Revolutionary Emma Goldman's first meeting with Professor Garside...

Radical EMMA GOLDMAN- Thomas Hamilton Garside's Rival... In Every Sense.

America's most notorious Anarchist and early feminist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) describes her first meeting with Thomas Douglas Hamilton Garside in her autobiography "Living My Life" (1931).

"I found Joseph Barondess and other strike leaders already at work...Professor TH Garside, a Scotchman, formerly lecturer for the Knights of Labor, and now at the head of the strike. Garside was about thirty-five, tall, pale, and languid-looking. His manner was gentle and ingratiating, and he resembled somewhat the pictures of Christ. He was always trying to pacify conflicting elements, to smooth things over".
Goldman was later implicated in the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, and deported by FBI boss J Edgar Hoover back to her brutal "Mother Russia". Her protégé John Reed, chronicled the 1917 Revolution in "Nine Days That Shook the World".

Trying to Avert America's Second Revolution...

"Capitalists, rapacious landlords and corrupt Federal government made Russia's brand new, shiny Bolshevism, seem more attractive than it was- in dirty reality. For many, "Radicalism" was the lesser of two evils. Its' roots were in the "middle-class", of Iowa storekeepers and Philadelphia office clerks, as much as the sweat-shops of the Lower East Side. For out of the quiet fury of the middle class, are revolutions borne. The working poor were too busy, simply being poor; surviving the factories and farms of the 1880's. Discontent was given its' voice by Thomas H Garside, in pen-and-ink, in Manchester drawing rooms and City debating halls. He inaugurated the first "Nationalist Club" in Boston with English Fabian leader, Sidney Webb in 1888. Contrary to belief, America is a strangely class-conscious society- self-conscious, perhaps..."

THG The Radicals' Radical - Infiltrating the Anarchists 

"It seems Thomas Hamilton Garside had gone to America secretly backed by a cabal of textile industrialists and financiers. Men such as John Doherty Barbour who owned mills in Ireland and across the US. (Thomas's grandson later married Barbour's granddaughter).

 

Eminence-gris figures, from JP Morgan to the Federal government, felt the US Constitution itself was threatened by the rise of extreme left-wing agitators, who declared that they would "Seize the means of production": lock-in US factories, closing ports and trade. There was as THG said "a noble naivety" in the Anarchists' creed. One that is hard understand today.

In 1915, Thomas H Garside was asked by British Prime Minister Lloyd George, to co-author the Parliamentary "War Pensions & Allowances Report". This remains the basis of welfare acts legislation for widows and the disabled in many countries.

Thomas Hamilton Garside and THE RHODES-MILNER ROUND TABLE

Cecil Rhodes, at one time the world's richest man, formed The Rhodes-Milner Round Table to create an "English-Speaking World Order". (And later Rhodes Scholars). WT Stead, Rhodes' friend and Executor, set about promulgating the organisation, with Anglo-German Lord Alfred Milner, via the most influential newspaper of the age- The Pall Mall Gazette. Thomas Hamilton Garside knew Stead via his father, who had formed the Garside & Stead Railway Co in 1866, with a relation of the Editor-Proprietor. Occultist WT Stead, a believer in clairvoyance, famously predicted his own death on Titanic, and Thomas H Garside's grandson, married the daughter of the widow of Titanic designer, Thomas Andrews...(Both men are depicted together in the First Class Smoking Room in the film "A Night to Remember"). Titanic's owner, The White Star Line, was owned by...JP Morgan, who was scheduled to be on the maiden voyage with Stead, who was to attend the Carnegie World Peace Conference- with President Taft...a patient of Dr Kellogg...

 

Meanwhile in America, Thomas Hamilton Garside "rose without a trace", through the ranks of the Masonic-styled Order of the Knights of Labour- a once mighty international force of 400,000+ members. They advocated a comparatively moderate approach to achieving universal workers rights. There were no calls for burning factories from The Knights, in their capes and secret initiation rites, based on the Jesuit order. TH Garside was duly elected President of the Cloakmakers Textile Union in 1890. As Goldman noted: "Garside informed us that the strike would be lost if we did not consent to a compromise. I disagreed with him and objected to his proposal. Several members of the committee upheld me, but Garside's influence prevailed. The strike was settled according to his suggestions".

The Man Who Might Have Been King Kellogg...

Bizarrely, my great great grandfather Thomas did actually marry an "Emma M Goldman" in Pennsylvania in 1884. Not the cheroot-smoking, gun-slinging bi-sexual radical, to whom Thomas thought he had been introduced after one of his lectures: but the rather prim Lutheran daughter of a successful Pennsylvanian farmer.

They married in Philadelphia, after breaking her engagement to a certain Will Keith Kellogg- brother of Dr John Harvey Kellogg. Dr Kellogg is wonderfully portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the film "The Road To Wellville". Another twist to the tale, is that I once sat next to the great actor at dinner and noted that he had brought a bag full of books- on nutrition, dieting and so on. Seeing that I was intrigued, he explained that it was his "research"- he was about to make a film about someone I'd probably never heard of- a Dr Kellogg...

Believing procreation to "sap the vital energies" the Kelloggs had no children- but adopted 42! Those attending Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanatorium included: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and even President Taft. A convert to the Fletcherisation Clinic (Masticating (Chewing)100 times) was Charles Ossining, who, failing to perfect a copycat "Cornflake", decided to experiment instead with a cocaine-based health tonic, progenitor of a beverage called by the unlikely name of "Coca-Cola".

Will Kellogg donated $66 million to his philanthropic foundation in 1930 and later, most of his stock- the equivalent today of $1.1 billion. 

Amidst all this, Thomas Hamilton Garside was the focus of a tumultuous public infatuation, by feminist poet and founder of the Free Love movement, Voltairine De Cleyre. (Friend of Lucy Parsons, and some say, erstwhile girlfriend of both Radical leader Goldman and writer Jack London). Though this liaison, played out in the papers, was probably more a ruse by which Thomas could gain access, to what Professor Goyens calls, the Inner Circle of Anarchists...

Rhodes famously misquoted "To be born an Englishman is to win First Prize in the lottery of life".