During the 1892 Homestead steel strike, after Pinkerton guards and striking workers fought a pitched battle that left ten dead, the young anarchist Alexander Berkman walked into the Pittsburgh office of Carnegie Steel chairman Henry Clay Frick and shot and stabbed him in an attempted attentat — propaganda of the deed meant to avenge the strikers. Frick survived; Berkman, who refused counsel and defended the act politically, was sentenced to twenty-two years, a term stacked from multiple charges that Pennsylvania law would ordinarily have merged.
He served fourteen years, much of it in solitary confinement in Western Penitentiary, and emerged in 1906 to write Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist — one of the enduring American accounts of long imprisonment, and a founding text of the prisoner-support tradition. Berkman's later career traced the era's arc: editor of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, imprisoned again in 1917 for opposing the draft, and deported to Russia on the Buford in 1919.