Biography
Charles Robert Plunkett was a young anarchist in the Ferrer Center / Modern School circle in New York and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. After the Ludlow Massacre he was active in the 1914 unemployed movement and the anti-Rockefeller agitation, and wrote the militant essay "Dynamite!" in Mother Earth (July 1914). On May 30, 1914 he was one of twelve arrested in the Tarrytown free-speech fight — with Becky Edelsohn (whom he later married) and Arthur Caron — for attempting to speak at Fountain Square; charged with disorderly conduct, the group was jailed and released on bail by June 8, 1914. He was a conspirator in the Lexington Avenue bomb plot that killed Caron on July 4, 1914 but was not present at the explosion and was never charged for it. He later left the anarchist movement and became a biologist and geneticist, publishing work on Drosophila genetics and a biology textbook, and died in 1981.
