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By Root 2474 0

noticed with unease that Goldman had moved beyond the single-minded focus of the German-, Russian-, and Yiddish-speaking immigrants of the East Coast. Goldman was addressing the liberal audiences of native-born reform-minded professionals—doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, many of them affluent and aristocratic patrons, now including communities on both coasts and in the midlands. These were the liberal intelligentsia of the professional middle class whom Goldman now considered in the vanguard of social change. She had learned the influence wealthy liberals could wield, an influence that helped keep alive the American anarchism she preached. A well-placed complaint in the ears of socially prominent liberals in any far-flung city could halt the kind of repressive police injunction against the “notorious” Emma Goldman’s speaking that might spoil the best-planned lecture tour. These tours were where audiences filled the coffers that fed Mother Earth not only by paying the price of admission but also by buying up the pamphlets of anarchist essays Goldman brought with her. Goldman was educating the middle class.

Mother Earth went to press with a “nest egg” of $250 from the progressive Russian theater troupe Goldman had sponsored in America (Living My Life, 312). Subtitled “a monthly magazine devoted to social science and literature,” the magazine’s cover offered a picture of the backs of a fanciful Adam and Eve, standing under the tree of knowledge. With their chains cast off behind them, they greeted a rising sun on the distant horizon, their feet on the open road that led to the new dawn. The mission statement of the opening issue extended the embrace of anarchism to all free thinkers, libertarians, and socially conscious aesthetes: “Mother Earth,” announced the first issue, “will endeavor to attract and appeal to all those who oppose encroachment on public and individual life. It will appeal to those who strive for something higher, weary of the commonplace ... to those who long for the tender shade of a new dawn for humanity free from the dread of want, the dread of starvation in the face of mountains of riches (Mother Earth, Mar. 1906, 4).

The journal, Goldman’s “dearest child,” as she often referred to it, also provided its peripatetic publisher with a “family,” including, among others, fellow publisher and radical anarchist journalist Max Baginski; Harry Kelly, a printer with a union background; American anarchist Leonard Abbott; Czech anarchist Hippolyte Havel; the anarchist theorist Voltairine de Cleyre; and, of course, Alexander Berkman, whose painful reentry to life outside prison began with writing for Mother Earth. With some of these comrades, she experimented in collective living arrangements, although the ideal of honoring individual wills and mutual needs proved impracticable. Other problems in the extended family of anarchists and artists were perhaps also inevitable. The loss of a primary focus on economic materialism and the defense of middle-class liberals as an embryonic vanguard made Goldman seem less revolutionary than other anarchists liked. At the same time her literary taste, formed by nineteenth-century realism in her youth, was too conservative for many new modern writers, whose experiments in atonality, abstraction, and anomie were unsatisfying to her. Goldman published, among others, the nineteenth-century poetry of Samuel Butler, Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, James Russell Lowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She gave space to poems by Anna Louise Strong and to Alice Stone Blackwell’s translations of Maxim Gorky’s poetry. Believing that literature claimed its importance as it exposed social problems, she chastised the “art for art’s sake” escapism of the New York literati. As Mother Earth bequeathed the voice of literary experimentalism to other journals, Max Eastman’s The Masses published the leftist literary avant-garde in America.

These criticisms aside, Mother Earth was a brave, dissident voice, preaching political and social change, while those who lectured to sustain