The Radicalization of European Jews in the US Metropolis

5 The Haymarket Tragedy

Dynamite is the emancipator! In the hand of the enslaved it cries aloud: “Justice or – annihilation!”1

Gerhard Lizius, secretary of the chapter of the International Working People’s Association in Indianapolis, spoke for multiple anarchists when he expressed this opinion in the anarchist journal Alarm.² Nevertheless, the image of the dynamite- or bomb-throwing anarchist was an idea in the public imagination often stimulated more by the press coverage of anarchists than by the reality. The images were tied together, and the anarchist terrorist of the late 19th century was considered willing to use either dynamite or other explosives to destroy the existent order and the people that represented or accepted it. ...