Living My Life - Emma Goldman [144]
Before long, Orleneff had set a definite date for the performance. We rented the Berkeley Theatre, printed announcements and tickets, and, with the help of Stella and a few young comrades, set to work to fill the house. At the same time we arranged a gathering at 210 East Thirteenth Street,6 to which we invited a number of people we knew would be interested in the magazine venture we had in mind. [ ... ] When our friends left that night, the expected child had a name, The Open Road, as well as foster-parents and a host of others anxious to help in its care.
I walked on air. At last my preparatory work of years was about to take complete form! The spoken word, fleeting at best, was no longer to be my only medium of expression, the platform not the only place where I could feel at home. There would be the printed thought, more lasting in its effect, and a place of expression for the young idealists in art and letters. In The Open Road they should speak without fear of the censor. Everybody who longed to escape rigid moulds, political and social prejudices, and petty moral demands should have a chance to travel with us in The Open Road. [ ... ]
We had enough for the first number, which we decided to issue in the historic revolutionary month of March.7 What other free-lance publication had ever started with more? Meanwhile we sent out a general appeal to our friends. Among the responses we received one from Colorado bearing the heading: The Open Road.8 It threatened to set the law on us for infringement of copyright! Poor Walt Whitman would have surely turned in his grave if he knew that someone had dared to legalize the title of his great poem. But there was nothing for us to do except to christen the child differently. Friends sent in new names, but we did not find one expressing our meaning.
While visiting the little farm one Sunday, Max and I went for a buggy ride.9 It was early in February, but already the air was perfumed by the balm of spring. The soil was beginning to break free from the grip of winter, a few specks of green already showing and indicating life germinating in the womb of Mother Earth. “Mother Earth,” I thought; “why, that’s the name of our child! The nourisher of man, man freed and unhindered in his access to the free earth!” The title rang in my ears like an old forgotten strain. The next day we returned to New York and prepared the copy for the initial number of the magazine. It appeared on the first of March 1906, in sixty-four pages. Its name was Mother Earth. [ ... ]
With Mother Earth off the press and mailed to our subscribers, I left a substitute in my office and, together with Max, started on tour. We had large audiences in Toronto, Cleveland, and Buffalo. It was my first visit to the last-named city since 1901. The police were still haunted by the shades of Czolgosz; they were in force and commanded that no language but English be spoken. That prevented Max from delivering his address, but I did not permit the opportunity to pass without paying my respects to the police. The second meeting, the next evening, was stopped before we could get into the hall.
While still in Buffalo, we received the news of the death of Johann Most. He had been on a lecture tour and had died in Cincinnati, fighting for his ideal to the very last. Max had loved Most devotedly and he was quite unnerved by the blow. And I—all my early feeling for Hannes now perturbed me as if there had never been the bitter clash that separated us. Everything he had given me in the years when he had inspired and taught me stood before me now and made me realize the senselessness of that feud. My own long struggle to find my bearings, the disillusionments and disappointments I had experienced, had made me less dogmatic in my demands on people than I had been. They had helped me to understand the hard and lonely life of the rebel who had fought for an unpopular cause. Whatever bitterness I had felt against my old teacher had given way