THE INFERNAL MACHINE

How anarchism gave birth to the surveillance state.

The “infernal machine” was Alfred Nobel’s invention, dynamite, a favored tool of those who embraced “the propaganda of the deed” due to its destructive power and easy availability. The anarchists gained notoriety with violent assassinations of heads of state in Europe and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, believing that only through destruction could a better world be born. Prolific popular historian Johnson begins with an international overview, then focuses on the U.S., where corrupt, inefficient local police forces were ill equipped to deal with any kind of crime. He traces the efforts of Joseph Faurot, a New York City police detective who introduced new methods of identification such as fingerprinting, and Arthur Woods, the NYPD commissioner who modernized and cleaned up the department from 1914 to 1917. Johnson’s protagonists on the other side are anarchists Alexander Berkman, attempted assassin of industrialist Henry Clay Frick and an unabashed proponent of violent political acts, and his partner Emma Goldman, who saw that violence damaged the cause but could not bring herself to disavow comrades who resorted to it. The author is sympathetic to the radicals’ outrage at modern capitalism’s brutality, noting that “for every death at the hand of a bomb-wielding anarchist, a hundred or more would die from factory accidents,” but he deems the anarchists’ association with violence “one of the most disastrous branding strategies in political history.” Woods’ use of data collection to identify the perpetrators of bombings and sometimes even prevent them rehabilitated the NYPD’s tarnished reputation, while random acts that killed civilians turned public opinion against the radicals. Drawing parallels with contemporary acts of terrorism and governmental abuses of power in monitoring citizens, Johnson makes history part of an ongoing story we all need to consider.

Smart, accessible, and highly readable.