Living My Life - Emma Goldman [307]
The applause was interrupted by loud protests. Some diners jumped to their feet and demanded the floor. They never would have believed, they said, that the arch-rebel Emma Goldman would ally herself with the Tories against the Workers’ Republic. They would not have broken bread with me had they known that I had gone back on my revolutionary past. It was growing late. The evening meant too much to me to have it end in a row. We were planning a meeting in Queen’s Hall, I informed the audience, and there we all should have opportunity to discuss the matter in detail. [...]
Owing to the elections and the approaching holidays, our meeting had to be postponed till January. My friends insisted that the backing of a numerous committee was indispensable to the moral success of our undertaking. I chafed at the delay and resented the idea of a committee. [ ... ]
In my public career I had been affiliated with groups only temporarily. I worked for them, not with them. Whatever value my activities had in America was due to my free-lancing and independent position. My London friends urged that my first large public appearance must have the proper support. The dinner had already called attention to my presence in London and to my purpose. The meeting would pave my way for further efforts. After all, they knew best how to reach the British public, and I was willing to follow their advice.
For two weeks I bombarded with letters every name on the list of the prospective committee, but the response was negligible. Most of them did not even reply. [...]
My circle of acquaintance kept enlarging, and invitations to luncheons, teas, and dinners began to pour in. Everyone was most hospitable, attentive, and cordial—all very pleasant if I had come to England for social entertainment only. But I had come for a purpose. I wanted to arouse the sensibilities of fair-minded Englishmen to the purgatory of Russia, to stir them to a concerted protest against the horrors parading as Socialism and Revolution. It was not that my hosts and their friends were not interested or that they questioned the facts I presented. It was their remoteness from the Russian reality, their lukewarmness to conditions they could not visualize and hence did not feel.
The Labour leaders were callous. In the words of a British Socialist, “It would spell political disaster to my party to declare to its constituents that the Bolsheviks had slain the Revolution.” [...]
When I first called on Professor Harold Laski,2 he expressed the opinion that I ought to take some comfort in the vindication anarchism had received by the Bolsheviki. I agreed, adding that not only their regime, but their stepbrothers as well, the Socialists in power in other countries, had demonstrated the failure of the Marxian State better than any anarchist argument. [...] In America I had never met such lack of response to any appeal. Laski thought I would find even the most radical elements reluctant to oppose the Bolsheviki. They were too enthusiastic about the Revolution to draw lines of demarcation. In time I might interest the labour ranks. He would do his best to aid me; he would invite his friends for the next Sunday afternoon to hear my story. Once more hope sprang from what seemed a hopeless and futile quest.
It was impossible for me to speak dispassionately about Russia, but on this occasion I sought to suppress all personal feeling. I spoke in a conversational tone and as objectively as I could. At the conclusion of my talk most of my questioners demanded whether I could point out “any political group more liberal than the