Of his 20th-century activities — other than quarreling with Eugene Debs and defending Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President McKinley in Buffalo) — little is known until the “rearrangement of markets” occurred in 1914-18. He seems to have been involved in the fast-growing electrical communications industry and to have had little interest in literature: “Marconi’s transmission of the letter S across the Atlantic by wireless today,” he told his wife on December 12, 1901, “is more important than Henry James’s publication of
Uncharacteristically for our line, he was no great traveler: to my knowledge he never visited Maryland, much less Europe; indeed, after the birth of my father during the Spanish-American War, Andrew V seems to have left Ontario only once, for Vera Cruz in the spring of 1914, in the mistaken hope that enough false messages might connect Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s resistance in Mexico with Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Manchu dynasty and the wars in the Balkan States, and bring about general political chaos in time for the Second International scheduled for Brussels in July. The mission failed; the general wish, of course and alas, was realized, just a month or two late.
Of his posture vis-à-vis the family, on the other hand, we know more, and of his end, if we accept provisionally my father’s account. Distressing to report, Andrew V exercised his “liberation” from the Pattern by regressing, almost absolutely, to the vain ancestral dialectic! Like the Andrews and Henrys prior to 1812, the more he considers the family archives — especially the Letters of 1812 and those exchanged between the twins during the Civil War — the more he comes to believe that his parents were after all deplorably successful secret agents for the Union, pretending to be Copperheads. It is not only the ignorant of history, it seems, who are doomed to reenact it!
Indeed, the quick end to my grandfather’s story, shortly thereafter, is itself a reenactment. Back at Castines Hundred in 1917 (when the U.S. and Canada become allies for the first time in their stormy history, though the old Yankee-Loyalist enmity is not dead, only sleeping, even today), he notes the anger of Ontario’s Fenians at the execution of Patrick Pearse and Sir Roger Casement after the abortive Irish rising of the year before; he is thereby reminded of the I.R.B.‘s attempt on the Welland Canal in 1866. Like the Fenians, but for different reasons, he declares himself indifferent to the World War, which has in his opinion nothing to do with ideology; he is much more interested in the revolution against the czar, and, in the (somewhat self-contradictory) name of International Anarchy, he associates himself with a Bolshevik plot to blow up the Welland Canal. It is the only ship channel around Niagara Falls, and is thus indispensable to the movement of materiél and manufactures from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic; its obstruction will gravely hamper the supply of the American and Canadian Expeditionary Forces in Europe. But lest the blame be placed on (or credit claimed by) German saboteurs, as was the case in the Black Tom explosion in Jersey City, he will broadcast by wireless from the ruined locks his solidarity with the bombers of the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade on July 22, 1916, and call for a Second Revolution in North America, against economic royalism.
There, the phrase is uttered: a Second American Revolution, quite a different matter from the “Second War of Independence” in 1812. Uttering it was to be my grandfather’s chief accomplishment. His associates were fellow anarchists and Bolsheviks from both Canada and the U.S., together with assorted Fenians, Quebec Librists, and sympathetic Germans from Wisconsin and western Ontario: two dozen in all, plus — significantly for that date — a precocious young Iroquois nationalist from the Tuscarora reservation on Grand Island, Andrew’s wife Kyuhaha’s militant brother
