Living My Life - Emma Goldman [2]
Writing her life story might have proved difficult. She had kept no diary. Although there had been a vast record of her writing and lecturing stored in the offices of Mother Earth, the journal she founded in 1905 and maintained through many busy years, these records had been destroyed by federal agents who systematically ransacked and looted the property of political radicals. Fortunately she had been a faithful and copious letter writer, and in response to her request more than a thousand of these were returned to her. Some letters to friends were meticulous accounts of her prison years—what she read, what she was fed, the gifts sent to her by loyal supporters, the campaigns she carried on for better conditions, the relations formed with other inmates. Other letters could provide testimony enough for her to recall her public life, years in which she was both witness to and a principal actor in the political convulsions that defined her time—workers’ strikes, riots, assassinations, the women’s rights movement, political repression, revolution, and exile. Five hundred more letters came from Ben Reitman, the man who had been for many years her publicist, road manager, and lover. In these she chronicled a response to a love affair in which she berated Reitman for betrayal, soothed his vanity when he was snubbed by the anarchist luminaries he hoped to impress, or frankly recalled the pleasures of his bed.
Goldman’s was a rich life to chronicle, the story of an intellectual and emotional journey of a Russian woman who became an American original, someone who combined the radical political traditions of nineteenth-century Europe with the insurgent individualism of the young American republic. The fusion she sought was an anarchism responsive to the changes in America in the early twentieth century, an anarchism that would transform the conditions of public and private life. To the call for radical reorganization of work life she inherited from European political tradition and to the conviction in the supremacy of individual liberty she found in the American literature of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, Goldman added advocacy of the birth control and free-love movements that had emerged out of nineteenth-century American anarchist and utopian communities. Without such reforms, she would argue, there would be no egalitarian emancipation of the whole of humanity.
The foundations of these beliefs, Goldman claimed in her autobiography, were laid in her earliest years in Russia when, as a child, her sympathies were stirred by the oppression of the peasants of her native Lithuania and the suffering of the political rebels, communists or anarchists, imprisoned or executed by the czars. While a young teenager in Russia, Emma Goldman had read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s widely influential 1863 novel, What Is to Be Done?, in which a young woman from the propertied Russian gentry escapes from the constraints of bourgeois marriage to claim romantic love and economic independence. Chernyshevsky’s heroine allies herself with the young radicals influenced by the European revolutions of 1848, rebels who sought to redress the great disparities of wealth in their own native Russia. To the young Emma Goldman, this sexually and materially emancipated model of womanhood was inspiring, chafing as Goldman was under the authoritarian rule of a patriarchal and often violent father.
In 1886, after she joined some of her family who had come earlier to Rochester, New York, Goldman’s sympathy for victims of social injustice was stirred into a lifelong commitment to political action by events in Chicago that became known to the world as the Haymarket Massacre. Four American anarchist revolutionaries, hanged in Chicago, had been held responsible without evidence for throwing a bomb that killed seven policemen. As the police opened fire, perhaps