Living My Life - Emma Goldman [311]
I entered Canada as unheralded as I had England two years previously. In Montreal I learned that no English anarchist had been heard in Canada for a great many years. The only active people were the Yiddish-language group, but they had no experience in organizing English lectures. [ ... ] The Toronto anarchists were more numerous and better organized. They were carrying on intensive propaganda in Yiddish and exerting an influence in their community, but they sadly neglected the natives. They were eager, however, to assist me to any extent with my program of English lectures. [ ... ]
Dear members of my family came to visit me from the States, and it was a great joy to be within their reach, even if they had to come to me instead of my going to them. Not that the opportunity was not offered me. Various friends were eager to smuggle me across the border. With my picture in every rogues’ gallery in the United States, I could not have remained there long without being recognized, and there was no object in hiding. Those of my friends and comrades who could afford it would come to see me. For the rest, I never liked sensation for its own sake. There still was a large place in my heart for my erstwhile country, regardless of her shabby treatment. My love for all that is ideal, creative, and humane in her would not die. But I should rather never see America again if I could do so only by compromising my ideas. [ ... ]
A note from Peggy Guggenheim on my return to Toronto expressed surprise that I had not answered Howard Young’s letter regarding my autobiography. Had I changed my mind about permitting him to raise a fund to enable me to write the book? He was planning to proceed with it and she would open the subscription with five hundred dollars. I replied that I had never received Howard’s letter, but it was all right for him to go ahead. Yet I should prefer to have my old friend W. S. Van Valkenburgh in charge of the hard work the appeal would entail. I knew that if energy and indefatigability could avail, Van was sure of success. With Peggy Guggenheim and Howard Young as my first sponsors, Kathleen Millay as the official secretary, and Van to do the heavy correspondence, the project was finally launched to secure funds for my writing the “master-piece that would set the world afire.”
Meanwhile my Toronto comrades kept on insisting that I was wanted in their midst. They had never believed that their city could respond so warmly to anarchist propaganda. They urged that I make Toronto my permanent home or that I remain there several years at least. [ ... ]
My family sent cash as their birthday gifts. The two Bens, Big and Little, and other friends had also remembered me on the occasion. I would have enough to keep going for part of the summer. I thought I would rest up for a while and then buckle down to prepare a new lecture course. But I lost all desire for a rest with the impending murder of Sacco and Vanzetti.4
The first knowledge of their arrest had reached me in Russia; then nothing more till I was in Germany. So overpowering were the proofs of their innocence, it seemed impossible that the State of Massachusetts would repeat in 1923 the crime Illinois had committed in 1887. Surely some progress had been made in America in the past quarter of a century, some change in the minds and hearts of the masses to prevent the new human sacrifice, I reasoned. Strange that I, of all people, should have thought so. I who had lived and struggled in the United States for more than half my life and had witnessed the inertia of the workers and the unscrupulousness and the inhumanity of the American courts! With our Chicago men innocently slain, with Sasha doomed to twenty-two years for an offence that legally called only for seven, with Mooney and Billings buried alive on perjured testimony, the victims of Wheatland and Centralia still in prison, and all the others I had seen railroaded! How could I have believed that Sacco and Vanzetti, however innocent, would escape American “justice”? The power of suggestion