Miles's blog

I’ve been watching the mini-series “Hatfields & McCoys” on the History Channel and I think it is pretty good.  I don’t know how accurate it is, but I read some articles online which are consistent with the story they are telling.  I love this sort of program—living history.  I have always thought the problems with history education is that teachers spend way too much time on the dates, etc. and not enough on the stories of the people involved. 

The Hatfield/McCoy feud had murders, kidnappings, illicit liaisons and out-of-wedlock children, war, theft, honor and institutional failure.  Sounds like a soap opera.  But this is how history is because people, by and large, have not changed in millennia.  The same motives that drive people’s actions today have always been present.  I hope the History Channel does more shows like this. I would like to make a suggestions for another historic incident which I have thought for a long time would make good television or a movie.  Here is a summary from Wikipedia.

In June 1892, a steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania owned by Andrew Carnegie became the focus of national attention when talks between the Carnegie Steel Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) broke down. The factory's manager was Henry Clay Frick, a fierce opponent of the union. When a final round of talks failed at the end of June, management closed the plant and locked out the workers, who immediately went on strike. Strikebreakers were brought in and the company hired Pinkerton guards to protect them. On July 6, a fight broke out between three hundred Pinkerton guards and a crowd of armed union workers. During the twelve-hour gunfight, seven guards and nine strikers were killed.

Emma Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman resolved to assassinate Frick, an action they expected would inspire the workers to revolt against the capitalist system. Berkman chose to carry out the assassination, and ordered Goldman to stay behind in order to explain his motives after he went to jail. Berkman tried and failed to make a bomb, then set off for Pittsburgh to buy a gun and a suit of decent clothes. Goldman, meanwhile, decided to help fund the scheme through prostitution. Remembering the character of Sonya in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866), she mused: "She had become a prostitute in order to support her little brothers and sisters.... Sensitive Sonya could sell her body; why not I?" Once on the street, she caught the eye of a man who took her into a saloon, bought her a beer, gave her ten dollars, informed her she did not have "the knack", and told her to quit the business. She was "too astounded for speech". 

On July 23, Berkman gained access to Frick's office with a concealed handgun and shot Frick three times, then stabbed him in the leg. A group of workers—far from joining in his attempt—beat Berkman unconscious, and he was carried away by the police. Berkman was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison; his absence from her life was very difficult for Goldman. Convinced Goldman was involved in the plot, police raided her apartment and—finding no evidence—pressured her landlord into evicting her. Worse, the attempt had failed to rouse the masses: workers and anarchists alike condemned Berkman's action. Johann Most, their former mentor, lashed out at Berkman and the assassination attempt. Furious at these attacks, Goldman brought a toy horsewhip to a public lecture and demanded, onstage, that Most explain his betrayal. He dismissed her, whereupon she struck him with the whip, broke it on her knee, and hurled the pieces at him. She later regretted her assault, confiding to a friend: "At the age of twenty-three, one does not reason."

How great a story is that?  Tow anarchists decide to assassinate a leader of industry and actually one of them gets close enough to pull the trigger while his girlfriend decides to prostitute herself to raise money?  That would make a terrific movie if done right.