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By Root 2411 0

penned these reflections, she bore a greater loss. Alexander Berkman, terminally ill and in great pain, took his own life in Nice. Her lifelong friend, he had been her comrade in exile, a second self with whom to share the disappointments when the anarchist ideal they served failed to take fire in the masses they attempted to instruct. In correspondence with each other Goldman and Berkman voiced despair as they watched Stalinism and Nazism overcome and brutally destroy anarchist positions where they had taken root. Finally Goldman and Berkman believed it was not Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler who defeated anarchism, but the inadequacy of the people themselves. In such a mood of political hopelessness and personal loss, Emma Goldman was hardly likely to have anticipated that she might be revitalized. She was sixty-seven years old, separated by an ocean from family and friends on whom she was wholly financially dependent, and contrary to the innuendos of the Daily Worker, barely able to eke out a living on the proceeds of lecture tours, subject to continual harassment from governments that might find it politically inexpedient to tolerate her. The image of a society formed by workers in a benevolent network of mutual-aid associations could not have seemed more remote in Europe in 1936, a time when European democracies were busy making their peace with fascism, a menace that, even as she mourned Berkman’s death, was acquiring its most virulent shape.

Civil war in Spain shook Goldman free of the grief that followed Berkman’s death. While the working class in Germany and Italy had succumbed ignobly to fascism, here at last, it seemed, a brave people were resisting tyranny in the name of the “beautiful ideal” to which Emma Goldman had dedicated her life. Five years earlier in 1931 a popular vote in Spain supplanted the Spanish monarchy with a republic, a republic that was liberal, left-leaning, and supported by militant anarchists, who had learned their antipathy to repressive governments from a Spanish follower of Bakunin in the mid-nineteenth century. Consistent with some of the apocalyptic militancy of Bakunin, the anarchists had staged a series of violent insurrections in hopes of preparing the ground for social revolution. By 1933, grown contemptuous of the government they had intitially supported, Spanish anarchists boycotted elections, permitting a more conservative government to come into power. Although a tentative popular-front government emerged to unite the left, the government faced opposition from both flanks. Meanwhile, forces of reaction, a powerful coalition of reactionary church leaders, landowners, conservative industrialists, and the military, had taken alarm.

In July 1936, the right struck with an army coup that divided Spain in two. In the northern provinces of industrial Spain and in the great southwestern estates of Andalucia and Estremadura, the coup was defeated by the spontaneous action of workers. In the industrial city of Barcelona, where workers toiled in appalling misery in airless textile mills, and among the miners in the northern provinces of Asturias and Oviedo, an uprising of militant trade unionists in the first few days of the war resulted in a massive collectivization of industry. Trade unions and political parties formed armed militias democratically organized without rank and privilege to defend themselves against the “Nationalists,” fascist brigades under the leadership of Francisco Franco. In the countryside, particularly in Aragon where agrarian workers had labored in unrelenting poverty, a collectivization of the land ensued with stunning rapidity after the fascist uprising was put down. Against all expectation, an anarchist social revolution had taken place and, for a few months, was declaring itself to the world in northern Spain and along its eastern coast.

Emma Goldman was ecstatic. In August 1936, she was invited by the Spanish trade unionists, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and the more militant FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), to Barcelona to undertake English