[4] He arrived in California in the spring of 1915 where he became involved in the defense of Mathew Schmidt and David Caplan, anarchists recently arrested following years living underground in connection with the October 1910 fatal bombing of the newspaper plant of the conservative Los Angeles Times.

[5] Berkman became a primary organizer of the Caplan-Schmidt Defense League in the summer of 1915 and henceforth devoted the bulk of his time to this legal fight, ending his formal editorial connection with Mother Earth.

[9] The editorial location of the semi-monthly anarchist magazine combined with its inflammatory name proved irresistible to local authorities, who raided the paper's offices on July 29, 1916 without a search warrant.

[9] In addition to founding the first local Mooney-Billings defense organization, Berkman travelled the country raising funds and public consciousness in support of the effort and winning the commitment of prominent New York attorney W. Bourke Cockran to work on the case on a pro bono basis.

[10] Shortly thereafter California authorities, despite having "absolutely no real evidence to go on" from their December raid, nevertheless obtained a grand jury indictment of Berkman on a charge of murder in association with the Preparedness Day bombing.

[11] By the time of the California indictment Berkman had already been arrested and detained in New York City along with Emma Goldman on charges of conspiracy to undermine wartime conscription, however, and the West coast case against him came to naught.

The publication's final issue, dated June 1, 1917, featured an anti-militarist cartoon by Maurice Becker on the cover and a short piece signed by Berkman inside which boldly declared:

[13] Berkman would spend the duration of the war and all of 1919 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary before being deported to Soviet Russia along with Goldman aboard the so-called Red Ark at the end of year, together with 200 other anarchists and sundry radicals.