Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Emma Goldman believed that restricting government power was impossible, making voting meaningless. She viewed the modern state as a violent and oppressive force. To achieve true freedom, individuals needed complete control over their work lives. Goldman argued that to be a genuine anarchist, one must embody these ideals. As a prominent activist, she lectured extensively across the United States. She faced imprisonment multiple times, was deported, criticized the political systems of both the US and USSR, declined to marry, and advocated for birth control.

Disappointed by America
In 1885, Goldman emigrated to the United States. In America, her hopes outran the dreary reality of working in a Rochester clothing factory and a brief, unhappy marriage to a fellow worker. A year after her arrival, she was shocked by the trial, conviction, and execution of labor activists falsely accused of a bombing in Chicago's Haymarket Square. After their deaths, Goldman declared that America "had proved most disappointing."

Starting Over
In 1889, on a grimly hot day in August, Emma Goldman left her sister's family and her husband, and the clicking tongues of the Rochester Jewish community, and boarded a train for New York.

Budding Anarchist
In New York City, Goldman joined the German anarchist movement and met one of its leaders, the brilliant editor and orator Johann Most, who helped shape Goldman into a witty, provocative speaker. She also met the man who would become the most important and abiding person in her life, Alexander Berkman. Her commitment to Berkman was boundless, and in 1892, she became an accessory in Berkman's attempted assassination of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in revenge for Frick's savage treatment of workers during the Homestead Steel Strike.

Revolution on the Russian Plan
Goldman and Berkman expressed an idea of revolutionary violence -- in the form of political assassination -- that derived from their Russian experiences. "They do believe that by getting rid of Frick they'll ignite a revolution," commented historian Oz Frankel. "But what neither of them have is a cultural translator, someone to explain to them the intricacies of this culture. They really don't understand that there is a difference between living in United States and living in Czarist Russia."

Defending an Assassin
Goldman would be entangled in another act of political violence nine years after the attempt on Frick's life. In 1901 President William McKinley was assassinated by a self-proclaimed anarchist, Leon Zcolgosz, who said he was inspired by one of Goldman's lectures. Goldman came to Czolgosz's defense (although they had no previous connection), saying, "As an anarchist, I am opposed to violence. But if the people want to do away with assassins, they must do away with the conditions which produce murderers." Throughout her life, Goldman would oppose violence in theory, but defend it in practice by shifting the blame for acts of violence onto the state and governing classes.

Fame
While Berkman languished in prison for fourteen years for his crime, Goldman embarked on a career of public speaking, quickly rising to national attention through her relentless cross-country lecture tours.

The Anarchists' Subculture
Goldman belonged to a unique and expressive subculture that flourished in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian Leon Litwack described its members as "some of the nation's most creative and iconoclastic artists, writers, and intellectuals, most of them libertarians, some of them revolutionaries," among them Roger Baldwin, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, Lincoln Steffens, Eugene Debs, "Big Bill" Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John reed, Margaret Sanger and Eugene O'Neill. According to Litwack, they shared a "rejection of bourgeois culture and... embrace of such causes as the labor movement, sexual freedom, feminism, socialism, and anarchism."

Taking Up Unpopular Causes
From 1906-1917, Goldman published an influential anarchist magazine, Mother Earth, devoted to politics and literature. Its high-spirited prose, Goldman wrote, "would voice without fear every unpopular cause." One of her purposes in publishing an anarchist monthly, according to historian Dan Georgakas, was "to reanimate an anarchist movement that had been on the defensive since the assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist."

Goldman was probably the most accomplished, magnetic speaker of her time in the United States. A labor organizer and anarchist leader, she crisscrossed the county lecturing on anarchism, economics, drama, birth control, free love, and women's emancipation. Everywhere she attracted enormous crowds who became spellbound by her rhetoric. In 1893, a terrible year of economic crisis during which urban children were dying of hunger, she addressed an enormous demonstration in New York City's Union Square, urging her listeners to invade food stores and take what they needed to feed their families

 in a vivid example of the anarchist principle of direct action. The police dragged Goldman off the protest stage and sent her to the prison on Blackwell's Island for two years. 

An Early Exposé of Soviet Communism
For Goldman the betrayal of the revolution was unspeakable. She wrote a series of articles for the New York World exposing the harsh political and economic conditions in Russia. Her account of her experiences in the new Soviet Union, My Disillusionment with Russia, was, she said, "denounced by American radicals of almost every camp." Throughout the 1920s and 30s she continued her efforts to expose the Bolshevik regime as a reactionary dictatorship based on terrorism and persecution.

Life in Exile
In exile, Goldman and Berkman eventually settled in France. Berkman lived in Nice, where he died in 1936. Goldman lived in St. Tropez, where she wrote her epic autobiography, Living My Life (1931). On its publication, The New York Times advised readers "to pay less attention to Goldman's politics and to read the book as a human document of the most absorbing interest." Not everyone agreed. Another critic attacked the memoir as a "thousand dull pages of fornication and fanaticism."

One Last Fight
Sixty-seven years old, Goldman turned her attention to one last fight -- a doomed war against fascism in Spain. In the summer of 1936, Spanish workers, peasants and anarchists had beaten back a military insurrection led by General Francisco Franco, and began to lay the cornerstones of a far-reaching anarchist society. Goldman made three visits to Spain during the course of the war, acting as publicist and fund-raiser for Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. But the anarchist revolution was short-lived. The victory of Franco and the Nationalist forces came as a staggering blow. Goldman later said the Spanish Civil War had influenced her more profoundly than her experience in Russia.