Living My Life - Emma Goldman [12]
She was jolted from what she called “spiritual death” after the execution of Czolgosz (Living My Life, 206) by events in Russia, where the czar was violently repressing insurgents. Awakened out of her depressive lethargy by a sense that in her motherland others were struggling against tyranny, she resolved that she would use her “greater access to the American mind,” her steadily growing confidence as an English speaker, to “plead the heroic cause of revolutionary Russia.” She had befriended politically engaged American reformers such as the settlement worker Lillian Wald and the patrician reformer Lucy Stone Blackwell. At the same time new Progressive era sentiment was more responsive to political dissent, directing its fire against urban political corruption and the appalling conditions among the poor, crowded into the cities’ tenement slums. When the suffering of the Russian revolutionaries promoted some sympathy for socialists among middle-class liberals, Goldman was able to arrange lectures in New York for the “grandmother” of the Russian revolution, Catherine Breshkovskaya. The prominent Republican William Dudley Foulke became president of the newly reorganized Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom.
Goldman was meeting rich and influential people as well through her sponsorship of a progressive Russian theater group whose American tour she had arranged. Disguised as a Russian gentlewoman in reduced circumstances, she played her part in many tea parties in Chicago, where none of the fashionable theater patrons understood they were entertaining the notorious anarchist. Not all of Goldman’s friends were pleased by her new prominence. Like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, some of her comrades believed she was too easily accommodating the middle class. When Berkman was at last released from prison in 1906 and reunited with Goldman, he discovered the girl he remembered changed in uncongenial ways: “Her mind has matured, but her wider interests antagonize my old revolutionary traditions.... Her friends and admirers crowd her home and turn it into a sort of salon. They talk art and literature ... even she has been infected by the air of intellectual aloofness” (493). Indeed the familiar Lower East Side neighborhood of immigrant kaffeeklatsches in backroom saloons was vanishing. But Goldman might have quarreled with him that these literary and artistic interests were new. Aesthetic passion was as real to her as sexual response, and she traced the provenance of her interests again to early childhood.
In a revealing anecdote Goldman offers in her autobiography (39), she describes a visit to the opera with anarchist Johann Most, in the early days of her romantic infatuation with him. Moved by the music, Goldman recalls her earlier encounter with opera as a child, so impressing Most with the passionate delivery of her memory that Most prophesies that she will replace him one day as a great public speaker (40). Listening to the young Emma Goldman, Most had heard a compelling force of conviction in her voice, one that would infuse her oratory with passion in the service of anarchism. Most, as Goldman recalls him, seems to have understood that the wellsprings of her political idealism nurtured as well a love of beauty. To the comrade who reproached her for spirited dancing at a party after a political meeting, Goldman responded: “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things” (ibid., 42). For Goldman the right to beauty was as important as the right to freedom itself. Just as physical passion was a force of self-expression, so too was aesthetic passion. “I cannot imagine a free society without beauty,” she wrote in exile to a friend, “for of what use liberty, if not to strive for beauty?” (Nowhere at Home, 99). Just as sexuality provided the adhesion that fixed individuals in social relations with one another, so too Goldman believed that the aesthetic response could be the conduit by which the “beautiful