Living My Life - Emma Goldman [194]
On our way to New York we stopped off in Concord. I had always wanted to visit the home of America’s past cultural epoch. The museum, the historic houses, and the cemetery were the only remaining witnesses of its days of glory. [ . . . ]
We visited Frank B. Sanborn, the biographer of Henry David Thoreau, the last of the great Concord circle.5 [ . . . ] He talked with reverence of Thoreau, the great lover of man and of beast, the rebel against the encroachments of the State on the rights of the individual, the supporter of John Brown when even his own friends had denied him. [ . . . ]
Sanborn’s estimate of Thoreau bore out my conception of the latter as the precursor of anarchism in the United States. To my surprise, Thoreau’s biographer was scandalized at my remark. “No, indeed!” he cried; “anarchism means violence and revolution. It means Czolgosz. Thoreau was an extreme non-resistant.” We spent several hours trying to enlighten this contemporary of the most anarchistic period of American thought about the meaning of anarchism.
From Provincetown I had written Frank P. Walsh about the San Francisco situation, telling him that I would go to Kansas City to talk the matter over further if there was any chance of his taking charge of the Mooney defence. His reply awaited me in New York. He could not accept my suggestion, Walsh wrote; he was involved in an important criminal case in his own city, and he had also undertaken to line up the liberal elements in the East for the Woodrow Wilson campaign.6 He was of course interested in the San Francisco labour cases, his letter continued; he would soon be in New York and take the question up with me; perhaps he would be able to make some useful suggestions. [ . . . ]
At the Wilson campaign headquarters in New York, presided over by Frank P. Walsh, George West, and other intellectuals, I had a long talk with Walsh about the Mooney case. He seemed much impressed and he assured me that he would like to step in and do something for the prisoners. It was a serious situation, he said, but a far graver issue was facing the country—the war. The militarist elements were anxious for Wilson to get out of office so they could have their own man as President. It was up to all liberal-minded and peace-loving persons to re-elect Woodrow Wilson, Walsh emphasized. [ . . . ]
I left Walsh with a feeling of impatience at the credulity of this radically minded man and his co-workers in the Wilson campaign. It was an additional proof to me of the political blindness and social muddle-headedness of American liberals. [...]
Persecution of birth-control advocates went merrily on. Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, a trained nurse, and their assistant, Fanya Mandell, were rounded up in a raid on Mrs. Sanger’s clinic in Brooklyn. [ . . . ]
The various hearings and trials in connexion with this matter proved that at least the judges were being educated. One of them declared that he distinguished between persons who gave out birth-control information free because of personal conviction and those who sold it. Certainly no such differentiation had been made previously, in William Sanger’s case, in Ben’s, or in mine. Even more striking proof that the agitation for family limitation was beginning to have an effect was given by Judge Wadhams during the trial of a woman charged with theft. Her husband, tubercular and out of work for a long time, was unable to support his large family. In summing up the causes that had led the prisoner to crime Judge Wadhams remarked that many nations in Europe had adopted birth-regulation with seemingly excellent results. “I believe we are living in an age of ignorance,” he continued, “which at some future time will be looked upon aghast as we now look back on the dark ages. We have before us the case of a family increasing in numbers, with a tubercular husband, the woman with a child at her breast and with other small children at her skirts, in poverty and want.”