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early hopes were that the attentat would provoke revolutionary uprising, a hope given luminous expression by Haymarket martyr August Spies’s death-house prophecy that “Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up” (Falk 23). Anarchists reasoned that not only would such individual acts of resistance, the attentats of Berkman and Czolgosz, for example, illuminate the social misery that compelled the assassin to violence, the acts must also humiliate existing authorities, revealing the limitations of their power by exposing their vulnerability. But even as Kropotkin himself regretted acts of violence, while never failing to sympathize with the conditions that impelled the actor to strike, Goldman too came to despair that any single attentat might illuminate the injustices that had nurtured the act. “Acts of violence, except as demonstrations of a sensitive human soul, have proved utterly useless,” she wrote to Berkman later, when both were exiled and living with the disappointments of their political hopes (Nowhere at Home, 95).

By the time of the publication of her collected essays in 1910, Goldman’s confidence in workers’ uprisings was deflated. In her essay “Minorities Versus Majorities,” she is skeptical of the revolutionary potential of the “masses” and convinced instead of their “inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 71). “The mass,” she regretted, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!” (ibid., 77). Change would come, she claimed, citing Ralph Waldo Emerson, as the masses were “schooled” (ibid., 78). Rather than believing in an epiphany of understanding jolting the “masses” into a revolutionary fervor, she placed her faith increasingly in an educated vanguard, the middle-class audiences to whom she lectured.

Goldman recalled, in her autobiography, the force of her conviction that she must continue her political work in English, among America’s native born. She was twenty-five years old, nine years in America. Her beloved Sasha was serving a twenty-two-year term for attempting to kill Frick. Newly released from a year’s imprisonment for “inciting to riot,” she found herself taken up by liberal middle-class sympathizers as a celebrated victim of political repression. Americans, too, she wrote, were “as capable of idealism and sacrifice as my Russian heroes and heroines ... From now on I meant to devote myself to propaganda in English among the American people.... Real social changes could be accomplished only by the natives” (Living My Life, 106).

Educating mainstream America in anarchist ideals was uphill work. Against her was the popular prejudice toward anarchism, fed by the violent acts of Berkman and Czolgosz. Against her as well was the failure of anarchism to provide a clear picture of the kind of anarchist society that would replace capitalism. Nor did the unwillingness of anarchists to embrace piecemeal reform on the way to a vaguely depicted paradise of mutual-aid societies sit well with the American working class struggling for the eight-hour workday. Goldman recounts some rueful struggling with such “crimes ... against the workers” in anarchist theory and resolves to do some “independent thinking” (ibid., 40).

As she became a more proficient English speaker and addressed audiences beyond the immigrant communities of the eastern seaboard, Goldman became increasingly a spokesperson for the reforms she believed were necessary to an emancipated, fully realized humanity. At the same time she embedded the ideals of European anarchism in the rich individualist tradition of America’s native soil—the revolutionary pamphlets of the insurrectionist patriot Tom Paine, the antipathy to the state and its liberty-crushing laws of the transcendentalist essayist Emerson, and, above all, the defiant individualism of Henry David Thoreau, whom Goldman called “the greatest American anarchist” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 56).

Thoreau’s essay Walden, recounting