Alfred Nobel’s father was an arms merchant in St. Petersburg; first developed obsession with chemistry and gunpowder-based experiments as a teenager in the lab in 1840s
Nitroglycerin incredibly unstable and deadly; “Humans had been stabbed, poisoned, impaled, burned, shot at, and hung. But getting blown to bits was a novel way to die.”
Not interested in nitroglycerin as a weapon but as a blast agent for engineering projects
His brother died from accidental explosion and his nitroglycerin factor my exploded in 1866
White diatomite powder in German dunes, when mixed with nitroglycerin created a paste that made it less accident prone; filed patent in 1866 with two names, Nobel’s Safety Powder and Dynamite
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin born into aristocratic family in 1840s but wanted to be an explorer and uncovered navigable route through Yablonovy Range
Encountering Paleolithic remains in dried lakes led him to insight that glaciers had once extended down through Eurasian steppes, “and in retreating had left behind a network of lakes and marshes that had been inhabited by early humans until the changing climate turned them into barren deserts.“ (first scientific attempt to make a case for natural climate change as a prime mover of the history of civilization)
Kropotkin inspired by Darwin but in Siberia saw struggle not between different organisms in survival of the fittest, but rather shared struggle against environmental conditions; networks of cooperation among and between species which he’d dub “mutual aid”
Henry Faulds, Scottish doctor and missionary in Tokyo, wrote Darwin in 1880 about studying the “skin furrows of the hand” i.e. fingerprints could offer new insights into evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens
Darwin not interested in studying fingerprints but passed along Faulds’ letter to his cousin Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement who’d been making measurements of the human body looking for patterns (pseudoscience of anthropometry)
Galton looking for connections between crime and physiology; found no correlation but did see opportunity to create standardized code of fingerprint properties for reliable identification
Simultaneous discovery of fingerprints for identification between Faulds and French police clerk Alphonse Bertillon, who developed approach using systemic series of different body measurements
National investigative institutions non-existent and local police were corrupt and inefficient
New York City municipal police force created in 1845, but lack of training and corruption made them “glorified security guards” and gathering evidence to solve crimes not part of the job
Allan Pinkerton a Scottish emigré with progressive and abolitionist roots; rose to national fame providing private security for Lincoln and espionage during the Civil War
Post-Civil War westward expansion created opportunities for security for transporting cash and other goods through lawless territories; Pinkerton sold services for security and investigating crimes
Department of Justice created in early 1870s and outsourced work to Pinkertons
Pinkerton advanced detective work through employment but also storytelling, publishing nonfiction true crime thrillers dramatizing their exploits
Alliance with railroads made Pinkerton very wealthy but also was a Faustian bargain
Trans-Siberian railroad uniting Moscow and St. Petersburg with the mineral-rich Asian steppes created modern Russia
Epic engineering projects like railroads required explorers and surveyors but also dynamite to create tunnels
“Dynamite turned out to be a peripheral player in the history of warfare. Its primary application proved to be in the realm of engineering and public works, allowing an unprecedented surge in the creation of rail tunnels, sewer systems, and subways around the world—major engineering projects that would have been impossible to pull off without the controlled explosions of dynamite.” London Underground, Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, Panama Canal
By the mid-1870s, Nobel was selling his explosives in markets all around the world. “The ambitious young chemist had become a titan of industry.”
Retained his Nordic melancholy and spent hours alone in his Paris laboratory – “the loneliest millionaire”
Dynamite was cheap, available, easy to use, concealable, anonymous, used from up close or far
One historian called dynamite “the terrible power of the powerless”
People’s Will a Russian anarchist revolutionary movement bent on assassinating Czar Alexander II
Alexander had emancipated the serfs in 1861, which younger generation of aristocratic students saw as an auger of new constitutional democracy Russia, but it remained stuck in imperial past
Trial of the 193 in 1877 of alleged subversives backfired when all were acquitted
Kropotkin emphasized “propaganda of the deed” after release from prison: “Mere words were not sufficient to incite revolutionary change. You needed an act of spectacular violence also called an attentat—directed against a well-known target, a strike dramatic enough to be picked up and amplified by the global media networks of the day.”
“Almost every new technology that succeeds in finding a wide audience turns out to have unintended consequences in the long run, new uses or secondary effects that its creator never dreamed of. But the reinvention of dynamite as a terrorist weapon—indeed, as the very origin point of terrorism itself—ranks high in the canon of unanticipated uses of new innovations. Conceived as a tool for engineers intent on building a new industrial age, dynamite ultimately helped empower a movement intent on destroying the very institutions and social structures that made industrialization possible.”
Emma Goldman arrived in New York City in 1889, decades before cars and steel construction for skyscrapers, so Lower East Side packed with people
Pushcarts an emblem of NYC street culture until banned by Mayor La Guardia in 1938; legacy of czarist Russia where Jews couldn’t own property
Homestead crisis in Pittsburgh pitted steel labor union against Carnegie Steel; Pinkertons brought in to bust which turned public opinion against them, and lost role as government investigators
After dynamiting a Paris cafe, Émile Henry arrested and got mug shot (or portrait parlé, talking picture) and body measurements by Bertillon at Department of Anthropometry; standardized dataset to create unique identifier that would enable police to identify detainees
Bertillon’s filing cabinets of photos and info had organized system of nested subcategories of measurements to retrieve accurate files; “a low-tech version of what we would now call a search algorithm”
Bertillon and Henry meeting represented clash of opposite ideologies: stateless egalitarianism vs. anti-subversion surveillance state
Nobel’s third will (not announced until after his death) established the five prizes
1898 conference in Rome of 21 European nations established Interpol and adopted Bertillon’s portrait parlé system; measurements could be telegraphed across Europe to find potential criminal matches
Goldman arrested for incitement to riot after rally in Union Square; served 1 year in prison then later returned to Europe to learn midwifery
“From the anarchist’s perspective, the true infernal machine that had been unleashed on the world was not Alfred Nobel’s invention; it was James Watt’s steam engine. The industrialists had been blowing people up or dismembering them long before Émile Henry walked into the Café Terminus. It was the capitalists who had armed the Pinkerton men and sent them up the river.”
Leon Czolgosz assassinated McKinley at 1901 Pan-American Exposition; during interrogation he said he was an anarchist and disciple of Emma Goldman
McKinley lived for eight days as gangrene attacked his stomach; wound wasn’t life-threatening but infection was
Roosevelt advocated for Immigration Act of 1903 to deport and prevent anarchist entry: “For the first time since the dark days of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, immigration officials were authorized to interrogate immigrants about their political beliefs.”
Roosevelt also advocated for a federal detective force, an American Interpol, but rebuffed by Congress for too much federal consolidation of power post-Pinkertons
Joseph Faurot sought to bring fingerprinting to NYPD but new NYC police commissioner in 1906 Thomas Bingham was a nativist and anti-immigrant who dismissed new scientific crime-fighting approaches as fad
All five NYC boroughs merged in 1898
Italian immigration exploded between 1891-1906 to 400k; emergence of Little Italy
Black Hand a loose affiliation of criminals and extortionists sending letters with black skulls and daggers and hand print
Bingham needed Italian speakers to infiltrate the Black Hand but NYPD was overwhelmingly Irish and he was anti-immigrant
Arthur Woods a former teacher and tutor of Roosevelt kids who’d become friend of Theodore Roosevelt and interested in police reform; appointed by Bingham as deputy commissioner to assist Faurot in modernizing archive of criminal photographs and develop undercover team to destroy the Black Hand
Murder trial in 1910 was first appellate case in U.S. history where fingerprints were accepted as legit form of evidence
Trial of thief Charles Crispi in 1911 brought in Faurot as expert witness for prosecution to explain new fingerprint science and link Crispi’s to crime scene
In 1913 J. Edgar Hoover as a law student at George Washington University took a day job in the Library of Congress order division classifying incoming publications with LCC; inspired by systematized card catalogs for collating info, which would inspire FBI work
Arthur Woods become police commissioner and started allowing anarchists public protest rather than immediately shutting down; prevented escalation and retaliation
First police bomb squad announced on August 1, 1914, same day as World War I; dubbed Bomb and Anarchist Squad
In run-up to World War I, the threat of public terror loomed large and U.S. “descended into a sustained state of anti-radical suspicion that exceeded the future red scares of the McCarthy era.”; not just anarchists, socialists, etc. but individuals and civilian groups
Postal crackdown on anarchist publications even more impact than surveillance since they were critical for income and dissemination
Goldman and Berkman were arrested under new Espionage Act
Hoover, recent law school grad, started working at Department of Justice which was exempt from draft
With new mayor and Tammany candidate, Bomb Squad transferred to military intelligence unit within War Department; ostensibly for war effort but also to protect from Tammany’s corrupting influence
Enemy Alien Registration drive of 1918 documented 480k German-born noncitizens; Hoover appointed to run operations in New York along with NYPD
Bombing of AG Palmer’s DC townhouse in June 1919 part of a national coordinated campaign; in response Palmer appointed celebrity detective William Flynn head of Bureau of Investigation and Hoover as lead of Radical Division
“When historians catalog the momentous inventions of history—the printing press, the telescope, the steam engine—they rarely include indexing algorithms in their canon of breakthrough ideas. But tools that help us explore ever larger pools of information—and widen the net we can cast in those pools—have often turned out to trigger inflection points in history.”
Hoover’s Editorial File System an early version of a relational database and national in scope; field reports classified by subject name, location, organizations, ideologies, etc.
“Collating information on just a single suspect could take hours, but more complex inquires were prohibitively time-consuming. Reorganizing all that information, and making it searchable, was the sort of problem only a librarian could love.”
In just two months the Radical Division collected 50k index cards documenting radical activity
“Hoover had weaponized library science in the service of subduing the revolutionary threat.”
Faurot introduced the first police radio system in 1922 and oversaw program to fingerprint newborn babies in maternity wards
Goldman and Berkman deported to Russia and eventually got an audience with Lenin, but grew disillusioned with the regime “suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything”; Goldman allowed back into US for speaking tour in ‘30s and died in 1940
“The sense of anarchism as a looming threat to the establishment had its final hurrah with the arrest, trial and execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti; after that, it was the threat of Soviet-style communism that dominated Hoover’s Editorial File System at the FBI.”
Ideological battle of twentieth century was between state capitalism, state communism, and fascism
“Today the means of destruction are more varied—passenger planes, anthrax, AK-47s—but the general tactics of terrorism remain anarchism’s most enduring legacy.”