Emma Goldman

Born June 27, 1869 (Kovno, Russia)

Died May 14, 1940 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

Social activist

Emma Goldman came to America and made a career of challenging the legitimacy of government, religion, and property. Throughout her political life she championed the constitutional right to freedom of speech and worked to improve conditions for the poor, laborers, and immigrants. Goldman criticized the social and economic subordination of women and was a lifelong opponent of war.

Goldman was an anarchist (person opposed to organized governments), so she rejected any enforced political order by an individual or government. She believed people were essentially good and that all forms of government authority were unnecessary and undesirable. She argued for a new social order based on the voluntary cooperation of individuals and groups.

"The kind of patriotism that we represent is the kind which loves America with open eyes. . . . We love the dreamers and the philosophers and the thinkers who are giving America liberty. But that must not make us blind to the social faults of America."

Goldman reached beyond the predominantly ethnic, immigrant audience that typically constituted anarchists in the early parts of the twentieth century and helped make the radical movement more mainstream in America. Like many anarchists, Goldman proclaimed her mission as one of promoting critical thinking, cultural and political change, and
social cooperation based on personal liberty. Emma's political activities inspired criminal laws banning the practice of radical politics. She was also a frequent defendant in criminal cases involving her political activities.

A social commitment

In the summer of 1868 Abraham Goldman married Taube Zodokoff, a widow with two daughters. Emma Goldman was born to the couple a year later and was soon followed by two boys. Abraham was an innkeeper in the small Lithuanian town of Papile. Jewish citizens were in the majority but German culture was dominant. The Russian Tsar, the supreme ruler of Russia, held political power in the area. Since the family inn also served as a training center for the Russian military, the Goldman family directly felt the authority of the Russian government.

At the age of seven, Emma was sent to the Prussian seaport of Konigsberg to live with relatives and attend a private Jewish elementary school, despite her father's reluctance to have an educated daughter. Emma transferred to a public school when her family moved to Konigsberg. It was there that young Emma was befriended by a teacher who introduced her to opera and literature and encouraged her dreams.

When Emma was twelve her father moved the family once again, this time to the large city of St. Petersburg, Russia, to seek work. Emma's formal education ended there as she and her siblings were required to work to supplement the family income. Emma continued to educate herself with every opportunity in the sophisticated city of St. Petersburg, which was also home to a rising generation of Russian political radicals.

Emma became fascinated with female political martyrs (women who gave their lives for a political cause) and was influenced in particular by Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel, What is to Be Done? In it, the heroine rejects her perceived destiny in order to become an ordinary physician among Russia's poor people.

With the collapse of the radical movement in Russia and facing pressure from her father to marry, young Emma decided she needed to leave Russia to pursue her dream of independence and social commitment. In 1885 at the age of sixteen, Emma arrived in the United States with her half-sister Helena aboard the German steamship Elbe. It was the same year that the Statue of Liberty was shipped to New York City from France to welcome immigrants such as Emma.

The girls lived with their elder sister Lena and found jobs in the expanding industrial city of Rochester, New York. Emma worked factory jobs and soon met a fellow laborer, Jacob Kersner, whom she married in 1886. Although the couple divorced in 1889, the marriage provided Emma with a claim to U.S. citizenship.

Radical activities

In 1886, Goldman closely followed the news of the Haymarket trials in Chicago, Illinois. Violence had erupted at an anarchist rally in Haymarket Square, resulting in the bombing deaths of seven policemen. Four anarchist labor leaders were convicted of conspiracy and executed, even though the actual bomber was never identified.

Goldman was deeply moved by the trial results. She joined the anarchist movement before moving to New York City in 1889 to participate in radical activities. She met her lifelong friend, Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), and helped him plot the assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick of the Carnegie Steel Company. It was a misguided effort to end the Homestead Steel strike. Frick was merely wounded and, in 1892, Berkman was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. The event made Goldman infamous when the New York World newspaper portrayed her as the mastermind of the plot.

A national economic crisis set off by the failure of four major railroad companies hit America in "The Panic of 1893." The stock market crashed and hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. New York City streets filled with the hungry and unemployed. The city's police, anxious to control the rising unrest, turned their attention to anarchists whose inflammatory speeches were aggravating an already tense situation.

By this time, Goldman was a well-known anarchist and lecturer who advocated for the poor. She addressed a public rally of some three thousand people at Union Square in August 1893 and was arrested for inciting a riot. While awaiting release on bail, Goldman was interviewed by the World's famous female reporter, Nellie Bly (c. 1867–1922).

As relayed in Brooke Kroeger's 1994 book Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist Bly wrote, "Do you need an introduction to Emma Goldman? . . . You have seen supposed pictures of her. You have read of her as a property-destroying, capitalist-killing, riot-promoting agitator." Bly then described the real Goldman as a "little bit of a girl, just five feet high, . . . not showing her one hundred twenty pounds; with a saucy, turned up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes that gazed inquiringly at me through shell-rimmed glasses."

While most reporters of the day were unsympathetic, Bly described Goldman as neat, immaculate, and well-dressed. Where the New York Times referred to Goldman as a fire-eating anarchist, Bly dubbed her "the little anarchist, the modern Joan of Arc," in a highly sympathetic report to her newspaper.

New criminal laws

Upon her release from prison in 1895, Goldman went to Europe where she studied medicine before returning to the United States and continuing her radical activities. In 1901 she was implicated in the murder of President William McKinley (1843–1901; served 1897–1901). Goldman was released because no evidence could be gathered against her, other than that the assassin had attended one of her speeches.

McKinley's assassination led to the passage of the 1902 Aliens Act. The act declared the advocacy of "criminal anarchy" to be a felony. The law became the judicial basis for all future expulsions and deportations from America. Goldman, later dubbed "Red Emma" because of her radical politics associated with the rise of the Communist Party in Russia whose symbolic color was red, founded the Free Speech League in 1903 to promote the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. She claimed the constitutional right for herself as well as other anarchists like Big Bill Haywood and his militant trade union (see sidebar).

From 1906 until 1917 Goldman edited and published the monthly journal Mother Earth. The magazine advocated the banning of all government and recommended it be replaced by voluntary cooperation among the people. She targeted all forms of repression—economic, political, and psychological. She worked in hopes of achieving a cooperative commonwealth in America. Goldman put her energies into lecturing, writing, and tireless political organizing. These activities led to her arrest in the spring of 1916. She received a fifteen-day prison term for giving a public lecture on birth control.

On June 15, 1917, officers arrived once again at the office of Mother Earth with a warrant for her arrest on charges of conspiracy to convince persons not to register for the draft. She and Alexander Berkman, who was arrested as well, each received a two-year prison sentence for their opposition to America's involvement in World War I (1914–18; war in which Great Britain, France, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies).

The federal government, led by a newly empowered J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) of the U.S. Justice Department, targeted Goldman for deportation as part of the "Palmer Raids" of 1919. The raids on aliens known or suspected of being political radicals resulted in thousands of arrests of mostly aliens (people with citizenship in other countries) believed to be political radicals in over thirty cities, but only around 250 were actually deported.

Hoover labeled Goldman the "Red Queen of Anarchy" and was waiting for her and Berkman upon their release from prison in Jefferson City, Missouri. Hoover needed a high profile case in his campaign against communists and subversives (those who seek overthrow of a government). Hoover had arranged for the deportation of nearly two hundred and fifty anarchists aboard the Buford. Dubbed, the "Soviet Ark," the decrepit, old transport ship carried its human cargo out of the New York harbor bound for Russia with Emma Goldman as its most famous passenger.

William Haywood

William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood (1869–1928) was a miner in Silver City, Idaho, when he became interested in the labor movement. In 1896 he joined the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and became active in union campaigns to increase wages and end child labor in the mines. He progressed through the ranks of the national executive board until deciding that labor problems required more revolutionary solutions.

Haywood and his political friends joined together in 1905 to form the radical labor organization, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Known as "the Wobblies," they wanted to unify all labor and place production in the hands of the workers. The IWW advocated strikes, boycotts, and passive resistance by their members. They were also accused of using violence and sabotage.

In 1906 the WFM and its leaders including Haywood were brought to trial for the murder of former Idaho governor, Frank Steunenberg (1861–1905). Famous attorney Clarence Darrow (1857–1938; see entry) defended Haywood and several others and they were acquitted in 1907. The trial received enormous publicity for its dramatic details. It was the first trial to be covered by the press wire services.

Haywood soon left the WFM and devoted his time and energy to the Socialist Party of America (believes that both the economy and society should be run democratically in order to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few) and the IWW. He was recognized as the spokesperson for industrial workers and was celebrated by various nonworking class socialists who turned
him into a public personality. The New York Times called Haywood "the most hated and feared figure in America," for his role in labor organization.

The IWW opposed U.S. participation in World War I and Haywood produced antiwar propaganda when America entered the conflict in 1917. That September the Justice Department conducted raids on the IWW headquarters in twenty-four cities. They seized books, minutes of meetings, financial records, and membership lists. Haywood and others were arrested under the Espionage Act for conspiracy and interference with conscription (the military draft).

In 1918 he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison and fined $10,000. While awaiting the result of an appeal for a new trial in 1921, Haywood jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union. He died in Moscow in 1928.

Adrift

Goldman was at first sympathetic to the new Soviet Union and its communist government. She became disillusioned, however, after witnessing the blatant disregard of civil liberties by Vladimir Lenin's (1870–1924) revolutionary government led by the Communist Party that banned all private property giving the government total control of the economy. By 1921 Emma fled the Soviet Union. She managed to obtain British citizenship by marrying a Welsh miner sympathetic to her plight. She spent the final two decades of her life traveling between England, Canada, and France, speaking out for her own humanist brand of anarchism.

Goldman wrote My Disillusionment in Russia in 1923 and published her autobiography, Living My Life, in 1931. By 1934 the political mood in the United States had changed as the fear of communism had declined. The aging Emma was allowed to return for a ninety day speaking tour. She lectured in sixteen cities, from New York to St. Louis. She spoke out against both German fascism (government marked by dictatorship, government control of the economy, and suppression of all opposition) and Soviet communism (government in which the state controls the economy and all property and wealth are shared equally by the people) to produce world opinion against them.

Goldman left the country as she had arrived, an anarchist and a radical who spoke on her own terms. Upon her death in 1940 at the age of seventy-one, the U.S. government granted permission for Goldman's body to be returned to the country for burial at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.

For More Information

Books

Chalberg, John. Emma Goldman: American Individualist. New York: Longman, 1991.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. "Big Bill" Haywood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. New York: Times Books, 1994.

Walker, Martin. America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-Six Lives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Web Sites

"Emma Goldman." Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/20.html (accessed on August 15, 2004).

"William Haywood." The National Archives Learning Curve.http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhaywood.htm (accessed on August 15, 2004).