Living My Life - Emma Goldman [3]
Awakened to a political life by the Haymarket affair, Goldman left her factory work and an early failed marriage in Rochester for the street corner, café, and saloon society of lower Manhattan, where she found a home among the European immigrants who had brought their anarchism and socialism with them to the new country. Emma Goldman’s work would carry the ideals of these immigrants from the self-imposed isolation of their insular community, where they preached to one another in their native tongues, into the mainstream of American intellectual debate.
She was not, in fact, the bomb-toting virago depicted by the popular press. But though she loathed violence, she would not condemn the radicals who practiced it, remaining loyal to the unsuccessful attentat, or revolutionary act of violence, committed by Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, her pal, as she called him—her lover, confidant, and lifelong friend. In 1892, when she was twenty-three, as she described fully in her memoir for the first time, Goldman helped Berkman plan and carry out an attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick, the Carnegie Steel plant manager who presided over the bloody confrontation between Pinkerton guards and strikers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. As she described in her autobiography, Goldman made an awkward and unsuccessful attempt to procure funds for Berkman’s attack by walking the streets one night as a prostitute. But for lack of funds to buy the railroad ticket to Pittsburgh, Goldman might well have been by Berkman’s side when he fired his gun. While Frick survived his bullet wounds, Goldman endured Berkman’s long and often brutal imprisonment as a personal vigil. Faithful to her friend, as she described in her autobiography, she once ascended a lecturer’s dais and lashed her fellow anarchist and former mentor Johann Most with a horsewhip because he had ridiculed and disparaged Berkman’s act.
Although Emma Goldman was never connected to the attempt on Frick’s life, nine years later in 1901 her notoriety as a dangerous rebel was sealed when the young Polish immigrant Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President William McKinley. Czolgosz, who acted alone and whose connection to anarchism was vague, was alleged to have told reporters “I am a disciple of Emma Goldman. Her words set me on fire.” Goldman herself called the statement “a police fabrication.” Although she had met Czolgosz briefly, and he had indeed heard her speak, “no living soul ever heard Czolgosz make that statement,” she wrote, “nor is there a single written word to prove that the boy ever breathed the accusation” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 88). Still, the association with assassination was indelible, and named a firebrand, she came to know the insides of many jails, charged with inciting to riot or for disseminating birth control information in violation of the Comstock laws, laws that had since 1873 defined all public discussions of human sexuality as obscene and illegal. But it was not until she counseled young men to resist the draft in the wave of jingoism accompanying the United States’ entry into World War I that she encountered the full weight of the justice system of her adopted country, a system that ultimately found reasons to nullify her citizenship and deport her.
2. THE “BEAUTIFUL IDEAL”—EMMA GOLDMAN’S ANARCHISM
As an anarchist, Emma Goldman would have brooked no illusions about the state and its agent, U.S. Attorney General Alexander Palmer, nor anticipated from it any admirable administration of social justice. The founding principle of anarchism, she claimed, “is the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful as well as unnecessary” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 50). It made no difference if a government were run by kings