10:00

at the front page and like, it's pretty likely

10:02

there'll be a mention of a bomb going off

10:04

somewhere. It just, statistically, it was just happening all

10:06

the time. And

10:09

how much of this disruption was tied to

10:11

the anarchists in the public mind? Like how

10:13

looming a threat was the anarchist movement? Yeah,

10:16

a lot of it was. There is

10:18

a kind of a blurring of lines

10:20

between the socialists and the communists and

10:22

the IWW and the anarchists. And they

10:24

were, you know, bedfellows and in some

10:26

ways, not largely disagreeing

10:28

about the role of the state, right?

10:30

That they were equally opposed to big

10:32

capitalism, but the anarchists also felt that

10:35

big government was as much of a

10:37

problem. So there was a

10:39

general sense of radicals were causing this political violence.

10:41

Right, and one of those radicals that you talk

10:43

about in the book is Emma Goldman.

10:45

Could you tell me about her and what her

10:47

role in the anarchist movement was? Emma

10:50

Goldman, you know, is one of the

10:52

most endlessly fascinating figures of

10:54

this period. A Russian émigré came over.

10:56

That much actual education came over as

10:58

a teenager to the United States, somehow

11:01

was giving lectures on

11:03

radical politics within a couple

11:06

of years of her arrival here, became

11:08

the leading figure of

11:10

the anarchist movement, arguably worldwide by the

11:12

first decades of the 20th century, and

11:15

had a very complicated

11:18

relationship to political violence. She had

11:20

had this long time partnership, really

11:22

what turned out to be a

11:24

lifelong partnership with Alexander Berkman, who

11:26

had a much less complicated relationship

11:28

to political violence, and had

11:30

notoriously attempted to assassinate Henry Clay

11:33

Frick in the early 1890s, gone

11:36

to prison for more than a decade. But

11:38

those early experiences, which Goldman had been

11:40

largely supportive of, had kind of turned her

11:42

against the use of political violence in

11:45

her writings, in her public statements. This

11:47

is right around the time that Gandhi is kind

11:49

of formalizing the principles of nonviolent protest.

11:52

And if Goldman had really, in a

11:54

full-throated way, embraced those, or

11:56

had hit upon them independently, the whole

11:58

history of the anarchist movement. where

20:00

the anarchist movement is really active. There are these

20:02

bombs going off all over the city, and

20:05

there's this real fear of the anarchist movement

20:07

and what these so-called radicals can do. And

20:09

at the same time, all this is going on,

20:11

you've got the police and the government trying to

20:14

figure out how to regain some kind of control

20:16

of the situation. But they don't exactly have the

20:18

tools to do it. Could you tell

20:20

me more about this? So up until, you

20:23

know, the late 1880s, the

20:25

idea of true detective

20:27

work being done with

20:29

scientific tools, like for instance,

20:31

fingerprint science, and done in

20:33

a formal way

20:36

with complex records, histories

20:39

of people convicted of crimes,

20:42

identification systems, including fingerprints,

20:44

all that stuff just didn't exist. And

20:47

crucially, this is another thing that I think

20:49

is so important to this story. There was

20:51

really no federal

20:53

investigative force. There was no

20:55

FBI. There was a Bureau

20:58

of Investigation that was chronically kind

21:00

of underfunded. There had generally been

21:02

a suspicion, kind

21:04

of an old school American suspicion of

21:06

consolidating too much power, particularly kind of

21:08

investigative power in the federal government.

21:11

If you were charged with a

21:13

federal crime, like you could be charged with a crime,

21:15

but it was very hard to prove it because there

21:17

was no system, there were no people on payroll, basically,

21:19

who could kind of marshal the evidence together to prove

21:21

that you were guilty. But soon,

21:23

fingerprint science develops alongside all

21:25

these other technologies that we'd

21:27

call biometrics today. Yeah, and

21:29

because there was no national

21:32

institution in the United States to

21:35

use these new advances in confronting the

21:37

threat of anarchism, the

21:39

real pioneers in adopting these new

21:42

techniques happened on a city level

21:44

and particularly happened in New York. And

21:46

so how did the police start using these new tools and

21:48

techniques? Yeah, New York, between 1900

21:50

and 1920, really reinvents

21:53

itself as a state

21:55

of the art police department led by a

21:58

few people like Joseph Fereau. Arthur

22:00

Woods, who adopt these new tools.

22:02

In many cases, they travel over to Europe to kind

22:04

of find out about them and come back. And, you

22:06

know, one of the things that I think is just

22:08

so extraordinary is the basic lack

22:10

of identification systems throughout

22:13

the 19th century. Like people

22:15

didn't largely have passports or

22:17

driver's licenses or obviously or

22:19

any kind of biometric evidence

22:22

for who they were. So if you were arrested

22:24

for a crime, you could just say they'd be

22:26

like, what's your name? And you could say, my

22:28

name is Bill Jones. And there

22:30

was on some level, there's no way to

22:32

prove that you were not Bill Jones, even

22:34

if you'd just been arrested three days ago

22:37

under another name. And so just the basic

22:39

ability to capture people's identity

22:41

and prove that they were that person

22:44

and that they were the person who had been convicted of

22:46

a crime or suspected of

22:48

a crime two years ago

22:50

or five years ago was an enormous

22:53

leap forward. And biometrics and fingerprinting and

22:55

photography and all that, you really introduced

22:57

that. And the power of something

22:59

like fingerprint technology takes a little while to

23:01

gain popularity. And there's this incredible court case

23:03

that you read about that really

23:05

shepherds in this era of forensic

23:07

science. Could you tell us

23:09

that story? Yeah, it's a case against

23:11

a burglar named Charles Crispy who had broken

23:14

into a Soho loft and stolen some, I

23:16

believe, undergarments. I think it was kind of

23:18

a lady's undergarment story.

23:21

And he left behind

23:23

a fingerprint and it matched a previous

23:25

fingerprint. And the fingerprint evidence was really

23:28

like central to the case.

23:30

But no one had ever been successfully

23:32

convicted of a crime based on fingerprint evidence

23:34

before that. So what does Furo end up

23:36

doing? Furo, who has

23:39

kind of built up this against

23:41

a lot of resistance internally at the

23:43

NYPD, he's built up this small identification

23:45

bureau and he's pretty much

23:47

the fingerprint guy inside the NYPD.

23:49

This is like 1911 and he has called in. It's

23:53

pretty much the only witness for

23:56

the prosecution because they really don't have any other evidence

23:58

other than this fingerprint. So,

24:00

Feroz is testifying and he's asked

24:03

to explain his method, and he just like rolls

24:06

out this crazy explanation that clearly

24:08

just bombs in the room. So

24:11

what does the prosecution do then? So

24:13

they come back and they basically are like, we'd

24:15

like to do an experiment. We'd like to do

24:17

a demo in a sense of this technology for

24:19

the jury so that they can understand it. And

24:22

they basically have Fero leave

24:25

the room and the jurors come

24:27

through, and one of the jurors presses

24:30

his finger against

24:32

a pane of glass, simulating what

24:34

Charles Crispy, the accused criminal, had

24:36

done. And then all the

24:38

other jurors, including the one who pressed his

24:41

finger on the glass, do a traditional fingerprint

24:43

impression. And they bring

24:45

Fero back, and then Fero

24:47

is basically seated in front of the jury,

24:49

and he has to identify which juror has

24:52

put their finger on the glass, and he nails it. He

24:54

goes through and he like picks it out, and he's like, it's

24:56

this juror right here. And

24:59

the jury is like, what is this witchcraft?

25:03

Just blown away, what is this incredible

25:05

display of his scientific power? And

25:07

almost instantly Crispy changes his plea

25:10

to guilty. He

25:12

just sees the scientific fire fire that's up

25:14

against him and he gives in. Right,

25:18

because before this, someone who committed a

25:20

crime could really just essentially disappear. Like

25:22

an anarchist could throw a stichodymite into

25:25

a church or something, and then

25:27

disappear into the crowd. But the

25:29

advent of these new technologies really

25:31

takes away that anonymity. Yeah,

25:34

and so the tide starts to turn

25:36

inside the NYPD, and then this Arthur

25:38

Woods figure becomes commissioner, who's very interested

25:41

in these things. They build up the

25:43

information architecture that allows them to

25:45

kind of track criminals, and they

25:48

increasingly are using that to investigate

25:50

the anarchists and other political attacks

25:52

in New York in that period.

25:54

And that infrastructure then

25:57

becomes the basis of what leads

25:59

to... the consolidation of this

26:01

kind of investigatory power on a federal level.

26:04

And as the police departments and the federal government

26:06

are gathering all this information, they

26:08

need a way to organize all of it.

26:10

And this is where another key historical figure

26:13

comes into the picture, and that's J. Edgar

26:15

Hoover. Could you tell me about

26:17

Hoover's contribution here and how this all collides

26:19

with the history of the anarchists? Yeah,

26:22

Hoover had basically moonlit in

26:24

D.C. when he was in high school and

26:28

in college as a library clerk, and

26:31

he was organizing, helping to organize the

26:33

Library of Congress's voluminous collections. And

26:35

there had been a new system that had

26:37

been introduced around this period by the former

26:39

director of the Library of Congress, whose name

26:42

was Putnam. And Putnam had

26:44

introduced basically something similar to the

26:46

Dewey Decimal system. It was basically like, hey,

26:48

we have all these books and they're in

26:50

different categories and they have authors. And

26:53

so we'll figure out a systematic way

26:55

of taking this information so that you

26:57

can explore, it was

26:59

really on some level, like what we would now

27:02

call a search algorithm. He

27:04

then goes to work for

27:06

the Justice Department and it's,

27:08

you know, World War I is still evolving.

27:11

The United States is not yet involved

27:13

in the war, but country's moving in

27:15

that direction. And there's serious concern about

27:17

German nationals inside of the United States,

27:19

who are also actually setting off bombs

27:21

on their own during this period. And

27:23

so Hoover gets assigned

27:25

to run the New York branch of

27:28

the big push to register

27:30

all the German nationals

27:32

living in the United States, which is arguably

27:34

like the largest kind of

27:37

identification management roundup in United

27:39

States history at that point. And Hoover's really

27:41

good at it. He's something like 23 or

27:43

24. And he,

27:45

you know, wins the praise

27:48

of his superiors. And so shortly after that,

27:50

after these bombs are starting to go off

27:53

in 1918 and 1919, the

27:56

Bureau of Investigation opens up a new division

27:58

called the Radical Division. And

28:00

the radical division is going to be

28:03

charged with rounding up these dangerous

28:05

anarchists and communists that are setting

28:07

off these bombs all across the

28:10

country using these new state-of-the-art information

28:12

science crime-fighting techniques. And they put

28:14

J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the radical

28:17

division. And Hoover's

28:19

first guiding quest is

28:21

to use this

28:23

new information science to

28:27

see that Emma Goldman is deported from

28:29

the United States of America. She

28:31

and Berkman had been sent to jail for encouraging

28:34

draft resistance leading up into World

28:36

War I. So in this

28:38

period, Goldman has been released

28:41

from prison, but the mood in the

28:43

country is very much kind of turning

28:45

against these radicals, the kind of endless

28:47

bombing campaigns that have happened. There have

28:50

been many more. And so Hoover, in

28:53

really his first act as head

28:55

of the radical division,

28:57

collects just an enormous amount

28:59

of information on Goldman and

29:01

Alexander Berkman, just going through.

29:04

I've seen all these files and

29:06

it's just extraordinary how much—it's the

29:08

whole book, basically, of information of

29:10

speeches she'd given. And he's organized

29:12

it all systematically. He's kind of

29:14

annotated everything. And it's precisely the

29:16

kind of information gathering and management

29:18

that the federal government just had

29:21

been incapable of doing before. It's

29:23

just a case that could not

29:25

have been made before. And

29:27

Hoover, for the first time, has kind of

29:29

marshaled all this information. And so it was

29:31

a kind of really intense moment where there's

29:34

a deportation hearing on Ellis Island. And

29:36

Goldman is there and Hoover shows

29:38

up and Goldman looks over and

29:41

Hoover just has these stacks of

29:44

paper on his desk. And

29:46

it's all the evidence that he's put together

29:48

to finally make the case that Emma Goldman

29:51

needs to leave the country for good. And

29:54

she kind of looks over there and she says

29:57

to herself, I'm not going to be able to

29:59

fight this. So

30:01

Hoover ends up successfully deporting

30:03

her and Berkman along with

30:05

a number of other radicals. They

30:08

leave in one of the last days of 1919

30:10

aboard a ship that the

30:12

press dubbed the Red Ark and

30:15

they sail out through the

30:18

New York harbor and end up

30:20

in Leninist Russia, where they are

30:22

instantly disillusioned with everything

30:24

that is happening there. It's interesting

30:26

that this whole story is taking place in the

30:28

backdrop of these two designs which work in

30:31

opposite directions. Like if you simplify them to

30:33

their most basic concepts, dynamite

30:35

is this destructive power that

30:38

creates chaos and information science

30:40

is basically trying to order everything, to put

30:42

everything back together. And ultimately

30:45

what you see is this sequence of

30:47

events where dynamite supercharges the anarchist movement,

30:49

which leads to the supercharging of the

30:52

forensic sciences and that ultimately

30:54

snuffed out the anarchist movement. And then

30:56

the surveillance state ascends and

30:58

it has its own destructive and pernicious

31:00

power. Well, I think one of

31:02

the things is

31:05

how long it took me to see it that way.

31:07

But they were kind of invisible, I

31:10

think. Not to

31:12

be too on brand here, but like they were... That

31:16

kind of, I don't know, like

31:18

high level clash between

31:21

technologies or approaches or

31:23

designs that come into

31:25

being slowly over time.

31:27

Yeah. It's almost

31:29

like a very slow motion film that

31:32

nothing seems to be happening when you watch it

31:34

at that slow speed. When you're

31:36

watching it over like 40 years, it seems

31:39

like there's just little isolated things happening. But

31:42

then when you speed it up, you realize, oh, this is

31:44

really a crash between these two different forces. But

31:47

once you see it that way, it

31:49

is very illuminating. Steven

31:52

Nelson, thank you so much for being on 99% of us. It

31:54

was a real pleasure to talk to you. Oh, Roman, I love

31:56

the show and it's such an honor to be on it. Stephen

32:17

Johnson's new book is called The Infernal Machine,

32:19

a true story of dynamite, terror, and the

32:21

rise of the modern detective. You can find

32:23

a link to the book in our show

32:25

notes, and you can also just go to

32:28

a store or go online and just buy

32:30

every Stephen Johnson book because they're all so,

32:32

so good. 99%

32:36

Invisible was produced this week by Jacob

32:38

Maldonado Medina and edited by Nina Patek,

32:40

mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan

32:42

Rial. Kathy Tu is our

32:45

executive producer, Kurt Kholstedt is the

32:47

digital director, Delaney Hall is our

32:49

senior editor, Taylor Shedrick is our

32:51

intern. The rest of the team

32:53

includes Chris Barrupe, Jason De Leon,

32:55

Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay,

32:57

Loshma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriela Gladney,

32:59

Kelly Prime, and me, Roman

33:01

Mars. The 99% Invisible logo

33:03

was created by Stefan Lawrence. We

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