Living My Life - Emma Goldman [15]
As the foremost anarchist publication in the English language in America, the journal hosted an ongoing forum in which such theorists as Goldman, Berkman, de Cleyre, Baginski, Coryell, and Kelly defined anarchism and anarchist communism, criticized statist socialism, and explained anarchism’s position on “defensive violence”; it offered regular excerpts from major libertarian writings, from the anarchist Kropotkin to the philosopher Nietzsche and the writer Oscar Wilde. Works that might otherwise have reached far fewer readers, like the educator and anarchist Francisco Guardia Ferrer’s journal The Modern School, were excerpted. In 1910 Mother Earth published Goldman’s own collected essays. Two years later, when no other publisher for Alexander Berkman’s finely hewn Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist could be found, the Mother Earth publishing company found the money.
The magazine published commentaries on pressing current issues such as free speech, child labor, education, white slave traffic, Zionism, and legal defense for radicals under indictment. It was alone in exposing the brutality of America’s jails, with firsthand accounts by those who had been there. The magazine flourished also as a form of anarchist bulletin board with reports of state trials of anarchists from all over the world, as well as reports of international and national anarchist meetings, notes coming in from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, England, Russia, Argentina, China, and Japan.
While she traveled, Goldman remained in continual contact with the magazine’s home office, posting accounts of her lectures at various sites across America; in many of these reports her inimitable voice gave Mother Earth the feeling of a family letter. From St. Louis, she complained about some comrade’s regrettable indifference to “cleanliness and beauty,” ending “I cannot even for her sake [raising funds for Mother Earth] speak in dingy little halls, dark and gloomy, with the dust and smoke making it impossible to breathe” (Mother Earth, May 1907, 132)-Occasionally family quarrels that broke out on its pages revealed the fault lines of more serious divisions. One quarrel surfaced when Ben Reitman, Goldman’s road manager and lover, reported a London meeting with Peter Kropotkin, who worried aloud that the American anarchists were becoming too “utilitarian,” too “respectable” (ibid., Oct. 1910, 252). Two months later Voltairine de Cleyre complained in the same pages that she had been booked into “respectable halls” during her lecture tour to address the professional middle class, halls whose rentals required a ticket of admission that few working people could afford. De Cleyre, who chose a life of spartan simplicity, insisted that anarchists take their message to the working class and implied that she might cheerfully breathe the “dust and smoke” that offended Goldman in service of that greater good (ibid., Dec. 1910, 323).
In response to de Cleyre, Goldman defended the “respectable halls” she had come to know, and with them defended the middle-class liberals as a vanguard. “The pioneers of every new thought rarely come from the ranks of the workers,” she wrote in a letter to Mother Earth, suggesting that the economic exigencies of their daily lives made them less likely to grasp theoretical truths. “Besides,” she added, in an ironic reference to the Marxist call to workers’ revolution, “it is an undisputed fact that those who have but their chains to lose cling tenaciously to them. The men and women who first take up the banner of a new liberating idea generally emanate