Living My Life - Emma Goldman [126]
Upon my release I was met by Max, Hippolyte, and other friends, with whom I went to the Isaak home. The charges against the comrades arrested in the Chicago raids had also been dismissed. Everyone was in high spirits over my escape from what they had all believed to be a fatal situation. “We can be grateful to whatever gods watch over you, Emma,” said Isaak, “that you were arrested here and not in New York.” “The gods in this case must have been Chief of Police O‘Neill,” I said laughingly. “Chief O’Neill!” my friends exclaimed; “what did he have to do with it?” I told them about my interview with him and his promise of help. Jonathan Crane, a journalist friend of ours present, broke out into uproarious laughter. “You are more naïve than I should have expected, Emma Goldman,” he said; “it wasn’t you O‘Neill cared a damn about! it was his own schemes. Being on the Tribune, I happen to know the inside story of the feud in the police department.” Crane then related the efforts of Chief O’Neill to put several captains in the penitentiary for perjury and bribery. “Nothing could have come more opportunely for those blackguards than the cry of anarchy,” he explained; “they seized upon it as the police did in 1887; it was their chance to pose as saviours of the country and incidentally to whitewash themselves. But it wasn’t to O’Neill’s interest to let those birds pose as heroes and get back into the department. That’s why he worked for you. He’s a shrewd Irishman. Just the same, we may be glad that the quarrel brought us back our Emma.”
I asked my friends their opinion as to how the idea of connecting my name with Czolgosz had originated. “I refuse to believe that the boy made any kind of a confession or involved me in any way,” I stated; “I cannot think that he was capable of inventing something which he must have known might mean my death. I’m convinced that no one with such a frank face could be so craven. It must have come from some other source.”
“It did!” Hippolyte declared emphatically. “The whole dastardly story was started by a Daily News reporter who used to hang round here pretending to sympathize with our ideas. Late in the afternoon of September 6 he came to the house. He wanted to know all about a certain Czolgosz or Nieman. Had we associated with him? Was he an anarchist? And so forth. Well, you know what I think of reporters—I wouldn’t give him any information. But unfortunately Isaak did.”
“What was there to hide?” Isaak interrupted. “Everybody about here knew that we had met the man through Emma, and that he used to visit us. Besides, how was I to know that the reporter was going to fabricate such a lying story?”
I urged the Chicago comrades to consider what could be done for the boy in the Buffalo jail. We could not save his life, but we could at least try to explain his act to the world. [ . . . ]
“Leon Czolgosz and other men of his type,” I wrote in my article [in Free Society], entitled: “The Tragedy of Buffalo,” “far from being depraved creatures of low instincts are in reality supersensitive beings unable to bear up under too great social stress. They are driven to some violent expression, even at the sacrifice of their own lives, because they cannot supinely witness the misery and suffering of their fellows. The blame for such acts must be laid at the door of those who are responsible for the injustice and inhumanity which dominate the world.” [ ... ]
The police and the press were continuing their hunt for anarchists throughout the country. Meetings were broken up and innocent people arrested. In various places persons suspected of being anarchists were subjected to violence. In Pittsburgh our good friend Harry Gordon1 was dragged out into the street and nearly lynched. A rope already around his neck, he was saved at the last moment by some bystanders who were touched by the pleading of Mrs. Gordon and her two children. In New York the office of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme was attacked by a mob, the furniture demolished, and the type destroyed. In no