Living My Life - Emma Goldman [191]
On the evening following the explosion there were just fifty people at my meeting, the rest of the audience consisting of detectives. The atmosphere was very tense, everybody fidgeting about, apparently in terror of another bomb. In my lecture I dealt with the tragedy of the afternoon as proving more convincingly than theoretic dissertations that violence begets violence. Labour on the Coast had been opposed to the preparedness parade, and union members had been asked not to participate. It was an open secret in San Francisco that the police and the newspapers had been warned that something violent might happen if the Chamber of Commerce kept insisting on the public demonstration of its mailed fist. Yet the “patriots” had permitted the parade to take place, deliberately exposing the participants to danger. The indifference to human life on the part of those who had staged the spectacle gave a foretaste of how cheaply life would be considered should America enter the war.
A reign of official terror followed the explosion. Revolutionary workers and anarchists were, as always, the first victims. Four labour men and one woman were immediately arrested. They were Thomas J. Mooney and his wife, Rena, Warren K. Billings, Edward D. Nolan, and Israel Weinberg.2 [ . . . ]
To charge these men with responsibility for the preparedness-parade explosion was a deliberate attempt to strike Labour a deadly blow through its most energetic and uncompromising representatives. We expected a concerted response in behalf of the accused from the liberal and radical elements, regardless of political differences. Instead we were confronted by complete silence on the part of the very people who had for years known and collaborated with Mooney, Nolan, and their fellow-prisoners. [ . . . ]
It was a desperate situation. Only Sasha and I dared speak up for the prisoners. But we were known as anarchists and it was a question whether the accused, of whom only Israel was an anarchist, would wish to have us affiliated with their defence; they might feel that our names would hurt their case rather than do them good. I myself knew them but slightly, and Warren K. Billings I had never met. But we could not sit by idly and be a party to the conspiracy of silence. We should have come to their assistance even if we had thought them guilty of the charges, but Sasha knew all of the accused well and he was absolutely certain of their innocence. He considered none of them capable of throwing a bomb into a crowd of people. His assurance was sufficient guarantee for me that they had had no connexion whatever with the preparedness-parade explosion. [ . . . ]
Ben, who had arrived from New York upon the completion of his prison term, was violently opposed to my remaining in San Francisco to finish my lecture series. My meetings were under police surveillance, the hall filled with hordes of detectives, whose presence kept my audiences away. He could not stand defeat; the mere handful of faithful friends in our hall, holding a thousand, was too much for him. Something else also seemed to be on his mind. He was more than usually restless and he besought me to discontinue my lectures and leave the city. But I could not go back on my engagements and I stayed on. I succeeded in raising at my meetings a hundred dollars and in borrowing a considerable sum for the defence of the arrested labour men. But so terrified was San Francisco that no attorney of standing would accept the case of the prisoners, who had already been