Back to previous page July 3, 2005  BOMB-MAKER, SPY AND CON ARTIST USURPED NOBEL INVENTION By Bill Eichenberger, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH In 1866, Alfred Nobel discovered that highly volatile nitro- glycerine could be made much safer to handle and to use if it were dried in diatomite and then shaped into sticks. The Swedish scientist called his invention dynamite, from the Greek dynamis, or power. He could not, of course, control whether others used this power for good or for ill. Within a decade of its invention, the explosive fell into the hands of "the Dynamite Fiend," whose story is told in Ann Larabee's new book. Alexander "Sandy" Keith grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and became rich as a goods broker, spy and con artist during the Civil War, consorting so closely with Southern operatives that he gained the nickname the "Confederate Consul." But it wasn't until after the war, when Keith, traveling under a series of assumed names, turned his mind toward mass destruction. For the insurance money the disaster would provide him, Keith planned to sink the trans-Atlantic steamship Mosel in Bremen, Germany. Porters on the quay dropped Keith's bomb, which detonated on the dock, killing 80 souls and grievously injuring another 50. Larabee's is a Gilded Age tale of greed, corruption and the advent of modern terrorism. Part of her challenge was drawing an accurate portrait of a murky villain. Who was Sandy Keith? Where did he come from? What forces shaped him? Why did he do what he did? Keith was born into a once-powerful clan in Scotland. With its circumstances reduced, the family was moved by Keith's father in the 1830s to Halifax, where his brother had already established a successful brewery. John Keith was a disastrously unsuccessful businessman, and his son Sandy went to work as a clerk for his uncle and namesake, Alexander, until the outbreak of war. Keith and the Confederate operatives had one thing in common: "They were all supreme fantasists." Keith made a fortune during the war, but knew the good times wouldn't last. "He now looked beyond the war," Larabee writes, "readying himself for an exit from the little town that could not contain his ambitions." On the heels of several big swindles (commissioned by a Confederate agent to buy two locomotive engines in Philadelphia, Keith made off with the cash instead), the Dynamite Fiend fled Canada for New York, then New York for St. Louis. Larabee retraces Keith's flight from his victims and into marriage to a pretty French milliner, Cecelia Paris, in mostly straightforward and unadorned prose. She occasionally interrupts the narrative to drop a wry comment. While on the run, Keith lived in Highland, a small town in southern Illinois, at a hotel called the Highland House. "Lincoln slept at the inn," Larabee notes, "as he presumably did everywhere in Illinois, and the bootjack he allegedly used to wedge his great feet out of his great boots is carefully preserved to this day in the town's library." At times, especially in her introduction, Larabee's prose becomes overheated. Describing the explosion on the dock next to the Mosel, she is unfortunately prone to adverbs ("vulnerably naked" instead of simply "naked"). But this tendency mostly disappears as the historian gets lost in the 19th century. But she is never really lost. She follows Pinkerton detectives as they pursue Keith from the Midwest to Germany, where he put together his bomb with the assistance of the finest clockmakers in the world. Keith used the aliases Thompson and Thomas, and is featured on a German postcard from 1875 as "Thomas, der Morder." It was Larabee who, nearly 130 years after the murders, discovered that Thomas was Keith. According to the author, Keith "believed in the new emerging rule of war, with its remote technologies that could kill at a distance, where the faceless enemy would fall without provoking the guilt of witness." His attack on the Mosel was not Keith's first attempt at sabotage. He insured cargo on a ship that sailed from Europe to New York, but that bomb never exploded. Because the insurance agents demanded to see Keith's cargo before it was loaded on the Mosel, he was able to insure it for only 3,000 marks, or about 150 English pounds. For that paltry sum, he was willing to kill everyone onboard. Larabee draws a tacit parallel to contemporary terrorism, quoting the German Empress Augusta, who said of Keith's attack: "Such a crime touches upon humanity, not upon nationality." Bill Eichenberger is Dispatch book critic. Copyright 2005 The Columbus Dispatch Back to previous page

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