Neander97 / Historical Trivia: Emma, "Red Emma," Goldman was many things--a feminist, anti-suffragette, a writer, and an incredible public speaker--but first and foremost, she was an anarchist. . . . It is no mere coincidence that in the 1960s, twenty years after her death in 1940, Emma Goldman once again sprang into the public's consciousness.

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EMMA GOLDMAN, 1869-1940

Emma, "Red Emma," Goldman was many things--a feminist, anti-suffragette, a writer, and an incredible public speaker--but first and foremost, she was an anarchist. Not coincidentally, her life in many ways paralleled the life of anarchism as a movement. Anarchism itself, although its roots dated much earlier, was born in 1871 just two years after Goldman; when Mikhail Bakunin, a Russia revolutionary, split the international socialist movement in two, between the anarchists, who followed Bakunin, and the Communists/Socialists, who followed the teachings of Karl Marx. Goldman's death in 1940 came just a few short months after the demise of the anarchist inspired Spanish Republic in 1939.

It is no mere coincidence that in the 1960s, twenty years after her death in 1940, Emma Goldman once again sprang into the public's consciousness. Given the brief flowering of the New Left, with its emphasis on decentralism and rejection of the fallacies of the Old Left; given the emergence of the Libertarian Movement, anarchism's twentieth-century stepchild, with its general but sweeping tendency to reject centralism and bureaucratic hierarchies; given the rise of the civil rights' movement, the womens' movement and the green movement, to name but a few; it is, indeed, little wonder that Emma Goldman has been seized upon as a role model by activists throughout the West.

In 1919, at the peak of the Red Scare, Emma Goldman, in the company of hundreds of "radicals," was exiled to Soviet Russia by the United States government. During the thirty years that she resided in the United States, Goldman had earned the fear and loathing of conservative American, and the admiration, and at times love, of the nation's dispossessed, with her taunting attacks on government, big business, and war. In her writings, as a pamphleteer and editor of Mother Earth magazine, and through her stirring and biting oratory, Goldman defended causes ranging from free speech to free love, from the rights of striking workers to homosexual rights, from the right of access to birth control to equal protection under the law for women. To much of middle class America she was both the "bogeyperson" incarnate and the symbol of the new woman. Emma Goldman flaunted her lovers and love affairs, she smoked in public, and proudly marched off to prison after her conviction for advocating resistance to the draft during the First World War. Her advocacy of human rights at the expense of the government and state was not, however, limited to critiques of the liberal west. Following her deportation to Revolutionary Russia, Goldman, holding true to her anarchical philosophies, was not slow to speak out against the excesses of Soviet tyranny--calling out to the world that oppression was oppression whether dealt out by Czarist cossacks or Soviet goon squads.

To say that Red Emma attracted controversy would be no understatement. Teddy Roosevelt called her a "madwoman... a mental as well as a moral pervert." The New York Times said she was a "mischievous foreigner... apart from the mass of humanity". The San Francisco Call characterized Goldman as a "despicable creature... [a] snake... unfit to live in a civilized country." Goldman was hounded for much of her life by two of the most notorious law enforcement officials in American history: Anthony Comstock and J Edgar Hoover. In the United States, she was jailed for her activism on numerous occasions--1893, 1901, 1916, 1918, and in 1919--on charges ranging from inciting to riot to advocating the use of birth control to opposition to World War I. During her deportation hearing, the American government called her the "ablest and most dangerous" anarchist in the country, while just a few short months later the Soviets found Goldman to be an irrepressible, irascible irritant. In addition to United States and Soviet Russia, Red Emma's activism led to her deportation from Holland and France, while, literally, dozens of other nations denied her entry into their lands.

So ardent was Goldman's fervor in support of those causes dear to her political philosophies, that Goldman even attracted the ire of the radical movement itself. She opposed women's suffrage, believing that the vote would prove to be nothing more than a placebo that would divert the feminist movement from the more important, fundamental concerns of economic and social justice. Goldman's adamant belief in a woman's right to choice, compelled her to cry out against the tyranny, so often, inherent in conventional marriage and led her to tout the virtues of "free love". To the Leftist establishment of her day, many of Goldman's causes were politically incorrect. Many in the mainstream Left, deemed Goldman's ideals to be, at best, bourgeois-inspired. This, a judgement rendered by political theorists, who placed their faith in the betterment of humanity, solely, in the cure-all solution of class warfare.

She was not, however, without her defenders and advocates. Kate Richards O'Hare, a socialist who occupied a neighboring jail cell with Goldman, said "the Emma Goldman that I know is not the Propagandist. It is Emma, the tender, cosmic mother, the wise understanding woman, the faithful sister, the loyal comrade. . . . Emma don't believe in Jesus, yet she is the one who makes it possible for me to grasp the spirit of Jesus." William Marion Reedy of the St. Louis Mirror said this: "there is nothing wrong with Miss Goldman's gospel that I can see except this: SHE IS ABOUT EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS AHEAD OF HER AGE!" To the thousands of workers, whom she helped to organize into unions and syndicates, she seemed little less than a demi-god. Her ideological mentors included Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Some of her acquaintances included Wobbly organizers "Big" Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, writers like Eugene O'Neil and Jack London and socialists like John Reed and Eugene Debs. Red Emma's writings and oratory exerted a tremendous influence on Margaret Sanger and Roger Baldwin, the founders of two of the most important institutions of contemporary American Liberalism, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU respectively.

Yes, it is no mere coincidence that twenty years after her death Red Emma Goldman once again sprang into the public's consciousness. It is little wonder that universities offer courses of study on Goldman's politics, that magazines and political groups adopt her name, that feminists brigades carry banners embroidered with her slogans, that vendors in Moscow's Red Square sell T-shirts bearing Goldman's portrait. Over a quarter of century has passed since her death, and yet one can still say, as did Meridel LeSueur, one of her legion of biographers, that Emma Goldman seems "a woman of the future."

A New Declaration of Independence (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/project.html)

by Emma Goldman

[Published in Mother Earth, Vol. IV, no. 5, July 1909.]

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

The mere fact that these forces--inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians. Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread, and many of her daughters are driven into the street, while thousands of tender children are daily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving men and women, realizing the great injustice and brutality of this state of affairs, earnestly and boldly do hereby declare, That each and every individual is and ought to be free to own himself and to enjoy the full fruit of his labor; that man is absolved from all allegiance to the kings of authority and capital; that he has, by the very fact of his being, free access to the land and all means of production, and entire liberty of disposing of the fruits of his efforts; that each and every individual has the unquestionable and unabridgeable right o free and voluntary association with other equally sovereign individuals for economic, political, social, and all other purposes, and that to achieve this end man must emancipate himself from the sacredness of property, the respect for man-made law, the fear of the Church, the cowardice of public opinion, the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious, and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life. And for the support of this Declaration, and with a firm reliance on the harmonious blending of man's social and individual tendencies, the lovers of liberty joyfully consecrate their uncompromising devotion, their energy and intelligence, their solidarity and their lives.

Sources:

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. EMMA GOLDMAN: A LIFE OF ANARCHY (1983).

Chalberg, John. EMMA GOLDMAN: AMERICAN INDIVIDUALIST (1991).

Drinnon, Richard. REBEL IN PARADISE: A BIOGRAPHY OF EMMA GOLDMAN (1961).

Falk, Candace. LOVE, ANARCHY, AND EMMA GOLDMAN (1984).

Goldman, Emma (1869-1940). LIVING MY LIFE, 2 volumes (A.A. Knopf, 1931).

Goldman, Emma. VISION ON FIRE: EMMA GOLDMAN ON THE SPANISH REVOLUTION (1983).

Goldman, Emma. A WOMAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (1979).

Goldman, Emma. RED EMMA SPEAKS; SELECTED WRITINGS AND SPEECHES (1972).

Shulman, Alix Kates. TO THE BARRICADES; THE ANARCHIST LIFE OF EMMA GOLDMAN (1971).

Solomon, Martha. EMMA GOLDMAN (1987).

Waldstreicher, David. EMMA GOLDMAN (1990).

Wexler, Alice. EMMA GOLDMAN IN EXILE: FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION TO THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1989).

Wexler, Alice. EMMA GOLDMAN IN AMERICA (1984).

Wexler, Alice. EMMA GOLDMAN: AN INTIMATE LIFE (1984).

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