Louise Berger - Tarrytown and The Lexington Avenue Bombing

Tarrytown and The Lexington Avenue Bombing

During this same period, Berger, Berg, and Hanson also became active in anarchist labor rights groups and the Anti-Military League. Most of these organizations used the Ferrer Center at their hub for activities. Here individuals like Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Luigi Galleani, and members of the Anarchist Red Cross and the Industrial Workers of the World spent a great deal of their time. During these meetings, plans were made to stage protests at the Tarrytown, New York estate of Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, owner of the Ludlow mines in Colorado.

The Ludlow Massacre in Colorado and police dispersal of the Tarrytown protests enraged most radicals. In June, members of the Lettish Anarchist Red Cross, including Berg, Hanson, Berger, and IWW member Arthur Caron began plotting a bomb attack to assassinate Rockefeller.

Berg, Hanson, and Caron began to collect dynamite from various sources, storing it in Louise Berger's apartment on New York's Lexington Avenue. Meetings were held at the Ferrer Center, where the conspirators devised a plan in which Berg, Hanson, and Caron would to plant a bomb at Rockefeller's home in Tarrytown. The plot was scheduled for July 3, but for reasons unknown, the plan was called off at the last moment. The three men returned to Berger's apartment from Tarrytown with bomb in hand.

At 9 a.m. on July 4, 1914, Louise Berger left her apartment and walked to the office of the Anarchist newspaper known as the Mother Earth Bulletin, where she worked as an editor alongside Alexander Berkman. It has been assumed by some who knew her that Berger was going there to inform Berkman that the bomb had been readjusted and was ready. At 9:15 an explosion occurred from Berger's apartment at 1626 Lexington Avenue. Passers-by witnessed a shower of debris and rubble fall into the street. Jack Isaacson, a newspaper editor who lived around the corner from Berger, recalled a man's arm falling from the Lexington Avenue building into the street in front of him. The three upper floors of the building were wrecked, while debris showered rooftops and the streets below. Large pieces of furniture were thrown hundreds of feet in the air due to the power of the blast.

The bomb had exploded prematurely, killing Carl Hanson, Charles Berg and Arthur Caron. A fourth person, Marie Chavez, was also killed. The blast threw Caron's body onto the mangled and twisted fire escape. The mutilated bodies of Marie Chavez and Hanson were found inside of the apartment. The blast had torn the body of Charles Berg into pieces, which were seen by spectators being thrown through the air onto the streets. In total, twenty other people were injured, seven of them severely enough to be hospitalized. Another man, an IWW member named Mike Murphy, was spending the night in the apartment, when the explosion occurred. Berkman and Berger attended the men's funerals. Berkman would later state that the Lexington Avenue explosion was the most meaningful anarchist event since the Haymarket riot. On July 20, 1914 Berger and two other women visited jailed hunger striker Rebecca Edelsohn, who was protesting her confinement for failure to pay a $300 fine for speaking disrespectfully of the American flag.