Living My Life - Emma Goldman [16]
Meanwhile, Emma Goldman and her comrades watched with mounting alarm as the drumroll of militarism in the United States intensified following the outbreak of World War I in Europe. In December 1915 Mother Earth denounced this swelling of patriotic fervor that was calling for intervention in Europe, and Goldman lectured widely across the country on “Preparedness to the Road to Universal Slaughter.” As Wilson’s government inched closer to war, calling it “the war to end all wars” and “the war to make the world safe for democracy,” Mother Earth called on the American working class to resist: “Workers alone can avert the impending war; in fact all wars; if they will refuse to be a party to them” (ibid., Mar. 1917, 10). Goldman told her audiences that the capitalist war was fought to enrich “the privileged few and help them to subdue, to enslave and crush labor” (Morton, 84).
In spite of the war propaganda maintained by a cooperative mainstream press, men did not immediately volunteer to join the hostilities. With war declared and a million-man army sought, only 73,000 men responded in the first six weeks, a lack of enthusiasm that made the antiwar efforts of the small dissident minority seem even more threatening. While Congress was debating Selective Service legislation, Goldman and Berkman organized a No Conscription League with branches in many American cities, the meetings often scenes of near-violent clashes with soldiers and sailors charging the platforms. When the Selective Service Act was passed in June 1917, requiring all men between the ages of twenty and thirty to register for the draft, Mother Earth was published with black borders, and men crowded the journal’s office in New York City to ask for advice. At such times the warnings of J. Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department’s new director of a radical-surveillance branch, that Emma Goldman was “the most dangerous woman in America” may have seemed prescient.
The Espionage Act of June 1917 made it illegal to encourage disloyalty to the military or to obstruct the draft, and issues of Mother Earth were impounded by the postal authorities. Along with other radical publications like Max Eastman’s The Masses and Berkman’s own publication the Blast, published out of San Francisco, Mother Earth ceased publishing. Its last issue of August 1917 never reached subscribers. The cessation of publication was painful for Goldman, who wrote, “A struggle of over a decade, exhausting tours for its supports, much worry and grief ... and now with one blow its life has been snuffed out” (Living My Life, 642). A more modest publication, the Mother Earth Bulletin, kept some avenues of communication open within the radical community from October 1917 to May 1918, when it too was banned from the mail. In these pages the anarchist Goldman defended the Russian Marxist Bolshevik October Revolution, which swept Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government from power in 1917. Although apprehensive that in Soviet Russia “the same monster is being set up” and that “in the end it will be the same delusion,” she urged anarchists to rally to defend the infant revolutionary government from being attacked by “capitalistic and imperialistic bloodhounds” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 261).
In 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act, prohibiting “disloyal, scurrilous and abusive language about the government.” Some nine hundred people would be imprisoned for violation of the congressional acts passed to quell dissent during war-time, among them the progressive reformer and socialist Eugene Debs, who was not released until 1921. Among the first to be arrested were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were imprisoned for conspiracy to encourage others to avoid the draft.
If anarchist agitators were not enough, established authority had additional reason to be fearful in those years. First the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia raised alarm, followed by labor unrest that spread across America with the end of the war. In 1919, a general strike was declared