Frank Harris' Bomb
An Introduction
by John Dos Passos 
[1896-1970] 

[1963] 

 

Frank Harris was an objectionable little man. He was sallow as a gypsy. He had bat ears, dark hair with a crinkle in it that grew low on the forehead, and a truculent mustache. People remarked on the richness of his bass voice. His charm was great, particularly for the opposite sex. He had the gift of gab to a sublime degree and a streak of deep scoundrelism that was the ruin of him. 

A natural storyteller, tall tales so permeated his private life that his biographers were hard put to it to disentangle any facts at all from the web of fiction he spun about himself. Particularly in the twenties, when he was editing Pearson's Magazine in New York, there used to be considerable journalistic searching for "the real Frank Harris." One wonders now if such a creature ever existed. He wrote some good short stories. He might have developed into a first-rate novelist if he hadn't been such a damn liar.   

Though at times he named Brighton, England, as his birthplace, amid other variants of his curriculum vitae, it seems likely that he first saw the light at Galway on the West Coast of Ireland, on St. Valentine's Day in 1856, and that he was christened James Thomas Harris. His parents were Plymouth Brethren, of the most fundamentalist of Protestant sects, and were probably Welsh. His mother died when he was very small. His father was a seafaring man who had managed to work his way up in the Royal Navy from ship's boy to lieutenant in command of a revenue cutter, no mean feat in those days. 

The father was always at sea. The children lived higgledy-piggledy, shifting from one small school to another as they followed their father's ports of call. Ireland was in a state of barely suppressed revolt. These were the days of the Fenian "troubles." Harris, who had been a great reader of Captain Marryat, told in later life of his bitter disappointment that his father failed to get him into the Royal Navy when he was fourteen. He always blamed his father for that. 

Little Jim Harris was obviously a bright youngster, a voracious reader with a retentive memory. His father, who wanted to do what he thought best for the boy, sent him to a classical English school, which he hated with an eternal hatred. With ten pounds he managed to wangle there as a prize for scholastic attainments he ran away to Liverpool and bought himself steerage passage to America. 

He must have reached New York in the early seventies. German and Irish immigrants poured off every ship. The country was in a state of intermittent boom and bust. Some greenhorns starved. Others made fortunes. Everybody talked big. 

Harris became enormously Americanized. He decided his name was Frank. Like a Horatio Alger hero he started out shining shoes. Then he worked as a sandhog in the pressurized caissons they used in building the piers for Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge. He saw a man die of the bends and went back to shining shoes. 

His story was that a gentleman whose shoes he was shining heard him quote some Latin and was so impressed that he offered him a job as night clerk in a Chicago hotel. If we can believe Frank Harris he was managing the entire hotel by the time he was seventeen. Some Texas cattlemen put up at his hostelry and induced him to go west with them to make his fortune. 

He was physically husky, and as he told the tale, with an ever-increasing abundance of detail, a great man with the ladies. He learned to ride in Texas and sopped up sagas of Indian-fighting and cattle-rustling across the Rio Grande. He was developing a flair for writing. His first articles came out in frontier newspapers. Two of his brothers seem to have settled in Lawrence, Kansas, and at some point he studied for a year or so at the university there, became a naturalized citizen--so his story goes--and was admitted to the Kansas bar. 

He caught the money-grubbing fever of the time. He'd speculate in anything. When a financial crash wiped out his and his brothers' investments in Lawrence real estate, he went to work for a newspaper in Philadelphia. From then on his accounts of his meetings with the literary great become as confusing as his tales of amorous successes. He seems to have actually grasped the hand of Walt Whitman after a lecture. He told of visiting Emerson in Concord. A name was all he needed to hang a story on. He became the great name-dropper of the century. 

Somewhere around the time he came of age Frank Harris decided he wanted to be an Englishman instead of an American. Little malpractices, like the rumored theft of a certain judge's lawbooks, may have made it too hot for him in Lawrence, and possibly he wore out his welcome with the college professor he was sponging on in Philadelphia. He tells a fantastic tale, a little too much like Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days to be believable, of crossing the continent to San Francisco with a highyaller paramour in his stateroom on the sleeper and sailing from the Golden Gate for Bombay and Capetown. Somehow, he did get himself from Philadelphia to Paris. 

His great admiration was Carlyle. It was the Paris of the French Revolution that he saw. He hired himself a cheap room on the rue St Jacques and learned the language by going through Hugo's Hernani and Madame Bovary with a dictionary. He attended Tame's lectures at the Sorbonne and made enough impression on that venerable critic to get a recommendation from him when he needed one. 

When his money ran out he went to see his father who had retired on halfpay at Denbigh in the beautiful Welsh Vale of Clwyd. He left Denbigh in a hurry to avoid having to marry a young woman who thought herself engaged to him; and, with the help of literary friends, got himself taken on as a teacher at Brighton College. The meeting with the aged Carlyle which later became such an important part of the Frank Harris legend may have taken place in Brighton if it took place at all. Forever after he posed as an expert on poor Carlyle's marital infelicity.  

As Harris told the story it was during his stay in Brighton that he speculated so successfully in Chilean bonds that he laid away twenty-five hundred pounds to finance his education. Teaching at a provincial college was not the young careerist's meat. After some kind of falling out with the college authorities Frank Harris was suddenly heard of as a war correspondent in Moscow for the American press, attached to the great pan-Slavist General Skobeliev in his short war against the Turks. Next he turned up in Heidelberg, listening to Kuno Fischer lecture on Shakespeare. As a writer he was planning to model himself on Carlyle. He sent Carlyle a wild west novel he was writing for his criticism. Since Carlyle was saturated with German scholarship Harris was bound he would seek his education in Germany. 

Expelled from Heidelberg, so he told it, for knocking down an insulting student with his fist, he moved on to Göttingen and Berlin. He became fluent in German, read Goethe and Heine, and soaked up all the Socialist theories out of which Bismark was building his welfare state as a bulwark for Hohenzollern autocracy. "Heroes and Hero-Worship," The Iron Chancellor became his great admiration. In English Shakespeare was god. 

European students in the years after the Franco-Prussian war were obsessed with socialism and sex, the two prongs of the revolt of the intellectuals against the established order. In Vienna Freud was soon to be inciting his patients to erotic dreams. In London Marx was dissecting capitalism in the library of the British Museum. Frank Harris completed his Wanderjahr with a grand tour that took him to Florence and Athens and Constantinople. He never tired of talking about sex. Spouting contes drolatiques of cosmopolitan bed-wrestling, he went back to Paris. There, by his own confession, he became the intimate friend of Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev somehow he muffed. 

At the age of twenty-seven, Frank Harris, tingling with lust and greed and ambition, was ready to take on the foggy capital of the Victorian world. He wrote of London as a woman "with wet draggled skirts," with "glorious eyes lighting up her wet pale face." He had somehow wangled a letter of introduction from Carlyle to Froude. It was as a poet he first showed himself. He had taken to representing himself as an American, an Irishman, or an Englishman as the occasion demanded. According to Harris' story Froude introduced him to literary society with a great dinner. 

Be that as it may, by the summer of 1883 Harris had only managed to publish an occasional book review in the Spectator. His money must have run out because soon we hear of him making slim pickings as a reporter for the Evening News. 

He had come back from Germany a Socialist. He didn't disdain to let his voice be heard at radical gatherings in Hyde Park. It was at a Socialist meeting that he first met Shaw. He told of being introduced to Karl Marx, and found the author of Das Kapital full of loving kindness. When Harris told him he had written the greatest book since The Wealth of Nations, he cried out that Harris' German was Wunderbar. 

Socialists, Communists, anarchists were all of a heap in those days. Some Hyde Park orators were rumored to be subsidized by the Conservative party to undermine Gladstone's dominant Liberals. Kropotkin smelt the agent provocateur in glib young Harris and warned his disciples away from him. 

Frank Harris was dragging on the shabby life of an apprentice writer in a Bloomsbury boarding-house when suddenly he burst on Fleet Street as the editor-in-chief of the Evening News. It is typical of Harris' career that the most believable explanation of his sudden leap to fortune is found in a novel called The Adventures of John Johns, a bestseller in its day, which according to the gossip of the Cafe Royal, was based on Harris' career. John Johns became editor of an important London newspaper by going to bed with the publisher's wife. 

He edited the Evening News for several years with great success. As editor he was skilful, resourceful, and ruthless. By using the sensation-mongering methods that were soon to bring William Randolph Hearst such success in America, he turned the paper from a liability into an asset for the owners in a few months. Years later he explained to some journalist friends that when he first took the sheet over his idea was to edit it as a cosmopolitan scholar of twenty-eight. "Nobody wanted my opinions; but as I went downwards and began to edit it as I felt at twenty, then at eighteen, then at sixteen, I was more successful: but when I got to my tastes at fourteen years of age, I found instantaneous response. Kissing and fighting were the only things I cared for at thirteen or fourteen, and these are the things the English public desires and enjoys today." 

As editor of the Evening News, in spite of the disrepute of that scandal sheet among men of good will, Frank Harris became a figure in London society. He was dressed by the best Bond Street tailors, adopted high Spanish heels to look less pint-sized, and was admitted to a number of clubs. For a man with a literary career to make the Evening News was a stepping-stone. Though Harris had already become famous for his social agility, it was with astonishment that the English reading public discovered that this young upstart, a mere boy of thirty who had appeared out of nowhere, was to edit the Fortnightly Review. The Fortnightly Review was the most respectable literary journal in England, but respectability gave no assurance of circulation. Frank Harris was a circulation builder in the modern sense. 

The eight years he edited the Fortnightly Review and his four years that followed as owner of the Saturday Review constituted the crowning period of his life. He was the centre of the literary nineties. He discovered H. G. Wells. He launched Shaw as a drama critic. He encouraged Cunninghame Graham and Max Beerbohm. He published Swinburne and Oscar Wilde and Beardsley. In spite of a continuing liaison with Laura Clapton, which he publicized as the great love of his life, he married a wealthy widow with a house in Park Lane. His luncheons were notorious, in Park Lane or at the Cafe Royal, where he liked to seat his guests at an oval table in the centre of the restaurant so that all London could overhear his gibes and indiscretions. His memory served him well. In a society appreciative of good conversation, his talk was a volcano of anecdote and paradox, laced with the scabrous revelations that so thrilled the prudish Victorians.  

"Modesty," he claimed was "the fig leaf of mediocrity." He was the bounder par excellence. When he boasted to Oscar Wilde that he'd gotten himself invited to every great house in London, Wilde made the famous rejoinder "But never more than once, Frank." 

He was the arriviste who never quite arrived. His wife soon tired of his infidelities and his cadging of her money for endless speculations on the shadier fringes of the City. Then there were freakish things about his personal habits. A colossal eater and drinker he had taken to using the stomach pump after meals as a substitute for the Roman vomitorium. Her solicitors arranged a separation. 

After a purple period the forces of British respectability were gaining the upper hand again. One symptom was the trial and venomous persecution of Oscar Wilde. Another was Harris' being cashiered as editor of the Fortnightly. According to his account the management objected to an article which described some bomb-throwing French anarchists without condemning them and to paying Swinburne fifty pounds for a poem which they considered seditious. 

The Saturday Review was a rearguard action. As a leader of opinion he was already slipping. Other stars of the Cafe Royal, Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, were fading into degradation and ignominy. Bernard Shaw was saved by his sense of humor and the thorough monogamy of his personal life. Wells, who kept his bohemianism quite private, was enshrined in the hearts of suburbia by his mixture of science fiction with social idealism. Licentiousness was going out of style. Harris became the man of lost causes. 

He defended Wilde and Havelock Ellis. He took the unpopular side in the Boer War. He attacked British imperialism and prudishness and hypocrisy and the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 

His life teemed with desperate expedients to raise money, deals with bucketshop operators, the use of his social connections to promote the sale of blue-sky securities. He had learned to live in the style of the Grand Dukes. He had become an addict of the Hotel du Cap at Antibes much frequented by the literary British in those days. Possibly hoping to cash in on the friendship, which we are assured was platonic, of the wealthy American lady who was then Princess of Monaco, he invested in a Monte Carlo hotel, then in one at Eze. He had begun to believe his own stories of his youthful success in the hotel business in Chicago. His luck had turned. Both schemes went awry. 

He had to make his living by writing. His stories of the American west had always gone over when he told them from the head of the table. He started to write them down. His style was forceful and clear. He had the narrative drive. His first publications were American-type short stories. Then he tried to emulate the success of Prosper Merimée's Carmen by a novelette about a bullfighter which he called "Montes the Matador." Montes was a great success. George Meredith praised it because the bull's feelings were so well described. Harris' hunting with the hounds hadn't brought him the wealth and position he craved. From now on he would run with the hares. 

Now, "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," as his beloved Shakespeare had put it, he found himself more and more siding with the exploited and the unfortunate. He would write with intent. He'd shatter the complacency of the well-heeled Victorians who were turning him down. After a hurried trip to America to refresh his memory of Chicago in 1908 he published The Bomb. 

  

When on May 4, 1886, in the course of the rioting that accompanied a wave of agitation for the eight-hour day, a bomb was thrown into a group of police advancing to break up a protest meeting in the Chicago Haymarket, the British press joined the American press in intemperate denunciation of the murderous anarchists. 

Frank Harris was still groping for the fourteen-year-old mentality as editor of the Evening News. It was not till many months later that any trace of the feelings of the erstwhile Hyde Park orator appeared in its columns. Even then, though in private he seems to have doubted the guilt of the indicted anarchists, his name did not appear along with that of his friend George Bernard Shaw, or along with William Morris' or Peter Kropotkin's, on an appeal for amnesty approved by a meeting of protest in London in the fall of 1887. The Park Lane viveur could hardly associate himself with the grubby mass meetings of radical sectarians. 

By the time Harris picked up the story the hanged men had been rehabilitated in the opinion of a large sector of American opinion. Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois, with a rare exhibition of civic courage, pardoned the two survivors in 1892. Altgeld went further. In a careful analysis of the trial he proved, to the satisfaction of most fair minded citizens, that though the Chicago anarchists might have been guilty of inciting to riot, they were innocent of conspiracy to commit murder, or of the bomb-throwing itself. Altgeld's pursuit of justice was the ruin of his career as a politician.  

The Bomb might well be classed as an early form of the "proletarian" novel. 

I don't know whether Frank Harris is a "great" writer or not. He had drive and force. He had a knack for sketching characters. His writing stands up with Wells's or Kipling's as an example of the limpid English style of the period. He was very much of a precursor. 

As a newspaper editor he foreshadowed the sensationalism of the cheap English press of our day. In The Man Shakespeare he led in the effort to save the mighty dead from the gradgrinds and the embalmers. Perhaps he loved Shakespeare "not wisely but too well." With his Contemporary Portraits he introduced into English with entertaining results a French strain of literary journalism. In My Life and Loves, and in the pornographic material he peddled pathetically from door to door in the latter part of his life, he anticipated the flood of smut that now clogs the literary marketplace. 

Critics have complained of historical inaccuracies in The Bomb. It rings true to the emotions of the time. Picking Rudolph Schnaubelt, the man who disappeared, as the bomb-thrower is as good a guess as any. If anybody knew who threw the bomb he has kept his mouth shut to this day. Harris fell into an anachronism in his description of the building of Brooklyn Bridge, which refers to the early seventies instead of the early eighties, but he had to work in his own experiences and recollections. Half a century after the book was first printed the reader will find the re-creation of the mood of the time singularly convincing. 

Looking back on the nineteenth-century anarchists from the sixties of the twentieth century, when exploitation of aspirations and resentments has become part of the standard textbook of political career-making, the Chicago anarchists seem as naïvely alien as the Children's Crusade. The oppressions and injustices that they protested against were real, but the notion that society could be shocked into justice and charity by the blowing up of a few policemen ranks with delusions relegated to the psychiatric ward. Out of the energy of these blind protests and deluded hatreds, of men struggling against adjustment to the changes in their lives enforced by technological revolution, we have seen terrible empires built. Perhaps the war-spirit of political ideologies is losing its hold as the passions that fed the wars of religion lost their hold in the past. In any case The Bomb will give you a glimpse of an odd and moving and disturbing, and fortunately fairly unique, episode in Chicago's history. 

 
Foreword
[To The First American Edition (1909)] 

[by Frank Harris] 

 

I have been asked to write a foreword to the American edition of The Bomb and the publisher tells me that what the American public will most want to know is how much of the story is true. 

All through 1885 and 1886 I took a lively interest in the labour disputes in Chicago. The reports that reached us in London from American newspapers were all bitterly one-sided: they read as if some enraged capitalist had dictated them: but after the bomb was thrown and the labour leaders were brought to trial little islets of facts began to emerge from the sea of lies. 

I made up my mind that if I ever got the opportunity I would look into the matter and see whether the Socialists who had been sent to death deserved the punishment meted out to them amid the jubilation of the capitalistic press.  

In 1907 I paid a visit to America and spent some time in Chicago visiting the various scenes and studying the contemporary newspaper accounts of the tragedy. I came to the conclusion that six out of seven men punished in Chicago were as innocent as I was, and that four of them had been murdered--according to law. 

I felt so strongly on the subject that when I sketched out The Bomb I determined not to alter a single incident but to take all the facts just as they occurred. The book then, in the most important particulars, is a history, and is true, as history should be true, to life, when there are no facts to go upon. 

The success of the book in England has been due partly perhaps to the book itself; but also in part to the fact that it enabled Englishmen to gloat over a fancied superiority to Americans in the administration of justice. The prejudice shown in Chicago, the gross unfairness of the trial, the savagery of the sentences allowed Englishmen to believe that such judicial murders were only possible in America. I am not of that opinion. At the risk of disturbing the comfortable self-esteem of my compatriots I must say that I believe the administration of justice in the United States is at least as fair and certainly more humane than it is in England. The Socialists in Trafalgar Square, when John Burns and Cunninghame Graham were maltreated, were even worse handled in proportion to their resistance than their fellows in Chicago. 

I am afraid the moral of the story is a little too obvious: it may, however, serve to remind the American people how valuable are some of the foreign elements which go to make up their complex civilization. It may also incidentally remind the reader of the value of sympathy with ideas which he perhaps dislikes. 

Frank Harris 

LONDON
January 1909 

 

 

Afterword
[to the Second American Edition (1920)] 

[by Frank Harris] 

  

 

FLAUBERT exclaimed once that no one had understood, much less appreciated, his Madame Bovary. "I ought to have criticized it myself," he added; "then I'd have shown the fool-critics how to read a story and analyze it and weigh the merits of it. I could have done this better than anyone and very impartially; for I can see its faults, faults that make me miserable." 

In just this spirit and with the self-same conviction I want to say a word or two about The Bomb. I have stuck to the facts of the story in the main as closely as possible; but the character of Schnaubelt and his love story with Elsie are purely imaginary. I was justified in inventing these, I believe, because almost nothing was known of Schnaubelt and as the illiterate mob continually confuse Socialism and free love, it seemed to me well to demonstrate that love between social outcasts and rebels would naturally be intenser and more idealistic than among ordinary men and women. The pressure from the outside must crush the pariahs together in a closer embrace and intensify passion to self-sacrifice. 

My chief difficulty was the choice of a protagonist; Parsons was almost an ideal figure; he gave himself up to the police though he was entirely innocent and out of their clutches and when offered a pardon in prison he refused it, rising to the height of human self-abnegation by declaring that if he, the only American, accepted a pardon he would thus be dooming the others to death. 

But such magnanimity and sweetness of spirit is not as American, it seemed to me, as Lingg's practical heroism and passion of revolt In spite of Miss Goldman's preference for Parsons, I still believe I chose my hero rightly, but I idealized Lingg beyond life-size, I fear. No young man of twenty ever had the insight into social conditions which I attribute to him. I should have given him less vision and put in a dash of squalor or of cruelty or cunning to make the portrait lifelike. But the fault seems to me excusable. 

The whole book is probably too idealistic; but as all rebels--socialists and anarchists alike--are whelmed in these States in a flood of furious and idiotic contempt and hatred, a certain small amount of idealization of the would be reformers is perhaps justified. On the whole I'm rather proud of The Bomb and of Elsie and Lingg. 

In a pamphlet published by the police, shortly after the execution of the Anarchists, it was stated that "Lingg's father was a dragoon officer of royal blood, but he only knew his mother for whom he always showed a passionate devotion. Four years after her liaison with the handsome officer, his mother wedded a lumber-worker named Link. When Louis was about twelve his foster-father got heart-disease through exposure and died. The widow was left in poverty and had to do washing and ironing in order to support herself and a daughter named Elise who had been born of her marriage. 

"Louis received a fair education [I continue to give the gist of the police record] and became a carpenter at Mannheim in order to help his mother. In 1879 he was out of his apprenticeship and went to Kehl and then to Freiburg. 

"Here he fell in with free-thinkers and became an avowed Socialist. In '83 he went to Luzern and thence to Zurich where he met the famous anarchist Reinsdoff to whom he became greatly attached. He joined the German Socialist society "Eintracht" and threw his whole soul into the cause.  

"In August 1884 Mrs. Lingg married a second time, one Christian Gaddum, in order, as she said, to find support for her daughter, she herself being in poor health; she asked Louis to return home if only for a visit. 

"But Louis had now reached the age for military service and as his whole being revolted against German militarism he decided to emigrate to America. 

"After the wayward boy had taken ship at Havre he and his mother corresponded regularly. All her letters breathed encouragement; she sent him money often and concluded invariably by giving him good counsel and urging him to write frequently. 

"That Lingg had a great love for his mother is shown by the fact that he kept all her letters from the time he left home till he killed himself. 

"His illegitimate birth appears to have annoyed the youth; he worried his mother to give him his father's name. In one letter she says: "It grieves me that you speak of your birth; where your father is I don't know. My father did not want me to marry him because he did not desire me to follow him into Hessia and as he had no real estate he could not marry me in Schwetzingen according to our laws. He left and went I don't know where." 

"A little later Louis appears to have asked her to get him a certificate of birth, for a later letter from her satisfies this request. I reproduce it word for word as characteristic of their relations: 

 

MANNHEIM, June 29, 1884. 

DEAR Louis: You must have waited a long time for an answer. John said to Elise that I had not yet replied to your last letter. The officials of the court you cannot push. For my part I would have been better pleased if they had hurried up, because it would have saved you a great deal of time. But now I am glad that it has finally been accomplished. After a great deal of toil, I put myself out to go to Schwetz-ingen and see about the certificate of your birth. I know you will be glad and satisfied to learn that you carry the name of Lingg. This is better than to have children with two different names. He (the first husband) had you entered as a legitimate child before we got married. I think this was the best course, so that you will not worry and reproach me. Such a certificate of birth is no disgrace, and you can show it. 

I felt offended that you took no notice of the "confirmation." Elise had everything nice. Her only wish was to receive some small token from Louis, which would have pleased her more than anything else. When she came from church, the first thing she asked for was about a letter or card from you, but we had to be contented with the thought that perhaps you did not remember us. Now it is all past... 

I was very much troubled that it has taken so long (to procure the certificate), but I could not help it. Everything is all right, and we are all well and working. I hope to hear the same from you. It would not be so bad if you wrote oftener. I have had to do a great many things for you the last eighteen years, but with a mother you can do as you please--neglect her and never answer her letters. 

  

"The certificate sent him read as follows: 

  

CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH 

  

No. 9,681. 

Ludwig Link, legitimate son of Philipp Friedrich Link and of Regina Von Hoefler, was born at Schwetzingen, on the ninth (9th) day of September, 1864. This is certified according to the records of the Evangelical Congregation of Schwetzingen. 

SCHWETZINGEN, May 24, 1884. 

(Seal.)

County Court: CLURIGHT.  

  

"One thing appears from the above, and that is that at home Louis' name was Link. Other documents, some of them legal, also found in his trunk, show that his name was formerly written Link. He must have changed it shortly before leaving Europe or just after reaching the United States. The thought of his illegitimacy (according to the police report) helped to make him in religion a free-thinker, in theory a freelover, and in practice an implacable enemy of existing society. His mother's letters show that she wished him to be a good man, and it was no fault of her early training that he subsequently became an Anarchist. 

"No sooner had Lingg reached Chicago than he looked up the haunts of Socialists and Anarchists . . . Lingg arrived here only eight or nine months before the eventful 4th of May, but in that short time he succeeded in making himself the most popular man in Anarchist circles. No one had created such a furore since 1872, when Socialism had its inception in the city. 

"Lingg had not been connected with the organization long before he became a recognized leader and made speeches that enthused all the comrades. While young in years, they recognized in him a worthy leader, and the fact that he had sat at the feet of Reinsdorf as a pupil elevated him in their estimation. This distinction, added to his personal magnetism, made him the subject for praise and comment . . . 

"His work was never finished, and never neglected. At one time he taught his followers how to handle the bombs so that they would not explode in their hands, and showed the time and distance for throwing the missiles with deadly effect; at another he drilled those who were to do the throwing . . . He was not alone a bomb-maker; he also constituted himself an agent to sell arms. This is shown by a note found in his trunk addressed to Abraham Hermann. It reads as follows: 

  

Friend:--I sold three revolvers during the last two days, and I will sell three more to-day (Wednesday). I sell them from $6.00 to $7.80 apiece. 

Respectfully and best regards, 

L. LINGG 

  

"In truth, he was the shiftiest as well as the most dangerous Anarchist in all Chicago. 

"The Haymarket riot proved a most bitter disappointment. Lingg was fairly beside himself with chagrin and mortification. The one consuming desire of his life had utterly and signally failed of realization." 

[Here occurs the police account of his arrest which I have reproduced in The Bomb. I now continue it]:  

"During the time Lingg remained at the station his wounded thumb was regularly attended to; he was treated very kindly, had plenty to eat, and was made as comfortable as possible. 

"One day I asked him if he entertained any hostility towards the police. He replied that during the McCormick factory riot he had been clubbed by an officer, but he did not care much for that. He could forget it all, but he did not like Bonfield. He would kill Bonfield, willingly, he declared. 

"Lingg was a singular Anarchist. Though he drank beer, he never drank to excess, and he frowned upon the use of bad or indecent language. He was an admirer of the fair sex, and they reciprocated his admiration, his manly form, handsome face, and pleasing manners captivating all. 

"There was one visitor he always welcomed. It was his sweetheart, who became a regular caller. She invariably wore a pleasant smile, breathed soft, loving words into his ears through the wire screen that separated the visitor's cage from the jail corridor, and contributed much toward keeping him cheerful. 

"She simply passed with the jail officials at first as 'Lingg's girl,' but one day someone called her Ida Miller, and thereafter she was recognized under that name. She was generally accompanied by young Miss Engel, the daughter of the Anarchist Engel, and during the last four months of her lover's incarceration she could be seen every afternoon entering the jail. She was always readily admitted until the day the bombs were found in Lingg's cell. After that neither she nor Mr. and Mrs. Stein were admitted. While it has never been satisfactorily proven who it was that introduced the bombs into the jail, it is likely that they were smuggled into Lingg's hands by his sweetheart. She enjoyed Lingg's fullest confidence, and obeyed his every wish. 

"It is not known whether Miller is the real name of the girl, but it is supposed to be Elise Friedel. She is a German, and was twenty-two years of age at the time, her birthplace being Mannheim, which was also Lingg's native town. She was tall, well-made, with fair complexion, and dark eyes and hair." 

Here ends the police account so far as it concerns us or throws light on the characters of The Bomb. It is informative and fairly truthful but plainly inspired by illiterate and brainless prejudice. Still it proves that in my story I have kept closely to the facts. 

  

FRANK HARRIS. 

 
