sundae bloody sundae

I'm easing back into blogging with a few cut and paste jobs. Like about the time that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman ran an ice cream parlour:

"But where to get enough money for the purpose?...It occurred to us that an ice-cream parlour might prove the means to our end." They put up $50 of their own, borrowed $150 from their landlord, rented a storefront, and "succeeded in turning the neglected ramshackle place into an attractive lunch-room....Within a short time we had paid back our landlord's loan and were able to invest in a soda-water fountain and some lovely coloured dishes."

This charming idyll of small-scale entrepreneurship among the anarchists ended with news of the crushing of the Homestead strike.

One day, spotting a newspaper headline over a customer's shoulder, Goldman saw news of the Homestead steel strike, which was being countered by violence from Pinkerton agents and the Pennsylvania state militia.

She paid for the man's paper with a free dish of ice cream (true story), then closed the store and plotted with Berkman to assassinate the steel company boss, Henry Clay Frick. Berkman eventually gained access to Frick's office, where he shot and stabbed the man but failed to kill him.

Berkman was sentenced to 22 years for the attempt. I have his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, in which he doesn't mention once that he plotted an attentat among the 99s.

(title thanks to John Band on twitter)

Comments

[Dan]

"When this ice-cream parlor closes, the revolution begins"

If there is an afterlife, I hope Goldman and Maggie Thatcher are happily swapping tips on ice cream somewhere up there.

[sglover]

What's the ice cream-Thatcher connection?

[Guano]

"What's the ice cream-Thatcher connection?"

A belief in certain circles that Margaret Thatcher, when she worked as a food chemist for Lyons, was part of the team that invented soft ice cream that contains a great deal of air.

[Alex]

Regarding Emma Goldman and the ice-cream, this essay is about the most New Yorker-y thing possible, and is also a delight.