Emma Goldman Part 1

Emma Goldman.

by Charles A. Madison.

EMMA GOLDMAN

_ANARCHIST REBEL_

The hanging of several anarchists in 1887 as a consequence of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago caused many Americans to sympathize with the gibbeted radicals. Youths swathed in bright idealism, men and women rooted in equalitarian democracy, workers trusting in the rect.i.tude of their government--all doubted the guilt of the condemned prisoners and were deeply perturbed by the egregious miscarriage of justice. Many of them for the first time became aware of the state's ruthless arrogation of power, and scores upon scores remained to the end of their lives inimical to government and apprehensive of all forms of authority.

Emma Goldman was one of these converts. Resentment against the restraints of authority was no new experience for this spirited girl. As far back as she could remember she had hated and feared her father, a quick-tempered and deeply hara.s.sed Orthodox Jew who had vented his emotional and financial vexations on his recalcitrant daughter. Unable to get from him the love and praise she craved, she had refused to submit to his strict discipline and had preferred beatings to blind obedience. Consequently she grew up in an atmosphere of repression and acrimony. "Since my earliest recollection," she wrote, "home had been stifling, my father's presence terrifying. My mother, while less violent with her children, never showed much warmth."

At the age of thirteen she began to work in a factory in St. Petersburg, and her life became doubly oppressive. She soon learned of the revolutionary movement and sympathized with its agitation against Czarist autocracy. To escape from the tyranny of her father, the irksomeness of the shop, and the repressive measures of the government, she fought with all her stubborn strength for the opportunity to accompany her beloved sister Helene to the United States. Early in 1886 the two girls arrived in Rochester to live with their married sister, who had preceded them to this country.

Like other penniless immigrants, the seventeen-year-old Emma had no alternative but to follow the common groove to the sweatshop. Paid a weekly wage of two dollars and a half for sixty-three hours of work, she naturally resented the social system which permitted such exploitation.

Together with other immigrants she had dreamed of the United States as a haven of liberty and equality. Instead she found it the home of cra.s.s materialism and cruel disparity. This disillusionment was deepened by the hysterical accounts of the trial in Chicago. She was quick to conclude that the accused anarchists were innocent of the charge against them; and the vilification not only of the prisoners but of all radicals merely hardened her hatred against the enemies of the working poor.

It was easy enough for her to believe John Most's claim in _Die Freiheit_ (which chance had brought her way) that Parsons, Spies, and the other defendants were to be hanged for nothing more than their advocacy of anarchism. What this doctrine was she did not quite know, but she a.s.sumed it must have merit since it favored poor workers like herself. When the jury found the men guilty, she could not accept the reality of the dread verdict. Her thoughts clung to the condemned anarchists as if they were her brothers. In her pa.s.sionate yearning to do something in their behalf she attended meetings of protest and read everything she could find on the case; and she sympathetically experienced the torment of a prisoner awaiting execution. In her autobiography, _Living My Life_, she wrote that on the day of the hangings "I was in a stupor; a feeling of numbness came over me, something too horrible even for tears." The very next day, however, she became imbued with a surging determination to dedicate herself to the cause of the martyred men, to devote her life to the ideals for which they had died.

In the meantime, discouraged and lonely, she had welcomed a fellow worker's show of affection. She felt no love for him and, as a result of an attempted rape at the age of fifteen, she still experienced a "violent repulsion" in the presence of men, but she had not the strength to refuse his urgent proposal of marriage. She soon learned to her dismay that her husband was impotent and not at all as congenial as she had thought. However, the very suggestion of a separation enraged her father, who had recently come to Rochester. After months of aggravation she did go through the then rare and reprehensible rite of Orthodox divorce, but she had to leave town to avoid social ostracism. When she returned some months later, her former husband again pursued her, and his threat of suicide frightened her into remarrying him.

Emma now felt herself thwarted and trapped. Twenty years old and yearning to make life meaningful, she chafed at the very thought of her drab and dreary existence. Her anxiety to elude her father's abuse, to free herself from a loveless marriage, to escape the dullness of her oppressive environment, only intensified her longing for freedom and affection. Consequently she began to nurture her dream of dedicating herself to the ideal championed by the Chicago martyrs. One day in August 1889 she broke relations with her husband and parents and left for New York with money supplied by her ever-devoted sister Helene.

In the metropolis Emma felt herself gloriously free. For the first time in her life she was completely independent. On the teeming East Side a new and wonderful world emerged before her, and she embraced it with pa.s.sionate abandon. Alexander Berkman, a determined doctrinaire at eighteen, made her acquaintance the day she arrived and the pair at once established an intimate comradeship which endured through many vicissitudes to the day of his death. John Most, the impetuous anarchist leader, became her lover as well as her mentor and opened new and fascinating vistas of the mind. "Most became my idol," she wrote. "I adored him." Under his tutelage she read seminal books and learned about significant men and ideas. Anarchism a.s.sumed definite meaning; the struggle by the many in want against the few in power, then so pathetically feeble, became to her a war unto death; the goal of social freedom appeared tangible and alluringly near. For months her voracious hunger for knowledge seemed insatiable, her capacity for emotion inexhaustible. This tremendous release of energy was in truth the expression of long-pent-up zeal. She threw herself into the radical movement of the East Side with the enthusiasm of an inspired visionary.

Her first years in New York were a period of preparation. Along with her work in sweatshops, which she had to do to earn her living, she found time to familiarize herself with the latest libertarian literature and to spend hours on end in intellectual discussion. Nor was she able to remain a pa.s.sive onlooker even during her early apprenticeship. With John Most's helpful guidance she went on her first "tour of agitation"

only a few months after reaching New York. She addressed several meetings in as many cities on the eight-hour day, then a timely topic, and discovered that she was able to hold the attention of an audience and to think quickly while facing its inimical questioning.

That winter the newly formed Cloakmakers' Union called its first general strike. Emma immediately "became absorbed in it to the exclusion of everything else." Her task was to persuade the timid girl workers to join the strike. With prodigious energy she exhorted them at meetings, encouraged them at dances and parties, and thus influenced many to partake in the common effort to improve working conditions in the sweatshops. The strike leaders were greatly impressed by her dynamic qualities as an organizer and public speaker.

Emma's a.s.sociation with John Most became strained to the breaking point when she perceived that he esteemed her more as a lover than as a fellow anarchist. His arrogance irritated her and, much as she admired his impa.s.sioned eloquence and incisive mind, she could not accept the acquiescent role he had a.s.signed her. When his high-handed behavior resulted in a factional split, she sided with those who rejected his domination. Some time later, when Most derided Berkman's attempt to kill Henry C. Frick and disavowed the theory of "propaganda of the deed" of which he had been the chief exponent, she came to hate him. At the first opportunity she lashed him with a horsewhip at a public meeting and denounced him as a renegade. Nor did time bring about a reconciliation.

Emma, Alexander Berkman, and a youthful artist were living together in congenial intimacy. They worked at their menial tasks during the day and devoted their evenings to agitation. Because the progress of anarchism in this country was too slow for them, the news of increased revolutionary activity in Russia filled them with a romantic nostalgia for their native land. They decided to engage in some business until they should have saved enough money for the journey back. In the spring of 1892 chance brought them to Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, where they were soon operating a successful lunchroom.

The b.l.o.o.d.y consequences of the lockout at the Homestead plant of The Carnegie Steel Company inflamed the minds of these youthful idealists.

The plan to return to Russia was abandoned with little regret. They agreed it was their duty to go to the aid of the brutally maltreated workers. Berkman insisted that their great moment was at hand, that they must give up the lunchroom and leave at once for the scene of the fighting. "Being internationalists," he argued, "it mattered not to us where the blow was struck by the workers; we must be with them. We must bring them our great message and help them see that it was not only for the moment that they must strike, but for all time, for a free life, for anarchism. Russia had many heroic men and women, but who was there in America? Yes, we must go to Homestead, tonight!" Taking with them the day's receipts and their personal belongings, they left immediately for New York. Berkman, eager to emulate the Russian nihilists who were then fighting hangings with a.s.sa.s.sinations, determined to make Frick, the dictatorial general manager, pay with his life for the death of those who had worked for him. Unable to perfect a bomb, he decided to use a pistol. Emma wanted to accompany him to Pittsburgh, but remained behind for the lack of railroad fare. A few days later the resolute youth of twenty-one made his way into Frick's office, discharged three bullets into his body, and stabbed him several times before being overpowered and beaten into unconsciousness.

Prior to the attempt on his life Frick had been severely criticized for harsh and arbitrary treatment of his employees. His determination to break their union and his reckless use of Pinkertons had antagonized even those who normally favored the open shop. Berkman's attack, so alien and repugnant to our democratic mores, completely changed the situation. Frick became the hero of the day. Journalists and public men vied in praise of the victim and execration of the a.s.sailant. The fact that the latter was of Russian birth and an anarchist only served to strengthen his guilt. Although Frick recovered from his wounds with extraordinary rapidity and was back at his desk within a fortnight, and although the law of Pennsylvania limited punishment for the crime to seven years, the defendant was tried without benefit of legal counsel and sentenced to twenty-two years' imprisonment.

The ascetic youth was thoroughly dismayed by the calamitous turn of events. He regarded Frick as "an enemy of the People," a cruel exploiter of labor who had to be destroyed as a concrete warning of the oncoming revolution. He gloried in this opportunity to serve the American workers in the manner of the Russian nihilists. It pained him therefore to think that he owed his failure to kill Frick to the interference of the very workers for whom he was ready to die. The attack upon him by John Most was distressing enough, but the scornful repudiation by the strikers and the coolness of labor everywhere cut him to the heart. Suffering the anguish of a living death in one of the worst prisons in the United States, he sought comfort in the thought that he was a revolutionist and not a would-be murderer. "A revolutionist," he later explained, "would rather perish a thousand times than be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder. In truth, murder and _Attentat_ are to me opposite terms.

To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people." Some years afterwards he came to believe that even such shedding of blood "must be resorted to only as a last extremity." It was this faith in the ideal for which he was prepared to die that kept him alive through fourteen years of physical torture and mental martyrdom. One need only read his _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, a work of extraordinary ac.u.men and power, to appreciate the high purpose that had motivated him and the strength of character that enabled him to turn his prison trials into spiritual triumphs.

Emma, his lover and accomplice, from the very first defended him with pa.s.sionate abandon. To her he was "the idealist whose humanity can tolerate no injustice and endure no wrong." The excessive punishment dealt to him by the state struck her as barbarous and cowardly. "The idealists and visionaries," she a.s.serted years later, "foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardor and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world." At the time, however, she grieved to think of her n.o.ble companion doomed to waste the best years of his life in execrable confinement.

Unable to lighten his suffering, she resolved to double her effort towards the realization of their common ideal. A physical breakdown, however, forced her to seek rest and medical care. Her sister Helene welcomed her back and helped her to regain strength. But the aggravation of the unemployment crisis in 1893 caused her to disregard the doctor's warning and to return to her post on the East Side. "Committee sessions, public meetings, collection of foodstuffs, supervising the feeding of the homeless and their numerous children, and, finally, the organization of a ma.s.s-meeting on Union Square entirely filled my time." As the main speaker at this large gathering she excoriated the state for functioning only as the protector of the rich and for keeping the poor starved and enslaved, like a giant shorn of his strength. Commenting on Cardinal Manning's dictum that "necessity knows no law," she continued: "They will go on robbing you, your children, and your children's children, unless you wake up, unless you become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right." For this speech she was arrested, charged with inciting to riot although the meeting was peaceable, and sentenced to one year in Blackwell's Island Penitentiary.

She went to prison in a defiant mood. She was now the avowed enemy of the corrupt minions of the state and she knew they would stop at nothing to keep her from agitating for a better world--the world for which she and Berkman were then in jail. She resolved to fight back and fight hard. So long as breath remained in her lungs and strength in her body, she would deliver her message to the oppressed ma.s.ses! No amount of torture in prison or persecution outside would deter her in the struggle against the state and the powerful rich!

While in prison Emma learned the rudiments of nursing. She liked the work better than sewing, and upon her release she persuaded several doctors to recommend her as a practical nurse. Wishing to qualify herself, she accepted the aid of devoted friends in order to study nursing in the Vienna Allgemeines Krankenhaus, a hospital of very high repute. While in Europe she lectured in England and Scotland and met the leading anarchists in London and on the Continent. She also made first-hand acquaintance with the contemporary social theater, on which she was later to lecture and write with penetrating insight. In the summer of 1896 she returned to this country, qualified as a nurse and midwife.

Once back in New York, she immediately resumed her anarchist activity.

Her first concern was to promote an appeal for Berkman's pardon, and keen was her sorrow and resentment when it was refused. More than ever eager to further their common ideal, and greatly moved by the sporadic attacks upon the more aggressive workers, she undertook her first continental lecture tour.

Everywhere workers were slain, everywhere the same butchery!...

The ma.s.ses were millions, yet how weak! To awaken them from their stupor, to make them conscious of their power--that is the great need! Soon, I told myself, I should be able to reach them throughout America. With a tongue of fire I would rouse them to a realization of their dependence and indignity!

Glowingly I visioned my first great tour and the opportunities it would offer me to plead our Cause.

Her opportunities fell far short of her expectations, but her words of fire ignited the hearts of many who came to scoff.

For the next twenty years she devoted most of her time to lecturing. She spoke wherever there were comrades enough to organize a meeting; and in scores of cities, from Maine to Oregon, there were libertarians ready to suffer great inconvenience for their cause. At first most of her talks were given in Yiddish and German; later, as she attracted more Americanized audiences, she spoke mainly in English. Her topics ranged widely in content. She expounded the doctrine of anarchism whenever possible, but her lectures dealt mainly with current social problems and the modern European drama. Shortly before World War I she discussed birth control with a frankness that sent her to jail for a fortnight.

She usually keyed her talks to the intelligence of her auditors, and always she spoke with clarity and enthusiasm.

Throughout her years of agitation she exercised extraordinary tact and exceptional physical courage. No other woman in America ever had to suffer such persistent persecution. She was arrested innumerable times, beaten more than once, refused admission to halls where she was to speak. Often the police dispersed her audience. Intimidated owners frequently refused to rent her meeting places or cancelled contracts at the last minute. On various occasions she was met at the train and compelled by sheer force to proceed to the next stopping place. In 1912 she and Ben Reitman, at that time her manager and lover, were driven from San Diego and the latter was tarred and tortured.

It must be said that the lawbreakers and defilers of liberty were not Emma Goldman and her hara.s.sed followers but the sworn guardians of the law and leading local citizens. The latter and not the anarchists were guilty of violating the rights of free speech and free a.s.sembly, of beating their victims without cause and of jailing them without warrant.

It was after one such instance of unprovoked brutality that Emma wrote:

In no country, Russia not exempt, would the police dare to exercise such brutal power over the lives of men and women. In no country would the people stand for such beastliness and vulgarity. Nor do I know of any people who have so little regard for their own manhood and self-respect as the average American citizen, with all his boasted independence.

The newspapers abetted the police in the lawless treatment of Emma and her fellow rebels. They sometimes perverted a grain of truth into columns of muck and made "Red Emma" a symbol of all that was dangerous and despicable. The rank injustice of this abuse caused the staid New York _Sun_ to protest on September 30, 1909: "The popular belief is that she preaches bombs and murder, but she certainly does nothing of the kind. Bombs are very definite things, and one of the peculiarities of her doctrine is its vagueness. The wonder is that with a doctrine so vague she managed to strike terror into the stout hearts of the police."

Nor were the police and the press the only perpetrators of this modern witch hunt. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed the att.i.tude of many persons of privilege and respectability when he bl.u.s.tered: "The Anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is the deeper degree of criminality than any other." When William Buwalda, a soldier in the United States Army and the recipient of a medal for bravery, shook hands with Emma Goldman at one of her lectures in 1908, he was courtmartialed and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. It was only as a consequence of numerous public protests that Buwalda was pardoned after he had served ten months. The Red Hysteria of 1917-21 merely climaxed decades of ill-treatment of a militant minority in a nation founded on the principles of human rights and individual liberty.

If this ugly chapter in recent American history was the work of men of property and of public officers, there were numerous other Americans, less powerful but of greater probity, who cherished the fundamental freedoms of our Founding Fathers. These liberals spoke out forcefully against the violation of rights guaranteed by the Const.i.tution. They gladly gave of their time and money to the defense of the hara.s.sed radicals. Because Emma Goldman suffered most from police brutality and because her dynamic personality attracted those who came in contact with her, she was befriended by scores of Americans in every part of the country. These Jeffersonian liberals admired her courage and sincerity and helped her to organize her lecture tours and to finance her propagandistic and literary ventures.

Emma reached the nadir of her career during the aftermath of President McKinley's a.s.sa.s.sination. With the memory of Alexander Berkman's fate still festering in her heart, she said: "Leon Czolgosz and other men of his type ... are drawn to some violent expression, even at the sacrifice of their own lives, because they cannot supinely witness the misery and suffering of their fellows." Even before her att.i.tude was known, she was arrested as an accomplice of Czolgosz and treated with extreme savagery before being released for lack of evidence.

Even more painful to her was the obtuseness of those anarchists who condemned Czolgosz's act as wanton murder. Ironically enough, even Berkman wrote from prison to disapprove of the shooting and to differentiate it from his own attack upon Frick; in his opinion the killing of McKinley was individual terrorism and not a deed motivated by social necessity. Emma was shocked by this argument, since to her both acts were inspired by the same high idealism and spirit of self-sacrifice. Unlike Berkman, who had come to see the futility of terrorism in a country like the United States, she was more interested in the incentive than in the effectiveness of an a.s.sa.s.sination. She was ostracized for her loyalty to Czolgosz and, as a consequence of his execution, suffered severe depression.

Once Emma Goldman had mastered the English language, she was not long in wishing to establish a periodical that would carry the message of anarchism to those whom she could not reach in person. Outbreaks of strikes in this country and increased revolutionary activity in Russia only made her more eager for a magazine of her own. In 1905 she was serving as manager and interpreter for Paul Orleneff and Alla n.a.z.imova, who had come to the United States for a theatrical tour. When Orleneff learned of Emma's ambition to publish a periodical, he insisted on giving a special performance for her benefit. Although a pouring rain kept the audience to a fraction of the expected number, the receipts sufficed to pay for the first issue of _Mother Earth_.

The scope and purpose of the new monthly, which began to appear in March 1906, were explained at the outset:

_Mother Earth_ will endeavor to attract and appeal to all those who oppose encroachment on public and individual life. It will appeal to those who strive for something higher, weary of the commonplace; to those who feel that stagnation is a deadweight on the firm and elastic step of progress; to those who breathe freely only in limitless s.p.a.ce; to those who long for the tender shade of a new dawn for a humanity free from the dread of want, the dread of starvation in the face of mountains of riches. The Earth free for the free individual.

Emma Goldman edited the monthly throughout its eleven years of existence. In all this time it reflected her views, her interests, her dynamic liveliness. Her fellow editors at one time or another were Max Baginski, Hippolyte Havel, and Alexander Berkman, but the character of the periodical underwent no change as a consequence. Each issue contained at least one poem, brief editorials on the events of the month, articles on current aspects of anarchism, comments on labor strikes and radical activities the world over, reports by Emma on topics of interest to her or on her frequent lecture tours, and finally appeals for money. Many prominent libertarians contributed essays of a philosophical or hortatory nature. It emanated a youthful vigor and an exuberance not found in any other contemporary periodical. Its several thousand readers were devoted to it and supported it with their limited means until the postal censor put an end to the monthly shortly after the declaration of war in 1917.

_Mother Earth_ was not Emma Goldman's sole publishing activity. A firm believer in the efficacy of educational propaganda, she printed and sold a long list of inexpensive tracts. Her table of literature became a prominent feature at all her meetings. When no commercial publisher would accept Berkman's _Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist_, she collected funds and issued the book herself. The volume has since become a cla.s.sic in its field, and stands to this day as a living reminder of the dominance of a keen and determined mind over all physical obstacles.

Emma also brought out her own collection of lectures, _Anarchism and Other Essays_. She was able, however, to find a publisher for her impressive volume of lectures on _The Social Significance of the Modern Drama_, which deals incisively with the European plays that dissect the common failures and fallacies of bourgeois society.