Living My Life - Emma Goldman [202]
In the Federal Building we were joined by Harry Weinberger, our pugnacious lawyer and unfailing friend. He asked for immediate arraignment and release on bail, but our arrest had purposely been staged for the late afternoon after the official closing hour. We were ordered to the Tombs prison.
The following morning we were taken before United States Commissioner Hitchcock. The prosecutor, Federal Attorney for the District of New York, Harold A. Content, charged us with “conspiracy against the draft” and demanded that our bail be set high. The commissioner fixed the bonds at twenty-five thousand dollars each. Mr. Weinberger protested, but in vain. [ . . . ]
I wanted Sasha bailed out first because of his injured leg, which still needed treatment; I did not mind remaining in the Tombs, for I was resting and enjoying an absorbing book Margaret Anderson6 had sent me. It was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, by James Joyce.7 I had not read that author before and I was fascinated by his power and originality.
The Federal authorities were not anxious to let us out of prison. The three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of real estate offered as our bond was refused on a flimsy technicality by Assistant Federal Attorney Content, who declared that nothing but cash would be accepted. There was enough on hand to bail out one of us. Sasha, always gallant, refused to come out first, and therefore the bond was given for me and I was released. [ . . . ]
At last we succeeded in procuring the twenty-five-thousand-dollar cash bond demanded for Sasha, and on June 25 he was released from the Tombs. We were entirely at one regarding our trial. We did not believe in the law and its machinery, and we knew that we could expect no justice. We would therefore completely ignore what was to us a mere farce; we would refuse to participate in the court proceedings. Should this method prove impractical, we would plead our own case, not in order to defend ourselves, but to give public utterance to our ideas. We decided to go into court without an attorney. [ ... ]
It was Tuesday, June 27, at 10 a.m., when, together with Sasha, still on crutches, I walked through the crowded court-room in the Federal Building to face the prosecution. [ ... ]
June 27 happened to be my forty-eighth birthday. It marked twenty-eight years of my life spent in an active struggle against compulsion and injustice. The United States now symbolizing concentrated coercion, I could not have wished for a more appropriate celebration than to meet its challenge. It gave me much joy to feel that my friends had, in the excitement of the moment, not forgotten the event. On my return to court they presented me with flowers and gifts. The demonstration of their love and esteem on this special occasion moved me profoundly.
Active participation in our trial having been thrust upon us, Sasha and I determined to use it to best advantage. We decided to wring from our enemies every chance to propagate our ideas. Should we succeed, it would be the first time since 1887 that anarchism had raised its voice in an American court. Nothing else was worth considering in comparison with such an achievement.
I had known Sasha twenty-eight years. As far as one human being can foretell how another will act under stress or when confronted with the unexpected, I had always believed that I could in reference to him. But Sasha as a brilliant lawyer was a revelation even to me, his oldest friend. At the end of the first day I almost pitied the unfortunate talesmen whom he had been catechizing for hours. Like bullets Sasha fired his questions at the prospective jurymen, examining them on social, political, and religious matters, making them writhe at the exposure of their ignorance and prejudice, and almost convincing the victims themselves