from Galicia and the stern determination of the Poles, both of whom were as exploited as the alleged coolies. It’s unclear if Andrej was agitating among Asian workers when he gathered these funds for Discontent, or if he was simply appropriating the term and applying it to all workers, but in any case, Andrej remained ahead of his racist times.

In that same December 28 issue, Andrej was listed again as an Agent for Discontent, meaning he was the paper’s official contact in Honolulu. His address was listed simply as Alakea Street with no address provided, meaning someone would have to walk down Alakea Street asking if anyone knew A. Klemencic before finding the Agent for Discontent, although this wasn’t difficult, given Alakea was just a short street that went right through Honolulu’s small downtown. Aside from Andrej, there was one other Agent for Discontent listed in San Francisco under the name L. Nylen and he lived at 15 Monroe Street, the same address where Andrej had lived.

Little is known about L. Nylen, although the September 14, 1898 issue of Discontent ran this short item in its Homes News column: Mr. L. Nylen, of Seattle, visited the colony last week. Comrade Nylen has taken a great interest in the success of Discontent. It appears that after visiting Home, he then left Seattle and moved to San Francisco, where he lived with Andrej, After his comrade sailed for Hawaii, Nylen remained behind, and both became Agents for Discontent at same time, implying the effort was coordinated.

While all of that was unfolding in Discontent, the comrades at Free Society in San Francisco announced in their January 22, 1899 issue that, for the benefit of comrade Emma Goldman’s propaganda tour, a ball has been arranged in this city for January 21, 8 o’clock p.m., at the Apollo Hall. This issue was printed before January 21 and distributed across San Francisco to advertise the event, although only $10.20 was raised from the ball, which was put on by the local International Workingmen’s Association, a long-lost splinter of the Black International that flickers in and out of San Francisco history.

Two weeks later, on February 4, 1899, a US soldier shot a Filipino soldier outside Manila, thus triggering the second Battle of Manila. This two day-long battle left dozens of US soldiers dead, along with hundreds of Filipinos, and marked the beginning of the Philippine-American War, a brutal conflict that lasted over a decade. Once this betrayal of the Filipinos was known to the public, a howl of anger rose across the world at this new US imperialism, where a recently freed population was now being butchered with rifles, artillery, and Gattling-guns.

Oddly, while his comrades at Discontent and Free Society wrote about the horrific slaughter, Andrej didn’t write a single word about the subject, at least not publicly. Starting in January 1899, Andrej wrote several articles from Honolulu that had nothing to do with Hawaii and were largely responses to other articles in Discontent, although he did send in another article on Switzerland for the February 8, 1899 issue, which was also reprinted in the Free Society for February 19. One of his articles was a response to E.C. Miles, a school teacher and librarian who lived at Home, and Andrej was adamant that Home didn’t need a university, something E.C. had suggested.

Andrej asked the reader, what is the use of the university? If Comrade Miles has money to spare, why doesn’t he invest it in a saw mill plant, and if he has not, he is then simply dreaming. In my opinion, the place for educating the people is the workshop and the camp, not in special buildings of any kind. You say you want to teach men and women the “science of human conduct.” What a humbug. Men and women have to hustle for grub, and have no time for a university training; and suppose they go through the university and get diplomas as doctors and professors, are they then better fitted to pull stumps or cut wood? Our great school is the universe and it needs no roofing.


The first Home schoolhouse

Meanwhile, the February 26 issue of Free Society featured an ad for a picnic to be held by the comrades and friends of Emma Goldman for the benefit of her lecturing tour at Ingleside (sea shore). Refreshments will be served. Take the Mission St. cars. In case of disagreeable weather the picnic will take place next Sunday. The back page of that issue also featured a rare piece from Bianca Gaffe, who translated her own sorrowful short story about the poor of Paris being chased out of Saint Eustache Church. It’s likely Bianca once lived in Paris, although little is known about her past.

After writing one more response to Discontent in the April 12 issue, Andrej didn’t send anymore articles for several months, although $3 was donated by Discontented Coolies of Honolulu in that same issue. Back in San Francisco, his comrades at Free Society received a call-out from Émile Pouget and other comrades in Paris announcing an International Revolutionary Labor Congress, a fancy term for an anarchist congress which would be held in Paris in 1900.This call-out was printed in the April 23 issue of Free Society, and one anarchist who planned on going was Emma Goldman. However, Emma had ulterior purposes for wanting to be in Paris, for she and her comrades were now working a plan to tunnel Sasha Berkman out of prison.

XVIII: Honolulu I Am Coming Back Again

The tunnel idea emerged in the winter of 1899, shortly after Sasha was denied a pardon. By March, Emma made plans to sail for Europe in the fall, knowing it was best to be out of the US when Sasha escaped. Many coded letters were smuggled in and out of the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, but the tunneling couldn’t begin until one of Sasha’s prison comrades was released, along with the diagrams and measurements for the tunnel.

In the meantime, Emma Goldman recruited several anarchists to dig the tunnel, among them a sailor named Eric B. Morton, known as either Ibsen or Eric the Red, given he was Norwegian. Once enough comrades were aboard with the plan, Emma finished her midwest lectures and traveled across the country to Tacoma, Washington, where she arrived on May 20, and would ultimately visit Home where she gave a lecture.

Coincidentally, just as Emma Goldman arrived on the west coast, her comrade Andrej was completely silent. While she was lecturing in San Francisco from June through July, there is no trace of Andrej’s activities, and by the time Emma Goldman gave her final San Francisco lecture on August 7 at the Turk Street Temple, there was no public information on Andrej.

From the port of Honolulu, it would have taken Andrej just over two weeks to reach Manila, just as it required the same amount of time to return. As you know, the US had begun fighting the Filipino rebels it once supported, and the pages of Discontent and Free Society were filled with attacks on this new US imperialism, with several articles specifically championing the native insurgents. However, none of these articles were written by Andrej, and there in no record of his activities from April to August 1899, enough time for him to have visited the Philippines more than twice.

Shortly before Andrej went silent, his comrade Bianca Gaffe wrote a call-out for the February 16 issue of the Tribune Libre anarchist newspaper, published out of Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Entitled Open Letter to Comrades of Both Worlds, her call-out announced that a group of anarcho-communists were busy looking for a site in California to create an anarchist colony called Nouvel Idéal, or Nuovo Ideal, or New Idea, the same name as the Isaak family’s cigar brand, which sadly went out business.

Bianca would contribute one more article for the May 11 issue of La Tribune Libre entitled In Defense of the word Anarchy, in which she defended her cherished beliefs, but after that Bianca Gaffe vanishes from history, presumably into her Nouvel Idéal colony. This mythical anarchist colony is the main setting for the 2021 anarchist novel Secolo Nuovo; or, The Times of Promise, which involves Bianca and her Swiss relatives. Regardless, all that’s known is that Bianca Gaffe disappeared from history precisely when Andrej went silent, and we can only imagine the rest of her story.

Andrej returned to print in the September 9, 1899 issue of Les Temp Nouveaux, publishing another installment of his The Hawaiian Islands column. Given the global mail delay, he likely wrote this dispatch sometime in early August, and he wrote nothing about his month’s long absence. Instead, Andrej jumped right in to news from Honolulu, explaining that, since the annexation to the United States, the local government has become agreat farce, even in the eyes of onlookers. One day the Supreme Court declared itself null, as a result of the annexation, and tomorrow, they say, the Americans will be the indispensable bosses of the country. He also described a strike of forty boilermakers at the Honolulu Iron Works, just as she commented on the forty Galicians still locked up for defying the conditions of their indentured sugar plantation labor.

Across the world in Paterson, New Jersey, the French speaking anarchists of that city banded together to publish the bi-weekly Germinal, the latest anarchist newspaper. That inaugural October 1 issue featured an announcement for an Italian language anarchist paper called l’Aurora which just launched in Paterson by Giuseppe Ciancabilla, while the back-page indicated that Germinal was printed on the same press once used to print El Despertar, the Spanish-language anarchist newspaper.

To round out the connections even further, the office of Germinal was at 327 Straight Street, right next door to the office of La Questione Sociale, the main Italian anarchist newspaper in the US, whose offices were at 325 Straight Street for many years. Giuseppe Ciancabilla was briefly the editor of La Questione Sociale, although a schism led him to resign and start l’Aurora.

A few weeks after Germinal debuted, Andrej mailed off another article, this time to Home, along with a donation of $3.75 sent from Discontented Honolulu, as listed in the October 18 issue of Discontent. When the article was printed in the October 25 issue, Andrej reported that the Galicians were finally freed from prison, although a local journalist had been imprisoned by the new US regime, and as Andrej sarcastically remarked, hurrah for a “free press.” Everywhere it is the same.

Meanwhile, in the October 15 issue of Free Society, a short item appeared announcing the launch of l’Aurora. Run by the Italian anarchists Giuseppe Ciancabilla and Ersilia Cavedagni, the first issue appeared on September 16, 1899, although by the October 14 issue the paper had relocated to West Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. In the October 28 issue, Ersilia published her ground-breaking article La Donna, or The Woman, an early anarcha-feminist analysis that is still ahead of its time in 2025. As you’ll see, Andrej would soon receive l’Aurora in Honolulu.

The only clue as to where Andrej might have been living was in the donations column of Discontent. Not only was $3.75 donated from Honolulu Discontented, but 50 cents came in from the Occidental Hotel in Honolulu, which stood on the same Alakea Street where Andrej was listed as living. The Occidental Hotel was owned by Edward Wolter, who built it in 1896. After a career as a military officer and sugar plantation stake-holder, he became a liberal free-thinker and hotel owner, and it’s entirely possible that Andrej converted this man to anarchism.

Andrej wrote another short dispatch a month later for the November 25 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux entitled simply Hawaii. As he reported from Honolulu, the council of ministers has been selling off more and more land for about ten months, and now MacKinley [sic] has given the order that the Hawaiian government no longer has the right to sell land. In other words, the sugar barons expanded their plantation holdings before new US laws prevented them.

By the time this November 25 article was published, Emma Goldman and Mary Isaak of Free Society were hanging out in London. As part of Sasha Berkman’s escape plan, Emma was to be out of the US. when Sasha was broken out of prison. After finding safe passage thanks to Eric Morton’s connections as a sailor, Sasha and Emma were meant to reunite in Paris during the summer of 1900. While she was in London, Emma sent numerous coded letters to the comrades involved in the tunnel project, although one can only guess at what exactly was being communicated.

In the November 29 issue of Discontent, Andrej published a short article entitled Hawaiian Labor Problem, where he explained that there have been five new plantations started here since the “flag raising.” The promoter and his henchmen have issued from $1,000,000 to $1,800,000 worth of stock against each. It is hard to tell how much cash flows into their pockets daily in “managing” the assessments. The managers are, of course, pillars of the several local churches and other noble institutions of the kind.

In the following December 6 issue, Discontent acknowledged a gift sent by Andrej from Honolulu, some beautiful photographs of scenes on the Hawaiian Islands, which we have had mounted and will display for all to view. Andrej had been busy photographing Oahu, and in the December 20 issue the Home librarian E.C. Miles acknowledged the receipt of a magnificent album, presenting some 75 large photographs of the natural scenery, cities, towns, public buildings and private residences, and varied rural scenes of the Hawaiian islands. Just as Andrej sent those gifts to Home, he also sent a coconut straw hat from the Hawaiian Islands to his comrades at Les Temps Nouveaux, which they placed in their raffle as item 218 for their January 27, 1900 issue.

Through his comrades, Andrej found out about the Germinal newspaper in Paterson, and he soon mailed an article and donation for their December 30, 1899 issue. His short Hawaiian news item explained that a battle took place between Japanese and Chinese laborers working at Kahuku, Oahu. The cause: jealousy, national rivalry, carefully fostered by the plantation owners. In another passage that’s far ahead of its time, Andrej wrote that white people carefully foster jealousies and thus manage to govern by dividing Japanese and Chinese workers. In addition to this article, Andrej donated 50 cents to Germinal, although he soon went quiet again.

Andrej wrote little through the first months of the New Century, but he did mail off a short article for the February 7 issue of Discontent about the recent burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown, which had become an outbreak zone for the Black Plague. In one of his few unfortunate statements, Andrej declared that Chinatown is defying every sanitary rule and the torch is applied in the right place this time, but I doubt that the result will be beneficial for the simple reason that the economical condition, which is at the bottom of the trouble, will remain untouched. Poor people are gazing at the smouldering ruins of their old abodes, not knowing where to go or where the next meal will come from.

Even with his statement on the right place to torch, Andrej still can’t help but blame the human traffickers, and earlier in the text he wrote, thousands upon thousands of Asiatics have been landed only to be exploited by our pious, psalm-singing holy crowd, under the wings of the traditional bird of prey. Result: Roman mansions and aristocratic luxury for the blessed; abject poverty and degradation for the damned. Chinamen and Japs are imported to compete against each other and against the natives. Against these, of course, the white wage slave is unable to compete. All these poor people are crowded into old wooden shanties and boarded so as to be as little expense to the planter as possible. It was precisely here in these crowded shanty towns that the Black Plague spread.

Along with his article, Andrej sent $1.50 to Home under the name Discontented, Honolulu. Around the same time, he mailed another gift to Les Temps Nouveaux, this time a book of photographs from Honolulu, which was listed as raffle item 265 in the February 10, 1900 issue. The winners of both the photo album and coconut straw hat were announced in the February 17 issue, but meanwhile Andrej went silent for another five months, more than enough time to smuggle aid to the Philippines.

XIX: The DaVinci Code

Back in San Francisco, the March 11 issue of Free Society featured an announcement for La Protesta Umana, which they described as a new eight page Anarchist monthly in the Italian language. Price 25 cents a year. The editor listed for this paper was Enrico Travaglio, an anarchist who also published the long running Secolo Nuovo, which he appears to have put on hold for this new project.

Across the country in Pittsburgh, a couple calling themselves Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Brown rented a house at 28 Sterling Street, just blocks from the Western Penitentiary. It was in April 1900 that this couple moved in, although Mr. Brown was none other than Eric B. Morton, while Mrs. Brown was the Chicago anarchist Vella Kinsella. Eric began his 300 foot tunnel that May, assisted by anonymous Italian comrades with mining experience. Wary of making noise, Eric bought a piano for the house, which Vella would play loudly whenever tunneling was going on. The piano was also fitted with an electric buzzer so that Vella could warn the tunnelers if anyone was approaching the house. In this manner, the anarchists took two months to dig the tunnel.

Emma and Eric corresponded through coded letters, and as she later described, Eric wrote in his usual jovial way. All was well with our plans…I was amused at the manner in which Eric had worded his letter, with a view to safety of course. But even I was puzzled by some of its contents. K was no doubt Kinsella, his friend, whom I had met in Chicago. But what on earth did he mean by a concert and a piano? I knew the woman had a good voice and was also a trained pianist, but what would she do with these talents in the house from which the tunnel was to be dug?

While they dug, Emma was planning the upcoming Anarchist Congress in Paris, although she was also mailing articles to Free Society in San Francisco, such as Some More Observations, printed in the April 29 issue just days before the tunnel began. Emma continued to write coded German letters to the anarchist Max Nettlau, who was part of the tunneling conspiracy, and their code involved the Louvre museum, a good tour guide, and how shitty the French comrades were. Emma constantly complained about the Parisian anarchists, and claimed to have no comrades among them, although this was obviously not true, given she was frantically preparing an Anarchist Congress with them.

These codes are quite humorous in that regard, like when Emma wrote to Max on May 15 that it is really the French who have the least idea idea of solidarity or sense of camaraderie, nowhere else have I come across such superficiality and indifference as right here, it is simply horrible. Despite the humor, a cop reading these letters would gather that Emma was having a bad time, nothing was going on in Paris, the local anarchists were dumb, and all Emma really wanted was a good tour guide for the Louvre. Meanwhile, her comrades were still digging the tunnel to free Sasha.

At the end of May, two as yet unidentified anarchists joined Eric Morton and Vella Kinsella at the digging site at 28 Sterling Street in Pittsburgh, posing as another married couple. Emma provides no clarity about who this couple was, but they lived there through June until the tunnel was complete, after which its entrance was hidden and the tenants moved out. Emma was completely in the dark, and she later recalled, Eric also wrote seldom, only a line or two about the “invention.” As she wrote to Max Nettlau later that July, all I know at present is, that the party and I must and will have to meet is expected in Munich either the later part of this, or the beginning of next month.

Unfortunately, ten days before she wrote these words, Sasha finally went to make his escape, only to find the prison had dumped a pile of construction materials over the entrance, making the tunnel unusable. Sasha had no safe or quick way to communicate this to his comrades, who were long gone from Pittsburgh. The other end of the tunnel was discovered by the police on July 26, and despite not finding any evidence the tunnel was for him, the prison warden put Sasha in solitary until 1901.

Eric Morton then sent Emma a short telegram which read: Sudden illness. Work suspended. Sailing for France. He arrived two weeks later and Emma hardly recognized him; the change he had undergone since I saw him in Pittsburgh was appalling. The big, strong viking had grown very thin, his face ashen and covered with blisters of pus. Eric would remain in Paris with Emma for the next months, and just three days after the tunnel had been discovered, an anarchist named Gaetano Bresci assassinated King Umberto I of Italy in revenge for the 1898 massacres in Milano. Anarchists were once again the scariest people on the planet, and the reigning socialists of France used this assassination to ban the Anarchist Congress scheduled for Paris on September 19, 1900. Despite the ban, several secret meetings took place between the comrades, and Emma sailed back to New York with Eric later that November.

Shortly before the tunnel was discovered, Andrej gathered and mailed $4 to Home for the August 1 issue of Discontent, submitting the money under the name Discontented, Honolulu. This means that Andre had returned to Honolulu by the beginning of July, and his next appearance would be in the mainstream Honolulu Republican. In that paper’s September 4 issue, a small headline ran: Klemencic Will Test His Case in Courts.

According to the Republican, Andrej was discussing the [suppression of the Boxer Rebellion] in China at the corner of Hotel and Union street [when] he was was ordered off by a policeman. The paper then quoted Andrej as saying, tomorrow night I am going to speak on the vacant lot adjoining the Occidental hotel on King street. If I am arrested I shall test my rights in the courts. The paper then explained that Andrej was a tailor and gave a short plug for Home, writing that Andrej said he was instrumental in forming the society. It is utopian in theory.

After that, nothing else was heard from Andrej until the October 17 issue, when his Agent for Discontent contact address was changed from Alakea Street to P.O. Box 800, the same box he listed in his first Hawaiian dispatch for Les Temps Nouveaux. Why he now listed this box in Discontent is unclear, just as it’s unclear if Andrej stopped living on Alakea Street.

There are no known letters between Andrej and Emma Goldman from this time period. However, as you’ve read above, Andrej organized Emma’s lecture tour in San Francisco, implying they spent much time together. During this period, according to Emma’s own words, I had worked with some of the members of the Junta engaged in underground activities to secure freedom for the Philippine Islands.

Given that Andrej began crossing the Pacific as soon as Emma left San Francisco, it’s likely they were smuggling weapons and aid to the Filipino insurgents, who were constantly praised in the pages of Free Society and Discontent. As you’ve read, Emma and her comrades organized a prison break through coded letters across one ocean, and it would’ve been just as easy to organize a second conspiracy across another ocean, this one involving rifles, bullets, and bolos.

XX: Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano

Emma Goldman’s report on the Paris Anarchist Congress appeared in the October 21, 1900 issue of Free Society. She fiercely attacked the socialist French government that forced their congress into the shadows where they huddled together in a stuffy room, in danger of being surprised by government hirelings, but with a zeal which knows no fear, [a few] men and women, who have given the best years of their life for the cause, some having undergone years of privations, imprisonment, persecution and want, old in years and experience, but young in heart and spirit, ever ready to continue the fight for final human emancipation.

Emma also described the physical violence they were subjected to when the police closed two of these secret meetings. Near the end of the article, Emma explained that the full reports of the congress meetings would be published in Les Temps Nouveaux, and she asked the comrades to contribute funds to make those texts a book. These texts eventually appeared that November in two issues of Les Temps Nouveaux, just as further congress reports appeared in Free Society through December. At the same time, the pages of Germinal in Paterson also carried numerous congress reports through December, although monetary issues forced it to become a monthly paper, rather than bi-weekly.

Back in San Francisco, young Enrico Travaglio was having trouble funding his La Protesta Umana newspaper, and as announced in the October 27 issue of l’Aurora, Enrico would temporarily halt the paper and that, since he intends to travel shortly to some Eastern city where better conditions exist for the regular publication of the P.U., he asks all comrades to be patient due to the regrettable but inevitable delay. When this was published, l’Aurora had been moved to Yohoghany, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles south-east of Pittsburgh, and by its November 10 issue, Enrico was still in San Francisco, where he raised 10 cents by selling copies of l’Aurora.

Andrej returned to print a month later with an article and a donation for the December 5 issue, where $1.50 was sent from Discontented, Honolulu. His Letter from Honolulu appeared in the following December 19 issue, and he reported that multiple new unions had formed in Honolulu: plumbers, painters, carpenters, stone masons, brick layers and sailors. There is now a movement on foot to organize the dock hands. It’s entirely possible Andrej was involved in forming these unions, and as he wrote, every Saturday night we have an open-air meeting, which, in my opinion, is the most efficient means of propaganda.

Bringing it back to Alakea Street, Andrej also noted that the genial proprietor of the Occidental hotel has organized a “Self Culture Club,” which meets in his parlor several times a week for discussions on ethics, and is now giving a series of lectures in Milan Hall. Again, this Occidental Hotel is possibly where Andrej stayed while he was in Honolulu, and he was clearly familiar with the owner, who donated 50 cents to Discontent.

On the other side of the world, the l’Aurora anarchist newspaper moved locations once again, this time to Spring Valley, Illinois, about a hundred miles west of Chicago. It was after they’d moved there, in their December 15 issue, that a $1 donation from Andrej appeared on their back page. This means Andrej was informed enough to send his money to Illinois, not Pennsylvania or New Jersey, all while being two weeks from news in Honolulu. One clue as to how he became so informed comes from Enrico Travaglio, who was still in San Francisco as of that issue, where he published a small item.

Enrico told the readers of l’Aurora that he wished to move to Illinois and turn La Protesta Umana into a literary and sociological supplement to their paper. As he explained, this proposal should possibly be implemented on the first of the following year, and I hope to succeed in this aim by taking advantage of l’Aurora’s printing material, as well as Ciancabilla’s helpful and loving cooperation. As you’ll remembers, l’Aurora was run by Giuseppe Ciancabilla and his partner Ersilia Cavedagni, and they were thrilled by this idea of a literary and sociological supplement to our publication and how willingly we have accepted it. We therefore hope that Comrade Travaglio can overcome all difficulties and soon join us. However, behind the scenes, bigger forces were at play.

As mentioned above, Andrej must have received a copy of l’Aurora in Honolulu by October 1900 for him to have donated in the December 15 issue. It was likely Enrico and his comrades at Free Society who sent Andrej copies of l’Aurora, and he knew that both La Protesta Umana and Free Society were soon relocating to Illinois. The final issue of Free Society printed in San Francisco was published on December 23, 1900 and would resume two months later in Chicago.

Speaking of Illinois, Andrej mailed a letter and donation to Spring Valley, some of which was published in the December 29 issue of L’Aurora. Only extracts concerning the concept of the General Strike were printed, while on the back-page Andrej donated 25 cents to paper. In this same issue, Andrej organized a fundraiser in Honolulu for the family of Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist who killed King Umberto I. Sometime in late November, Andrej and five others in Honolulu each contributed 50 cents and then mailed the $3 to Spring Valley, Illinois, where it was then forward to Paterson, New Jersey.

In the January 12, 1901 issue of l’Aurora, a news item on Home, Washington appeared on the back page, reporting on the December 22, 1900 arrest of Charles Govan, printer of Discontent, on the charge of disseminating obscene literature. As the author declared, how prudish these American magistrates are when it comes to printed matter! If instead it were fresh and tender meat, oh, then, their modesty would disappear!


Charles Govan, far left, with Verity family

After sending this money to Gaetano Bresci’s family, Andrej went silent yet again, this time for three months, long enough to visit the Philippines more than once. Meanwhile, the February 1 issue of Germinal featured news of Charles Govan’s arrest at Home, while donors to the paper like H. Bezingue and the Faucon brothers lived in places like Midway Island or Peking, China [now Beijing], excellent stops on a smuggling route to the Philippines.

Free Society resumed publishing in Chicago with its February 3, 1901 issue, and Sigismund Danielewicz was now listed as the San Francisco agent for the paper. It was in Free Society that Andrej made his return to print, writing a short article entitled A Pertinent Proposition for the April 21 issue. As he told the reader, all active agitators in our ranks are constantly approached with the questions, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” I think a pamphlet treating the idea of a “general strike” would to a great extent answer the question.

Andrej went on to recommend certain texts for publication as pamphlets, including a text from the recent Paris Congress. He also encouraged the pamphlets to deal with the gigantic American Railway Union strike, the two street car strikes in Cleveland and St. Louis, the gold miners’ strike in Idaho, and the last coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania. After such lengthy absences, Andrej was remarkably well informed, especially on Oahu, which still had no telegraph connection with the US. When it came to correspondence with Paris, it took over a month for mail to arrive there from Honolulu, such as the article Andrej mailed to Les Temps Nouveaux for its April 27, 1901 issue.

Titled simply Honolulu, this would be the last article Andrej wrote from Hawaii, and also one of the most gratifying. As he opened the article, after much reflection about the best way to spread communist anarchism in this locality, I recognized that the best way was to speak in the streets. But I had to wait until the missionary republic officially became American territory, which just happened. On this occasion, the bureaucracy prepared a big party and public reception for the authorities.

Andrej decided to crash the party, and as he wrote, after putting on my black outfit, I had myself driven in a hackney carriage to the said palace. After one of the gentlemen of the Reception Committee had relieved me of my hat, I explained that I was living at the Hawaiian Hotel, and that I was on my way round the world. So the man from the Committee introduced me to the potentates and their females, and, by Jove, I fully enjoyed the ball, a copious supper, and a delicious punch.

Two days after this infiltration, Andrej went to a street corner in Honolulu and explained to those present the entertainments that had been afforded at the recent festival at the expense of those who admired the luxury outside. Andrej was arrested when he spoke at the same corner the following week and convicted of having obstructed the sidewalk. After paying his $6.25 fine, Andrej told the judge he would continue speaking on the same corner, and as he described, I climb on a box, and doubly quick, I knock God and the State, the army, religion, politics, the general strike, etc. To finish, I invite the audience to buy anarchist pamphlets and I distribute periodicals free to those who ask for them.

After this, the police left Andrej alone, and as he closed his article, as long as it wasn’t known there was an anarchist in town, the daily newspapers made a big fuss about the arrival of passing princes. Now, they keep quiet during their stay and only give news of them after their departure. This is perhaps the most vivid account of Andrej’s methods of street agitation, and not only was he extremely funny, he was also quite effective.

With this article, Andrej also mailed some Hawaiian shells to Paris, and they were listed as item 89 in the latest Les Temps Nouveaux raffle. These shells were won by the lucky holder of ticket 1060, as announced in the May 11, 1901 issue, but after this there was no further mention of Andrej for many months. However, unlike his previous disappearances, we know where he was thanks to Discontent, which changed his contact address in its August 7 issue. Once again, Andrej was listed as living at 75 Eagle House in the port of Yokohama, Japan, the same place he stayed at back in 1898 when he first sailed across the Pacific.

XXI: bolo’bolo

From the summer of 1901 to the spring of 1902, there was no word from Andrej, only that he’d arrived in Yokohama by July 1901. A month after his 75 Eagle House address was listed in Discontent, Free Society ran a warning in their September 1 issue, calling the comrades’ attention to another spy. He is well dressed, of medium height, rather narrow shouldered, blond, and about twenty-five years of age…His demeanor is of the usual sort, pretending to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names, or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence. If this same individual makes his appearance elsewhere, the comrades are warned in advance, and can act accordingly. Five days later, this alleged spy, Leon Czolgosz, assassinated President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York.

Everyone at Free Society was quickly arrested, along with Emma Goldman, Enrico Travaglio, and several other Chicago anarchists. Out in Spring Valley, the police arrested Giuseppe Ciancabilla, while out at Home, Washington the police arrested three Discontent editors, the Home postmistress, and Lois Waisbrooker, a spiritualist anarchist who published a newspaper at Home. Other were arrested across the country, such as Antonio Maggio, the anarchist who first put the blues into musical notation. All of them were charged with aiding the assassination of William McKinley.

Thanks to the efforts of radical lawyer Clarence Darrow (a Free Society donor and contributor) all of the Chicago comrades were soon released without charge, given there was no evidence connecting them to the assassination, and the printed denunciation of Czolgosz in Free Society prior to his act certainly made compelling evidence for the defense.

When the paper resumed with its October 6 issue, Abraham Isaak wrote an article titled Why We Considered Czolgosz a Spy, which stopped just sort of apologizing for the false accusation. It would only be in the October 13 issue that his son Abraham Isaak Jr. wrote a formal apology, stating, although at the time the warning seemed justified, it was an error. No matter what opinion one may have of Czolgosz, it will be admitted that he was not a spy. For that note, I offer to Leon F. Czolgosz, hated and despised as he is by all the world, an apology.

The truth of the matter is that an anarchist had justified assassinated the man responsible for the war in the Philippines, the annexation of Hawaii, and the economic colonization of Cuba, among many other crimes. McKinley was assassinated while Andrej Klemenčič was en route to the Philippines, where the insurgents were still being pushed into the mountains by the McKinley’s soldiers. It’s unclear exactly when Andrej arrived in the Philippines, but he didn’t stay for very long. Instead, the next mention of Andrej was in the November 24 issue of Free Society.

As the author wrote, Comrade Klemencic, who is well known to many comrades in America, especially on the Pacific coast, was recently in Sydney, Australia, where he showed his usual zeal for the propaganda. Several public meetings were held on the domain, at which he spoke. The police shadowed Klemencic and other comrades, but no arrests were made. The article then provided an extract from the Sydney Evening News where Andrej was accurately quoted as praising the anti-militarists of Russia who refused to serve in the army, but, notwithstanding, these young apostles of a more humane era were all sent to the prison, simply because they refuse to commit legal murder.

From Sydney, it seems Andrej then traveled to New Zealand, and as he later recalled, I had the privilege of traveling in New Zealand for several months while the Boer war was going on in South Africa, witnessing all the wild patriotism the New Zealanders, led on by imperialistic despots, gave vent to at that time. I did not go to the secretary of labor for information about conditions there, but got it by mixing with the citizens of that country in their daily affairs and studying their methods in public and private life.

Andrej wrote these words five year later in a debate with a socialist, and as he explained, it is true that [New Zealand] has a postal bank, old age pension, and a system of leasing land and loaning money to the settler. But why do they have all this. Because otherwise the people would emigrate to other parts of the world and capitalistic investments would have been lost. They threw a bone to the proletaires to gnaw at, and these proletaires thot this socialistic progress. While it was true that one could find a few Anarchists scattered over the country, the majority of New Zealanders were bourgeois racists, and as Andrej made clear, to my knowledge the New Zealanders furnished about 16,000 men and over one million pounds to support the imperial policy of Cecil Rhodes. Once again, Andrej was ahead of his time in calling out racist insanity when he saw it.

While he was agitating among the Kiwis, a certain Senator Hoar introduced a resolution into the US senate that December which called for some island, or, if that cannot be done, some other suitable territory, may be set apart, to which, under due precautions and after fair and proper trial, persons found guilty of attempting or instigating or counseling the overthrow of all Governments or of criminal attempts upon the life of Chief Magistrates or high officials of such Governments, may be transported and to which they may be confined.

Just before this resolution was introduced, Robert Pinkerton of the Pinkerton private detective agency suggested that an island in the Philippines could be used as a penal colony for anarchists, and to this place let us send everyone who wants anarchy; put them all on one island, and let them work it out among themselves. Much of this was reported in Free Society, and it appears that Andrej caught up on this island scheme when he finally reached the Philippines.

Meanwhile, l’Aurora was suppressed by the US government, although Giuseppe Ciancabilla and Ersilia Cavedagni soon teamed up with Enrico Travaglio in Chicago and finally put their combined powers into one journal, the monthly La Protesta Umana. An announcement for it appeared in the January 26, 1902 issue of Free Society promoting the new monthly Anarchist review which is shortly to appear in Chicago.After this new journal was launched that February, a rare English article from Giuseppe Ciancabilla appeared in the March 23, 1902 issue of Free Society entitled Echoes from Europe.

It was in the March 26 issue of Discontent that Andrej returned to print, and this time he was in the Philippines, having arrived there sometime before February 15, 1902. In an article entitled Shall We Have An Island?, Andrej humorously suggested US politicians give the anarchists the island of Polilo, which was located at 122 degrees east (Greenwich) and 15 degrees north, 231 miles in area, with several small islands in the southern vicinity; about 10 miles off the eastern coast of Luzon, about 35 miles north east from Manila.

Along with these very exact coordinates, Andrej cited two more islands, although he didn’t give their latitude and longitude. As he explained, since I have been here, I have never heard the names of the two islands mentioned publicly or privately. If you want to go from Polilo to Manila, you have to go across the straits, then across the mountains to Sta Cruz de Laguna, thence over the lake on Pasig river to Manila, or by rail around half Luzon, north or south. There will be no trouble with the people or the climate. It’s unknown if Andrej ever went to Polilo, or if this was the mythical gun smuggling terminus, but in any case, Andrej only wrote about the island on his final visit to the Philippines.

Andrej appears to have also mailed an article to Free Society for its March 30 issue, and it was preceded by a disclaimer entitled Privacy of the Mails, where the editors explained we received a letter from Comrade A. Klemencic of Manila (published in this issue), which was opened. The Manila date of the postoffice is February 15, 12:30 p.m., that of Chicago March 22, 11 a.m. (indistinct). The front of the envelope bears the stamp, “Received at Sta. C, Chicago, Ill. | unsealed.” Not only does this reveal exactly how long it took a letter to reach Chicago from Manila, it reveals that any letters exchanged across the Pacific could have possibly received the same scrutiny.

In his article, Andrej started off by being funny, and as he told the reader, since Mr. Pinkerton and his ilk of advocates so prominently advertise their desire to banish Anarchists to some island of the Philippine group, I thought it not out of place to send word from the other end of the line. After comparing US politicians to the Italian Mafia and Spanish Jesuits, Andrej then declared never to relent my zeal in undermining that brutal, enigmatical sphynx Authority, although this paragraph was likely filled with code. It was only after this seemingly long-winded intro that Andrej described Manila.

As he explained, on my arrival here, the atmosphere was rather heavy on my lungs for about two weeks, but since then I feel light and strong again. Most of the soil is of rich volcanic decay, with a profuse abundance of rain, which gives a luxurious growth of almost everything planted. The sun of course is rather warm, but as the soil is well soaked and gives way to evaporation, it is most of the time misty and cloudy if not raining. Northeastern breezes furnish fresh air from Alaskan waters, which makes life pleasant, healthy, and comfortable. There are no such extremes of heat and cold as in the American northeast.

However, he also remarked that, while the scenery in its variety is very conspicuous and imposing in its endless combinations; still the most interesting places of scenic reputation are as yet “rebel territory” or under “military rule,” and would cost me more trouble and money than I can afford just now for a visit. In regards to US troop movements, Andrej described how 165 soldiers went into the jungle, only to leave a dozen or more skeletons bleaching in the jungle; the rest will be finished up in the hospitals or lunatic asylums as cripples for life, with a few exceptions.

In addition, Andrej described how the US water-boarded a disobedient soldier named Private Richter who praised Leon Czolgosz, only for him to be drowned to death. Other soldiers who cheered the anarchist assassin got one to ten years sentences while their commanding General Weiler was doing “good work” in “concentration” camps around here in Laguna and Batangas, to say nothing about prancing in Samar and Lyte. The result is much sympathy for Czolgosz, but little for McKinley. Andrej then closed his article with the sentence, such is the echo around here from that pistol shot in Buffalo.

This same article would be summarized in the April 1902 issue of La Protesta Umana, which was officially published under the names of Giuseppe Ciancabilla and Enrico Travaglio, although Ersilia Cavedagni was also involved. At the time, La Protesta Umana shared the same 515 Carroll Street address as Free Society, and both papers received the same letter from Andrej, although the Protesta Umana editors merely cited a letter we received from a comrade living in Manila.

Andrej wrote one more article from Manila, sending it to Discontent for their April 2, 1902 issue. While the thought of getting an island from the government was amusing, Andrej made some clarifications for those who might take seriously the idea of a settlement in the Philippine Islands, through the instrumentality of the politicians. There is no doubt in my mind that they would try to foist some of the roughest types of depraved mankind on the gentle dreamers and hard workers. Andrej also believed that judges would foist the worst gang on the colonists to cope with. Still, I think there would be hope of better conditions for all.

With this final dispatch from Manila, Andrej did another of his disappearing acts. It’s possible he went to Polilo, that his article was a way of letting comrades know he’d be there if anything happened to him, but this is all conjecture. What is known is there exists only one reference of Andrej from April 1902 to February 1903. During that time, his beloved Discontent was banned by the US government, with its mailing suppressed even before its final April 30, 1902 issue.

In the May 4 issue of Free Society, the editors informed the reader that the postmaster general has ordered the postoffice at Home to be abolished. This action is taken in response to the recommendation of the grand jury which asserted that the residents of Home were misusing the office for unlawful purposes. Altho a court decided that the accused were not guilty, the postmaster acts against them notwithstanding! The infamous usurpation of the postal officials seemingly knows no bounds.

In the following May 11 issue, the editors asked their readers to contribute to the Home defense fund and its treasurer Oliver Verity, one of Andrej’s old friends. Free Society would continue to champion Home and supported them through their trial. While the other four defendants were found not-guilty, Lois Waisbrooker ended up being the only anarchist convicted of a crime following McKinley’s assassination.


Lois Waisbrooker at Home

Meanwhile, Andrej had vanished without a trace. Given his last known location was Manila, it seems likely he remained in the Philippines for the next six months, and in that time period, the late Philippine Republic was crushed, the rebel army formally surrendered, and the only resistance were scattered guerrilla armies of various religions and beliefs. Were he running guns and aid, Andrej would have sent it to these scattered bands, although most of rebels who weren’t dead had agreed to an amnesty and were now ruled by the US.

These were truly dispiriting times, especially for those who hoped for a Filipino victory, and it appears Andrej left the Philippines sometime in September 1902. On his way back to the United States, he would have stopped in Honolulu, and Andrej was there just before the first telegraph cable arrived on the Silverton from San Francisco. After uncoiling 2,276 nautical miles of this cable, the first transmission from Honolulu to San Francisco took place on January 1, 1903.

Andrej left Oahu just as the island was physically connected to the new imperial infrastructure of capitalism. What little freedom lay within that two week information lag was now eradicated, and this same cable would soon reach Midway Island, then onward to the new imperial colonies of Guam and the Philippines. This was the birth of our modern information age of under-sea fiber-optic cables, but back then neither Andrej or any other anarchists sabotaged these trans-Pacific telegraph cables. And so it was that Andrej Klemenčič sailed back to San Francisco, bitter with defeat, although he was never one to wallow. Instead, Andrej helped wage a guerrilla war on US soil.

XXII: Watching the Ships Roll In, Then I Watch ‘Em Roll Away Again

It appears that Andrej returned to San Francisco sometime in October 1903, and this is known through a $1 annual subscription fee he sent to La Protesta Umana in its November issue. After staying in San Francisco through January, Andrej traveled 1,000 miles north to Home, Washington, arriving sometime in early February. The only known reference to his time there comes from The Demonstrator, the new Home newspaper, and in its inaugural March 11 issue, the editors reported on the January 23 opening of Liberty Hall, a giant social center, school, and print shop for the anarchist community.


Liberty Hall, Home, WA

After the hall’s opening, regular Sunday night lectures were held every week, and it appears Andrej spoke there on February 7. In the list of Sunday speakers, Andrej was second, with the editors mentioningthat he belongs to his community, although he is now on his way to Honolulu, and has considerable traveling to do before settling down among us. By the time this first issue was published on March 11, Andrej was clearly on his way back to Hawaii, likely passing through San Francisco once again, although such things were easy for anarchists on the west coast, given their sailing connections through Sigismund Danielewicz, who was still very much a close comrade of this crew.

Andrej returned to Honolulu sometime in March, and he appears to have remained through April when he mailed two packages, one to Home, the other to Paris. In the May 23 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, a communication was sent by the familiar K, from Honolulu, while a package to Home was listed in the May 27 issue of The Demonstrator when the editors wrote, Andrew Klemencic has sent several nice gifts from Honolulu to comrades here. It’s unclear what these gifts were, but this would be that last English language communication from Andrej for nearly two years.

Andrej returned to San Francisco sometime in May, and it appears he stayed there with his comrades for some weeks. Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Ersilia Cavedagni, and Enrico Travaglio had relocated La Protesta Umana from Chicago back to its birthplace of San Francisco, and it was among them that Andrej resolved to travel across the Rocky Mountains and join the striking miners who’d risen up against the Colorado capitalists, most notably in Colorado City and Cripple Creek.

It was around this time that a new paper appeared, Cronaca Sovversiva, and as described in the June 21, 1903 issue of Free Society, the paper was a new Anarchist Italian weekly, hailing from the church-ridden State of Vermont, specifically Barre, Vermont, where the paper listed a PO Box. The first issue of the Cronaca was published on June 6, and not only did it feature an article by Emma Goldman, it was printed on the same press that once produced l’Aurora. On the back-pages of its June 13 issue, an advertisement for La Protesta Umana appeared, along with its new PO Box address in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the Cronaca was distributed in Paterson, New Jersey out of 327 Straight Street, the same address that once housed the French anarchist Germinal newspaper.

This ad ran in the Cronaca through July, but unfortunately a conflict arose between Giuseppe Ciancabilla and Enrico Travaglio, causing Enrico to abandon La Protesta Umana and return to his long running Secolo Nuovo. It’s hard to know how seriously to take this, given these anarchists remained intimately connected throughout the conflict, but there still exist a few traces of that very public flame-war, most notably the September 15, 1903 issue of Secolo Nuovo, which is one of just three that survived the Great Fire of 1906.

In a sprawling 2,000 word article entitled The Malady of the Times, the anonymous author trashed Giuseppe Ciancabilla, accused of him of trying to steal the l’Aurora printing equipment in Spring Valley, and questioned his choice of accepting a provisional release from prison in Illinois, unlike Enrico Travaglio and the others, who simply waited for trial and were released for lack of evidence. All of this was written under the snooping eyes of the Italian Consulate, which kept files on these dangerous anarchists who killed King Umberto I.

The article was likely written by Cesare Crespi, the adoptive-father of Enrico Travaglio and co-founder of Secolo Nuovo. It was Cesare’s name on the newspaper masthead, just as it was published out of his print-shop on old Montgomery Street [now Columbus], and he kept the paper rolling while Enrico was off in Chicago with the Free Society crew. In the article, Enrico is quoted several times, implying he didn’t write the text, although it’s also possible he did. In any case, Cesare supported Enrico and even contributed an article to La Protesta Umana, although after the paper moved back to San Francisco in February 1903, a split occurred among the comrades.

It’s possible that Giuseppe and Enrico were feigning a public conflict and accusing each other of being police agents, all to confuse the Italian Consulate, which was certainly monitoring them. In 1903, the Consulate duly informed the Italian Ministry of the Interior that[Ersilia] Cavedagni resides in San Francisco, California, where she lives with [Giuseppe] Ciancabilla and is considered extremely dangerous. However, it’s also possible and Giuseppe and Enrico were simply being irresponsible in telegraphing their personal conflicts across San Francisco, the US, and Europe.

Seventy years after these events, the anarchist Vincenzo Ferrero recalled that Giuseppe had fallen in love with Travaglio’s sister. He and Travaglio had a falling out—I don’t know why, but Travaglio said that Ciancabilla had called him a spy in Protesta Umana. Once when I printed a Ciancabilla issue of l’Emancipazione I asked Travaglio for his recollections. He said ask me anything but that. Enrico did in fact have a half-sister named Nina Crespi, who would have been 15 when she met Giuseppe in 1903, but it’s doubtful they fell in love, given Giuseppe was in a relationship with Ersilia Cavedagni. What’s certain is that no one knows the truth about the conflict between Giuseppe and Enrico, not even a close friend like Vincenzo Ferrero.


Giuseppe Ciancabilla

However, the Cronaca Sovversiva, printed on same l’Aurora press that Ciancabilla allegedly tried to steal, maintained friendly relations with La Protesta Umana throughout its print-run, and as you’ll see, everyone pitted at each other’s throats in this newsprint conflict would soon be close comrades again, making it even more believable that some of these internal conflicts were feigned in order to trap spies. The pages of Free Society carried two reports of Italian anarchists outing spies, just as anarchists in London not only outed an Italian spy, the let him buy them a printing press and likely convinced him to shoot King Leopold of Belgium, which he did, although unfortunately the king lived.


Gennaro Rubino shooting at King Leopold

In any case, Andrej Klemenčič was quite busy during this San Francisco drama, and it appears he arrived in Colorado sometime in June 1903, just in time for the first uprising of the Colorado Labor Wars, as they became known. When Andrej arrived, armed conflicts were being waged by striking mine-workers in Colorado City, the Cripple Creek mining district, and Denver, although it’s unclear exactly where he was, at least until September 18, 1903, when Andrej composed his first Colorado dispatch for Les Temps Nouveaux. Over the next two years, he would write only in French.

XXIII: Rocky Mountain High

Andrej’s dispatch began with a place and a date: Pueblo, Colorado, Sept. 18, which is apparently where he settled down after the first Colorado uprising. As he wrote to his French comrades, the miners’ strike in the Cripple Creek gold district of Colorado is certainly one of the most interesting in recent times in America. In the last election, politicians had promised to introduce the eight-hour day in the mining and metallurgical industries, but they were careful to end the legislature without the promised reform. Whereupon the blast furnace workers at Colorado City went on strike, and to make the demand more serious, the miners of the Cripple Creek district joined in.

Unfortunately, the repression had already arrived by the time Andrej wrote this, and as he explained, when the bosses saw the workers’ solidarity, they mobilized the “militia” with the peremptory declaration to decimate the “Western Federation of Miners.” Now, the state of Colorado has no law authorizing the governor to declare a “state of siege”; but that didn’t stop him from doing it anyway, and letting his amateur soldiers arrest and imprison citizens for no rhyme or reason.


Pro-union journalists imprisoned in the “bull pen”

The Colorado Labor Wars were also regularly covered that fall in the pages of the Cronaca Sovversiva, which carried news items from Pueblo, Telluride, and Cripple Creek, among many other Colorado mining centers. Various correspondents with names like Varlin, Joe, and N.P. were all seemingly in Colorado sending dispatches back to Barre, Vermont, where the Cronaca churned out a new issue every week. Even its main editor, Luigi Galleani, who wrote under the pen name El Vecc. (short for El Vecchio, or The Old Man), composed several news items on the Colorado Labor Wars.

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, longtime Free Society contributor Sam Mintz teamed up with Enrico Travaglio to put out a new anarchist semi-monthly newspaper, The Petrel, named after the birds which herald a coming storm. Advertisements for it appeared in the January 24, 1904 issue of Free Society, claiming that The Petrel would be published for the benefit of the average proletarian; to elucidate our ideas in a manner and style outspoken and simple; and with a more revolutionary spirit permeating its columns than those the now appearing journals. These reasons, and no personal vanity, prompt and inspire us in our new undertaking.A shorter version of this ad ran in the January 27 issue of The Demonstrator, a paper which also maintained friendly relation with Enrico’s alleged nemesis, Giuseppe Ciancabilla.

To make matters even more complex, a long advertisement was run the January 23, 1904 issue of the Cronaca Sovversiva, where Sam Mintz hilariously wrote, this propaganda work is intended to fill a gap in the American anarchist movement in that the existing periodicals tends to give hospitality to writings on scientific and abstruse subjects properly suited to a magazine, and which may be of capital interest to four intellectuals. Luigi Galleani wished the new paper great success and praised its efforts to unite comrades of different nationalities in a bond of active and fruitful solidarity against the raging reaction.

It seems that Luigi was referring to Sam Mintz being Jewish and Enrico Travaglio being Italian, but for whatever reason, Enrico didn’t attach his name to this statement, although he likely translated it into Italian. Unfortunately, there are no extant copies of The Petrel, with most assumed to have been lost in the Great Fire of 1906, and only three issues were ever published, all of them during 1904.

However, in the February 14 issue of Free Society, a writer criticized the first issue of The Petrel, callings its ideas not adapted to promote the cause of freedom, although by March 13 this same writer described the second Petrel as showing great improvement. It is free from bombast and bluster, and confines itself to argument and “philosophy,” for which it be put under the ban by those who imagine that the world can be revolutionized by bombastic phrases. By this point, Free Society had moved its operation to New York City, with its last Chicago issue published on February 21.

Back across the Rockies, Andrej went on the offensive, and the only trace of his activity can be found in The Indicator newspaper of Pueblo, and on its front-page for March 26, 1904, a short item entitled They’re Keeping It Up appeared, in which Andrej was listed as a local organizer for the smeltermen’s union. He was quoted as saying, the sooner the strike is called in Pueblo the better it will be for the strikers at Denver. This short item is the only trace of Andrej’s activity from October 1903 to May 1904, and when he finally wrote another French dispatch for Les Temps Nouveaux, events in Colorado had dramatically escalated.

His article appeared in the May 14, 1904 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, and after describing the repression that descended on the miners, Andrej informed the reader that anarchist ideas are virgin in these parts, but, with the help of Comrade Ciancabilla and others who have sent periodicals of our ideas, I have been able to sow some literature. In other words, despite the public conflict, Andrej felt no hesitation working with Giuseppe, and it’s likely he distributed La Protesta Umana and Cronaca Sovversiva among the Colorado miners.

On that note, Andrej also explained that he and his Pueblo comrades formed a group among Italians, as well as a cooperative of the Union of Workers of Mills and Metal Foundries, of which I am the organizer and secretary. I am also a delegate to the Council of Labor of Pueblo, and my speeches are better received than I expected. I believe that our philosophy and our tactics will establish themselves to remain in this part of the world, especially if these despotic conditions continue to predominate.


Colorado Fuel & Iron plant, Pueblo

Andrej mailed another dispatch to Paris, which appeared in the July 2 issue, briefly catching the reader up on the formation of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and the war they fought against the mine-owners of the Rocky Mountains. After the 1903 uprising, the government cracked down on the miners, including in Telluride, where they arrested Charles H. Moyer, president of the WFM. Andrej described all of this in his dispatch, including the November 21, 1903 dynamiting of the Vindicator mine in the Cripple Creek district, which killed some henchman of the mine-owners.

This dynamiting was the work of a union bomber named Harry Orchard, and he will play a prominent role at the end of this narrative. It is notable that Andrej didn’t mention the Vindicator blast until over seven months later, and then only to write, in French, a pre-arranged explosion occurred at the Vindicator Mine, Cripple Creek, killing half a dozen scabs; but the authorities failed to pin the blame on the Federation members; so it was a fiasco.

In this article, Andrej described attending the twelfth annual convention of the WFM, held in Denver from May 23 to June 8, 1904. As he wrote, I was sent as a delegate from a union of 216 Pueblo metal founders. Well, I noticed that what’s bad is the delegates have too much faith in legality, but otherwise they are very socialist, seeking to obtain the full value of their work by all means, including the anarchist tactics that I presented. Three delegates were sent to tell the judges “that we’ve waited long enough to know their opinion on the Moyer case.” The answer was “that Moyer would be released shortly.” Finally, it was decided to continue the strike to the last penny, and the last drop of blood, with the final aim of getting rid of wage labor for the inauguration of socialism.

In the official minutes of that convention, Andrej was listed as A. Klemencic of Pueblo Miners and Smeltermen’s No. 216 and allowed one vote in the proceedings. When votes were recorded, Andrej was listed right beside William D. Haywood, hereafter to referred to as Big Bill, one of the most important members of the WFM. It also appears that Haywood voted by proxy through Andrej for a certain vote, and their names appear together four separate times, making it highly likely they knew each other.


Big Bill, right

However, Andrej informed Les Temps Nouveaux that after the convention, a way had to be found to stifle the vitality of the Federation, given that the mine owners were close to bankruptcy, with the majority of the mines being flooded. 250 pounds of dynamite were placed under the platform of the Independence Cripple Creek station, with a revolver in the middle of the dynamite covered by a chair leg, and connected with a 400-foot long wire to the sheds of a nearby mine. On Monday, June 6, at six o’clock in the morning, when the scabs were getting ready to go home after work, an explosion was set off, sending about fifteen of them into eternity and seriously injuring several.

Andrej appears to be implying that the capitalists engineered the Independence Station bombing, an act later claimed by Harry Orchard, who was allegedly paid by the WFM to do so. Andrej then narrated the repression in Cripple Creek that followed the Independence bombing, concluding that, with all this, the people of Denver and Pueblo are left with their arms crossed. Denver is 70 kilometers from Cripple Creek, and Pueblo a little more than 50.

After briefly describing a speech he gave at the Pueblo Trades Assembly where he gave courage to those who believed the “infernal machine” was the work of the strikers, Andrej then wrote, I believe we’re heading straight towards a cataclysm that will be one more step towards the proletarian emancipation of these Rocky Mountains which provide gold to the “knights of industry” and lead to the producers.

Just as Andrej covered this for Les Temps Nouveaux, various Italian correspondents continued to cover the Colorado Labor Wars for the Cronaca Sovversiva, notably G. Pimpino, which was simply another pseudonym for Luigi Galleani. The Cronaca also ran an item from La Protesta Umana in its July 9, 1904 issue, just as it regularly advertised 5 cent Errico Malatesta pamphlets on its back-page. Despite the alleged feud between Errico and Giuseppe Ciancabilla, one could hardly tell there was a schism in the pages of Cronaca Sovversiva

It was around this time an anarchist named Humbert Rulliére rolled through Pueblo on his way to San Francisco. Humbert, aka Laurent Casas, was a former French miner, escaped convict from the Salvation Islands penal colony, and a writer for Les Temps Nouveaux whose story is as lengthy as Andrej’s. At the time, Humbert was traveling from Saint Louis, and he seems to have stayed with Andrej in Pueblo where the two became comrades.


Humbert Rulliére

Humbert reached San Francisco by September and joined Giuseppe, Ersilia, and the other comrades in promoting La Protesta Umana. While there, Humbert donated 50 cents to the Cronaca Sovversiva for its October 20, 1906 issue. While his full relationship with Andrej is largely undocumented, Humbert will play an important role at the end of this narrative.

Andrej returned to print in the August 6 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux with another Colorado dispatch, this one providing a more in-depth history of the WFM leading up to the present, where Andrej was part of a Pueblo committee preparing a huge demonstration of solidarity with the members of the W.F. of M., and we have invited Moyer and Haywood. Moyer was being charged with the 1903 bombing of the Vindicator mine in Cripple Creek, although as Andrej remarked, he was in Denver when the bombing occurred. From all this, it seems even more likely that Andrej knew not just Big Bill, but also Charles Moyer.

As he told his French readers, we lack neither money nor arms, nor courage, but the lack of anarchist tactics makes action hesitate; we can very easily shoot or hang the whole Peabody gang, but Roosevelt will then send the regular troops; therefore, civil war, or we can undertake armed resistance when we are understood by the workers, organized or not, by all the whipping boys. In the meantime, we must turn the salad well in oil, salt, mustard, pepper, etc.

In his concluding paragraphs, Andrej informed the reader that in September we shall have here in Pueblo the convention of the State Federation of Labor, of which I am the organizing delegate on behalf of the Trades Assembly of Pueblo. I shall have another opportunity to show the delegates that politics is killing us, and that we should get used to direct action, not to discuss the price of our slavery, but to seek to appropriate the product. The capitalists are pushing us to the extreme, and only by extreme means can we organize the libertarian society that the oppressed desire. So, let’s get to work, comrades, across the United States!

Andrej briefly reporting on this convention in the September 10 issue, which he claimed frightened the Colorado governor into withdrawing the state militia from the mining regions. Andrej then described how, at the great sympathy meeting at Pueblo, Haywood had explained in great detail how he sent the governor packing, and assured us the so-called peace would not come, and that the whole grifter gang could go fuck themselves. This was the meeting Andrej helped organize for Big Bill and Charles Moyer, and apparently it went well.

Andrej ended that September 10 article by explaining that Labor Day will have a popular stamp here [in Pueblo], because the unions have invited all sympathizers to take part in this demonstration. Unfortunately, there is already too much politics to achieve any serious result for the benefit of the producers. There are a lot of people who believe that if I appear on the platform, I will be accused of anarchism, despite the fact that I am “general secretary” of the organizing committee of “Labor Day.”Andrej signed this article from Pueblo on August 22, meaning it took just over two weeks to reach Paris after he mailed it from Colorado.

Soon after this was published, Giuseppe Ciancabilla passed away from tuberculosis on September 16, 1904. He was only 32 years-old, and his many comrades composed a obituary in the final, tri-lingual issue of La Protesta Umana. Published on October 1, the obituary was printed in Italian, French, and Spanish. Over forty San Francisco comrades signed their names to the dedication, but Enrico Travaglio wasn’t one of them.

In the October 2 issue of Free Society, a short obituary was printed which stated that Giuseppe died from consumption, the proletarian disease, which he had contracted from overwork, misery, and persecution. Across the continent in Barre, Vermont, the editors of the Cronaca Sovversiva critiqued La Protesta Umana in their August 20 issue, defended Giuseppe in their September 17 issue, but when they learned of his passing, they provided a brief obituary in the September 24 issue, describing his final days as being livedin poor health, worn out by work, poverty, and persecution. The Cronaca also printed the first installment of Giuseppe’s The Mystification of Collectivist Socialismin its October 8 issue, with the other installments running through November 19.

The Demonstrator of Home would reprint Free Society’s short item on Giuseppe in their October 12 issue, although they added, Comrade Ciancabilla had bought two acres of land in Home and was preparing to move here. Given all the facts, it’s more than likely that Andrej convinced Giuseppe to move to Home when they met in San Francisco two years earlier.

Across the Rockies in Pueblo, Andrej wrote another US dispatch for the October 29 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, informing the reader that, at the Federation of Labor convention, and at the Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah Coal Miners convention, the Trades Assembly gave a banquet at which I was the principal speaker for the local organizations. For the Labor Day demonstration, my tactics were misunderstood and all my arrangements were thrown out the window.

Shortly after he wrote this, Free Society ran its final issue in New York City, citing over a hundred dollars debt on its head. On top of this, Abraham Isaak wrote that the comrades in New York alone could easily support an English Anarchist weekly if they recognized its pertinence. But they do not. Abraham proposed the newspaper transition from a weekly to a monthly, but only if enough comrades committed resources. Should the paper fail to come out on January 1 for lack of sufficient support, the subscriptions received meanwhile will be returned, and the subscribers of Free Society will receive the Demonstrator until their subscription expires. Alas, Free Society ran its last issue on November 20, and its subscription lists were mailed to Home.

Andrej wrote another dispatch for the December 31, 1904 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux, and he was saddened to report that a Pueblo comrade had suffered an assassination attempt. Andrej described how the mine owners ordered their henchmen in Trinidad to destroy and burn the office of the Lavoratore Italiano and to kill Carlo Demolli, a good comrade; the order was carried out: the office was ransacked, smashed to pieces and burned. Demolli was attacked in Pueblo by six individuals who broke his head and, finally, wanted to force him into a carriage to take him out of the city and finish him off for good, but this trick did not work, our good comrade, at the last moment, and with the help of passers-by, was able to free himself from the hands of the assassins. Despite surviving his wounds, Carlo was ultimately arrested in the hospital for distributing obscene literature.

Further on, Andrej explained that, here in Pueblo, the Republican senator is forcibly elected with a 4-vote majority over the Democratic candidate, and so on; the electoral fraud is official. Gee! I interfered in the elections to preach unionism and anarchy among the Slavic and Italian populace; so we’ve well patched up the cracks in our union of metal founders. From this, it can be gathered that his local Miners and Smeltermen’s No. 216 union had lost some members, only to now be patched up with Slavic and Italian members receptive to Andrej’s preaching of anarchy.

Andrej returned in the February 18, 1905 issue with an article entitled Politics in the State of Colorado, summing up the electoral sham of the recent governor’s election. Later in the article, Andrej announced he would give twelve lectures between October-November, all through the Pueblo Trades’ Assembly, of which Andrej was a member. The unifying theme of his lectures would be the General Strike, and Andrej wrote, I take advantage of my status as an American citizen, and I gain new friends every day to study anarchist principles and tactics.

Soon after writing this, Andrej sent another dispatch for the April 1 issue, only this time it was a Manifesto and Call for a Worker’s Congress to take place in Chicago in June 1905, a reprint of the first call to form the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In his short introduction to this now famous text, Andrej wrote, I am now seeking to launch the idea of colonies similar to those at Home in which the unemployed and strikers could find a home and begin to produce for their own needs. Because of this, we know that Andrej was still inspired by the Home Colony he helped found, finding it just as vital as the General Strike he also advocated.

Andrej wrote another dispatch for the April 29 issue, largely dealing with the recently stolen Colorado election. It was also around this time that Andrej wrote his first English article in years, this time for The Miners Magazine, the official organ of the WFM. Entitled Industrial Unionism and Socialism, the article advocated industrial unions over the reigning craft unions, which were often pitted against each other in a race for membership dues, just as they often compromised with the capitalists.

This article was then reprinted in the June 21 issue of The Demonstrator, his first contribution to Home’s press in over two years, and as noted above, Home was clearly on his mind. Filled with dreams of anarchists eating clams by the sea, Andrej caught a train north to Chicago sometime in June 1905, and within the month he’d help found the IWW, which still exists today in 2025.

XXIV: A Cosmopolitan Crowd

Andrej was present on the opening day of the first IWW convention, Tuesday, June 27, 1905, which was called to order by his comrade Big Bill Haywood. Andrej’s only listed contribution that day was seconding a motion of the Committee on Credentials, and he wouldn’t appear in the minutes again until June 29, when his official credentials were listed as being affiliated with the Pueblo Tailors Union. After having organized the smeltermen of Pueblo, it appears Andrej returned to his lifelong trade and represented his fellow tailors to the emerging IWW.

Later in the afternoon of June 29, Andrej made his first major speech, and against the opposition of Delegate Sunagel, he was able to go on at length about the revolutionary upsurge that followed the execution of Haymarket Martyrs. Andrej claimed that the cherished idea of the craft-union AFL was that we shall all remain slaves, and that their new organization should insist that we shall get our share that we are producing, and we stand on the motto of the comrades of the Western Federation of Miners that they retain in their magazine and on their emblem, that “All wealth is produced by labor, and it belongs to the producer thereof.” That is the program that we want, and that is the program that we will stick to and that we will carry out to the letter. And that is the reason for the call of the Manifesto, as I understand it. I thank you for your kind attention.

The next day, June 30, Andrej helped pass a resolution formally recognizing May 1 as the worker’s holiday, just as he introduced an anti-militarism resolution that included the provision that any members accepting salaried positions to defend capitalism, directly or indirectly, should be denied the privilege of membership in this organization. This resolution would come up again on the morning of July 4, and Andrej made clear that, if we take our stand on the economic struggle, we should not mix politics in the organization.

It was later in the afternoon of July 4 that Andrej made perhaps his greatest contribution to the emerging IWW when he said, we have got Austrians, Chinamen, Japs, and people of all nationalities here in this country. So we have got Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, and we are a cosmopolitan crowd. Now, then, as it is, all lines that were ever established have always been established by men who were a bunch of robbers, thieves and exploiters, and we want to combine ourselves as humanity, as one lot of people, those that are producing the wealth of our oppressors, and we want to have under that banner our brothers and sisters of the world. Thanks to this contribution, the organization was named the Industrial Workers of the World, not Industrial Workers of the USA.

On a similar note, Andrej made a contribution to the IWW label and emblem during the morning of July 7, suggesting an image that might have on one side Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, and on the other side America, and the two hands between the old continent and the new continent. This would be then the Industrial Workers of the World. But if we are talking about the world, then to only get the American side of it, we get only one part of it. I think it would be plausible that we ought to have on one side the old world and on the other side the new world, with the two hands from the old world and the new world bound together, and that would be, I think, the sentiment we are representing here. While the final label and emblem didn’t resemble Andrej’s design, it did depict a nation-less globe.

The founding convention ended on July 8, 1905, and Andrej likely remained in Chicago for some days, enough time to pen another US dispatch for Les Temps Nouveaux. In its August 26, 1905 issue, Andrej gave a basic run-down of the proceedings and resolutions, along with the basic points of agreements, such as, trade unions help employers to deceive workers by making them believe that workers have common interests with the exploiters. After explaining that the next congress would be held in May 1906, he instructed his French readers to address all communications to the Secretary of the General Committee, W. Trautmann, 148 W. Madison St., Chicago-Ill.

Andrej returned to Pueblo sometime in August, and in that time an Italian anarchist named N. Casciola became Pueblo’s correspondent for the Cronaca Sovversiva, although it’s unclear if they met. Andrej’s next contribution from Pueblo was for The Liberator, a new anarchist newspaper founded by Lucy Parsons in Chicago. It’s likely that Andrej met with Lucy while he was in Chicago, given she attended the IWW founding convention. For the Liberator’s inaugural issue, Andrej contributed an article entitled Industrial Unionism, which was a basic primer on the IWWs goals.

In a broad call for agitation, Andrej concluded, join the industrial unions where they exist, and organize them where there are none as yet. We musn’t lay too much stress on local difficulties but let us bear in mind that a general strike will never be possible unless we have got class-conscious industrial groups all over the country. Where we are finding faults, try to correct them, not criticize but appreciate the good intention of an unsuccessful attempt to co-operate and not antagonize the struggling masses of disinherited. We need no mutual admiration clubs and sophistry of our own. Let us take off our coats and the action will speak of our attitude in leading on the fight. All on board and do the work of organization and education for industrial emancipation.

Andrej signed this article from Pueblo, implying he was there by late August, and for the second September 10 issue of The Liberator, he donated $1. For the third September 17 issue, Andrej provided some clarity on the previous year’s aborted Labor Day march, writing that, last year we could not agree in fundamental principles, we therefore agreed to disagree and had no celebration whatever. This year we agreed on the following points: 1. Not to ask merchants for prices. 2. Not to ask business men to patronize the program. 3. Not to have speakers for the occasion. 4. Not to indulge in parading.

During that year’s Labor Day, Andrej explained that his Pueblo crew had a peaceful picnic at the lake and sold quite a few copies of “Social Ge. Strike” by A. Roller. Although we mustn’t be carried away by our enthusiasm, we must remember that only a very small percentage of local slaves belong to a union of a fighting disposition, still I can immensely appreciate the spirit of evolution since my contact as delegate to the local central body of organized labor. Whatever faults we may find in a union, and to be sure there are many, but the value of education to our fellow workers is certainly of a deep and far reaching character, because it promises changes to come.

Back east in Barre, Vermont, the editors of the Cronaca Sovversiva printed an advertisement for The Liberator in their September 16, 1905 issue, claiming that after the disappearance of Free Society, the need for an anarchist newspaper was keenly felt among the English-speaking element. After introducing the project, the editors wrote that if the paper, in addition to promoting sound anarchist theory, vigorously and forcefully conducts this campaign against the businessmen invading the Trade Unions of North America, it will have more than justified its appearance in the world of anarchist journalism. For this, we send it our fraternal greetings. It should be noted that the Cronaca had little to say about the IWW, and this endorsement of The Liberator was the closest it had come to supporting the industrial union.

Andrej wrote another pro-IWW article for The Liberator’s September 24 issue, but around that time he left Pueblo and traveled west over the Rocky Mountains. He’d been living in Pueblo for just over two years, and he certainly was a major figure in the Colorado Labor Wars, but no more so than hundreds of other agitators. What made Andrej’s special was his anarchism, and as you’ve just seen, he did much to spread his beliefs far and wide among the rebel miners.

XXV: Home Again, Home Again

Andrej returned to Home sometime during October 1905, and for the first time in all these years, he actually lived there on a daily basis. It’s unclear who’s house he stayed in, but Andrej was comfortable enough to mail an article to The Liberator for its October 29 issue. As this mail traveled to Chicago, Andrej was also busy as the new editor of The Demonstrator, having taken the place of James F. Morton, who soon left Home. Morton had fallen out of favor for his spiritualism and editorial dominance of the paper, and in the place of his philosophical meanderings, Andrej resumed his international anarchist news column, which appeared in the November 1 issue of The Demonstrator.

That first column was simply titled Foreign News and printed after James F. Morton’s goodbye letter in the November 1 issue. After a two-week break, Andrej’s news column, now titled International Review appeared on the front of the November 15 issue and took up an entire page. On the second page, not only did Andrej contribute an article entitled Anarchism and its Applications, the IWW symbol now appeared below the publication information, something Andrej insisted on.

Charles Govan, the Demonstrator printer, later explained to his comrade Joseph Labadie that it was Andrej who gets up news for [The Demonstrator] was one of the instigators of the Industrial Union and is very enthusiastic about it. An account of him I put in [the IWW logo]. The same issue that first featured the IWW logo also revealed that a young anarchist named Leon Morel donated $1 to the paper while he was in town with his romantic partner Ersilia Cavedagni.

After the death of her lover Giuseppe, it appears that Ersilia moved to Oakland with a French anarchist named Leon Morel, who was part of the Germinal group that had contributed to La Protesta Umana. At the time, Ersilia was 41, while Leon was 22, and as reported in that November 15 issue, they arrived from San Francisco and have been here for the past two weeks, [buying] a tract of land across the bay on which they will locate next spring. It should be noted that Ersilia and Leon only went to Home after their comrade Andrej returned, and it’s possible these moves were coordinated.

However, in his account for Les Temps Nouveaux, Leon completely omitted Ersilia’s presence at Home, writing that he left San Francisco on November 1st on one of the steamers which serve the Pacific coast, and I arrived at Home on the 4th, having passed through Seattle and Tacoma. At the colony, I was lucky to meet Klémencic, who was passing through and also in Home. At first I thought that, like me, Klémencic had come there out of curiosity. But he explained to me that he had already known this magnificent country for a dozen years, and that the colony was somewhat his work. I was surprised. As you can see, Leon claimed it was a surprise to find Andrej there, but he also claimed to have traveled alone, which wasn’t the case.

In regards to anarchist newspapers, Leon also remarked that, in Chicago, The Liberator appears, costing $50 for 1,000 copies. It is too expensive and, despite the good will of comrades, The Liberator will certainly cease to be published for lack of funds. Now, as it is urgent to have in the United States at least one anarchist organ in the English language, I think that the Demonstrator is ideally suited to this. Since his return to Home, Klémencic has taken over its management and has given it a very interesting character. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Leon would be proven correct about The Liberator, although he was also correct about the Demonstrator being better suited to the task.

After Leon and Ersilia left, Andrej continued writing his news columns, although in the December 6, 1905 issue of The Demonstrator it was revealed that Andrej had returned to Tacoma where he was running the tailor shop of some comrades. As reported in that issue, Nathan and Bessie Levin are at home again after an absence of a year in Tacoma, where they were engaged in the tailoring business. Andy Klemencic has charge of the place now, which is located at 728 St. Helens avenue. If you want any clothes made, repaired, cleaned or dyed call there.

The Levins were two Belarusan anarchists who recently moved west from Philadelphia, and it remains unclear how they knew Andrej. However, it seems likely he lived in their house for his two months at Home, and the Levins trusted Andrej enough to let him live and work in their tailor shop, which was their primary means of livelihood. The couple recently had a son, and while they were at Home to be with him, Andrej was not only tailoring, he was agitating on the streets of Tacoma. Andrej helped found the first IWW branch in Tacoma, which met every Wednesday at 8 p.m., in S.L.P. hall above postoffice, and encouraged his comrades to run for the Tacoma School Board, a contest they unfortunately lost.

Shortly before he left for Tacoma, Andrej wrote an article about Home for the Cronaca Sovversiva, some of which forms the historical timeline for this narrative. As he explained to Italian readers, the colony currently numbers about 150 people living in 40 houses, and owns 40 cows and over 2,000 heads of poultry. There is no industry yet. We only have one road, built through the colony on the hill overlooking the sea. We have a school and a 36-by-50-foot ballroom. The soil is sandy on the hills, very suitable for fruit trees, and in the valleys the land is of good quality for legumes, which grow perfectly here without the need for laborious and difficult irrigation. The evergreen tree is the most common, but in the valleys there’s an abundance of deciduous trees.

Andrej mentioned that the foreign element in the colony is represented only by an Italian family and a single comrade, a few Slavs, Germans, and two Swedes; the vast majority, therefore, is made up of Americans. While the Slavs were the Levins, the Italians were Frank and Therese Lazerri, along with Anton Zoncanelli, who would later be arrested during Home’s nude bathing scandal.

After providing more details of Home, Andrej closed his article with poetic descriptions of the landscape: The climate is temperate; rainy and cool in winter, it’s not too hot in summer because the wind keeps the temperature mild. During the months of July and August, and sometimes even September, it doesn’t rain at all; so we enjoy an ideal climate among these peaceful bays and perpetual greenery of the island’s vegetation, surrounded by the white Olympic Mountains and the majestic and imposing Mount Rainier. Indeed, today (November 13th) as I write these lines, I’m enjoying a soft, clear, and warm sun among the varied and multicolored flowers and the crisp air in the sublime calm of the pine forests. A happy life of work and thought.

Andrej mailed his article off to Barre, where it was printed in the December 2, 1905 issue of the Cronaca. At the end of Andrej’s text, editor Antonio Cavalazzi added his own commentary, writing that, to be truly useful to the idea, comrades mustn’t withdraw from the masses, they mustn’t isolate themselves, but they must experience the conditions of the workers, interpret their aspirations, nourish them with their own life practices, their own experience, and push them to their ultimate consequences, spreading the anarchist idea always and everywhere, gaining new convinced proselytes who are capable in turn of broadening and intensifying anarchist action and propaganda. Little did Antonio know that Andrej had left Home to do just that in Tacoma.

It wasn’t just the Cronaca that received an update from Home, it was also Les Temps Nouveaux in Paris, and it appears Andrej mailed them a similar French article around the same time. However, given the mail delays, it wouldn’t arrive in Paris until late December 1905, but when it did, the editors also found an article on Home from Leon Morel, and both were published together in the January 6 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux.

While parts of Leon’s article on Home were quoted above, Andrej’s article on Home forms part of the historical timeline in this narrative and has already been heavily quoted from. The Les Temps Nouveaux article is very similar to the one Andrej sent to the Cronaca, although with many different details, such as mentioning his old friend Emanuel F. Rotschek, whose daughter Kate was in a romantic relationship with Carl Nold, one of the anarchists arrested after Sasha’s attentat.

Much like in his Cronaca article, Andrej closed this Temps Nouveaux article by explaining that the country’s climate is temperate throughout the year; in summer, because the breezes of the sea and mountains bring their freshness, and in winter the Japanese current, lukewarmness. The magnificence of the mountains; the eternal greenery of a majestic vegetation of pines, firs and cedars, the islands which bathe in the peaceful Puget Sound, all form in the colony of Home a setting of marvelous beauty.

Andrej appears to have written this when Leon Morel was at Home, and Leon’s own article in Les Temps Nouveaux directly mentioned Andrej in its opening sentence, implying they were written together as a joint effort of promoting Home. However, as stated above, Andrej left Home that December, just as Leon and Ersilia appear to have traveled to Philadelphia. In the meantime, their words on Home were read by tens of thousands of anarchists across the US, some of whom soon longed for its trees, waters, and ferns.

XXVI: The Wizard of Destiny

Andrej continued his international news column for The Demonstrator, just as he continued tailoring at 728 Saint Helens Avenue. In his spare time, Andrej helped organize a big massmetting in Tacoma, Wn., for the purpose of expressing sympathy and sentiments of solidarity for the struggling proletaires of Russia, who were then fighting some of the last battles of the 1905 Revolution. The meeting was to be held on January 22, 1906 in the Germania Hall, and in the same January 17 issue where Andrej announced this, he also reported on the December 30 dynamite attack that killed Frank Steunenberg, the former governor of Idaho.

Andrej told the reader that Steunenberg was the initiator of “bullpen” methods for striking miners in the Cour d’Alene district in 1899, a notorious moment where the late-President McKinley sent the Buffalo Soldiers to keep striking miners in a concentration camp for months, all to foment racial hatred and take pressure of the capitalist mine-owners. Steunenberg was the Governor of Idaho who called for these federal troops, causing him to be widely hated among the labor movement. Now that he was dead, Andrej claimed that the authorities are trying in every way to implicate the Western Federation of Miners and cause them to spend money to defend those who will be accused.

An expanded report of this bombing was published in the January 20 issue of Les Temps Nouveaux where Andrej pointed out that Steunenberg, the inventor of concentration camps for miners, had at one point been a member of the Typographers’ Union, but he soon realized his ambition of becoming a proper statesman! Andrej explained that the dynamiting of Steunenberg had riled up the ruling class, and now the whole pack of regular and amateur detectives are on the hunt to win MONEY.

Shortly after this was printed, Andrej mailed off an article to The Liberator for its February 3 issue, detailing the successful mass-meeting in Tacoma. As he explained, through the efforts of my friends and comrades, a committee was appointed to visit the “Trades Council” which promised co-operation. N.J. Burns, president of the Trades Council, officiated as chairman of the meeting. Upon me devolved the task of telling about conditions in Russia. The event raised $23 for the Russian comrades, and Andrej would continue to cover events in Russia through his news column.

Andrej also promoted a certain Irene M. Smith, one of the speakers at the Russian mass-meeting, who at the time was delivering lectures in Tacoma. Andrej proposed in the Feburary 7 issue of The Demonstrator that he would help organize a debating club to discuss social economics at the end of Irene’s lectures at Parker’s Hall, which was located at 1117 ½ Tacoma Avenue. However, there were no subsequent report-backs on the lectures or debating clubs, at least in The Demonstrator.

In the February 21, 1906 issue, Andrej wrote an advertisement for Emma Goldman’s new monthly anarchist magazine, then titled The Open Road after the Walt Whitman poem. Andrej remarked, with the “Liberator” in Chicago and The Demonstrator on the Pacific coast, our disheartened comrades ought to be inspired with new courage and show more interest in behalf of Anarchist principles and tactics in this country. He humorously ended this ad by stating, the comrades in the coal mining region, where a number of wageslaves are more or less agitated by the impending strike, should show more activity in disseminating the ideas of revolutionary industrial unionism and in helping to organize locals of the I.W.W. They should write to William Trautman, 148 W. Madison street, Chicago, Ill., for full particulars. In other words, Andrej turned it into an IWW ad.

A similar ad for The Open Road appeared in the February 10 issue of the Cronaca Sovversiva, and its author claimed that the name of Emma Goldman is a sure sign this new magazine will bring to the propaganda of libertarian ideas an energetic and precious contribution of unprejudiced intelligence and iconoclastic courage.

That same February 10, a grand celebration was held in Liberty Hall at Home in celebration of the community’s tenth anniversary. As described in the Home News column for February 21, that evening, with the happy, healthy population of Home filling the spacious hall, and the Home band—one of the best in the country—assembled on the stage, must have been a great contrast to the time when the three men landed in a rowboat and started to clear off the little patch of ground. As a testament to his importance in founding the community, A. Klemencic delivered the opening address, then the band played a few selections, after which different members talked of the old times and new.

Andrej continued with his news column for The Demonstrator that winter, but he also wrote an article for the March 4 issue of The Liberator boosting the IWW, as well as donating 50 cents. Unfortunately this would be the last article that Andrej wrote for The Liberator, and the paper published its last issue on April 15, 1906. Just as Leon Morel had predicted, that Chicago paper was too expensive. This left The Demonstrator as the only English language anarchist newspaper, given that Emma Goldman’s new monthly anarchist magazine, now titled Mother Earth, was more of a literary digest.

Meanwhile, the Pinkerton private detective agency kidnapped Big Bill Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone in Denver and illegally transported them to Boise, Idhao, where they were charged with organizing the December 30, 1905 dynamiting of former governor Steunenberg. Andrej reported on this in the March 7, 1906 issue of The Demonstrator, writing that a meeting of the mine owners of the western states was held secretly in Denver less than a month ago when $1,000,000 was subscribed to be used in further efforts to break up the [WFM]. This will explain some points about the men and methods employed to ferret out the parties responsible for Steunneberg’s death.

In that same news column, Andrej announced the closing of The Liberator in Chicago, the movement of Regeneración to Saint Louis, and reminded the Tacoma comrades of the celebration to be held on March 18 in commemoration of the Paris commune. As reported in the April 4 issue, the Paris commune was very fittingly celebrated in Tacoma by such organizations as the I.W.W., trades council, S.P., and S.L.P., which proves the fact that class consciousness is above party prejudices in this community.

An entry in that issue’s Home News column revealed that quite a number of Homeites, and some of our neighbors, assembled at the hall Sunday [April 1, 1906] afternoon to listen to a recital, by comrade A. Klemencic, of the story of the kidnapping of comrades Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone. His feeling portrayal of the home life of these men brot tears to the eyes of many. Having been an eyewitness of the persecution of the miners during the struggle between the miners and the mineowners, comrade Klemencic’s address was very interesting, and enabled those present to understand the situation much better. Several others made remarks. A collection, amounting to $10, was taken up to help in the struggle which is now being waged to set Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone free.

Andrej wasn’t just preaching to the choir at Home, we was also agitating in Tacoma, and as he described in the April 18 issue, the Tacoma Trades Council selected comrades Burns, Dowler and myself to arrange a massmeeting to protest against the “extra-legal” methods of the Idaho and Colorado state authorities. In other words, Andrej got the Tacoma Trades Council to support his comrades. This event was meant to take place on April 22, but as Andrej explained in his May 2 news column, it was postponed for two weeks to allow the use of the opera house for a benefit for the [San Francisco] earthquake sufferers.

Andrej also mentioned that J.H. Walsh, of Seattle, has been appointed as organizer for the I.W.W. on the Pacific slope, and it appears James H. Walsh met up with Andrej in Tacoma. That same May 2 issue also mentioned in its Home News column that a picnic, to spend Sunday, June 17, in Home, is being arranged in Tacoma. Comrade Klemencic has the matter in hand and writes there will be ice cream and lemonade for the picnicers. Come and bring your lunch. While it wasn’t advertised as such, the main attraction of this event would be James H. Walsh, western organizer for the IWW.

It’s likely that Andrej and James helped organize a group of sheet metal workers in Tacoma, and as Andrej reported in the May 16 issue, the workers went on partial strike and have worked only eight hours since May 1 and four hours on Sundays. Meanwhile, up north, the much anticipated massmeeting was held in the Grand operahouse in Seattle, Wn., on May 6, to protest against the injustice being dealt to Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. The speakers very successfully showed the judicial wirepulling to legally murder the prisoners.

Shortly after this issue of The Demonstrator was published, Sasha Berkman was finally released from prison on May 18, 1906, and he immediately went to Detroit to stay with Carl Nold and his partner Kate Rotschek. As you’ll remember, Kate was the daughter of Andrej’s old friend Emanuel F. Rotschek, and she spent several days with Sasha and Carl. Emma soon arrived at the apartment, reuniting with her beloved Sasha, and together they began a lecture tour across the US starting with a May 22 speech in Detroit.

Sasha’s new freedom was announced in the June 2 issue of the Cronaca Sovversiva, followed by the full publication of his Detroit speech in the June 6 issue of The Demonstrator. As usual, that issue also featured Andrej’s news column, which now took up the full front page of each Demonstrator. At the same time, Andrej had dramatically improved the newspaper as its main editor, and according to the printer Charles Govan, for the six months ending February 28 the paper, for the first time, paid all my actual expenses.

However, there was more going on beneath the surface, and Charles also wrote to his friend Joseph Labadie that it keeps me limping to get stuff to fill for pages, and Klemencic’s stuff has all to be gone over, and it takes at least 2 ½ hours to get in readable shape. I wouldn’t fool with it, only it is news, and Klemencic has stood by us in everything. It appears that Charles and Andrej had a decent working relationship, and together they helped the Demonstrator flourish. Andrej may have been largely subsidizing the paper with his tailoring income, and he was flush enough to send two francs to Les Temps Nouveaux for its June 9 issue.

In fact, the Demonstrator was doing so well that the June 20, 1906 issue suddenly featured a new, modernist masthead and a two-column layout as opposed to the traditional four. The paper was also doubled in size to 8 pages, but just like before, Andrej’s International Review column remained on the front-page. In his entry for the US, Andrej explained that the I.W.W. organized a mill workers’ local, with twenty-two charter members, in Tacoma, Wn. The members are very desirous to extend the work of organization in the large sawmills of this locality. It’s likely that both Andrej and James H. Walsh helped organize this IWW local, and after its formation, they both went to Home for the long awaited picnic with ice cream and lemonade.

As described in the Home News column for June 20, after luncheon, and before the ice cream was served, we were treated to a very interesting address by Comrade Walsh, organizer and lecturer for the I.W.W. He exposed the rottenness of our capitalistic system in forceful language, giving us some very vital points to ponder over and told us of the place we’ll get off at if we don’t get busy with our brains, backed by life-sized action.

After his lecture, there was both ice cream and dancing, after which we accompanied our guests to the dock where the band rendered more music as a farewell salute. With warm hearts we stood on the walk and watched the steamer glide away with her cargo of human freight. In conclusion, the author wrote, long live the memories and success to the I.W.W. Much credit is due to our enthusiastic and indefatigable worker and staunch comrade, A. Klemencic, for the success of the occasion.

Meanwhile, Andrej had been writing about shingle-weavers since the May 16 issue of The Demonstrator, where he explained that the shingle weavers of Ballard, Wn., have been on a strike for several weeks, demanding the same wages as paid in other localities for the same work. The Seattle shingle magnates are decidedly opposed to granting the strikers’ demands and are resorting to all kinds of tricks to outwit them. This union is a new one, and is waging a fight, and displaying a solidarity of purpose, never dreamed of by the millowners. Not a single member has as yet returned to work, and it is probable that the weavers will win a complete victory.


Shingle weaver

Months later, in the July 4 issue, he wrote, the shingle weavers are extending their strike. It can readily be seen that the general strike of this important industry is the only one which will be efficient enuf to establish more desirable conditions for the men who are risking their limbs every moment while at work. It’s unclear if Andrej organized these shingle-weavers in Ballard, which wasn’t yet incorporated into Seattle, or if they joined the IWW, but the IWW certainly gained a foothold in the shingle trade, one that ultimately led to the Everett Massacre of 1916.

Around the time that he wrote this update on the Ballard strike, Andrej also mailed an article to Les Temps Nouveaux, which appeared in its July 14 issue. Andrej provided his French readers with a thorough summary of the IWW dynamite trial in Boise, Idaho, although Andrej also remarked that it remains to be seen what the attitude of the proletariat will be. Up to now, all that’s been done is to collect money and vote on agendas, which the capitalist class obviously doesn’t care about.

Later, in the July 18 issue of The Demonstrator, Andrej wrote that the shingle weavers in Western Washington are yet on strike, and are determined to win, but he also provided an update on his latest organizing efforts. As he described, the street laborers employed by the Tacoma (Wn.) Railway and Power Company struck for better wages. They demanded $2.50 per day for ten hours’ work. This was refused, but the company agreed to pay $2.25 and furnish street-car tickets to the laborers. About sixty of the men joined the local of the I.W.W.

Andrej was likely injured in this brief rail strike, and as described in the July 18 entry of the Home News column, A. Klemencic, the wizard of destiny and activity, spent a few days here recuperating from what might have proven a fatal railway accident. He was lucky to get out with a severe scalp wound and some bruises. However, Andrej wasn’t so injured that he couldn’t debate a Seattle socialist who came to lecture at Home, and as Andrej told the crowd, the workers need never expect any material benefit from any political party. All organized power demands support at the expense of labor. It must have followers, and free men and women protest against leadership. Absolute individual liberty dispenses with all parties, creeds, customs, and organizations.

XXVII: The Trial of the Century

Andrej continued writing his news column that summer, just as he occasionally wrote feature articles on various subjects. In his August 1 entry for the US, he explained that the Tacoma Trades Council is circulating a petition to be presented to Judge Frank Smith at Caldwell, Idaho, for an immediate trial of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone or admit them to bail pending a trial. This was likely Andrej’s doing, and he didn’t stop his agitation, reporting in the August 22 issue that the Trades Council passed a resolution “that no aspirants for a political office be invited to the picnic to be held on labor day.” Some of the members of organized labor are opening their eyes.

In the September 19 issue, Andrej reported on the street-car strike in San Francisco and the sheer greed of the Weyerhauser logging company, but he also devoted half a page to the Regeneración crew and the situation in Mexico, which was bad. However, after all of this, Andrej first mentioned Harry Orchard, the union bomber, who had been arrested in Idaho and admitted to the bombing. Also arrested was Stephen Adams, who allegedly corroborated Orchard’s confession, claiming that he not only helped Orchard, they’d conducted numerous bombings and assassinations on behalf of the WFM.

However, as Andrej reported, Stephen Adams released a public statement, claiming, the statement that I signed was made up by James McPartland, detective, and Harry Orchard, alias Tom Hogan. I signed it because I was threatened by Governor Gooding saying I would be hanged if I did not corroborate Orchard’s story against the officers of the Western Federation of Miners. A fact that Andrej didn’t report, and couldn’t report, was that radical lawyer Clarence Darrow paid Stephen’s uncle $50,000 to go into the prison where he was being held and promise Stephen $25,000 to recant his confession, which Stephen quickly did. In a likelihood, Stephen Adams was in truth a union trigger-man, the same as his former comrade Harry Orchard.

Harry Orchard and Andrej Klemenčič were certainly in Colorado at the same time, just as they both knew Big Bill Haywood and Charles Moyer. It’s highly likely that Andrej knew Harry Orchard, and as shown above, Andrej didn’t write about Orchard’s confession until Stephen Adams had been paid by the defense to recant his own confession. However, unknown to Andrej, a Pinkerton known as Operative 21 had infiltrated the socialists of Caldwell, Idaho and become part of the defense canvassing teams who went door-knocking at the home’s of potential jurors. Through this Operative 21, the Pinkertons hoped to catch defense lawyer Clarence Darrow paying off potential jurors, just as they suspected he paid off their star-witness Stephen Adams.

While this operative was creeping around Caldwell, Andrej was busy tailoring in Tacoma, although he also found time to write, even in his native Slovenian. For the October issue of the Proletarec socialist newspaper of Chicago, Andrej contributed a Slovenian language article entitled Economic Warfare, a brief summary of his days in Slovenia, much of which has already been quoted above and forms part of this narratives’s historical timeline.

Andrej ended this article with a call to his Slovenian readers to join the IWW or Western Federation of Miners, which are one and the same. Let’s get to work; we may be representing a small nation [Slovenes], but let’s do our best to spread our power and connections, so that we’ll get the recognition of the broader proletariat in our fight for universal well-being of everyone. It’s unclear when Andrej met the editors of Proletarec, but he’s known to have corresponded with several Slovenians across the US over the years.

In addition to writing for the Slovenian press, Andrej continued to pen his international news column for The Demonstrator, and in the US entry for the October 3 issue, Andrej used the n-word for the second time. The first time he used it was back in the March 1, 1899 issue in an article critiquing the Socialist Labor Party, where he wrote that Socialists always see a “n—- on the fence” when there is a plucky Anarchist in the neighborhood. This old racist expression (n—- on the fence) came directly from slave plantations and was used to imply that some disorder was about to occur. In this manner, Andrej was implying that the racist socialists were in fact racist.

As mentioned above, the second time Andrej used the n-word was in the October 3, 1906 issue of The Demonstrator when he wrote, there is something doing again in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Several dozen “peaceful n—-s” were lynched by the “respectable” citizens of Atlanta, Ga. From the use of quotations, it’s clear that Andrej is referencing stereotypes like peaceful Uncle Tom in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ddespite his sarcasm being in horrible taste, Andrej clearly didn’t think the white people of Atlanta were civilized.

In that same US entry, Andrej also reprinted a press dispatch claiming that Harry Orchard was now a raving maniac. Advices which have reached Denver contain the information that Orchard’s mind has given away under the terrible strain to which he has been subjected for almost a year. This was only the second time Andrej brought up the prosecution’s star witness, and he did so only to spread the belief that Harry Orchard was insane and nothing he said was true.

In the October 17 issue, Andrej returned to the US south, writing, with all the boasting of liberty there seems to be a cruel and brutal race war, befitting savages, going on in this country. After the bloody work done in Atlanta and Macon, Ga., it was repeated in Argenta, Ark. Men and women are maltreated and murdered simply because they happen to be of another color. All the laws enacted will never protect the negro, he has to do it himself. From this entry, we can be certain that Andrej Klemenčič was no anti-black racist, even if he was a product of his times.

Immediately after writing about these lynchings, Andrej’s next paragraph returned to his anti-colonial roots when he reported, the sugar trust has decided to annex Cuba—and that settles it. The Cubans have nothing to say about it, for sugar is king, and Havemayer & Co., his bosses, and Roosevelt & Co., his servants, have decreed that the island be annexed. If the Cubans did protest no heed would be paid to their protest, and they would be shot as “traitors to their country,” which explains the smooth sailing of the imperialists. Humanity counts for nothing, dollars everything. Yankee imperialists do not seem to remember very much of the history of the Spanish “conquistadores” and its final doom. Yes, gentlemen; Cuba will start a new leaf in history, and before you are thru with the affair you may not like it.

That October 17 issue of The Demonstrator was the last one to feature Andrej’s news column on the front-page, and he began to write less and less for his US entries, focusing instead on Russia, France, and Mexico. For example, after devoting a page to the kidnapping of Mexican anarchist Antonio Villareal, Andrej devoted just a short paragraph to The Emancipator, a new paper published in San Francisco by his comrade Humbert Rullière, aka Laurent Casas. This short item was the entirety of Andrej’s US entry for the November 21, 1906 issue of The Demonstrator, and over the next months his US news would become far less local, just as entire column moved to the back pages.

In the December 5 issue, Andrej ran news from Chicago and Salt Lake City, but none from Tacoma or Washington State. In the December 19 issue, Andrej devoted half a page to Russian news while his US news was mostly a short paragraph concerning a strike in Tampa, Florida, as well as a brief mention of a prominent socialist who just moved to Seattle. This pattern continued in the January 16, 1907 issue, with another half page devoted to Russia, while the US entry was an extract from a Seattle press dispatch on police repression, followed by an advertisement and extract from Kakumei, a Japanese anarcho-socialist newspaper founded in Berkeley, California by Kōtoku Shūsui.

By the February 6, 1907 issue, there was no US entry at all, with the majority of the news column devoted to France and Mexico. In the February 20 issue, the column featured just two short paragraphs on the US, one devoted to Luigi Galleani’s recent arrest and $7,000 bail, the other devoted to The Emancipator newspaper in San Francisco, which had changed its address.

It wouldn’t be until the March 20 issue that Andrej wrote some local news for the Pacific Northwest, explaining that the “lumber jacks” have tied up the mills in Portland, Ore., by refusing to work until their demands for shorter hours and more pay are granted. In a rare update on the Boise trial, he described how a mistrial was the result in the Steve Adams case, the jury standing six for guilty and six for not guilty. The trial of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone has been postponed until the middle of April.

The April 3 issue featured an entire page dedicated to they insurrection in the Moldova region of Romania, now known as the Peasant Uprising of 1907, which was also covered in the April 20 issue of Cronaca Sovversiva. While he devoted multiple columns to this seminal event, Andrej wrote just two paragraphs of local US news, stating that the [IWW] strike of the saw-mill employees in Portland, Ore., was broken on March 24 by the employers succeeding in getting some of the skilled workmen to return to work.

Describing the last IWW effort he was involved with, Andrej wrote in that April 3 issue that the strike at the Tacoma, Wn., smelter brot about the formation of a union, with 250 members, which affiliated with the I.W.W. A few men went back to work for an increase of fifteen cents per day, but the union men are still out. Andrej returned to the smeltermen’s strike in the April 17 issue, explaining that the Tacoma smelter has resumed operation with non-union men entirely.

This would be the second time Andrej organized among smelter workers, but just like in Pueblo, Colorado, his union fought an uphill battle. As his comrade James H. Walsh would note in the June 8 issue of the IWW’s official Industrial Union Bulletin newspaper, the scabs hired to work now are losing money for the company, and are talking of striking themselves. We have got a few of them out, and into the union. In other local Tacoma news for that April 3 issue, Andrej wrote that for several months the Tacoma, Wn., building trades have been at war with the master builders for the right to maintain their “Building Trades assembly,” and a general strike may be the result.

This was the last local news Andrej wrote for The Demonstrator, with his remaining entries focused mostly on San Francisco. However, in the June 19, 1907 issue, Andrej informed the reader that a jury has been selected and the trial of Haywood is proceeding. Orchard, Gooding [Idaho governor] and [Colorado governor] Peabody are showing much affection to each other. Birds of a feather flock together.

In the July 3 issue, Andrej wrote that the testimony for the prosecution in the case against Haywood is all in, and testimony for the defense is now being introduced. Clarence Darrow, in very logical, forceful and energetic language, outlined the line of defense. The attorneys for the defense, with their witnesses, are showing up the plot of the mine-owners and their hired thugs, the Pinkertons, to railroad these men to the gallows, and the hope an an acquittal is very strong.

At the end of the prosecution’s witness list was Harry Orchard, who admitted to blowing up the Vindicator mine in 1903, the Independence Station in 1904, and claimed that Bill Bill and George Pettibone ordered him to kill Governor Peabody, although he never accomplished this assassination. More importantly, Orchard claimed that Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone ordered him to blow up Frank Steunenberg in 1905, and given all the evidence, it’s all but certain Orchard rigged the dynamite so that it would explode when Steunenberg opened his white picket fence.

The defense was allowed to cross-examine Orchard, and by June 14 they had punched enough holes in his story to convince the jury he was an unreliable grifter who would say anything for a buck. Matters worsened on June 26 when the judge allowed an alleged psychologist in to see Orchard, who privately determined that Orchard was telling the truth. This psychologist then communicated his findings to the Boston Herald, who published them in full. Darrow and the defense team were furious, knowing this was an attempt to prejudice the jury, but despite this setback, the defense plunged into their witness list on June 30, 1907.

The defense was still calling witnesses when Andrej wrote his final English language news column for the July 17 issue of The Demonstrator. After running through events in Spain, Italy, Holland, and France, he then left one final US entry, which was fittingly dedicated to the IWW, explaining that the call for the third annual convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, to be held in Chicago, beginning Monday, September 16, has been issued. It is hoped that this convention will succeed in bringing together all the warring factions, and that a new and stronger union, with broader views, will be founded and joined by all conscientious workers.

It would be on July 30, 1907 that Big Bill was found not guilty by the jury, with the other defendants exonerated later that summer. Nevertheless, Harry Orchard’s testimony was public, and now every cop and private detective of the US knew of the WFM bombing network. On top of this, there was now much public evidence that Orchard had been a Pinkerton since at least 1903, implying that the agency encouraged bombings to then elicit work from the mine-owners. As mentioned above, Andrej likely knew Harry Orchard, just as he knew Big Bill and Charles Moyer, and for all these reasons and more, Andrej Klemenčič disappeared into thin air that July of 1907.

XXVIII: The Crucifixion of Andrej Klemenčič

Andrej cared very deeply about The Demonstrator and did everything in his power to help it succeed, which it did under his editorship. He didn’t leave the paper until his comrade Humbert Rulliére, aka Laurent Casas, aka Lawrence Cass, arrived at home in June 1907. Humbert had published The Emancipator in San Francisco, but in the July 3 issue of The Demonstrator, it was announced that with this issue the paper was consolidated with The Emancipator. The editor of The Emancipator, Lawrence Cass, has taken charge of the editorship of The Demonstrator, and hereafter we shall publish a paper of broader agitation in behalf of the emancipation of the working class, which we consider will benefit the whole of humanity, continuing the propaganda started in The Emancipator.

Andrej left the paper in trusted hands, for Humbert had moved in with the French and Italian anarchists who lived across the bay in Home, among them Ersilia Cavedagni and Leon Morel, who arrived there in April. By the time Andrej left the Pacific Northwest, an entirely new crew of insurrectionary anarchists had set up shop in the once sleepy Home, and an entirely new era of the colony would begin. However, Andrej was there for none of it, and by September, trouble was already brewing.


“…across the bay in Home…”

While the Demonstrator printer Charles Govan had a good working relationship with Andrej, this wasn’t the case with Humbert, and as Charles wrote, it was either stop the sheet or let the group of Frenchmen (who are living in communism across our bay) have it. Charles let them have it, as it were, and he continued to print the paper until December 4, 1907, when it was announced that all the readers and more particularly the old friends of The Demonstrator are informed that Chas. Govan is no longer connected with this paper.

The main conflict was over money, something that never came up with Andrej. However, with Andrej’s tailoring subsidies now absent, the Demonstrator group refused to pay Charles $15 per issue, instead going with F.A. Cowell who did each issue for $8. However, according to Charles, Cowell and Cass could not get along, as I predicted, for more than two issues, when they came after me and paid me $11 an issue. Charles continued to print the paper until it ran its final issue on February 19, 1908.

From the July 17, 1907 issue to the February 19, 1908 issue, there wasn’t a single mention of Andrej. It was if he stopped existing. Likewise in the correspondence between Charles Govan and Joseph Labadie, there isn’t a single mention of Andrej after the spring of 1907 even though Charles freely wrote of him before then. To be clear, Charles lived in Home proper while Andrej lived in Tacoma, but Andrej was also friends with the Levins, whose tailor shop he took over, and they also had nothing to say about him after the spring of 1907.

As mentioned above, Radium Levin, the son of Nathan and Bessie Levin, later explained that his father had a cleaning store in Tacoma, and Andrew Klemencic worked for him as a tailor. He was bald, middle-aged, and lived in Tacoma. Aside from this, Radium has nothing else to say about Andrej, not even in the dozens of pages of Home history he assembled entitled There Was No Place Like Home. Given that his parents worked closely with Andrej and clearly trusted him, Radium having no other recollections seems odd, although he was only 4 when Andrej disappeared.

However, given that Andrej was a founder of the IWW and one of its most active agitators, it seems doubly odd that there isn’t a single mention of Andrej in The Industrial Union Bulletin, the first official paper of the IWW. This paper regularly advertised the minutes from the 1906 convention, a 620 page text which featured several of Andrej’s speeches and was sold for 50 cents. As you’ll recall, Andrej also organized an ice cream and lemonade picnic at Home where IWW organizer James H. Walsh was the main speaker, and Walsh wrote numerous report-backs and articles for the Bulletin throughout 1907, including on the IWW smeltermen’s strike that Andrej also covered in The Demonstrator. However, the IWW itself might provide some explanation for Andrej’s departure, given the third IWW convention began in Chicago on September 16, 1907.

There is no record of Andrej in the minutes of that Chicago convention, although several delegates had fictitious names, such as the hilarious Delegate William J. Pinkerton. This funny name is also a sign of how aware the IWW was of Pinkerton infiltration, especially so soon after the Idaho trial. Andrej missed the 1906 convention, busy as he was in Tacoma, and his sudden departure could be explained by him wanting to have a voice in the IWW he helped found. Unfortunately, that 1907 convention led to the WFM leaving the IWW, something Andrej would have certainly disliked.

As it stands, there’s no record of Andrej in any US publication from June 1907 through 1908, the year he’s alleged to have died of a heart attack. However, in the December 7, 1907 issue of the Cronaca Sovversiva, someone from Tacoma identified as il sarto, or the tailor, donated 50 cents to the paper’s Chicago Martyrs commemorative issue fund, and this is more than likely Andrej, given that fellow tailors Nathan and Bessie were living full time at Home with their son Radium.

However, this donation column was irregular, listing everyone who donated to the fund since the last column, and he could have made this donation at any point that summer or fall. As you will remember, Andrej was a previous contributor to the Cronaca, having written them an article about Home, and in the January 11, 1908 issue, the Cronaca began printing the IWW logo on its back page.

If this 50 cent donation to the Cronaca did come from Andrej, it implies he was no longer using his real name in the anarchist press. This wouldn’t be surprising, given that his last news columns for The Demonstrator also lacked his signature, and with the facts about Harry Orchard now public, it’s highly likely Andrej was not only trying to stay hidden, he was planning to fake his own death.

XXIX: The Resurrection of Andrej Klemenčič

Finding an exact source for his passing is extremely difficult for something as definitive as death, and given the sheer number of comrades Andrej had in the US, Asia, Australia, and Europe, the vagueness around his death becomes even more mysterious. For example, the Industrial Union Bulletin of the IWW was in the habit of running obituaries for fallen comrades, such as the June 13, 1908 obituary for John W. Wagner of Denver, Colorado, the August 8 obituary for George Pettibone, or the December 12 obituary for Joe Benoki in Oregon. However, the Bulletin never ran an obituary for Andrej Klemenčič throughout 1908, the year he was alleged to have died, even though Andrej co-founded the IWW.

As far as can be determined, the only source on his death was the April 13, 1909 issue of Proletarec, the Slovenian socialist newspaper published in Chicago. In that article, someone identifying themselves as Preddvorčan wrote that Klemencic had died, although a cause of death wasn’t given. This author claimed to have visited Home where he asked the colonists if, because of Klemencic’s death, their newspaper “Demonstrator” stopped being published. I was told no; because in the colony everyone understands each other in such times, but they stopped issuing it because it cost too much.

This rambling article, little of which was about Andrej, ended with the following addendum: If anyone is a relative of Klemencic, please contact Tacoma. In fact, there is $600 of his money in the bank, which he deposited in their care while wounded. (At the same time, according to co-ed. Fr. Petric, with whom Klemencic was in a correspondence relationship—A.K. had a brother who was located in the state of Wash. and moved among the coal mines of Ondot. Op. ed.) Relatives who testify in the bank that they are trustworthy will be able to withdraw the mentioned sum. Our friend also had 2 acres of well-cultivated land [at Home], which is meaningless to his relatives, because in this communist colony no one can sell any property.

This April 13, 1909 article in Proletarec certainly makes it seem like Andrej died, especially given that at least one Home resident confirmed his death to Preddvorčan. However, this same Preddvorčan opened his article by stating, last year [1908] we read in “Proletarec” an article written by Comrade [Ivan] Šolar that the Slovenian anarchist Andrej (his first name was Tone op. ed.) Klemencic had died. Firstly, Andrej’s first name wasn’t Tone. Secondly, Ivan Šolar did in fact write about Home during 1908, although he never once mentioned Andrej, or his alleged death.

The Home article Ivan Šolar wrote for Proletarec was in the February 25, 1908 issue, where he explained that around 200 people of both sexes live in the “Home” settlement, who despise all existing laws. They have their own hall and printing house, where the newspaper “The Demonstrator” is printed; the colony is incorporated. These people live completely satisfied, freely, according to natural principles, independent of modern absolutism. Not only does Ivan Šolar fail to mention Andrej, a fellow Slovenian who founded Home, he also fails to mention Andrej’s death.

To be clear, Ivan Šolar didn’t mention Andrej Klemenčič during the course of 1908, at least as far as can be determined. The August 4, 1908 issue is currently missing, as well as a few pages of the December 1 issue, so unless those happen to be the issues where Ivan wrote the obituary for Andrej, it appears that Preddvorčan was wrong when he recalled that last year [1908] we read in “Proletarec” an article written by Comrade [Ivan] Šolar that the Slovenian anarchist Andrej (his first name was Tone op. ed.) Klemencic had died.

Preddvorčan claimed to have gotten some of the information on Andrej’s death from a Home resident identified only as Haine. This is most likely William J. Heine, who lived at Home with his wife and two children, although he often worked in Tacoma for months at a time. Preddvorčan identified William as an anarchist, although William’s son Wild Bill Heine insisted his father was a socialist, but in any case, he would’ve known Andrej for around two years before his alleged death.


Wild Bill Heine

According to Preddvorčan, Andrej was a tailor. Already in his early youth, he left his home and went to Paris, where he stayed for a long time. Later, he was taught the French language by soldiers and military officers, as the anarchist Haine told me. I was told that Klemencic was in China, Peking and Canton for many years. Some of this lines up with Andrej’s actual history, namely his time in Paris, although he lived more years in Hawaii than mainland Asia, and he taught Austro-Hungarian officers French rather than being taught by them. All this say, neither Preddvorčan or William J. Heine appear to know very much about Andrej’s past.

Put briefly, this April 13, 1909 article announced out of nowhere that Andrej Klemenčič died sometime in 1908, although no date was given, the only source being a Proletarec article by Ivan Šolar, which doesn’t appear to exist. As stated above, Ivan Šolar did write about Home in the February 25, 1908 issue, although there was no mention of Andrej or his death. Ivan wrote 15 articles for Proletarec through 1908 and up to April 13, 1909, although none of them reference Andrej, and it’s unclear why unnamed editors of Proletarec insisted his first name was Tone.

The current Slovenska Biografija entry for Andrej lists him as dying of a heart attack sometime in 1908 at the age of 40, although it doesn’t list a place of death. That entry lists Andrej as last living at Home, when in reality he was living in Tacoma when he disappeared. This short Slovenian biography has no references to Andrej’s life in Tacoma, Hawaii, or Colorado, and it’s unclear how the Slovenian historian Sandi Volk determined that Andrej died of a heart attack, given there are no known obituaries for Andrej in the local Tacoma newspapers.

Insisting that Andrej faked his death in 1908 might seem like paranoiac speculation if not for several important details. For example, given the close relationship Andrej Klemenčič had with Emma Goldman, why is it that her Mother Earth magazine never featured an obituary for him? How is it that Emma failed to mention the tragic death of a tireless anarchist agitator who spread the Beautiful Idea wherever he went? Why did Emma also fail to mention Andrej in her autobiography Living My Life, especially in the sections on San Francisco and Home? None of this appears to make any sense unless one accepts what will soon be obvious: Andrej Klemenčič faked his death.

XXX: The Second Coming of Andrej Klemenčič

Before getting to all the other anarchists who magically forgot Andrej ever existed, let’s return to the socialist Proletarec newspaper from Chicago, the only known source on Andrej’s death. As most immigrants will vouch for, during difficult times it’s much easier to trust another immigrant from one’s homeland than even the kindest of strangers, and it’s entirely possible that Andrej entrusted the faking of his death to the Slovenian language Proletarec.

If you’ll recall, Andrej made a suggestion for the first IWW emblem at its 1905 convention in Chicago, and he told the delegates, inasmuch as we cannot take the world as it should be we must take it as it really is. We know it is round, and we cannot put it on a piece of paper so as to be round. Now, we might have on one side Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, and on the other side America, and the two hands between the old continent and the new continent. This would be then the Industrial Workers of the World. But if we are talking about the world, then to only get the American side of it, we get only one part of it. I think it would be plausible that we ought to have on one side the old world and on the other side the new world, with the two hands from the old world and the new world bound together, and that would be, I think, the sentiment we are representing here.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but in the December 3, 1907 issue, when Proletarec transitioned from a monthly to a weekly newspaper, their new masthead displayed two hands clasping each other across the globe, one coming from Asia, the other from Europe and Africa, and they met together over Central America. Andrej’s suggestion followed literally would have shown two hands clasped over a blank ocean, with just a trace of land visible, and this Proletarec image was the closest anyone came to manifesting the image Andrej dreamed up for the 1905 convention. It’s possible Andrej was secretly living in Chicago after leaving Tacoma, and that it was here he planned to fake his death, but before getting to that, let us go down the list of important anarchists and radicals who had nothing to say about Andrej or his death.

The most glaring example is that of Jean Grave, the anarchist Pope of Montmartre, who would have known Andrej for at least 15 years before his disappearance, if not a decade longer. Grave published the bulk of Andrej’s non-English writings in Les Temps Nouveaux and kept in regular correspondence with him even when Andrej wasn’t sending articles or donations to Paris. Because of all this, it’s extremely odd that Les Temps Nouveaux never mentioned the tragic death of its longtime correspondent Andrej Klemenčič, and there’s no obituary for him in either 1907 or 1908. Andrej simply stopped appearing in Les Temps Nouveaux, and Jean Grave never mentioned him again.

Likewise with Emma Goldman, who never wrote about Andrej in either Mother Earth or her 1931 autobiography. The same goes for Big Bill Haywood, who never mentioned Andrej in his 1929 autobiography. As mentioned above, Andrej definitely organized Big Bill’s lectures in Pueblo, voted with him at WFM meetings in Denver, and joined him in co-founding the IWW, so it’s extremely odd that Big Bill never mentioned the Slovenian internationalist anarchist Andrej Klemenčič. To be clear, Big Bill wrote his autobiography in Russia under the protection of the Bolsheviks, and they would’ve been the only people he feared displeasing with his story.

Whether in capitalist France like Emma or communist Russia like Big Bill, neither of these figures felt safe writing about Andrej. It’s the same for Luigi Galleani and the editors of the Cronaca Sovversiva, who wrote obituaries for any fallen anarchist, regardless of their internal conflicts or schisms. These obituaries are easy to spot in the Cronaca because of the thick black funeral stripes printed alongside them, although none of them are about Andrej Klemenčič.

As mentioned above, the IWW’s official newspaper The Industrial Union Bulletin also wrote obituaries for its fallen comrades, and none of them were ever about Andrej. Not even James H. Walsh, who we know went to Home with Andrej, ever mentioned Andrej’s death. At the same time, in the hundreds of loose documents related to Home, he only appears in Discontent and The Demonstrator, never in the private reminiscences of his comrades. Radium Levin is the only Home resident to mention him several decades later, and his former father-in-law, Enrico Travaglio, never mentioned Andrej in The Trials of a Noble Experiment, his short history of Home.

To conclude this list, we also have Charles Govan, the printer of Discontent and The Demonstrator, who wrote about Andrej in his private letters to Joseph Labadie. However, in 1907 and 1908, he made no reference to Andrej when he described the ultimate collapse of The Demonstrator, which he blamed on Humbert Rulliére, aka Laurent Casas. Charles always liked Andrej, so it’s odd that he never told Joseph Labadie what happened to him, especially given his alleged death in 1908. Hopefully you can now smell something fishy in the air, so with that scent in your nose, we can now transcend to the final chapter of this biography.

XXXI: The Gnostic Teachings of Andrej Klemenčič

What happened to Andrej Klemenčič? A worst case scenario would be that he was an infiltrator and his anarchist comrades killed him, although this is highly unlikely, given all the facts. It’s slightly more probable that Andrej was falsely accused of being an infiltrator and killed, but while this might easily explain Andrej’s near-total erasure from anarchist history, there is little chance of this being true. What’s more likely is that Andrej faked his death, but if he did that, where did he go?

Before getting to that, let us consider the possibility that Andrej simply died of a heart attack. Although we don’t know when or where this heart attack is alleged to have occurred, we do know that Andrej was likely fond of tobacco and alcohol, two vices which aren’t kind on the heart, especially if one has a hereditary condition.

Andrej once wrote that a person cannot pursue scientific studies if he is hungry, or cold, or in need even of tobacco, wine or anything else to which he has been accustomed. Andrej then went on to call tobacco and wine part of a persons necessaries [sic], implying they were necessary to him. Also, Andrej was allowed to join the Glennis colony as an outsider because, as he put it, it was decided that the colony’s regulations didn’t apply to me; therefore, I was left with complete freedom, because tobacco, wine and spirits were prohibited there, and even free love was unknown.

Given this seeming fondness for smoke and booze, it’s entirely possible that Andrej wore himself out after two decades of roving agitation across the Earth. However, if this were truly the case, why didn’t a single anarchist in the US or France mourn his passing in print and in deed? How could such a tireless agitator blow out his heart and not a single anarchist newspaper commemorate his passing?

Again, it seems far more likely that Andrej faked his death and had assistance from the same comrades who failed to note his passing. Given his past travels, Andrej could have literally gone anywhere from Tacoma. For example, in 1907, the same Eric B. Morton who tried to tunnel Sasha Berkman out of prison appeared in San Francisco, having just smuggled weapons from across the Atlantic to Saint Petersberg before crossing Russia and sailing across the Pacific to California. Andrej could have gone either direction; west across the same Pacific that Eric just arrived on, or east by train across the US and the Atlantic, both routes invisible to the authorities.

The smuggling operation out of New York City is well documented by Emma Goldman and her comrade Lucy Robins Lang, as well as several anarchist historians, but the smuggling route out of San Francisco has thus far been shrouded in mystery, and as you’ve seen, it was likely built by Andrej himself. It’s more likely that Andrej sailed west across the Pacific, but if he did so, where was he going, and why? One can only guess at this point, but given what Andrej was writing about between 1905 and 1907, it’s likely he would have gone to Russia.

For example, in the April 18, 1906 issue of The Demonstrator, Andrej’s international news column featured an entry on Russia largely dedicated to the March 25, 1906 assassination of Pavel Alexandrovich Sleptsov, the governor of Tver. A still unknown member of the Socialist Revolutionaries threw a bomb under Sleptsov’s carriage and, as Andrej described it, Revolutionary Socialists do not bother much with election. Slepzoff, governor of Tver, one of the brutal despots, was blown into eternity by a bomb. This method of electioneering seems, for the time being, to be more speedy and efficient than by voting in getting rid of the bloodsuckers preying on the unfortunate population.

Before that, in the December 20, 1905 issue, Andrej wrote an article entitled The Revolution in Russia, and he opened with this sentence: we are hardly able now to register the individual revolts which take place in the revolutionary movement in Russia since the different labor organizations and peasants are taking part therein. Andrej was referencing the Revolution of 1905, still very much alive, although on its last legs, and as he wrote to those distant insurgents, our sympathy is with you, O Russian people; your fight is our fight; your success is our encouragement, and your defeat will mean harder work for all those who aspire to make the earth a better place to live on.

In the January 17, 1906 issue, Andrej provided statistics on those who died in the Revolution as of October 1905, and while the Imperial army killed 60,000 rebels, over 24,000 troops were killed by the insurgents. As he remarked on the front page of the February 21 issue, the anarchistic method of selfdefense and direct action is gaining ground every day in the struggle against ignorance and despotism thruout the empire. Much activity in printing or revolutionary matter and gathering of weapons for selfdefense has been manifested lately in Bielostok, Vilna, Kovno, Kieff, Warsaw, Moscow, Odessa, Riga, Gorodno, Ekaterinoslav, St. Petersburg and many other places. The despotic action of the government is producing terrorism; therefore, the revolutionary activity will be spasmodic for some time to come. From two to ten attempts on the lives of officials and police are reported daily.

As you’ll recall, on January 22, 1906, Andrej helped organize a big massmetting in Tacoma, Wn., for the purpose of expressing sympathy and sentiments of solidarity for the struggling proletaires of Russia, and he ecstatically reported on the continued assassination of the Imperial tyrants, such as Maria Spiridonova’s fatal shooting of Gavriil Niklayevich Luzhenovsky, a landlord, pogromist, and politician in Tambov. As he wrote in the May 16, 1906 issue, dozens of attempts to kill tyrants and despots are made every day thruout the empire, some of which are successful and some partially so, but only a few of these individual revolts ever reach the American reading public. At Odessa the chief of police was killed in broad daylight, but his assistant has escaped the same fate thus far. The governor was assassinated one week later.


Maria Spiridonova

These attentats inspired Andrej, prompting him to write, terrorism is the supreme court of a people in rebellion, and is the only efficient method of punishing the scoundrels who commit countless crimes under the cloak of law and order. It is the reaction after this deplorable condition that makes men and women rise and see that justice is done at the risk of their own lives.

Andrej also noted the rise in armed expropriations, describing in the July 18 issue how two armed robbers entered a train between Yaroslav and Moscow, killed the attendant, robbed a carriage manufacturer’s of $4,500 and disappeared, unmolested, into the forests. A band of revolutionaries seized a Volga steamer near Kostroma, and captured 450 pounds of pyrotilene, which will come in handy to fill the bombs. In St. Petersburg the assistant cashier Gasperovich and his assistants from the admiralty were knocked out by a fighting squad and robbed of a bag of money containing $12,000.

Andrej would have had to read many papers each week to assemble all this Russian direct action news, but he did so religiously, with enthusiasm. However, there was little to be enthusiastic about in Tacoma, and even Andrej’s comrade James H. Walsh wrote of how difficult conditions were for the striking IWW smeltermen, who ultimately lost. Russia must have seemed tantalizing with its level of direct struggle, and Andrej wrote his final Russian entry in the June 19, 1907 issue, noting that a certain Colonel Gezekovsky was just assassinated in Sebstopol.

Andrej’s final English language news column appeared in the July 17 issue of The Demonstrator, and while he certainly reported on revolutionary activity in France and Mexico, he didn’t have the same enthusiasm as he did for Russia. As you’ve seen, Andrej’s access to the sailing world of the west coast, along with the mythical smuggling route, would have allowed him to reach eastern Russia within a month, with another month needed to reach Moscow by land.

Perhaps there’s a Russian insurgent who appears sometime in 1908 or 1909, a person with a vague past and an uncertain destiny. Perhaps there’s much more to Andrej’s story, and while he could’ve ended up a Bolshevik like the anarchist Victor Serge, he could’ve also remained an anarchist throughout the rise of the USSR, something which would have likely cost him his life. There’s no way to know, at least for now, and before this text becomes even more conjectural, let us end it here, staring at the sphinx-like mystery of Andrej Klemenčič, the anarchist agitator you never heard of.

Long Live Anarchy!

Comments

negative materialist (not verified) Thu, 08/21/2025 - 19:46

To imagine him moving through the shadows of Petrograd or Moscow, is to see the logical continuity of a life dedicated to unceasing struggle. The target changed, but the principle remained inviolate: any state, any class, any bureaucracy that places itself above the people is an enemy of liberation. The belief that he took his fight to the heart of the Red bureaucracy is an affirmation that I want to believe. Thank you for bringing his life to our attention.

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