Biography
Arthur Caron was a French-Canadian-born anarchist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Born on December 16, 1883 in Quebec, he worked for years as a weaver in Fall River, Massachusetts, and after the deaths of his wife and infant child moved to New York City, where he threw himself into the 1914 unemployed movement led by Frank Tannenbaum. During one demonstration he was seized by detectives, beaten so badly his nose was broken, and hospitalized. In late May 1914, after the Ludlow Massacre, he joined the free-speech fight at Tarrytown, New York against John D. Rockefeller; arrested for trying to speak at Fountain Square, he was jailed with eleven others — among them Becky Edelsohn and Charles Plunkett — and released on bail by June 8, 1914. He was killed on July 4, 1914 in the Lexington Avenue explosion at 1626 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, when a dynamite bomb — reportedly intended for the Rockefeller estate in retaliation for Ludlow — detonated prematurely as he and fellow anarchists Charles Berg and Carl Hanson assembled it; an uninvolved tenant, Marie Chavez, was also killed. Some 5,000 mourners later gathered in Union Square, addressed by Alexander Berkman and Becky Edelsohn.
