Living My Life - Emma Goldman [22]
Home, if she had one, was America, where she had left behind family and friends who supported her financially and emotionally. To an American friend she wrote about her desire to return to the home she missed. That home was among the polyglot socialist and libertarian immigrant communities, among liberal settlement workers and reformers whose America, she believed, permitted “adventure, innovations, experimental daring, which, except for Russia, no European country does.... It is this surcharged, electric, and dynamic atmosphere which permeates its writers, poets, and dramatists,” she wrote to Berkman. “Europe is hoary with age; it sticks in its centuries of traditions; it dares nothing” (Nowhere at Home, 235). Most of her efforts to return had been fruitless. But after an impressive roster of artists and scholars intervened on her behalf—among others, John Dewey, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis—she was granted a ninety-day visa in 1934, albeit with conditions that she confine her lectures to literature. Emma Goldman crossed the border in February 1934 at Niagara Falls, where a customs official noticed “a grandmotherly person with a blue twinkling eye” (Chalberg I).
Although the initial welcome home was encouraging, the lecture tour was poorly handled, with bookings into large, expensive halls where at times only a handful of rows were occupied and those by the middle aged and middle class, a younger audience kept out by the ticket price. Still echoing sentiments that accompanied the reviews of her autobiography, some friendly mainstream press seemed to suggest that as the old anarchist tiger had been defanged by failure and passing years, kindness was appropriate. The New York Herald Tribune called her “our old friend,” and the Washington Herald observed that her legendary wit had become “more nimble with increasing age” (Drinnon 280). The Communists, whom she had enraged with her criticism of the Soviet Union, were unforgiving, suggesting not only that she was lecturing to fill coffers to feed a lavish exile in the south of France, but also that her “reactionary” politics would smooth the way for fascism in the United States. But even as she was being reviled by the Communist Daily Worker, one of the Hearst chain, in an excess of ignorance, reminded its readers that “Red Emma” was “for many years the leading Communist in the United States” (ibid., 280). Goldman’s tour revealed the anomalies of her situation—that in her anarchist opposition to centralized state power, she would draw fire from entrenched positions at opposite ends of the political spectrum. A writer for The Nation defined the irony of this stance. Saying nay to the twin behemoths of capitalism and communism, Goldman had become “a symbol of the ultimate social cleavage, of differences that cannot be bridged” (3/21/34, 320). The disappointment over audiences aside, America had become home, and Goldman was desolate when at the end of her ninety-day visa, despite efforts made on her behalf, she was compelled to leave the United States. To one friend she wrote, “for a revolutionist and internationalist it is indeed disgraceful to be rooted to the soil of one country. Perhaps one can not adjust oneself easily in later years as one does in one’s youth. Whatever the reason I have to admit defeat. The ninety days of my return dispelled whatever doubts I had on that score. I know now I will remain an alien abroad for the rest of my life” (Drinnon 290).
A year after Goldman