Living My Life - Emma Goldman [13]
In her essay “The Modern Drama,” Goldman denies that propagandistic literature can adequately represent “modern, conscious social unrest” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 241) and turns to the theater for the “leaven of radical thought and the disseminator of new values” (ibid., 242). The middle class might be able to insulate itself against the sufferings of the poor and against the hypocrisies and stultifying repressive force of its own prejudice and conventions; but the stage and its living representation of social misery bring home this painful reality even to self-satisfied audiences. For example, Goldman argues, when George Bernard Shaw’s character Undershaft declares that “the worst of crimes is poverty” and that “all the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his play is far more effective as political instruction than all of Shaw’s socialist tracts (ibid., 261). Other modern playwrights achieve similar force. Ibsen, “the supreme hater of all social shams,” wars against all false idols, paving the way for woman’s emancipation in A Doll’s House, performing “the last funeral rites over a decaying and dying social system” (ibid., 257) in An Enemy of the People, with “the regenerated individual, the bold and daring rebel” rising out of its ashes.
Lecturing on the social significance of modern drama, Emma Goldman had fixed yet another string to her bow. The comprehensiveness of her reform vision was enthralling. One young woman who became a social reform worker wrote, “Can you imagine the effect she had on an East Side girl of seventeen who knew nothing of the world of culture? She introduced me to Strindberg, Shaw, and Ibsen. I used to travel clear across town to hear her lecture Sunday nights on literature, birth control, and women” (Anarchism and Other Essays, vii). While all of her interests cohered in the primary value she placed on individual freedom, she insisted that such freedom was in essence aesthetic, political, and sexual, a mixed brew all her own.
5. MOTHER EARTH—“THE DEAREST CHILD”
While she was establishing a national reputation on the lecture circuit, Emma Goldman fulfilled a long-standing ambition and founded her own journal. Like herself, Mother Earth was “woven of many skeins,” an anarchist journal of impressive range and breadth that, with “Yiddish perseverance and boundless enthusiasm” (Living My Life, 312), she brought before the public in 1905. With revenues from her lecture tours, where she was finding a sympathetic audience willing to hear her out now that the McKinley assassination taint was fading, Goldman was able to supply the funding that kept the always financially precarious journal in print for more than a decade. Publishing Mother Earth represented a milestone for her. Bringing this dream for “an independent radical spokesman in the United States” (ibid., 312) to fruition signaled a personal victory over the depressive inactivity that followed the McKinley assassination. At the same time, the journal provided a means of constructing an anarchist platform that combined Goldman’s interest in social and cultural issues. Through Mother Earth and the community of activists it gathered, Goldman became the spokesperson for her kind of American anarchism, one that kept alive the theoretical insights of the European anarchists, but was free of a single-minded focus on propaganda for working-class consciousness and insurrection that had been the earlier focus of the immigrant communities. As she so often had reason to observe, her kind of anarchism was as interested in the “internal” as well as the “external,” in psychological well-being as well as economic improvement. She intended to keep Mother Earth “free from party politics,” “to voice without fear every unpopular progressive cause, and to aim for unity between revolutionary effort and artistic expression” (ibid., 312).
No surprise, then, that when he emerged from fourteen years in prison, Alexander Berkman