Living My Life - Emma Goldman [208]
The threat of the sailors evidently had an effect on the Ambassador, with the result that President Wilson was moved to prompt action. Whatever the message of the President to Governor Whitman, our delegation found the latter in a very receptive mood. Moreover, quantity is always appreciated by aspiring politicians, and the labour delegation consisted of a hundred men, representing nearly a million organized workers of New York. With them were Morris Hillquit6 and Harry Weinberger, who impressed upon the Governor that Alexander Berkman did not stand alone, and that his extradition would be resented by labour all through the United States. Mr. Whitman thereupon decided to telegraph District Attorney Fickert for the records of the case and promised to postpone final action until he had thoroughly acquainted himself with the indictment against Sasha.
It was a victory indeed, though it did only temporarily delay proceedings. But instead of sending the requested documents, the San Francisco prosecutor wired Albany that “the Berkman extradition would not be pressed for the present.” We had known all along that Fickert could not afford to produce the records, since they did not contain a scintilla of evidence to connect Sasha with the explosion. [...]
America, only seven months in the war, had already outstripped in brutality every European land with three years’ experience in the business of slaughter. Non-combatants and conscientious objectors from every social stratum were filling the jails and prisons. The new Espionage Law7 turned the country into a lunatic asylum, with every State and Federal official, as well as a large part of the civilian population, running amuck. They spread terror and destruction. Disruption of public meetings and wholesale arrests, sentences of incredible severity, suppression of radical publications and indictments of their staffs, beating of workers—even murder—became the chief patriotic pastime.
In Bisbee, Arizona, twelve hundred I.W.W.’s were manhandled and driven across the border. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, seventeen of their comrades were tarred and feathered and in a half-dead condition left in the sage-brush. [ . . . ] Through the length and breadth of the country stalked the madness of jingoism. One hundred and sixty I.W.W.’s were arrested in Chicago and held for trial on charges of treason. [ . . . ] There was hardly a city or town in the wide United States where the jails did not contain some men and women who would not be terrorized into patriotic slaughter. [ . . . ]
The assaults on life and on free speech were supplemented by the suppression of the printed word. Under the Espionage Law and similar statutes passed in the war fever the Postmaster General had been constituted absolute dictator over the press. Even private distribution had become impossible for any paper opposed to the war. Mother Earth became the first victim, soon followed by the Blast, the Masses, and other publications, and by indictments against their editorial staffs.
The reactionaries were not the only element responsible for the patriotic orgy. Sam Gompers8 handed over the American Federation of Labor to the war baiters. The liberal intelligentsia [...] all shared in the glory. The Socialist war phobia, the resolutions of their Minneapolis Conference, their patriotic special train, draped in red, white, and blue, their urging of every worker to support the war, all helped to destroy reason and justice in the United States.
On the other hand, the Industrial Workers of the World and those socialists who had not gone back on their ideals had by their blind self-sufficiency in the past also helped to sow the seeds of the crop they were now reaping. As long as persecution had been directed only against anarchists, they had refused to take notice or even to comment