Unlike his parents, Andrew V is overtly and intensely political, by his own declaration first a socialist and then (when the analogy between strikebreaking robber barons and imperialist industrial nation-states persuades him that a “rearrangement of markets” by cataclysmic war is in the offing) an anarchist, the first in the family since his grandfather’s French-Revolutionary youth. He decides that the whole family tree, Cooks and Burlingames alike, has been as it were attending to the wrong dog’s bark: it is not this or that government that is the enemy, except to this or that other government: it is government—on any scale larger than tribal, with any powers or functions beyond the most modest defensive and regulatory. More regressive than Henry and Henrietta together, he takes as his heroes Julian the Apostate, Philip II, the Luddite loom-breakers — all those who would undo the weave of history. Especially he admires Tecumseh and Pontiac, driven to confederate in the cause of anticonfederation. He applauds the Cuban revolutions against Spain, the war of the Boer republics against Britain, the Philippine insurgency, the Russian, Mexican, and Chinese revolutions, the Boxer Rebellion — anything that either resists enlargement or divides what is by his lights too large already; redistributes more equitably, decentralizes, or promises to do so.

Of his 20th-century activities — other than quarreling with Eugene Debs and defending Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President McKinley in Buffalo) — little is known until the “rearrangement of markets” occurred in 1914-18. He seems to have been involved in the fast-growing electrical communications industry and to have had little interest in literature: “Marconi’s transmission of the letter S across the Atlantic by wireless today,” he told his wife on December 12, 1901, “is more important than Henry James’s publication of The Sacred Fount.” (My grandmother agreed; she preferred H.J.‘s short stories.) He was a friend of Alexander Bell from nearby Brantford (named after the Mohawk Joseph Brant), and though he agreed with Mark Twain that the telephone is an instrument of Satan, he explored the possibilities of its misuse, along with the wireless’s, in “the coming war.”

Uncharacteristically for our line, he was no great traveler: to my knowledge he never visited Maryland, much less Europe; indeed, after the birth of my father during the Spanish-American War, Andrew V seems to have left Ontario only once, for Vera Cruz in the spring of 1914, in the mistaken hope that enough false messages might connect Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s resistance in Mexico with Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Manchu dynasty and the wars in the Balkan States, and bring about general political chaos in time for the Second International scheduled for Brussels in July. The mission failed; the general wish, of course and alas, was realized, just a month or two late.

Of his posture vis-à-vis the family, on the other hand, we know more, and of his end, if we accept provisionally my father’s account. Distressing to report, Andrew V exercised his “liberation” from the Pattern by regressing, almost absolutely, to the vain ancestral dialectic! Like the Andrews and Henrys prior to 1812, the more he considers the family archives — especially the Letters of 1812 and those exchanged between the twins during the Civil War — the more he comes to believe that his parents were after all deplorably successful secret agents for the Union, pretending to be Copperheads. It is not only the ignorant of history, it seems, who are doomed to reenact it!

Indeed, the quick end to my grandfather’s story, shortly thereafter, is itself a reenactment. Back at Castines Hundred in 1917 (when the U.S. and Canada become allies for the first time in their stormy history, though the old Yankee-Loyalist enmity is not dead, only sleeping, even today), he notes the anger of Ontario’s Fenians at the execution of Patrick Pearse and Sir Roger Casement after the abortive Irish rising of the year before; he is thereby reminded of the I.R.B.‘s attempt on the Welland Canal in 1866. Like the Fenians, but for different reasons, he declares himself indifferent to the World War, which has in his opinion nothing to do with ideology; he is much more interested in the revolution against the czar, and, in the (somewhat self-contradictory) name of International Anarchy, he associates himself with a Bolshevik plot to blow up the Welland Canal. It is the only ship channel around Niagara Falls, and is thus indispensable to the movement of materiél and manufactures from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic; its obstruction will gravely hamper the supply of the American and Canadian Expeditionary Forces in Europe. But lest the blame be placed on (or credit claimed by) German saboteurs, as was the case in the Black Tom explosion in Jersey City, he will broadcast by wireless from the ruined locks his solidarity with the bombers of the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade on July 22, 1916, and call for a Second Revolution in North America, against economic royalism.

There, the phrase is uttered: a Second American Revolution, quite a different matter from the “Second War of Independence” in 1812. Uttering it was to be my grandfather’s chief accomplishment. His associates were fellow anarchists and Bolsheviks from both Canada and the U.S., together with assorted Fenians, Quebec Librists, and sympathetic Germans from Wisconsin and western Ontario: two dozen in all, plus — significantly for that date — a precocious young Iroquois nationalist from the Tuscarora reservation on Grand Island, Andrew’s wife Kyuhaha’s militant brother (Kyuhaha is approximate Iroquoian for “unfinished business”). This fellow’s name was Gadfly Junior; he claimed to the son of a Tuscarora chief named Gadfly Bray and the brother-in-law of Charles Joseph Bonaparte (Betsy Patterson’s grandson and, briefly, Teddy Roosevelt’s Indian commissioner). Like many of his Mohawk brothers, this Gadfly Junior was a specialist in high steelwork; on the strength of this experience (and a stint in the Wyoming Valley anthracite mines, and a general feistiness), he appointed himself chief of demolition.

The old canal had 25 lift locks: the plan was to dynamite them in quick succession with wireless detonators fashioned by my grandfather. Twenty-five bundles of dynamite were assembled, each fitted with a small wireless receiver tuned to ignite a blasting cap upon receipt of the international Morse code signal for a particular letter of the alphabet; an alternative signal, common to all, could be used to detonate them simultaneously if time was short. No ideological slogan known to the conspirators was alphabetically various enough to do the job; their programmes were anyhow too heterogeneous for agreement: they settled on the standard typewriter-testing sentence, stripped of its redundant characters — THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPD V LAZY G — and reserved as the common signal the only letter missing there from, the one hallowed by Marconi seventeen years before and by James Joyce as the first in the scandalous novel he’d just begun serializing in The Little Review. On the night of September 26 (American Indian Day, Gadfly Junior would have been gratified to know, though it’s also the anniversary of General McArthur’s recapture of Detroit from Tecumseh’s warriors in 1813) the saboteurs in two trucks and a car rendezvoused at the little town of Port Robinson, the midpoint of the canal, and spread out along the 25 miles of its length from Port Colborne on Lake Erie to St. Catherines on Lake Ontario, each to his assigned lock with his charge of explosives. All were to be in place by sunrise, when — just as the British army was breaking the Hindenburg line in the final offensive of the war — my grandfather would transmit on his wireless key the fateful sentence.

I believe that I have neglected to mention that I myself had been born that year, out of wedlock, to my precocious parents: my father, 19, had “supped ere the priest said grace” with the current flower of the Castines, his cousine Andrée III. In this return nearly to the center of the family gene-pool — which A.C. V had commendably eschewed for the health of the line, given the particular consanguinity of his own parents — Henry Cook Burlingame VI betrays (I had better say affirms; he made no secret of it) his affinity for his namesakes Henry and Henrietta. He does not despise his father (who, we remember, apparently put by all revolutionary activities between 1898 and 1918 to raise him, except for the Vera Cruz expedition of 1914); indeed he admires him… as a cunning double agent dedicated to subverting the cause he officially espouses!