CHAPTER ONE: PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED
Anarchists have long been associated, in the public mind, with political terrorism. Their advocacy or tolerance of violent resistance to political and economic oppression glaringly differentiated them from most socialists and other radicals. As the nineteenth century progressed, insurrection against increasingly well-armed and powerful governments became more obviously futile, dangerous, and counterproductive. In response, radicals organized political parties and labor unions; when these encountered repression, other revolutionaries refashioned the tactics of violence. "Propaganda of the deed," a term originally meaning insurrection and other forms of collective resistance, increasingly connotated the assassination, by an individual or small group, of a powerful, symbolic political or economic figure--an attentat.[i] Emma Goldman and her Mother Earth circle sponsored one of the radical movement's most sustained and forthright discussions of this tactic in the years before World War I. The controversy, however, gradually moved away from consideration of the actual impact of attentats on the real world and towards the subjective motivations and personal satisfactions of the attentateur. In the end, violent resistance became a subordinate, if still prominent, aspect of the anarchists' vision of social change.
I
Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892 transformed Emma Goldman's life and decisively shaped her philosophy of revolution. Berkman was one of Goldman's lovers, and Goldman was intimately involved in planning Berkman's attentat and in raising crucially important money. She longed to accompany Berkman to Pittsburgh, as Russian revolutionary women accompanied their men; but the lack of $50, Berkman's own insistance that Frick was not worth two lives, and his desire that Goldman remain free and publicize his deed and motives, prevented her. Although Goldman acquiesced, she was despondent at "the terrible fact that he he had no need of me in his last hour." Berkman's act, "for which he alone paid the price," inspired and haunted her for the rest of her life.[ii]
Berkman's attentat was motivated by the Homestead lockout. In an attempt to destroy the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, Frick locked out the workers at Carnegie's Homestead plant, fortified the grounds, and imported 300 heavily armed Pinkertons, thus starting a pitched battle that left over a dozen people dead and many more wounded. These spectacular events aroused the entire country, much of which was indignant against Frick. "To us it sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection," Goldman later wrote. "The native toiler had risen... we thought." It was the psychological moment for an attentat. Berkman first tried to construct a bomb, using a crowded tenement for his workshop; when this fizzled, he decided upon gun and dagger.[iii]
Berkman's motives ranged from the immediately practical to universal and transformative. The assassination of Frick, the anarchists thought, "would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy's ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of America had its avengers." Berkman considered Frick himself an "insignificant reptile" not individually worth a terroristic effort. Frick, however, symbolized an entire system of oppression; his death would weaken and discredit that system and embolden the workers for further action. The attentat itself would "imbue discontent with conscious revolutionary purpose" and enlighten both the striking workers and the country at large about the meaning of anarchism. Workers and commentators alike would be impressed by Berkman's selfless devotion to the cause of humanity. "The People," in Berkman's striking religious imagery, "could not fail to realize the depth of a love that will give its own life for their cause." As the first attentat in the United States, it would inspire emulation and perhaps even ignite the social revolution. At least it would win the strike; when Frick died, Carnegie would settle with the union, and even those workers blind to the deeper meaning of Berkman's act would understand its practical effects.[iv] This would benefit the anarchists.
Berkman was intensely concerned with the ethical quality of his deed. As he wrestled with the moral implications of his attentat he offered contradictory justifications, simultaneously asserting that it was not murder and also that the ends justified the means. Berkman claimed both that killing Frick was not taking a human life and that taking some human lives was defensible and even necessary. Only the workers need be considered, Berkman thought. "The rest are parasites, who have no right even to exist.... All means are justifiable; nay, advisable, even to the point of taking life.... The removal of a tyrant is not merely justified; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist. Human life is, indeed, sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life.... Murder and Attentat are to me opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people." Revolutionists must "sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the People's cause.... Indeed, the more repugnant the means, the stronger the test of one's nobility and devotion."[v]
The results of Berkman's supreme deed were disappointing. His sacrifice did not inspire other attentats, much less incite the social revolution. Frick did not die and Carnegie did not negotiate. Instead, the workers were crushed and their their union was destroyed. (Berkman's act did not contribute to the union's destruction, which was inevitable once the governor mobilized the state militia. However, many contemporaries and subsequent historians blamed Berkman for alienating public opinion from the strikers.) The workers whose cause Berkman made his own suspected and misunderstood his motives; an imprisoned Homestead striker thought that Berkman sought vengeance for a sour business deal. The Homestead workers considered themselves respectable, law-abiding, American workingmen who were driven to armed self-defense by the outrageous acts of their oppressors; they vehemently repudiated Berkman and his act. Horrified, the general public associated anarchism with deranged terrorists. Berkman was showered with abuse even from some anarchist comrades. Johann Most, doyen of the anarchists, repudiated Berkman's act, thus splitting the anarchists and so enraging Goldman that she horsewhipped Most in public. For years afterwards some anarchists and Homestead workers slandered Berkman as an agent provocateur who had generated sympathy for Frick and indignation against the strikers; they asserted that Berkman had been quietly freed after his trial.[vi]
"Deeply humiliated" at Frick's survival, Berkman consoled himself that even if the strike had been lost, "our propaganda is the chief consideration. The Homestead workers are but a very small part of the American working class. Important as this great struggle is, the cause of the whole People is supreme. And their true cause is Anarchism. All other issues are merged in it; it alone will solve the labor problem. No other consideration deserves attention.... Properly viewed, the merely physical result of my act cannot affect its propagandistic value.... The chief purpose of my Attentat was to call attention to our social inequities; to arouse a vital interest in the sufferings of the People by an act of self-sacrifice; to stimulate discussion regarding the cause and purpose of the act, and thus bring the teachings of Anarchism before the world.... The conditions necessary for propaganda are there: the act is accomplished."[vii]
But yet greater disappointment awaited Berkman. Although Berkman believed that his public defense would magnify his act's meaning and impact, his trial was secret and precursory. Berkman's English was halting, his interpreter incompetent, and the judge harshly biased, so the workers never heard his explanation. Nor could his poor and marginal comrades influence the public. From every immediate and long-term perspective, therefore, Berkman's act was a crushing failure, a catastrophe for him, his friends, and the anarchists. His deed was also indelibly associated with a terrible defeat for labor. Under such circumstances, Berkman consoled himself that "true morality deals with motives, not consequences."[viii]
II
None of these considerations moderated Goldman's own stance. The year after Berkman's attentat Goldman was imprisoned for inciting a riot. Mindful that her mentor, Johann Most, had repeatedly suffered incarceration for incendiary utterances, Goldman usually used guarded and cautious language. Instead of overtly advocating provocative deeds, she predicted that workers would commit them at some future time if their demands were not met, thus disguising advocacy as a conditional prediction. But at a demonstration of the unemployed at Union Square in 1893, Goldman discarded her carefully prepared speech and urged starving workers to "go among the capitalists and rich people and ask for bread, and if they will not give it to you peacefully, then take it by force." She urged workers to procure arms and "demand what belongs to you"--not just bread and freedom but all the products of their labor. Like Berkman, Goldman believed that "society lies in its last convulsions" and hoped that some small incident would ignite the revolution. She vividly contrasted the luxury and debauchery of the rich with the misery and destitution of the poor. She denounced "capitalists who torture thousands to slow death in their factories" and "men whose fortunes have been built upon a foundation formed by pyramids of children's corpses." She demanded that the earth "be swept of these parasites," and, at a mass meeting celebrating her release from prison, predicted that "the future will be ours." The authorities "are working on their own coffins... Every Anarchist they send to jail or to death takes another spadeful of earth from the hole into which their carcasses will be placed."[ix]
After her regaining her freedom, however, Goldman no longer explicitly urged that other people commit violent deeds, or advocated a specific illegal act to a particular individual or audience. Anarchists "should not act on the advice of any outsider when they feel that it is their duty to perform something for the sake of their principles," she said. "If I felt it my duty to perform something of the kind I would do it without asking any one whatsoever about it; neither would I advise any person to do something for which they might have to forfeit their lives. We can all tell the difference between right and wrong, and that alone should govern us in our actions." She insisted that only revolution could achieve significant change, that police would not dare to shoot down workers who had armed in self-defense, and that "the time of reckoning is not far--a time when no concessions will be granted to the tyrants." She declared that "I do not advise anyone to rebel and place their lives in jeopardy, but put the situation before the working people and ask them to think and act for themselves." The oppressed would use violence whenever they felt it necessary; her advice could neither precipitate nor forestall this. Workers should resort to violence only under appropriate conditions as a last resort; the individual must decide. Violence, she said, was not an intrinsic part of anarchism. Methodists, Republicans, and believers in many other causes sometimes committed violent acts, which were not blamed on Methodists or Republicans in general, but on the individual. Anarchy stood for peace and the free and full development of human individuality; it was the antithesis of force. Goldman sincerely disliked violence, which she blamed on injustice and oppression: "If we were free we would talk of higher things."[x]
In fact, Goldman soon downplayed her incendiary utterances. In future years, when asked about her speech of 1893, she claimed that she had merely quoted Cardinal Manning's declaration that necessity knows no law and that a starving man has a right to his neighbor's bread. But this argument, based not on class but on necessity, did not attack capitalism, and is much tamer than her actual statement at the time. Goldman's alleged quote from Cardinal Manning is a myth. Goldman's friend Voltairine de Clyre, schooled in a convent, first mentioned Cardinal Manning in her speech "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation," delivered while Goldman was still in prison. Charles Mowbray, an English anarchist, noticed this quote and, at the mass meeting celebrating Goldman's release from prison, said that Goldman "dared to tell the masses, as Cardinal Manning himself has said, that a starving man has a right to share his neighbor's food." But Goldman's speech focused on the class war, called the workers to revolution, and urged them to appropriate everything they had created.[xi] Goldman viewed starvation as only an exaggerated example of the "normal" process whereby workers are deprived, insidiously or abruptly, of the necessities of life. If the labor theory of value was correct, workers would be fully justified in stealing all the luxuries they could lay their hands on; they need not wait until they were starving to steal, or content themselves with the bare necessities.
Goldman summarized her stance on public advocacy of violence in a private letter to her lover and manager Ben Reitman in 1910 after Reitman had appalled her by openly espousing violence. She reiterated her belief that "if no other method is left, violence is not only justifiable but imperative, not because anarchism teaches it, but because human nature does and must resist opppression." But talk is cheap, Goldman scolded Reitman; he should not advocate what he will not do himself. No one should advocate violence in the abstract because "intelligent violence.... implies discretion [and] judgment as to time and place." In an uncharacteristic outburst she said that "people do not commit an act because you tell them to, they are too damned cowardly for that." This must have stemmed from her frustration at her, and Berkman's, inability to conjure up a revolution with mere words, because ordinarily Goldman ridiculed people who obeyed orders. She also warned Reitman of the consequences of publicly advocating violence. "I tell you Ben, you are playing with fire, you will get yourself into prison for absolutely nothing at all, and the worst of it, you will not serve anarchism."[xii]
But if Goldman did not advocate terrorist acts after her release from prison, she did defend and extol them. Berkman's attentat, she said, had struck fear into the hearts of the capitalists, "showed to all who wish to see the real cause of the people's misery," and demonstrated that anarchists were not "fools or ruffians" but idealists who championed every person's "right to learn, study, enjoy, love and live according to his own desires." Goldman conceded that "violent acts do not change conditions unless a change has taken place in the minds of the people," but argued that attentats often implanted ideas that written and oral propaganda later cultivated. "In France the admirable acts of Ravachol, Henry, Valliant, Caesario and others have done more for the spreading of our principles than ten years of writing and speaking," she exclaimed. As a result of such deeds, anarchist papers had vastly increased their circulation and others had begun publication. Repression "cannot stop the tide from flowing on"; even "a gallows on every streetcorner" could not quell resistance. "The principles of those who died on the gallows or are languishing in prison are today discussed in the press, in the pulpit, and in the mansions of the rich," she thundered.[xiii]
Goldman insisted that "the acts of Berkman, Caeserio, Henri, Valliant, Pallas and other brave heroes were but the heralds of the coming Social Revolution." If other people emulated these men, despots would all perish. And other people, she fervently believed, would emulate these heroes. When Angiolilio assassinated the Spanish prime minister Canovas del Castillo (1897) in retaliation for Canovas's infliction of horrible torture on anarchists in Montjuich prison, Goldman said that "heroes like Golli do not ask permission of me or anybody else to do their duty as they see it. So long as tryants oppress mankind Gollis will be found to execute them.... They tell us that by despatching one tyrant we will not change society; that another tyrant will take his place. Yes, my friends, that is true, and another Golli will come up to meet every such new tyrant. Whenever there is a Caesar there must be a Brutus."[xiv]
European anarchists did kill several heads of state, but none of these acts achieved any significant reform, much less sparked revolution. Instead they generated intense persecution of anarchists and identified anarchists in the public mind with explosives and violence. This accumulated experience eventually changed Goldman's analysis of "propaganda of the deed" from a focus on concrete results to a concentration on subjective motivation, as evinced in another aspect of Goldman's response to Angiolillo's assassination of Canovas. Scrupulously avoiding hurting innocent people, Angiolillo killed without hatred. Making a distinction common to anarchists, he told Canovas's wife "I did not mean to kill your husband. I aimed only at the official responsible for the Montjuich tortures."[xv]
Goldman, who had publicly declared that she would kill Canovas if she were in Spain, approved of Angiolillo's deed: "He had acted while the rest of us had only talked about the fearful outrages." But since Berkman's deed five years before "I had ceased to regard political acts, as some other revolutionists did, from a merely utilitarian standpoint or from the view of their propagandistic value. The inner forces that compel an idealist to acts to violence, often involving the destruction of his own life, had come to mean much more to me. I felt certain now that behind every political deed of that nature was an impressionable, highly sensitized personality and a gentle spirit. Such beings cannot go on living complacently in the sight of great human misery and wrong. Their reactions to the cruelty and injustice of the world must inevitably express themselves in some violent act, in [a] supreme rending of their tortured soul."[xvi]
In March 1901 Goldman reiterated her belief that the attentateur's idealistic motivation, not the results of his act, counted. Assassins served a worthwhile purpose; "it is well that they exist, otherwise despots would reign supreme, and life be unbearable." Yet her support for assassinations stemmed from more than their practical effects. "I have and always will stand on the side of the one who has been courageous enough to give his own life in taking or attempting to take the life of a tryant, whether industrial or political," she said. "I am on the side of every rebel, whether his act has been beneficial or detrimental to our cause; for I do not judge an act by its result, but by its cause; and the cause of each and every rebellious act has been organized despotism on the part of society, and the innate sense of justice and a rebellious spirit on the part of the individual." She asserted that "the philosophy of Anarchy is an absolute foe to violence, therefore I do not advocate violence. An Anarchist who advocates violence as part of the teachings of Anarchy, has never properly understood its doctrines." She approved of acts of violence only because government "leaves no other method of propaganda." Goldman specifically repudiated rumors than she had renounced violence.[xvii]
When Leon Czolgosz, a man with tenuous anarchist connections, assassinated President McKinley later that year, the authorities demanded that Czolgosz implicate Goldman. They tortured him, asked him leading questions, and falsely quoted Goldman as repudiating him; when Czolgosz steadfastly maintained her innocence, they distorted his testimony. Goldman was arrested. The police did have some reason to suspect her. In the years 1893-1900 she had extolled anarchists who had assassinated the king of Italy, the president of France, and the prime minister of Spain; she also applauded Auguste Vaillant for throwing a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies and said that she "would have approved" the assassination of the Austrian Emperor. When Angiolillo had killed, she surmised that President McKinley worried that he might be next. Goldman repeatedly asserted that there was no difference between American "democracy" and the autocracies of Europe. She specifically accused McKinley of massacring American workers and Filipinos--acts resembling those that evoked anarchist attacks on European leaders. Asked in 1897 whether she would approve of the killing of President McKinley, she said evasively that "he is only a tool, a mouthpiece of Mark Hanna."[xviii] This was disingenuous because very few of the anarchists' targets were themselves towering figures. Berkman, we remember, regarded Frick as an "insignificant reptile." Rather, such targets represented important interests and had symbolic meaning.
Under such circumstances it is remarkable that Goldman stood by her principles--and by Czolgosz. She claimed that "he has wounded government in its most vital spot" by revealing that America's vaunted freedom and democracy only glossed over social wounds as raw as any in Europe. Yet her main defense of Czolgosz was not pragmatic. When most radicals harshly condemed him, Goldman snorted: "As if an act of this kind can be measured by its usefulness, expediency, or practicality. We might as well ask ourselves of the usefulness of a cyclone, tornado, [or] a violent thunderstorm." Attentats resulted from the impact of intolerable oppression on especially sensitive natures. Words could neither incite nor prevent such acts, which were a tragic waste of life; they would continue as long as "economic slavery... exploitation, and war, continue to destroy all that is good and noble in man." This was again somewhat ingenuous, because Goldman based her entire life enterprise on the assumption that words could change livesand inspire action. But Goldman createa a media sensation by declaring that while she sympathized with Czolgosz, she would nurse McKinley if he needed her services. (Goldman was a professional nurse.) Surprisingly, Berkman agreed; the oppressor had become human to him. A decade ago, he said, "it would have outraged all our traditions even to admit the humanity of an official representative of capitalism."[xix]
Goldman reiterated her contention that "I do not advocate violence; government does this, and force begets force." But her paeans to Czolgosz indicate that she regarded the lone assassin as a superior being. Although "thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant.... It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others." Such a person was driven by "an abundance of love and an overflow of sympathy with the pain and sorrow around us.... a love so strong that it shrinks before no consequence.... a love so all-absorbing that it can neither calculate, reason, investigate, but only dare at all costs.... My heart goes out to him in great sympathy, as it goes out to all the victims of oppression and misery, to the martyrs past and future that die, the forerunners of a better and nobler life."
She blamed such tragedies on those "responsible for the injustice and inhumanity which dominate the world."[xx]
Goldman's principled defense of Czolgosz cost her dearly. She could not get work as a nurse even under an assumed name, and found lodging only by concealing her identity. She became a pariah, and was herself disgusted with humanity. "More and more I withdrew into my own four walls," she later remembered. "The struggle for the necessities of existence became more severe.... I was again compelled to take piece-work from the factory." Her friend Abe Issak, editor of the anarchist Free Society, planned to eviscerate her article praising Czolgosz until her outraged protests pressured him into printing the article as she wrote it. Her stance had continuing repercussions; five years later, shortly after founding Mother Earth, she alienated many potential supporters when she dedicated the October 1906 issue to Czolgosz.[xxi] She and several others were arrested for holding a meeting to discuss Czolgosz and his deed. Goldman commemorated his death, like those of the Haymarket martyrs, throughout her life.
More immediately, her support of Czolgosz caused a jarring rupture with Berkman, still in jail for his attack on Frick. Berkman agreed with part of Goldman's analysis; he extolled "the beautiful personality of the youth, of his inability to adapt himself to brutal conditions, and of the rebellion of his soul." Berkman lamented that "it is at once the greatest tragedy of martyrdom and the most terrible indictment of society that it forces the noblest men and women to shed human blood, though their souls shrink from it." Yet Berkman felt that a truly significant attentat required social purpose and effect in addition to subjective and idealistic motivation. Revolutionary significance existed only when the victim was a "direct and immediate enemy of the people" and understood as such by the masses. "In that alone lies the propagandistic, educational import of an attentat" unless it was "exclusively an act of terrorism." Czolgosz's act did not undermine the state, frighten the authorities, change policy, or achieve any immediate political purpose. Its educational value was negated by the fact that the people did not perceive McKinley as their enemy. "In an absolutism the autocrat is visible and tangible," Berkman continued. "The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the source of democratic tyranny, and as such it cannot be reached with a bullet. In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people. Politics is but its handmaid. Hence the battle is to be waged in the economic rather than the political field." Berkman claimed that his own act was "far more significant and educational than Leon's" because it was "directed against a tangible, real oppressor, visualized as such by the people."[xxii]
Berkman insisted that the taking of human life, including that of an egregious oppressor, was never justified by mere subjective necessity or personal need--not even by the revolt of an anguished, individual soul fighting intolerable oppression. An attentat was worthwhile only if it had positive effects. This was an important departure from Goldman's new emphasis, even if Berkman was as deluded about these effects as was Goldman. The American working class execrated both Berkman and Czolgosz as deranged. The assassination of McKinley led to public hysteria, Post Office censorship, a political test for prospective immigrants, increased repression, and ferocious state and federal anti-anarchist laws.[xxiii]
Goldman, however, was stunned that Berkman used the same arguments against Czolgosz that Most had used against Berkman. "Most had proclaimed the futility of individual acts of violence in a country devoid of proletarian consciousness and had pointed out that the American worker did not understand the motives of such deeds," she later exclaimed. She herself insisted on "the value of Czolgosz's political act"; she argued that anarchists fought all injustice, political as well as economic, and that Berkman's deed was no more understood by the people than Czolgosz's.[xxiv]
III
Goldman's pronouncements on violence often blurred the line between advocacy, sympathy, explanation, and approval. In December 1906, responding to criticisms of Mother Earth's apotheosis of Czolgosz, Goldman said that "we are open and avowed revolutionists; but we defy anyone to produce a single line from any English Anarchist paper or magazine published within this country within the last twenty-five years where assassination is advocated or even implied.... Is sympathy for an unfortunate man identical with justification of or apology for the man's act? As real Anarchists we neither condemn nor justify; our business is to understand, understand, understand.... Government and its representatives assassinate liberty at every step. At last a man arises who embodies in himself all the revolt of the people--he strikes down one of the invaders." Goldman said that anarchists "neither advocate nor advise acts of violence" but leave such acts to individual judgment. But in 1907, at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, she and her friend Max Baginski introduced a resolution on "Individual and Collective Terror," unanimously adopted, that endorsed "the right of rebellion on the part of the individual, as well as on that of the masses." Only the most sensitive and tender spirits commit terroristic acts, which "together with their causes and motives, must be understood, rather than praised or condemned." During revolutionary periods, such as contemporary Russia, terrorism "serves a twofold purpose: it undermines the very foundation of tyranny, and kindles in the timid the divine spirit of revolt.... The Congress, endorsing this resolution, manifests its understanding for the act of the individual rebel, as well as its solidaric feeling with collective insurrection."[xxv]
Goldman did not limit the efficacy of violence to Russia or to revolutionary periods. In 1907 she said that Big Bill Haywood, then an official of the Western Federation of Miners, was acquitted of spurious charges against him because "the jury knew right well that the Western Miners thoroughly understood how to handle and use dynamite." Berkman expressed her sentiments when, commenting on the McNamara case in December 1911, he said that "I know that all life under capitalism is violence; that every moment of its existence spells murder and bloodshed." Berkman avowed that nonviolence was "the gospel to keep the slave in submission. As long as the world is ruled by violence, violence will accomplish results. Unfortunately so, but necessarily true." Goldman and Reitman both threatened violent retaliation for Reitman's near-lynching by government-sanctioned vigilantees in San Diego in 1912; Goldman directly threatened the chief of police with death if the vigilantees murdered Reitman.[xxvi]
America's leading anarchist again confronted the issue of violence after the Lexington Avenue explosion in June 1914. This grew out of the Ludlow massacre, a yet more gruesome replay of the Homestead lockout. Rockefeller's Colorado Coal and Iron Company had evicted striking workers from company housing, hired armed guards, and secured the services of the Colorado national guard. Braving the severe Colorado winter, the workers established a tent colony. On April 20, 1914, when most of the strikers were away on picket duty, the national guard poured coal oil on the tents housing their families, set them on fire, and machine-gunned the fleeing women and children. The national guard killed over twenty people that day, including three prisoners. Indignation against Rockefeller was widespread, and anarchists from the Mother Earth circle organized demonstrations in Rockefeller's hometown of Tarrytown, New York. The protesters were clubbed by police, abused by local residents, jailed, and sometimes tortured. Desperate and exasperated, some protesters prepared a bomb, apparently to kill Rockefeller; but it exploded prematurely in the tenement, nearly destroying the building and killing three anarchists and one other person.[xxvii]
Berkman exulted in the heroism of the victims. Managing Mother Earth while Goldman was on one of her fundraising and lecture tours, he filled the July issue with explanations and defenses of the attempted deed. Berkman extolled the dead bomb-makers as martyrs; indeed, historian Paul Avrich persuasively argues that Berkman masterminded the plot. Berkman's funeral speech enthused that "there are still men in the labor movement who will not stand quietly by when they themselves or other workers are persecuted, oppressed, and maltreated." The American worker had "no rights and no opportunities." His only recourse lay "in his determination to fight, in his consciousness of his economic strength, and in his power to organize a tremendous movement whose slogan will be direct action, with its final purpose, the general strike. And while we are advancing toward this most desired culmination, while we are approaching the Social Revolution, there will always be individuals, more intelligent, more determined and daring than the rest, eager to pave the way by acts of individual devotion and sacrifice." Since the Haymarket tragedy of 1886 anarchists "have taught the people that violence is justified, aye, necessary in the defensive and offensive struggle of labor against capital. They have freed the public mind, to a remarkable extent, from the superstition of bourgeois morality." Anarchists would "fight to the death, if need be, with the minority weapon more effective in the hands of an individual than is a whole company of armed thugs.... The power of economic solidarity of labor will ultimately knock the last master off the back of the last slave, and meanwhile--while labor gathers this power, its success will be hastened, its courage strengthened, by tempering oppression with dynamite."[xxviii]
Goldman, who was lecturing on the west coast, was appalled by both the act itself and Mother Earth's praise for it. "Comrades, idealists, manufacturing a bomb in a congested tenement house!" she later exclaimed. "I was aghast at such irresponsibility. But the next moment I remembered a similar event in my own life. It came back with paralyzing horror." When Berkman had manufactured a bomb to throw at Frick, "I had silenced my fear for the tenants, in case of an accident, by repeating to myself that the end justified the means.... It took years of experience and suffering to emancipate myself from that mad idea." She still believed that "acts of violence committed as a protest against unbearable social wrongs" were inevitable and that those who committed them were the most sensitive and caring people. "But though my sympathies were with the men who protested against social crimes by a resort to extreme measures, I nevertheless felt now that I could never again participate in or approve of methods that jeopardized innocent lives." Goldman exclaimed that "when I received copies of the July issue of Mother Earth, I was dismayed at its contents.... I had tried always to keep our magazine free from such language, and now the whole number was filled with prattle about force and dynamite. I was so furious that I wanted the entire issue thrown into the fire. But it was too late; the magazine had gone out to subscribers." At the time Goldman wrote Reitman that "as a free person," she could not "force a man who acts as editor to write what I want when I am miles away." Yet she never publicly criticized Berkman or the editorial stance of the publication of which she was editor. Indeed, Goldman did not repudiate violence; she deplored risking the innocent but did not oppose killing the guilty. She scolded Reitman that "my position is not against violence and never will be unless I become weakminded." Even if she did disapprove of a specific act, "I should still be on the side of the actionist because I hold that if society makes no provision for the individual, society must take the consequences." Her main public comment on the explosion was a telegram, published in Mother Earth, extolling the bomb-makers as "the conscious and brave spokesmen" of the oppressed and "victims of the capitalist system and the martyrs of labor."[xxix] Nobody said much about the non-anarchist victim of the explosion.
Goldman and Berkman also responded truculently to the Preparedness Day explosion in San Francisco in July 1916. Indeed, their comments on this event recapitulate their major justifications of political violence. Someone--no one ever found out who--threw a bomb into the militaristic Prepardness Day parade, killing ten people. Goldman, who was lecturing in San Francisco at the time, believed that only her chance postponement of her own lecture attacking "prepardness" saved her from a legal lynching. Worried that anarchists would be blamed for the bomb, and feared a repetition of the Haymarket executions. And true to form, the authorities instituted their usual reign of terror; as the newspapers howled for blood, the police arrested, threatened, and abused anarchists.
While disclaiming approval of the bomb, Goldman and Berkman nevertheless analyzed it in terms that approached justification. Goldman exclaimed that the "human sacrifice" of the European war and "the industrial conflict in the United States" killed and maimed far more victims than one puny explosion. She blamed not the individual who threw the bomb, but American society's "criminal indifference to human life" and "worship of the Golden Calf." Turning on itself, official violence generated retaliation that "strikes out blindly and sends terror into the craven hearts of the despoilers of the earth." Those who live by violence die by violence, she proclaimed; the prepardness advocates were responsible for the bomb. Berkman similarly blamed the explosion on "the murder psychology developed by the military preparedness agitation" which was "imbuing the minds of the people with national and racial antagonisms, with thoughts of hatred, violence and slaughter.... Terrible as the tragedy is, it is merely a foretaste in miniature of what the people may expect, multiplied a million times, from the Prepardness insanity."[xxx]
Goldman and Berkman composed a leaflet, "Down with the Anarchists," (significantly, perhaps, printed in The Blast but not in Mother Earth) claiming that "Anarchists hold life as the most sacred thing.... Anarchism means OPPOSITION to violence, by whomever committed, even if it be by the government. The government has no more right to murder than the individual." Individual anarchists sometimes committed violence, they admitted, but so did Democrats and Methodists. Despite these disclaimers, the bulk of the leaflet was devoted to extenuating and even praising individuals such as the one who threw the bomb. Individuals commit violence, Goldman and Berkman said, either because of economic need, itself a product of an inhuman social system, or out of resistance to degradation and oppression. Admitting that words do affect actions, they proclaimed that any vision of social betterment "makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot." If such these struggles resulted only "in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation." When a person with "a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men" learns "that his suffering and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings" he will, if especially sensitive, become violent. Such people "will even feel that their violence is social and not antisocial, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow sufferers." We "who ourselves are not in that terrible predicament" should not condemn those "who act with heroic self-devotion, often sacrificing their lives in protest.... The man who flings his whole life into the attempt, often at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs of his fellow men, is a saint compared to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his protest destroy other lives besides his own."[xxxi]
In the war years Goldman did more than defend the violent acts of others. Indeed, despite her apparent resolution to avoid advocating violence, she reiterated her position of 1893. In March 1914, Frank Tannenbaum, an anarchist affiliated with Mother Earth and the IWW, led hunger marches of the unemployed through the streets of Manhattan. Until he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Tannenbaum led as many as 1,000 men to various churches and demanded food, money, and shelter. Goldman herself urged one crowd to "march down to the mayor, march down to the police. March down to the other city officials. Make them tell you what they are going to do to give you food and shelter. Go to the churches, go the the hotels and restaurants, go to the bakeshops, and tell them they must give you something to keep you from starving." Radical journalist Lincoln Steffens, a sympathetic observor, claimed that she encouraged "the looting of the stores." When The New York Times asked her why she was not arrested for such statements, as she had been in 1893, Goldman replied that in 1914 the unemployed were more conscious of their victimization, and the authorites were consequently more cautious in repressing them. "Even the courts would not send a person to jail for a year for such an utterance, if made today, as I served a year for making then," she said. Goldman implicitly threatened violence if the police interferred with or attacked the marchers.[xxxii]
A few years later, when wartime inflation had seriously eroded the purchasing power even of employed workers, Goldman attacked "the speculators in hunger, war, and death" who prolonged the war by selling food and other necessities to the belligerents, thus driving up prices--and profits--at home. "The very idea of peace creates a panic in Wall Street," she charged. Thirty million Americans went hungry even in normal times, and the war had vastly increased this number. Goldman said that speculators destroyed tons of food or allowed it to rot in the fields rather than sell it at affordable prices. When New York's Governor Whitman belittled reports of widespread hunger and cavalierly advised workers to live within their means, Goldman compared him to the grain hoarder during the French Revolution who told the people to eat hay. "The man got all the hay he wanted and a rope around his neck in the bargain," she proclaimed. When East Siders marched and rioted over the shortage of affordable food, Goldman credited them with reducing the price of food. The rioters "have indicated the steps the people will have to take in the future to achieve their aim. These steps do not lead to the mayor's office, nor yet to petitions for various reform.... The masses must unite, they must show a determined, solid front. I said twenty-five years ago necessity knows no law. Necessity is slowly but surely teaching the people that they are entitled not merely to potatoes and onions but to all the luxuries they have created; to the beauties of life, to art and music. No one can given them that. They must learn to take it themselves."[xxxiii]
Goldman advocated violence whenever she concluded that self-defense or retaliation against official violence was imperative, or whenever a revolutionary situation potentially existed. Events in 1917 kindled her hopes that the United States might soon undergo a great transformation. When the United States entered World War I and enacted conscription, Goldman called for massive resistance and a general strike, predicted antimilitarist agitation among the troops, and advocated (as did SP leader Eugene Debs) an internationalist revolutionary war against capitalism. Inspired by the Russian revolutions of 1917, Goldman hoped, and occasionally ventured to predict, that similar provocations--brutal repression, wartime shortages, and conscription--would topple the American government. At the right psychological moment, she said in June 1917, the people would revolt "and the Judges, Mayer [the judge who had sentenced the first two anti-draft protesters, and was soon to send Goldman and Berkman to jail] and the other judges, will fly off the bench." Ecstatic when the Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky, she praised their confiscation of the land and the factories, and advocated similar measures in the United States. She hoped that her life and agitation would help fosterthe coming transformation.[xxxiv]
IV
Goldman's discussions of violence arose out of a social mileau characterized by industrial violence and working-class resistance. Many strikes of the era resulted in pitched battles between heavily armed forces; when capitalists hired thugs (often deputized) and enlisted local police and state militias, armed workers responded with attacks on company police and property. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Homestead lockout and strike, the West Virginia miners strike, and the Ludlow massacre were only spectacular examples of a widespread phenomenum. In Europe and the United States, anarchists executed heads of state and other important figures. Goldman's revered Haymarket anarchists had advocated defensive violence in The Alarm, while many immigrant anarchist groups manufactured bombs, stockpiled weapons, and used violence against their class enemies. Even conservative socialists such as Victor Berger urged that an armed working-class was the only safeguard for liberty.[xxxv]
Many of these incidents reveal a pattern. Radicals more readily resort to extreme language and action when mainstream society concedes the justice of their complaints and provides a language suitable for radical protest. Such social legitimation of protest encourages militant rhetoric and action. Major acts of political violence by oppressed groups often occur when a society or a ruling class has blatantly violated its own professed standards or ideals, or when a particular act of oppression is egregious even by the standards of the time. Berkman's attentat was evoked by the Homestead outrages, acknowledged as such by a wide spectrum of mainstream opinion; the Lexington avenue explosion resulted from the Ludlow massacre combined with state and private terrorism against those who protested it. Other working-class violent resistance, such as that of the McNamaras and the Structural Iron Workers, represented desperate attempts to preserve a threatened way of life. Indeed, recent historians have emphasized the frequently defensive nature of working-class resistance and language. Even workers who regarded themselves as respectable, law-abiding, and patriotic citizens protected cherished values with violence. Indeed, their violent means were often motivated precisely by their desire to preserve their social status and respectability.
Insurgent groups often grow more strident, radical, uncompromising, and bitter as their claims and demands win a measure of acceptance. This is why African Americans grew angrier after the historic civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965, why radical feminism spread after some important women's demands were being addressed, and why opposition to the Vietnam war became more intransigent even as it entered mainstream society. As long as dissidents are a radical fringe, receiving no validation or support from mainstream society, they doubt, on some level, the justice of their cause and the accuracy of their perceptions. But when the mainstream culture concedes the justice of some of their complaints and the accuracy of some of their insights, the radicals expect action. This, however, is usually halting, half-hearted, and insufficient, and therefore generates increased frustration and anger. De Tocqueville said that the most precarious time for an unjust regime is when it attempts to reform itself; similarly, a society risks upheaval when it acknowledges, but does not significantly redress, the grievances of a large segment of the population.
Goldman's support for political violence was organically related to her theory of individual and social change. The anarchists, even more than the Wobblies, emphasized the rights and duties of the individual as opposed to Socialist focus on the collectivity. When the Socialists advocated legal, peaceful, and gradual change, anarchists and Wobblies asked a question the Socialists could not answer except by considering workers abstractly as a class with a preordained historical task, rather than as concrete individuals with pressing human needs. What methods could an individual person, urgently suffering from intolerable abuse, justly use while awaiting organization by the working-class majority? As one IWW member asked Socialists, "What are your political methods going to do for the unemployed who are actually suffering? They want food, not politics."[xxxvi] Even if an individual worker was willing to patiently convert his fellows, enduring utmost deprivation until the inauguration of the co-operative commonwealth, his employer might object. Activists faced discrimination on the job as well as frequent police brutality even when engaged in ostensibly legal activities. Corporate spies, the blacklist, and the yellow-dog contract supplemented injunctions, police, and militia as instruments of class control.
Socialists, Wobblies, and anarchists constantly proclaimed that capitalism was systematic, organized violence against workers. Spectacular use of armed violence against the workers was, according to their philosophies, no different in principle from the ordinary operation of the system, also upheld by violence or the threat of violence. The distinction between defensive and offensive violence was therefore irrelevant. Workers need not wait until they were clubbed or shot or set on fire to revolt; they could resist at any time and by any means.
Goldman, Berkman, and their comrades effectively and intelligently argued for working-class violence. Like black militants of the late 1960s, the anarchists clearly asserted the right of individual self-defense against naked aggression, especially if this aggression was socially sanctioned. "The government," they said, "has no more right to murder than the individual." Goldman asserted that "the spirit of rebellion is the spirit of progress," and that non-violent, Tolstoyean resistance would fail. The events of history validate her claim that ruling classes never voluntarily surrender power; individuals and groups must seize liberty by their own exertions.[xxxvii] The anarchists eventually concluded that revolutions, in addition to being substantive events in their own right, were, more significantly, benchmarks consolidating changes that had already occurred, and that anarchy would triumph only after many revolutions. This, however, was an argument for revolution rather than against it. The anarchists correctly perceived that revolutions are usually ignited by some specific incident that reflects endemic conditions. No one could predict which incident would foment revolution. The anarchists repudiated the idea that a small vanguard party could conjure up a revolution or lead it once it started; they desired a popular, spontaneous uprising, sparked but not controlled by a militant minority. Revolution, therefore, stemmed partly from individual action; those conscious that oppressions was systematic rather than isolated must channel inchoate rebellion into coherent action. Tactics appropriate and necessary in a revolutionary situation were usually futile or self-defeating under other circumstances; yet no one could predict whether a revolutionary situation truly existed unless they tried to foment revolution. Socialist and communist parties, castigating anarchist spontaneity, have often defused revolt and sided with the ruling class against radicals in their own ranks.
Anarchist violence, Goldman believed, could have salutary effects short of total revolution. Revolutionary violence could terrorize oppressors and moderate their ferocity, as well as eliminate individuals guilty of particularly atrocious conduct. It could therefore modify policy. Charles Robert Plunkett propounded this idea after the Lexington explosion. "The moral effect of the explosion," he claimed, "was as great as if our comrades had succeeded in their purpose." Plunkett declared that the explosion struck terror into the hearts of the capitalists; Berkman similarly claimed that it frightened exploiters. "The enemy has been taught to respect the power of our ideal backed by the willingness and determination to fight," he said.[xxxviii] Even if violence alarmed the middle class, it often spurred them to address, in however half-hearted a fashion, the underlying causes of industrial unrest. Violence could desanctify high officials by revealing them as vulnerable mortals responsible for their conduct. Although the anarchists did not confuse the individual oppressor with a system of oppression, they did hold heads of state, popularly considered above ordinary moral standards, individually responsible for their actions, much as the Nuremberg tribunal later did. However much capitalist and government officials may embody systems of power, the anarchists believed, they are in the end mortal and fragile beings who must answer for the harm they cause. Assassins motivated by genuine grievances that affect many people, they believed, could indicate the extent and seriousness of popular discontent. What explained, Goldman asked, the ferocious reaction to McKinley's assassination? Czolgosz's deed indicated that the United States, like Europe, was riven by class conflict; the fatal bullet therefore undermined national pride and identity. Had Czolgosz truly been a deranged individual who represented nobody but himself (like President Garfield's assassin), he would have not evoked the ferocity he did.
The Woman Rebel, Margaret Sanger's magazine, which had close ties to Goldman and her circle, adduced one final argument for subaltern violence. "Even if dynamite were to serve no other purpose than to call forth the spirit of revolutionary solidarity and loyalty," The Woman Rebel editorialized in the aftermath of the Lexington Avenue explosion, "it would prove its great value. For this expression of solidarity and loyalty and of complete defiance to the morality of the masters, in a time of distress and defeat and death, is the most certain sign of that strength and courage which are the first essentials [of] victory."[xxxix]
Goldman's arguments for political violence, however, far transcended the immediately practical. Goldman and Berkman generally insisted that persons must follow their consciences and foment justice regardless of consequences. "I bow to nothing except my concept of right," Goldman proclaimed. The anarchists detested consequentialist and pragmatist arguments as leading inexorably to compromise, demoralization, and defeat. Each individual, they insisted, must apply her values to her own life, rather than mouthing vapid theories. They repudiated "the ends justifies the means"--consequentialism--precisely because it rationalized acqueiscence in oppression rather than instigating rebellion. Reliance on the mechanisms of change legitimized by the oppressors was not only irrational and ineffectual but wrong. Resistance, however seemingly ineffective, would bolster confidence and harden resolve for further resistance, while submission only generated degradation and defeat. Various contributors to Mother Earth anticipated the sentiments of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" by asserting that if a worker faced death by starvation or disease, he should exit from life by means of his own chosing, and take some of his oppressors with him.[xl]
VI
Goldman's support for working-class violence evoked severe criticism from most Socialists, who condemned illegal or violent resistance to oppression. The Socialists asserted that violence alienated public opinion and evoked severe governmental repression; it therefore debilitated all leftist organizations, including those (such as the SP) that worked within the system. Any talk of violence, SP hierarch Morris Hillquit claimed, "is sure to be quoted against us forever and ever." Because violence and assassination could not be democratically discussed or planned, they remained the tactics of isolated individuals or small bands rather than a mass movement. The Socialists regarded violence as at best a threatrical gesture of despair--a tacit admission that the working class could not achieve its own liberation--and at worse the machinations of provocateurs.[xli]
These criticisms had some merit. In anarchist rhetoric, violence became increasingly detached from any conceivable practical purpose and became a mere gesture of revolt. This was not particularly Goldman's fault. Violence could indeed be productive in a revolutionary situation--and no one could say for sure when such a situation existed. Goldman and Berkman clearly, if sorrowfully, believed that violence would necessarily begin and accompany any genuine social revolution; when violence did erupt, they hoped it both indicated and strengthened the revolutionary impulse that would make it effective. It was only natural that anarchists would hedge their bets and assert the meaningfulness of violence even when it had no such consequences, just as they desperately sought meaning for their own lives and sacrifices in the absence of overt social change. Similarly, socialists and labor activists touted the supposedly beneficial effects of lost elections and strikes in raising working-class consciousness and preparing the masses for future triumphs.
Yet in her attempt to find meaning and purpose in failed efforts, Goldman too often emphasized the subjective motive of the attentateur rather than the objective consequences of his act. She stressed that violence resulted from the interaction of especially sensitive, socially-conscious natures and unendurable oppression. She subordinated and at times ignored the element of calculation and reason, the weighing of costs and benefits. Goldman and Berkman proved correct in their suspicion that the Socialists, in the United States and in Germany, had become conservatives with an undue reverence for law and legality. However, the anarchists justified or praised almost any assassination as long as the target was appropriate; and they defined this fitness by the moral quality, specific actions, and official position of the target, and by the motives of the assassin, rather than by the expected or actual consequences of the act. This was a new note in the discussion of violent working-class resistance, one mostly lacking in both SP and IWW literature. It consoled Berkman after the transparent failure of his attentat and became a leitmotif in Goldman's writings on the subject. But it served as both a rhetorical substitute for effective action and a mask for failure. Even when the anarchists considered objective consequences, their emotion sometimes overwhelmed their reason. Berkman's claim that the Lexington explosion struck terror into ruling-class hearts was mere bluster; his exultations falsely imply that his comrades had accomplished rather more than blowing themselves up. The moral effect of the explosion was entirely upon the anarchists, who could tell themselves that some workers rejected capitalist hegemony and had the backbone to resist. This was a significant effect, which lay at the heart of Franz Fanon's analysis of political violence, but it was not the primary result the anarchists sought. Berkman claimed he considered the objective consequences of an act. However, emotions stirred by reminiscences of his own heroic deed, not dispassionate analysis, governed his response to Lexington.
Goldman and Berkman supported working-class violence whenever it had a constructive, achieveable purpose--for self-defense, deterrence of official terrorism, and individual survival. These are rational motives. Yet Goldman and Berkman too often championed almost purposeless or counterproductive violence by others. Their philosophical defense of assassination conflated vengeance and retribution with substantive effects. Whenever Goldman spoke of prisons, she proclaimed that retribution solved nothing. Confronted with the contradiction between this and her approval of assassinations undertaken for reasons of vengeance, she would perhaps reply that forbearence by the strong has vastly different implications than submission by the weak. But random, ineffectual attentats do not educate the masses or intimidate the oppressors; on the contrary, they alienate the workers and embolden the rulers to yet more ferocious mayhem. Goldman, however, was not a consequentialist; she urged people to do what is right, regardless of consequences. For her, resistance and rebellion was always right.
The Mother Earth circle answered the Socialist critique. The capitalists and their state, anarchists declared, would use whatever violence was necessary to maintain control and throttle revolt, whatever tactics the workers used. Any effective resistance to oppression, however peaceable, evoked official terrorism. The use of massive violence against peaceful strikers validated this claim. The corporations and the government routinely encouraged vigilantee terrorism and themselves used mass terror against strikes and other forms of protest. Government forces often murdered workers and then indicted strike leaders for these murders; they accused unions and strikers of violence when none was committed; and the federal government violated the Constitution by despatching troops or the national guard when this was clearly illegal. The capitalist press routinely advocated extermination of Wobblies, anarchists, and restive workers (not to mention blacks); these respectable advocates of terrorism and violence were never punished because they were the government. Only quiescence, the anarchists properly declared, would avoid repression; any effective working-class organization or action would evoke savage repression. The workers, therefore, must mobilize and resist, individually and collectively. Those who could not survive repression were doomed. Repression could not succeed without the cooperation of the victims; workers composed the overwhelming majority of the police, the national guard, and the army. Radicals would transcend suppression not by obeying capitalist law, but by preaching antimilitarism and internationalism to the working class, including the army.
To the Socialist assertion that assassination and violence were undemocratic, the anarchists replied both that the United States was not a democracy, and that democracy was itself a form of oppression. The anarchists believed, far more sincerely than the Socialists, the Marxist doctrine that any government is a class instrument, "the executive committee of the ruling class." This is why the anarchists rejected all social welfare legislation, including that proposed by the SP, as undermining proletarian self-activity and disguising the true nature of the capitalist state. The anarchists could not regard the American government, with its ferocious antilabor animus and racist and patriarchal structures, as in any way representing the American people. They repeatedly asserted that "democracy" was no better than autocracy, and might even be worse because democratic forms lulled the workers into inactivity by giving them a false sense of freedom and participation.
The anarchists repudiated democracy even in the sense of genuine majority rule. For them, the individual's rights trumphed the majority's will; no majority could legitimately oppress a minority. An exploited minority (or individual), anarchists believed, could rightly resist by whatever means it chose, without obeying the laws or moral code of its oppressors. The Declaration of Independence demanded that government both protect "inalienable rights" and also derive "its just powers from the consent of the governed"; the anarchists, more forthrightly than the Socialists, recognized that these two imperatives could easily conflict even in a genuinely democratic society. If assassinations and attentats weakened the social fabric or undermined "democratic institutions" as Socialist theoreticians charged, this was an anarchist intent. Goldman thought that the most positive effect of Czolgosz's deed was its undermining of American claims to democracy, fairness, and class cooperation. The anarchists disdained public opinion; thralldom and obedience to it was itself submission to tyranny and complicity in evil. Believing in revolution rather than reform, anarchists viewed the increased repression evoked by their actions as revealing more clearly the essential nature of the capitalist and statist regime, and therefore hastening its collapse.[xlii] Every attentateur provided an inspiring example. Workers who emulated these heroes could free themselves; those who remained subservient could blame nobody but themselves. Although Goldman explicitly rejected actions that endangered innocent lives, she castigated people who acquiesced in their own oppression or that of others. Every individual who submited, she believed, helped enslave those who resisted.
In elaborating their philosophy of resistance, the anarchists confronted a perennial radical conundrum. Those who oppose inhuman treatment--slaves in the old South, rebels against Nazi rule, or workers in twentieth-century America--often find that their resistance provokes yet more savage murder and torture from their rulers. Ceasing opposition because of brutal retaliation rewards official murder and torture and allows the violence of the oppressors to determine the tactics of their victims; yet resistance in such cases generates more horror and more innocent victims. It is a genuine dilemma, and there is no easy way out. The anarchists resolved this problem by asserting that if enough individuals lived according to their own values, this in itself would precipitate the revolution. It might actually constitute the revolution. For the anarchists, expressive politics was prefigurative politics--living in the present the full, free life that the revolution would secure and universalize. This was true, however, only if the radicals won enough adherents to make their lifestyle plausible. Similarly, assassinations, mass action, and violent resistance could topple a regime, but only if enough individuals and organized groups employed such methods.
The Woman Rebel, a short-lived monthly edited by Margaret Sanger and distributed by Goldman, explicitly advocated assassination of public officials in its July, 1914 issue. Goldman greatly influenced and aided Sanger early in her career; Sanger borrowed many of Goldman's ideas and tactics in her crusade for birth control. The Woman Rebel was a "best-seller" at Goldman's meetings. Following the Lexington incident, Sanger published "A Defense of Assassination" by one Herbert A. Thorpe. This article reiterated Goldman's psychological defense of violence as proceeding from the interaction of as especially sensitive nature and outrageous oppression. Thorpe continued,
There is no difference, ethically, between killing a man instantly or slowly over-working or starving him to death, yet those are the conditions imposed upon millions of workers throughout the world today, owing to the brutality of the employing and official classes, and their ability to control large armies of ignorant police and soldiers.... Since the great mass of people are by force of circumstances unable to use the same weapons employed by the better educated and privileged class, this does not preclude the working class from using whatever other means of defense may be at its disposal, such as the strike, boycott, sabotage, or assassination. [grammar corrected]
Turning Social Darwinism against the capitalists, Thorpe declared that just as an individual could kill a savage or wild animal, so "those who, owing to the nature of our social fabric, are beyond the reach of correction.... should not be permitted to live upon or block the march of the many towards better conditions."[xliii]
The anarchists were correct in their assertions that Frick, McKinley, Rockefeller, and other lynchpins of the American system were directly and personally responsible for the torture and murder of millions of human beings. The owners of the American economy and political structure forcibly withheld the necessities of life from millions of Americans, dooming them to early and painful deaths. This was presented to the victims as the inevitable and natural operation of an impersonal system, but it was in fact the calculated, deliberate decision of those who profited from torture and death. American foreign policy directly exterminated millions of people in much the same way, by imposing regimes that forcibly deprive their populations of the necessities of life. McKinley's conquest of the Phillipines, with its massacres of civilians and destruction of villages, cost tens of thousands of innocent lives; millions more perished in the continuing slaughter imposed by the corporate economic structure the United States imposed on the Phillipines. (This carnage continues today.) Almost any prominent American politician or industrialist is as guilty of mass murder and torture as were the European monarchs of their day (or their totalitarian successors); only the precise motives and mechanisms of destruction differed, and this only in details. No individual, given the choice between suffering varieties of slow torture or death (inflicted by Czar, Kaisar, Stalinist, Nazi, or American) would care overmuch for the technical differences in motive and technique.
In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that we can determine the justice of a nation (or other institution) by asking ourselves what society we would construct for ourselves from behind a "veil of ignorance," where we knew nothing about our position in the society we designed. From this perspective, we would not care (for example) whether we were denied medical care because of our race, economic status, or some other criterion. We would judge a society on the basis of how many people were denied care, not the criterion used. Nor would the precise motive for denying us care much concern us, or whether the resultant deaths were deliberately sought as an end in their own right or inflicted as "collateral damage" in pursuit of other goals. In a racist society it seems perfectly natural (except to some of the victims) to deny medical care to individuals because of their race; a capitalist society denies care to those who cannot pay (even as other institutions ensure that many cannot pay). Both a racist and capitalist society, however, are deliberately constructed for the benefit of some people at the expense of others. Although Rawls is a deontologist, consequentialist philosophers have arrived at similar conclusions by applying their ethical standards to society.[xliv]
The extent of the American holocaust of Goldman's time can be guaged by reading the government's own statistics, published by the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1916 after years of hearings. The CIR concluded that between one-half and two-thirds of working-class families "were living below the standards of decent subsistence, while about one-third were living in a state which can be described only as abject poverty." The CIR concluded that "the babies of the poor died at three times the rate of those who were in fairly well-to-do families," 256 per thousand compared to 84 per thousand. Those who died were perhaps fortunate, because "the last of the family to go hungry are the children, yet statistics show that in six of our largest cities from 12 to 20 per cent of the children are noticeably underfed and ill nourished."[xlv] Their parents faced a daily "Sophie's Choice" of who would eat, and who go hungry; who would wear a warm coat, and who would shiver in the cold; who would die a lingering, painful death, and who would survive.[xlvi]
The Commission stated that these conditions were avoidable. The top 2% of the American people owned 60% of the wealth, the middle class of 33% owned 35% of the wealth, and the poorest 65% owned but 5%. (Today's figures are similar.) The Commission concluded that "with a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth, the entire population should occupy the position of comfort and security which we characterize as middle class."[xlvii] This being true, those who constructed the American economic system--and maintained it with terrorism and violence--were guilty of a Holocaust equalling others of the twentieth century.
Why did some 1910s radicals recognize the deliberate nature of these horrors, and the personal responsibility of those who profited, while their successors have mostly lost this insight? Bolton Hall, an associate of Goldman's, provided part of the answer when he commented that the horrors of poverty in the United States "are less striking, but just as real tortures" as those inflicted on prisoners in Czarist Russia, "only we are more used to them. Because these inflictions come in a less dramatic way and from less personal sources, they do not so violently stir most persons to revolt."[xlviii] The Russian atrocities, of course, did not stir most Russians to revolt; but Hall recognized that systematic, endemic abuses seem natural and impersonal, while people often recognize new or unexpected atrocities for what they are.
In Goldman's time, some American radicals perceived the realities of capitalist mass murder because fundamental economic and social changes made oppression obvious. New instruments of custom, hegemony, and class rule had not yet evolved to mystify and obscure the horrible truth. In Goldman's day, industrial, corporate capitalism was a recent development, and could not appear immutable, natural, and inevitable. The capitalists depended for their success on a wholesale rearrangement of work and society that many workers fervently resisted.[xlix]
In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, some workers owned their own skills, which they learned from other workers and sold to the capitalists on terms determined by the workers themselves. (Others remembered such days). They therefore regarded themselves as independent citizens engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship with their employers. The capitalists, however, were brazenly and relentlessly expropriating the workers' skills and subordinating workers to the machine and the capitalist reorganization of production. Most American workers today learn their skills under the supervision of their bosses, who mold and reshape their workforce in accordance with changing technology and the needs of the marketplace. The capitalists also own the machines. Under such circumstances, workers perceive themselves as properly subordinate to those who, it appears, provide them with machinery, training, and employment. Workers seem dependent on the capitalists for tools, skills, and jobs, while the objective dependence of the capitalists on the workers for profits is obscured. The capitalist's right to rearrange work according to his own whims and profits seems natural, because the capitalist has seemingly created, and definitely owns, the entire social mileau in which work is performed. Big Bill Haywood could clearly see that the manager's brains lay "under the workman's cap"; this insight eludes today's workers.[l]
The very meaning of property was palpably changing in Goldman's time. Proprietary capitalism, under which businesses were the personal possession of an individual entrepreneur or small group of partners, was overwhelmed by corporations whose stock was owned and traded by anonymous, distant individuals with no knowledge of or concern for the community or its workers. Stockholders were conerned only with profits, and, if dissatisfied with the performance of their company, sold their stock rather than improving conditions. The Commission on Industrial Relations decried "the impersonal, remote, and irresponsible status of stock ownership" and complained that the typical manager of a corporation was "totally ignorant of the actual operations of such corporations, whose properties he seldom, if ever, visits"; directors "know nothing and care nothing about the quality of the product, the condition and treatment of the workers from whose labor they derive their income, nor the general management of the business."[li]
This change from personal to impersonal ownership had enormous effects on workers, other citizens, local communites, and the social system. National (and soon enough international) markets and the decline of face-to-face relationships between employer and employee considerably worsened the wages, hours, and conditions of the workers even as it made rising from worker to owner virtually impossible. Workers who were once respected, personally known, and well-treated, and who had hopes of eventually becoming owners themselves, now became faceless "hands," relegated to permanent wage-earner status. The division between capitalist and worker, once relatively porous, became a social chasm--a change accentuted by massive immigration. Workers ferociously resisted those changes, although, because different workers were afflicted at different times and in different ways, they never forged a united front of opposition.
The rise of industrial, corporate capitalism initially threatened not only the workers but almost every social group. The established middle class, once firmly in control of their local "island communites," lost power and social status as distant, impersonal corporations increasingly decided their fate and that of their communities. Banks, railroads, and other vast corporations increasingly controlled the community, rather than being subject to its regulation. Farmers were similarly aggrieved by the railroads, storage companies, and other corporations upon whose slightest whims the lives of men and communities depended. Workers did not lack allies in their fight against the emergent corporate capitalism; they derived both moral and material support from other classes against a common enemy widely perceived as an alien intruder into local community affairs.[lii]
Under such circumstances, corporate rule seemed neither natural, inevitable, or just. The new capitalists ruled not by hegemony but by brute violence. They hired thugs to staff their vast company police forces, and enlisted the armed forces of local, state, and federal governments to murder dissident workers. The use of the United States Army to break strikes, pioneered by Andrew Jackson, became common after 1877. Against the opposition of organized labor, state police forces were modernized and strengthened in training, manpower, and equipment, and empolyed to crush labor unrest. Injunctions were also employed on an unprecedented and growing scale. The corporations employed vast numbers of spies, discharged workers for any or no reason, and enforced the blacklist and the yellow-dog contract. Many radicals in Goldman's day, therefore, clearly perceived the deliberate, socially-constructed nature of the new corporate order, whose changes seemed like naked aggression against workers, their families, and their communities. The new order clearly lacked the solidity and permanence required for hegemony. Today, the capitalists have long since completed their "revolution from above" and consolidated new mechanisms of social control and class rule that effectively disguise the nature of their regime. Today's radicals and rebels seldom penetrate the mystification and lies that surround their rulers, or regain the insights of their predecessors. For the most part, today's dissidents content themselves with criticizing specific aspects of the system, while implicitly accepting the legitimacy of U.S. institutions.
Goldman and her comrades perceived, more clearly even than most of their contemporaries, the nature of these new mechanisms of control, as yet imperfectly formed. They opposed those new tools of dominion when they were more overtly mechanisms of control, and not yet hegemonic. As we shall see, they opposed the paternalism of the welfare state, business unionism, welfare capitalism, "democratic" electioneering and political reforms, public education, mass production and consumerism, middle-class charitable and uplift institutions, and much of mass popular culture. Emphasizing a politics of class, they opposed ruling-class divisions of the proletariat on the basis of the working class on the basis of gendered, racial, national, religious, educational, occupational, and other artificial antagonisms and inequalities.
In opposing these new mechanisms of dominion, the anarchists broadened their vision beyond violence to a criticism of every institution. Because they rejected political action, conservative unionism, and other palliatives, they crafted other strategies for social transformation. The transparent failure of violent resistance by individuals or small groups did not cause the anarchists to repudiate "propaganda of the deed"--an integral part of anarchist history and ideology. But the events of the decades after Homestead did cause the anarchists to develop other aspects of their philosophy. Anarchists, therefore, propounded additional tactics and theories of social change appropriate for the long stretches between revolutionary situations. As early as 1908--in an article written for a mainstream newspaper--Goldman denigrated the attentat and expounded a wider vision of the processes of social change. "I do not believe that these acts can, or ever have been intended to, bring about the social reconstruction," she said, clearly exaggerating. "That can only be done, first, by a broad and wide education as to man's place in society and, second, through example. By example I mean the actual living of a truth once expressed, not the mere theorizing of its life element. Lastly, and the most powerful weapon, is the conscious, intelligent, organized, economic protest of the masses through direct action and the general strike."[liii]
[i]
CHAPTER ONE
5. Joll, 102-110; Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince, (New York, 1971), 156-157.
[ii] LML, 83-95; quotes are on 88. Drinnon's account is on 39-54, and Wexler's on 61-70.
[iii] LML, 84, 87.
[iv] LML, 87. Berkman's account of his attentat is in PMA, 1-88; quotes are on 58, 4, 59, 67.
[v] Wexler, 63; PMA, 7, 55.
[vi] PMA, 50-54; Drinnon, 52-53. Goldman claimed at the time that she horsewhipped Most, and, although she had long since been mortified at her act, repeater her account in LML, 105-6, 114. Her biographers accept her account, yet Most said that Goldman, seeking notoriety, merely brandished a toy whip. "Emma Goldman in Limbo," The New York World (September 1, 1893).
[vii] PMA, 67-8.
[viii] PMA, 136.
[ix] For Goldman's use of veiled language, see "Here is Oakey Hall," The New York World, October 8, 1893 and "Most and Emma Goldman," The World, August 20, 1893. "Take it by force" is in "Urging Men to Riot," The World, August 22, 1893. "Last convulsions" is in "My Year in Stripes," The World, August 18, 1894. "Pyramids of children's corpses" is in "The Law's Limit," The World, October 17, 1893. This article gives the entire speech EG was prevented from giving in court. "Parasites" is in "My Year in Stripes." The remaining quotes are from "Hailed EG," The World, August 20, 1894, which recounts the meeting welcoming EG upon her release from prison. All these articles are in EGP-GW. At the time, EG claimed that she had not directly urged the use of force; in LML (122-23) she proclaims that she did urge workers to take bread if the capitalists would not give it to them.
[x] Outsider, and I do not advise anyone, "Emma Goldman Here," (The Pittsburgh Leader, November 20, 1896). Reckoning, "The Law's Limit," (The World, October 17, 1893). If we were free, "Howls for EG," (The New York Times, August 20, 1894). All of these are in EGP-GW. At her trial, Goldman equivocated on her advocacy of violence. She claimed that she did not approve of Berkman's act, although she approved of his courage and idealism. Asked whether she approved of the use of bombs and dynamite, she said that they may be necessary in the distant future, at the time of the social revolution, and that she knew neither whether she would live until that day or what she would do. One reporter, in "Only the Moral Law," The New York World (October 7, 1893) was astounded that Goldman could wax eloquent on the Golden Rule one minute, only to immediately talk "of stuffing bombs with dynamite as a housewife talks of stuffing a turkey." GET EXACT QUOTE HERE. The EGP-GW has numerous clippings of Goldman's testimony, as well as the "transcript" (in reality a summary) of the trial; these differ in details but agree on most of the main points.
Although Goldman frequently approved of violent acts, she occasionally talked as if a united working class could overturn the the government and come into possession of society without any violence--an idea later propounded by many members of the IWW. In 1898, she told workers that "When you are educated, when you realize your power, you"ll need no bombs, and no dynamite or militia will hold you." "Emma Goldman, Anarchist," (The San Francisco Call, April 27, 1898). See also, "Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers," (The Cleveland Plain Dealers, May 6, 1901). As I explain below, Goldman explicitly repudiated this view at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1906.
[xi] Voltairine de Clyre, "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation," a speech given on December 16, 1893 to protest EG's imprisonment, is reprinted in The Selected Works of Voltairine de Clyre, (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914), 204-219. The reference to Cardinal Manning is on 208. Charles Mowbray's speech is in "Hailed EG," (The World, August 20, 1894), EGP-GW.
[xii] EG to Ben Reitman, August 26, 1910, EGP-C.
[xiii] Berkman's attentat, and the principles, (The Firebrand, November 17, 1895, reprinted from The Torch, London). Violent acts, (The Detroit Sentinel, July 30, 1898). In France, (The Firebrand, May 24, 1896). Cannot stop the tide, (The Firebrand, May 24, 1896). Gallows on every streetcorner, (Pittsburgh Leader), November 23, 1896.
Goldman publicly extolled Berkman's act on numerous occasions. In 1892 she said that "we must make the most of this deed of Berkman's and follow it with other similar deeds until there are no more despots in America" and "The report of Berkman's shot will be heard all over the world and echo down through the ages. Other deeds like this will follow until capital is dead. His bullet did not kill, but others are being moulded and they will fly with surer aim." "Wild Anarchist Talk," (The New York Times, August 2, 1892) and "They Talked a Great Deal," (The New York Times, August 2, 1892). MAKE SURE THIS IS NOT THE SAME ARTICLE, DIFFERENTLY SUBTITLED. In 1895 she said that "the act was not altogether in vain; Plutocracy has never raised its head so proudly since." (The Firebrand, July 21, 1895).
Joll (113-117) and Woodcock (288-294) discuss the individuals mentioned by Goldman. Their accounts differ in minor details. Francois-Claudius Ravachol, a truly Dostoevskian character, murdered a rich hermit to obtain money for the anarchist cause, bombed the houses of prominent politicians, and "walked to the gallows singing an anti-clerical song. Ravachol was in the tradition of the heroic brigand." (Woodcock, 288-90).
Emile Henry placed a bomb in the offices of a company known for its brutal repression of strikes; the police took the bomb to their headquaters, where it exploded and killed four or five policemen. Henry, claiming that everyone was complicit in social crimes, then exploded a bomb at a crowded cafe to avenge the execution of Vaillant. In explanation of his act, he said, "I would like to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their insolent triumphs would be distrubed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast in down in mud and blood." (Joll, 117-118).
Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies, and at his execution predicted that "my death will be avenged." (Woodcock, 292).
Santo Jeronimo Caserio, an Italian, killed President Carnot of France to avenge Vaillant. (Joll 113-114).
[xiv] Acts of Berkman, (The Firebrand, July 21, 1895). Heroes like Golli, (The World, August 17, 1897). Goldman also said that King Humbert of Italy was justly executed (The New York Times, December 12, 1900). Gaetano Bresci, his assassin, was a member of an anarchist group in Paterson, New Jersy, who travelled to Europe explicily to assassinate Humbert. She justified the assassination of President Carnot in Free Society, July 30, 1899. She discussed many of these incidents in her essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence," AOE, 79-108, where she quotes many of the attentateurs at length.
Goldman was criticized by her comrades for extolling Golli. At a small gathering to evaluate the public meeting held about the Canovas affair, "other speakers expressed the belief that a better end would have been accomplished if the doctrine of Anarchy had been explained and the causes for CAnovas's removal through his tyranny made clear." "Her Comrades Rebuke Emma Goldman," (The New York Tribune, August 23, 1897.)
Pallas threw a bomb at a general in retaliation for the execution of four anarchists (Joll, 111).
[xv] "The Psychology of Political Violence," AOE, 102-3. LML (189-190) quotes Angiolillo somewhat differently.
[xvi] LML, 118-119.
[xvii] "An Open Letter," Free Society, February 17, 1901. Goldman made no distinctions between "democracies" and other forms of government in this regard.
[xviii] The Czolgosz incident is discussed in Drinnon, 68-77, and Wexler, 100-112.
Would have approved, "Anarchists in Spain and New York," (The World, August 17, 1897.) McKinley feared he would be next, (The World, August 17, 1897). Goldman's denunciations of McKinley appeared in "The Tragedy at Buffalo," Free Society, October 1901, reprinted, ME, October 1906. Mouthpice of Hanna, (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 17. 1897.)
One of the subheads in the above article read "She thinks all rulers should be removed, with the exception of President McKinley." The article reported the following dialgue between an unnamed questioner and EG.
Questioner: "Then you favor the execution of all heads of governments?"
Goldman: "Yes, if you please to put it that way."
Questioner: "Do you think that Mr. McKinley should be removed--or, as you call it, executed?"
Goldman: "McKinley--pooh! He is only a tool, a moputhpiece for Mark Hanna. I don't consider McKinley."
On another occasion Goldman said that McKinley was "not worth killing." FIND SOURCE FOR THIS
After McKinley was shot, Goldman said "I don't think they should make any more fuss about the President than over any other man." Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1901.
In 1900, Goldman had said that anarchists had more important tasks than "removal of the heads of a few rotten kings." "The Paris Congress," (Free Society, October 21, 1900: 1, 3.) She sometimes tried to convince the public of the respectability of her views; see Charles Thompson, "An Interview with Emma Goldman," (The New York Times, May 30, 1909). Her seemingly pacific sentiments here would not reassure anyone familiar with the nuances of Goldman's position.
[xix] The first three quotes are from "The Tragedy at Buffalo," Free Society, October 1901, reprinted in ME, October 1906. Berkman, outraged, PMA 413. Goldman and Berkman discuss their disagreement in LML 322-325 and PMA, 412-418. Goldman's willingness to nurse McKinley is recounted in LML 305-6. See HDT on JB for similar appraisal of earlier use of violence against oppression.
[xx] EG, "The Tragedy at Buffalo," (Free Society, October 1901, reprinted, ME, October 1906). Voltairine de Clyre's views are expressed in "McKinley's Assassination from an Anarchist Standpoint," ME, October 1907: 303-306. De Clyre called McKinley a "man who had ordered others killed without once jeopardizing his own life, and to whom death came more easily than to millions who die of long want and slow tortures of disease."
[xxi] four walls, and the incident with Abe Isaak, LML 321, 313; ME lost backers after its Czolgosz issue, EG, "The Situation in America," ME, November 1907. EG arrested for meeting, "Anarchists in Court," The New York Times, Nov 1, 1906, EGP-SW.
[xxii] PMA, 412-417.
[xxiii] note here sources for anti-anarchist laws: PO censorship, immigration tests on political beliefs, state laws.
[xxiv] LML, 324-25.
[xxv] EG, "Reply," ME, December 1906; EG, "The International Anarchist Congress," ME, October 1907, 316. Goldman's views were very similar to Kropotkin's in many regards. For his views on violence, see Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince (Schocken Books, 1971), 357, 360-1.
[xxvi] EG on Haywood, Free Society, November 1907, p. 68, EGP-GWS; Berkman, "The Source of Violence," (ME, December 1911); EG and Ben threaten retaliation, Ben Reitman, "The Respectable Mob," (ME: June 1912): 109-114, and EG, "The Outrage San Diego," (ME, June 1912): 115-122. See also, in the same issue, Berkman, Harry Kelly, and Hippolyte Havel, "A Protest and a Warning," (122-23). EG threatens the chief of police, Caroline Nelson, "Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman Tell of San Diego Experience, Industrial Worker, (June 6, 1912): 4-5. Goldman claimed that the chief "began to shake in his knees and declared that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping of Reitman."
Goldman similarly claimed that she was well-treated in prison because the matron knew that if she were mistreated her comrades would avenge her. EG, "My Year in Stripes," (The New York World, August 18, 1894).
[xxvii] For a brief account of the Ludlow Massacre and the response of the anarchists, see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement, (183-216, especially 191-196.)
[xxviii] Berkman's funeral speech is in ME, July 1914. Berkman, who could still be returned to prison to complete his sentence for attempting to assassinate Frick, pretended that he did not know the cause of the explosion, but said that he hoped it was caused by a bomb being prepared for Rockefeller.
Goldman (LML, 537-38) claimed that "with the exception of Sasha's own address and those of Leonard D. Abbot and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the harranges were of a most violent character." Berkman's, however, was among the most violent of them all.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was upset at the speeches, writing to her friend Mary Heaton Vorse, "Saturday made me decide never to speak with the anarchists again. They insisted on speaking one after the other until we were completely exhausted... shouting 'We believe in dynamite" until instead of a dignified memorial meeting it became hysterical proclamations of personal opinions... they had such a unique opportunity to fix the full responsibility on society as it is and give an inspiring and sympathetic presentation of their principles...." Flynn blamed Berkman for this fiasco. Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies, Penguin, 1988, 53.) Compare this with the criticisms of Goldman's extolling of Golli, above.
The issue of violence generated more overt disagreement in Mother Earth than any other subject. In the tenth anniversary issue of March, 1915, two contributors explicitly criticized ME's stance of violence. This, however, shows that even some people who supported EG recognized and dissented from her views on this subject.
[xxix] LML, 536-38; EG to Ben Reitman, September 16, 1914, EGP-C; telegram, ME, July 1914, 154. Goldman's letter to Reitman was written under circumstances opposite from those of her 1910 letter cited above; in the earlier letter, Goldman was responding to Reitman's advocacy of violence, in the second letter to his disapproval of it. Goldman's position, however, remained the same.
[xxx] Goldman quotes are from EG, "Stray Thoughts," (ME, August or September, 1916); Berkman's are in "Worshipping the God of Dynamite," (The Blast, August 15, 1916): 2. Berkman had long wanted his own anarchist journal, focusing on labor issues; on January 15, 1915, he began publication of The Blast.
[xxxi] The Blast (August 15, 1916): 5-7.
[xxxii] Charles Thompson, "So-Called IWW Raids Really Hatched by Schoolboys," (New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 29, 1914); Lincoln Steffens quote is from Kaplan, Steffens, 205.
[xxxiii] EG, "Speculators in Starvation," typescript, EGP-GW. This was written in 1917 or 1918. How often it was actually delivered--if at all--is uncertain. CHECK NEWSPAPERS, ESPECIALLY NEW YORK ONES.
[xxxiv] The judges, EG, Speech Against Conscription and War, June 14, 1917, EGP-GW. Judge Meyer was the judge who had savagely sentenced two anti-draft agitators and was soon to give EG and Berkman the longest possible sentences allowed by law. For Goldman's views during this period, see her speeches, "America and the Russian Revolution," January 11, 1918; "We Don't Believe in Conscription," May 18, 1917; Address of EG, Kate Richards O'Hare Testimonial Dinner, November 17, 1919. See also her pamphlet, "The Truth About the Boylsheviki," (Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1918) and her articles in Mother Earth Bulletin, which replaced Mother Earth until it too was suppressed. The speeches are in EGP-GW; Mother Earth Bulletin is in EGP-GD, although EG's own articles are in EGP-GW.
[xxxv] Arich, Sacco-Vanzetti, the Anarchist Background; Gallagher, All the Right Enemies; ---, John Most. For Victor Berger's attitudes, see my chapter on the IWW.
[xxxvi] Charles Thompson, "So-Called IWW Raids Were Hatched by Schoolboys," New York Times Sunday Magazine (March 29, 1914).
[xxxvii] Berkman and Goldman, "Down with the Anarchists," The Blast, (August 15, 1916): 5-7. SPIRIT OF PROGRESS; TOLSTOYEAN
[xxxviii] Charles Robert Plunkett, "Dynamite!," and Berkman, "A Guage of Change," (ME, July 1914). Theodore Schroder, "On Conscience," (ME, July 1907): 227, denounced the measurement of an act "by the intensity and kind of emotional states which we associate with it."
[xxxix] Editorial, "Tragedy," The Woman Rebel, (July, 1914): 1.
[xl] IF WE MUST DIE-TYPE CITATIONS
[xli] For the Socialist argument against sabotage, violence, and illegal action generally, see my chapter on the IWW.
[xlii] After Goldman and Berkmen were charged with obstructing the draft, Goldman wrote Agnes Inglis that "even if we are convicted if will be our gain. People will see what crimes and injustices are committed in the name of democracy." She also said that "it will be worth going to jail for the propaganda accomplished and that's the main thing after all." As late as April 1919 Goldman still believed that the jailing of so many political criminals helped "the advancement of Revolutionary ideas.... From now on no one will dare maintain in any public meeting that we have free speech and a free press. It will be ridiculed like that other famous boast that everyone can become a millionaire in our country." Wexler, 232, 235, 240. Goldman, of course, vastly underestimated the tenacity of both of those myths.
[xliii] Robert A. Thorpe, "In Defense of Assassination," The Woman Rebel, (July, 1914): 1-2.
[xliv] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; also books by Ted Honderich; utilitarianism for and against, anthologies on Rawls, MIll's anthology by Bobs-Merrill, book on killing v letting die. CLEAN THIS UP
[xlv] Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report, (Washington, 1916), 22-23.
[xlvi] CIR pages; also shivering Lawrence children; coal miners children, etc. quote these.
[xlvii] Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report (Washington, 1916), 33. This report is a gold mine of information on the condition of the American working class in 1916, and the mechanisms by which the capitalists imposed those conditions. Pages 17-68 provide a splendid overview. The volumes of testimony is also of great use to historians.
[xlviii] Bolton Hall, "Can the Kingdom of Heaven be Taken by Force," (ME, January 1917): 32.
[xlix] cite secondary sources on resistance: Montgomery's Fall of the House of Labor; Homestead book, etc etc, Salvatore on Debs, etc.
[l] William Haywood, Industrial Socialism, GET EXACT PAGE
[li] Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report, (Washington, 1916), 26-27.
[lii] The phrase is from Robert Wiebe's excellent The Search for Order.
[liii]EG, "What I Believe." This was originally published as an article in The New York World in 1908; it was later issued as a pamphlet, reprinted in RES, 34-46. The quote is on page 46.
I
Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892 transformed Emma Goldman's life and decisively shaped her philosophy of revolution. Berkman was one of Goldman's lovers, and Goldman was intimately involved in planning Berkman's attentat and in raising crucially important money. She longed to accompany Berkman to Pittsburgh, as Russian revolutionary women accompanied their men; but the lack of $50, Berkman's own insistance that Frick was not worth two lives, and his desire that Goldman remain free and publicize his deed and motives, prevented her. Although Goldman acquiesced, she was despondent at "the terrible fact that he he had no need of me in his last hour." Berkman's act, "for which he alone paid the price," inspired and haunted her for the rest of her life.[ii]
Berkman's attentat was motivated by the Homestead lockout. In an attempt to destroy the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, Frick locked out the workers at Carnegie's Homestead plant, fortified the grounds, and imported 300 heavily armed Pinkertons, thus starting a pitched battle that left over a dozen people dead and many more wounded. These spectacular events aroused the entire country, much of which was indignant against Frick. "To us it sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection," Goldman later wrote. "The native toiler had risen... we thought." It was the psychological moment for an attentat. Berkman first tried to construct a bomb, using a crowded tenement for his workshop; when this fizzled, he decided upon gun and dagger.[iii]
Berkman's motives ranged from the immediately practical to universal and transformative. The assassination of Frick, the anarchists thought, "would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy's ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of America had its avengers." Berkman considered Frick himself an "insignificant reptile" not individually worth a terroristic effort. Frick, however, symbolized an entire system of oppression; his death would weaken and discredit that system and embolden the workers for further action. The attentat itself would "imbue discontent with conscious revolutionary purpose" and enlighten both the striking workers and the country at large about the meaning of anarchism. Workers and commentators alike would be impressed by Berkman's selfless devotion to the cause of humanity. "The People," in Berkman's striking religious imagery, "could not fail to realize the depth of a love that will give its own life for their cause." As the first attentat in the United States, it would inspire emulation and perhaps even ignite the social revolution. At least it would win the strike; when Frick died, Carnegie would settle with the union, and even those workers blind to the deeper meaning of Berkman's act would understand its practical effects.[iv] This would benefit the anarchists.
Berkman was intensely concerned with the ethical quality of his deed. As he wrestled with the moral implications of his attentat he offered contradictory justifications, simultaneously asserting that it was not murder and also that the ends justified the means. Berkman claimed both that killing Frick was not taking a human life and that taking some human lives was defensible and even necessary. Only the workers need be considered, Berkman thought. "The rest are parasites, who have no right even to exist.... All means are justifiable; nay, advisable, even to the point of taking life.... The removal of a tyrant is not merely justified; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist. Human life is, indeed, sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life.... Murder and Attentat are to me opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people." Revolutionists must "sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the People's cause.... Indeed, the more repugnant the means, the stronger the test of one's nobility and devotion."[v]
The results of Berkman's supreme deed were disappointing. His sacrifice did not inspire other attentats, much less incite the social revolution. Frick did not die and Carnegie did not negotiate. Instead, the workers were crushed and their their union was destroyed. (Berkman's act did not contribute to the union's destruction, which was inevitable once the governor mobilized the state militia. However, many contemporaries and subsequent historians blamed Berkman for alienating public opinion from the strikers.) The workers whose cause Berkman made his own suspected and misunderstood his motives; an imprisoned Homestead striker thought that Berkman sought vengeance for a sour business deal. The Homestead workers considered themselves respectable, law-abiding, American workingmen who were driven to armed self-defense by the outrageous acts of their oppressors; they vehemently repudiated Berkman and his act. Horrified, the general public associated anarchism with deranged terrorists. Berkman was showered with abuse even from some anarchist comrades. Johann Most, doyen of the anarchists, repudiated Berkman's act, thus splitting the anarchists and so enraging Goldman that she horsewhipped Most in public. For years afterwards some anarchists and Homestead workers slandered Berkman as an agent provocateur who had generated sympathy for Frick and indignation against the strikers; they asserted that Berkman had been quietly freed after his trial.[vi]
"Deeply humiliated" at Frick's survival, Berkman consoled himself that even if the strike had been lost, "our propaganda is the chief consideration. The Homestead workers are but a very small part of the American working class. Important as this great struggle is, the cause of the whole People is supreme. And their true cause is Anarchism. All other issues are merged in it; it alone will solve the labor problem. No other consideration deserves attention.... Properly viewed, the merely physical result of my act cannot affect its propagandistic value.... The chief purpose of my Attentat was to call attention to our social inequities; to arouse a vital interest in the sufferings of the People by an act of self-sacrifice; to stimulate discussion regarding the cause and purpose of the act, and thus bring the teachings of Anarchism before the world.... The conditions necessary for propaganda are there: the act is accomplished."[vii]
But yet greater disappointment awaited Berkman. Although Berkman believed that his public defense would magnify his act's meaning and impact, his trial was secret and precursory. Berkman's English was halting, his interpreter incompetent, and the judge harshly biased, so the workers never heard his explanation. Nor could his poor and marginal comrades influence the public. From every immediate and long-term perspective, therefore, Berkman's act was a crushing failure, a catastrophe for him, his friends, and the anarchists. His deed was also indelibly associated with a terrible defeat for labor. Under such circumstances, Berkman consoled himself that "true morality deals with motives, not consequences."[viii]
II
None of these considerations moderated Goldman's own stance. The year after Berkman's attentat Goldman was imprisoned for inciting a riot. Mindful that her mentor, Johann Most, had repeatedly suffered incarceration for incendiary utterances, Goldman usually used guarded and cautious language. Instead of overtly advocating provocative deeds, she predicted that workers would commit them at some future time if their demands were not met, thus disguising advocacy as a conditional prediction. But at a demonstration of the unemployed at Union Square in 1893, Goldman discarded her carefully prepared speech and urged starving workers to "go among the capitalists and rich people and ask for bread, and if they will not give it to you peacefully, then take it by force." She urged workers to procure arms and "demand what belongs to you"--not just bread and freedom but all the products of their labor. Like Berkman, Goldman believed that "society lies in its last convulsions" and hoped that some small incident would ignite the revolution. She vividly contrasted the luxury and debauchery of the rich with the misery and destitution of the poor. She denounced "capitalists who torture thousands to slow death in their factories" and "men whose fortunes have been built upon a foundation formed by pyramids of children's corpses." She demanded that the earth "be swept of these parasites," and, at a mass meeting celebrating her release from prison, predicted that "the future will be ours." The authorities "are working on their own coffins... Every Anarchist they send to jail or to death takes another spadeful of earth from the hole into which their carcasses will be placed."[ix]
After her regaining her freedom, however, Goldman no longer explicitly urged that other people commit violent deeds, or advocated a specific illegal act to a particular individual or audience. Anarchists "should not act on the advice of any outsider when they feel that it is their duty to perform something for the sake of their principles," she said. "If I felt it my duty to perform something of the kind I would do it without asking any one whatsoever about it; neither would I advise any person to do something for which they might have to forfeit their lives. We can all tell the difference between right and wrong, and that alone should govern us in our actions." She insisted that only revolution could achieve significant change, that police would not dare to shoot down workers who had armed in self-defense, and that "the time of reckoning is not far--a time when no concessions will be granted to the tyrants." She declared that "I do not advise anyone to rebel and place their lives in jeopardy, but put the situation before the working people and ask them to think and act for themselves." The oppressed would use violence whenever they felt it necessary; her advice could neither precipitate nor forestall this. Workers should resort to violence only under appropriate conditions as a last resort; the individual must decide. Violence, she said, was not an intrinsic part of anarchism. Methodists, Republicans, and believers in many other causes sometimes committed violent acts, which were not blamed on Methodists or Republicans in general, but on the individual. Anarchy stood for peace and the free and full development of human individuality; it was the antithesis of force. Goldman sincerely disliked violence, which she blamed on injustice and oppression: "If we were free we would talk of higher things."[x]
In fact, Goldman soon downplayed her incendiary utterances. In future years, when asked about her speech of 1893, she claimed that she had merely quoted Cardinal Manning's declaration that necessity knows no law and that a starving man has a right to his neighbor's bread. But this argument, based not on class but on necessity, did not attack capitalism, and is much tamer than her actual statement at the time. Goldman's alleged quote from Cardinal Manning is a myth. Goldman's friend Voltairine de Clyre, schooled in a convent, first mentioned Cardinal Manning in her speech "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation," delivered while Goldman was still in prison. Charles Mowbray, an English anarchist, noticed this quote and, at the mass meeting celebrating Goldman's release from prison, said that Goldman "dared to tell the masses, as Cardinal Manning himself has said, that a starving man has a right to share his neighbor's food." But Goldman's speech focused on the class war, called the workers to revolution, and urged them to appropriate everything they had created.[xi] Goldman viewed starvation as only an exaggerated example of the "normal" process whereby workers are deprived, insidiously or abruptly, of the necessities of life. If the labor theory of value was correct, workers would be fully justified in stealing all the luxuries they could lay their hands on; they need not wait until they were starving to steal, or content themselves with the bare necessities.
Goldman summarized her stance on public advocacy of violence in a private letter to her lover and manager Ben Reitman in 1910 after Reitman had appalled her by openly espousing violence. She reiterated her belief that "if no other method is left, violence is not only justifiable but imperative, not because anarchism teaches it, but because human nature does and must resist opppression." But talk is cheap, Goldman scolded Reitman; he should not advocate what he will not do himself. No one should advocate violence in the abstract because "intelligent violence.... implies discretion [and] judgment as to time and place." In an uncharacteristic outburst she said that "people do not commit an act because you tell them to, they are too damned cowardly for that." This must have stemmed from her frustration at her, and Berkman's, inability to conjure up a revolution with mere words, because ordinarily Goldman ridiculed people who obeyed orders. She also warned Reitman of the consequences of publicly advocating violence. "I tell you Ben, you are playing with fire, you will get yourself into prison for absolutely nothing at all, and the worst of it, you will not serve anarchism."[xii]
But if Goldman did not advocate terrorist acts after her release from prison, she did defend and extol them. Berkman's attentat, she said, had struck fear into the hearts of the capitalists, "showed to all who wish to see the real cause of the people's misery," and demonstrated that anarchists were not "fools or ruffians" but idealists who championed every person's "right to learn, study, enjoy, love and live according to his own desires." Goldman conceded that "violent acts do not change conditions unless a change has taken place in the minds of the people," but argued that attentats often implanted ideas that written and oral propaganda later cultivated. "In France the admirable acts of Ravachol, Henry, Valliant, Caesario and others have done more for the spreading of our principles than ten years of writing and speaking," she exclaimed. As a result of such deeds, anarchist papers had vastly increased their circulation and others had begun publication. Repression "cannot stop the tide from flowing on"; even "a gallows on every streetcorner" could not quell resistance. "The principles of those who died on the gallows or are languishing in prison are today discussed in the press, in the pulpit, and in the mansions of the rich," she thundered.[xiii]
Goldman insisted that "the acts of Berkman, Caeserio, Henri, Valliant, Pallas and other brave heroes were but the heralds of the coming Social Revolution." If other people emulated these men, despots would all perish. And other people, she fervently believed, would emulate these heroes. When Angiolilio assassinated the Spanish prime minister Canovas del Castillo (1897) in retaliation for Canovas's infliction of horrible torture on anarchists in Montjuich prison, Goldman said that "heroes like Golli do not ask permission of me or anybody else to do their duty as they see it. So long as tryants oppress mankind Gollis will be found to execute them.... They tell us that by despatching one tyrant we will not change society; that another tyrant will take his place. Yes, my friends, that is true, and another Golli will come up to meet every such new tyrant. Whenever there is a Caesar there must be a Brutus."[xiv]
European anarchists did kill several heads of state, but none of these acts achieved any significant reform, much less sparked revolution. Instead they generated intense persecution of anarchists and identified anarchists in the public mind with explosives and violence. This accumulated experience eventually changed Goldman's analysis of "propaganda of the deed" from a focus on concrete results to a concentration on subjective motivation, as evinced in another aspect of Goldman's response to Angiolillo's assassination of Canovas. Scrupulously avoiding hurting innocent people, Angiolillo killed without hatred. Making a distinction common to anarchists, he told Canovas's wife "I did not mean to kill your husband. I aimed only at the official responsible for the Montjuich tortures."[xv]
Goldman, who had publicly declared that she would kill Canovas if she were in Spain, approved of Angiolillo's deed: "He had acted while the rest of us had only talked about the fearful outrages." But since Berkman's deed five years before "I had ceased to regard political acts, as some other revolutionists did, from a merely utilitarian standpoint or from the view of their propagandistic value. The inner forces that compel an idealist to acts to violence, often involving the destruction of his own life, had come to mean much more to me. I felt certain now that behind every political deed of that nature was an impressionable, highly sensitized personality and a gentle spirit. Such beings cannot go on living complacently in the sight of great human misery and wrong. Their reactions to the cruelty and injustice of the world must inevitably express themselves in some violent act, in [a] supreme rending of their tortured soul."[xvi]
In March 1901 Goldman reiterated her belief that the attentateur's idealistic motivation, not the results of his act, counted. Assassins served a worthwhile purpose; "it is well that they exist, otherwise despots would reign supreme, and life be unbearable." Yet her support for assassinations stemmed from more than their practical effects. "I have and always will stand on the side of the one who has been courageous enough to give his own life in taking or attempting to take the life of a tryant, whether industrial or political," she said. "I am on the side of every rebel, whether his act has been beneficial or detrimental to our cause; for I do not judge an act by its result, but by its cause; and the cause of each and every rebellious act has been organized despotism on the part of society, and the innate sense of justice and a rebellious spirit on the part of the individual." She asserted that "the philosophy of Anarchy is an absolute foe to violence, therefore I do not advocate violence. An Anarchist who advocates violence as part of the teachings of Anarchy, has never properly understood its doctrines." She approved of acts of violence only because government "leaves no other method of propaganda." Goldman specifically repudiated rumors than she had renounced violence.[xvii]
When Leon Czolgosz, a man with tenuous anarchist connections, assassinated President McKinley later that year, the authorities demanded that Czolgosz implicate Goldman. They tortured him, asked him leading questions, and falsely quoted Goldman as repudiating him; when Czolgosz steadfastly maintained her innocence, they distorted his testimony. Goldman was arrested. The police did have some reason to suspect her. In the years 1893-1900 she had extolled anarchists who had assassinated the king of Italy, the president of France, and the prime minister of Spain; she also applauded Auguste Vaillant for throwing a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies and said that she "would have approved" the assassination of the Austrian Emperor. When Angiolillo had killed, she surmised that President McKinley worried that he might be next. Goldman repeatedly asserted that there was no difference between American "democracy" and the autocracies of Europe. She specifically accused McKinley of massacring American workers and Filipinos--acts resembling those that evoked anarchist attacks on European leaders. Asked in 1897 whether she would approve of the killing of President McKinley, she said evasively that "he is only a tool, a mouthpiece of Mark Hanna."[xviii] This was disingenuous because very few of the anarchists' targets were themselves towering figures. Berkman, we remember, regarded Frick as an "insignificant reptile." Rather, such targets represented important interests and had symbolic meaning.
Under such circumstances it is remarkable that Goldman stood by her principles--and by Czolgosz. She claimed that "he has wounded government in its most vital spot" by revealing that America's vaunted freedom and democracy only glossed over social wounds as raw as any in Europe. Yet her main defense of Czolgosz was not pragmatic. When most radicals harshly condemed him, Goldman snorted: "As if an act of this kind can be measured by its usefulness, expediency, or practicality. We might as well ask ourselves of the usefulness of a cyclone, tornado, [or] a violent thunderstorm." Attentats resulted from the impact of intolerable oppression on especially sensitive natures. Words could neither incite nor prevent such acts, which were a tragic waste of life; they would continue as long as "economic slavery... exploitation, and war, continue to destroy all that is good and noble in man." This was again somewhat ingenuous, because Goldman based her entire life enterprise on the assumption that words could change livesand inspire action. But Goldman createa a media sensation by declaring that while she sympathized with Czolgosz, she would nurse McKinley if he needed her services. (Goldman was a professional nurse.) Surprisingly, Berkman agreed; the oppressor had become human to him. A decade ago, he said, "it would have outraged all our traditions even to admit the humanity of an official representative of capitalism."[xix]
Goldman reiterated her contention that "I do not advocate violence; government does this, and force begets force." But her paeans to Czolgosz indicate that she regarded the lone assassin as a superior being. Although "thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant.... It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others." Such a person was driven by "an abundance of love and an overflow of sympathy with the pain and sorrow around us.... a love so strong that it shrinks before no consequence.... a love so all-absorbing that it can neither calculate, reason, investigate, but only dare at all costs.... My heart goes out to him in great sympathy, as it goes out to all the victims of oppression and misery, to the martyrs past and future that die, the forerunners of a better and nobler life."
She blamed such tragedies on those "responsible for the injustice and inhumanity which dominate the world."[xx]
Goldman's principled defense of Czolgosz cost her dearly. She could not get work as a nurse even under an assumed name, and found lodging only by concealing her identity. She became a pariah, and was herself disgusted with humanity. "More and more I withdrew into my own four walls," she later remembered. "The struggle for the necessities of existence became more severe.... I was again compelled to take piece-work from the factory." Her friend Abe Issak, editor of the anarchist Free Society, planned to eviscerate her article praising Czolgosz until her outraged protests pressured him into printing the article as she wrote it. Her stance had continuing repercussions; five years later, shortly after founding Mother Earth, she alienated many potential supporters when she dedicated the October 1906 issue to Czolgosz.[xxi] She and several others were arrested for holding a meeting to discuss Czolgosz and his deed. Goldman commemorated his death, like those of the Haymarket martyrs, throughout her life.
More immediately, her support of Czolgosz caused a jarring rupture with Berkman, still in jail for his attack on Frick. Berkman agreed with part of Goldman's analysis; he extolled "the beautiful personality of the youth, of his inability to adapt himself to brutal conditions, and of the rebellion of his soul." Berkman lamented that "it is at once the greatest tragedy of martyrdom and the most terrible indictment of society that it forces the noblest men and women to shed human blood, though their souls shrink from it." Yet Berkman felt that a truly significant attentat required social purpose and effect in addition to subjective and idealistic motivation. Revolutionary significance existed only when the victim was a "direct and immediate enemy of the people" and understood as such by the masses. "In that alone lies the propagandistic, educational import of an attentat" unless it was "exclusively an act of terrorism." Czolgosz's act did not undermine the state, frighten the authorities, change policy, or achieve any immediate political purpose. Its educational value was negated by the fact that the people did not perceive McKinley as their enemy. "In an absolutism the autocrat is visible and tangible," Berkman continued. "The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the source of democratic tyranny, and as such it cannot be reached with a bullet. In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people. Politics is but its handmaid. Hence the battle is to be waged in the economic rather than the political field." Berkman claimed that his own act was "far more significant and educational than Leon's" because it was "directed against a tangible, real oppressor, visualized as such by the people."[xxii]
Berkman insisted that the taking of human life, including that of an egregious oppressor, was never justified by mere subjective necessity or personal need--not even by the revolt of an anguished, individual soul fighting intolerable oppression. An attentat was worthwhile only if it had positive effects. This was an important departure from Goldman's new emphasis, even if Berkman was as deluded about these effects as was Goldman. The American working class execrated both Berkman and Czolgosz as deranged. The assassination of McKinley led to public hysteria, Post Office censorship, a political test for prospective immigrants, increased repression, and ferocious state and federal anti-anarchist laws.[xxiii]
Goldman, however, was stunned that Berkman used the same arguments against Czolgosz that Most had used against Berkman. "Most had proclaimed the futility of individual acts of violence in a country devoid of proletarian consciousness and had pointed out that the American worker did not understand the motives of such deeds," she later exclaimed. She herself insisted on "the value of Czolgosz's political act"; she argued that anarchists fought all injustice, political as well as economic, and that Berkman's deed was no more understood by the people than Czolgosz's.[xxiv]
III
Goldman's pronouncements on violence often blurred the line between advocacy, sympathy, explanation, and approval. In December 1906, responding to criticisms of Mother Earth's apotheosis of Czolgosz, Goldman said that "we are open and avowed revolutionists; but we defy anyone to produce a single line from any English Anarchist paper or magazine published within this country within the last twenty-five years where assassination is advocated or even implied.... Is sympathy for an unfortunate man identical with justification of or apology for the man's act? As real Anarchists we neither condemn nor justify; our business is to understand, understand, understand.... Government and its representatives assassinate liberty at every step. At last a man arises who embodies in himself all the revolt of the people--he strikes down one of the invaders." Goldman said that anarchists "neither advocate nor advise acts of violence" but leave such acts to individual judgment. But in 1907, at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, she and her friend Max Baginski introduced a resolution on "Individual and Collective Terror," unanimously adopted, that endorsed "the right of rebellion on the part of the individual, as well as on that of the masses." Only the most sensitive and tender spirits commit terroristic acts, which "together with their causes and motives, must be understood, rather than praised or condemned." During revolutionary periods, such as contemporary Russia, terrorism "serves a twofold purpose: it undermines the very foundation of tyranny, and kindles in the timid the divine spirit of revolt.... The Congress, endorsing this resolution, manifests its understanding for the act of the individual rebel, as well as its solidaric feeling with collective insurrection."[xxv]
Goldman did not limit the efficacy of violence to Russia or to revolutionary periods. In 1907 she said that Big Bill Haywood, then an official of the Western Federation of Miners, was acquitted of spurious charges against him because "the jury knew right well that the Western Miners thoroughly understood how to handle and use dynamite." Berkman expressed her sentiments when, commenting on the McNamara case in December 1911, he said that "I know that all life under capitalism is violence; that every moment of its existence spells murder and bloodshed." Berkman avowed that nonviolence was "the gospel to keep the slave in submission. As long as the world is ruled by violence, violence will accomplish results. Unfortunately so, but necessarily true." Goldman and Reitman both threatened violent retaliation for Reitman's near-lynching by government-sanctioned vigilantees in San Diego in 1912; Goldman directly threatened the chief of police with death if the vigilantees murdered Reitman.[xxvi]
America's leading anarchist again confronted the issue of violence after the Lexington Avenue explosion in June 1914. This grew out of the Ludlow massacre, a yet more gruesome replay of the Homestead lockout. Rockefeller's Colorado Coal and Iron Company had evicted striking workers from company housing, hired armed guards, and secured the services of the Colorado national guard. Braving the severe Colorado winter, the workers established a tent colony. On April 20, 1914, when most of the strikers were away on picket duty, the national guard poured coal oil on the tents housing their families, set them on fire, and machine-gunned the fleeing women and children. The national guard killed over twenty people that day, including three prisoners. Indignation against Rockefeller was widespread, and anarchists from the Mother Earth circle organized demonstrations in Rockefeller's hometown of Tarrytown, New York. The protesters were clubbed by police, abused by local residents, jailed, and sometimes tortured. Desperate and exasperated, some protesters prepared a bomb, apparently to kill Rockefeller; but it exploded prematurely in the tenement, nearly destroying the building and killing three anarchists and one other person.[xxvii]
Berkman exulted in the heroism of the victims. Managing Mother Earth while Goldman was on one of her fundraising and lecture tours, he filled the July issue with explanations and defenses of the attempted deed. Berkman extolled the dead bomb-makers as martyrs; indeed, historian Paul Avrich persuasively argues that Berkman masterminded the plot. Berkman's funeral speech enthused that "there are still men in the labor movement who will not stand quietly by when they themselves or other workers are persecuted, oppressed, and maltreated." The American worker had "no rights and no opportunities." His only recourse lay "in his determination to fight, in his consciousness of his economic strength, and in his power to organize a tremendous movement whose slogan will be direct action, with its final purpose, the general strike. And while we are advancing toward this most desired culmination, while we are approaching the Social Revolution, there will always be individuals, more intelligent, more determined and daring than the rest, eager to pave the way by acts of individual devotion and sacrifice." Since the Haymarket tragedy of 1886 anarchists "have taught the people that violence is justified, aye, necessary in the defensive and offensive struggle of labor against capital. They have freed the public mind, to a remarkable extent, from the superstition of bourgeois morality." Anarchists would "fight to the death, if need be, with the minority weapon more effective in the hands of an individual than is a whole company of armed thugs.... The power of economic solidarity of labor will ultimately knock the last master off the back of the last slave, and meanwhile--while labor gathers this power, its success will be hastened, its courage strengthened, by tempering oppression with dynamite."[xxviii]
Goldman, who was lecturing on the west coast, was appalled by both the act itself and Mother Earth's praise for it. "Comrades, idealists, manufacturing a bomb in a congested tenement house!" she later exclaimed. "I was aghast at such irresponsibility. But the next moment I remembered a similar event in my own life. It came back with paralyzing horror." When Berkman had manufactured a bomb to throw at Frick, "I had silenced my fear for the tenants, in case of an accident, by repeating to myself that the end justified the means.... It took years of experience and suffering to emancipate myself from that mad idea." She still believed that "acts of violence committed as a protest against unbearable social wrongs" were inevitable and that those who committed them were the most sensitive and caring people. "But though my sympathies were with the men who protested against social crimes by a resort to extreme measures, I nevertheless felt now that I could never again participate in or approve of methods that jeopardized innocent lives." Goldman exclaimed that "when I received copies of the July issue of Mother Earth, I was dismayed at its contents.... I had tried always to keep our magazine free from such language, and now the whole number was filled with prattle about force and dynamite. I was so furious that I wanted the entire issue thrown into the fire. But it was too late; the magazine had gone out to subscribers." At the time Goldman wrote Reitman that "as a free person," she could not "force a man who acts as editor to write what I want when I am miles away." Yet she never publicly criticized Berkman or the editorial stance of the publication of which she was editor. Indeed, Goldman did not repudiate violence; she deplored risking the innocent but did not oppose killing the guilty. She scolded Reitman that "my position is not against violence and never will be unless I become weakminded." Even if she did disapprove of a specific act, "I should still be on the side of the actionist because I hold that if society makes no provision for the individual, society must take the consequences." Her main public comment on the explosion was a telegram, published in Mother Earth, extolling the bomb-makers as "the conscious and brave spokesmen" of the oppressed and "victims of the capitalist system and the martyrs of labor."[xxix] Nobody said much about the non-anarchist victim of the explosion.
Goldman and Berkman also responded truculently to the Preparedness Day explosion in San Francisco in July 1916. Indeed, their comments on this event recapitulate their major justifications of political violence. Someone--no one ever found out who--threw a bomb into the militaristic Prepardness Day parade, killing ten people. Goldman, who was lecturing in San Francisco at the time, believed that only her chance postponement of her own lecture attacking "prepardness" saved her from a legal lynching. Worried that anarchists would be blamed for the bomb, and feared a repetition of the Haymarket executions. And true to form, the authorities instituted their usual reign of terror; as the newspapers howled for blood, the police arrested, threatened, and abused anarchists.
While disclaiming approval of the bomb, Goldman and Berkman nevertheless analyzed it in terms that approached justification. Goldman exclaimed that the "human sacrifice" of the European war and "the industrial conflict in the United States" killed and maimed far more victims than one puny explosion. She blamed not the individual who threw the bomb, but American society's "criminal indifference to human life" and "worship of the Golden Calf." Turning on itself, official violence generated retaliation that "strikes out blindly and sends terror into the craven hearts of the despoilers of the earth." Those who live by violence die by violence, she proclaimed; the prepardness advocates were responsible for the bomb. Berkman similarly blamed the explosion on "the murder psychology developed by the military preparedness agitation" which was "imbuing the minds of the people with national and racial antagonisms, with thoughts of hatred, violence and slaughter.... Terrible as the tragedy is, it is merely a foretaste in miniature of what the people may expect, multiplied a million times, from the Prepardness insanity."[xxx]
Goldman and Berkman composed a leaflet, "Down with the Anarchists," (significantly, perhaps, printed in The Blast but not in Mother Earth) claiming that "Anarchists hold life as the most sacred thing.... Anarchism means OPPOSITION to violence, by whomever committed, even if it be by the government. The government has no more right to murder than the individual." Individual anarchists sometimes committed violence, they admitted, but so did Democrats and Methodists. Despite these disclaimers, the bulk of the leaflet was devoted to extenuating and even praising individuals such as the one who threw the bomb. Individuals commit violence, Goldman and Berkman said, either because of economic need, itself a product of an inhuman social system, or out of resistance to degradation and oppression. Admitting that words do affect actions, they proclaimed that any vision of social betterment "makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot." If such these struggles resulted only "in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation." When a person with "a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men" learns "that his suffering and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings" he will, if especially sensitive, become violent. Such people "will even feel that their violence is social and not antisocial, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow sufferers." We "who ourselves are not in that terrible predicament" should not condemn those "who act with heroic self-devotion, often sacrificing their lives in protest.... The man who flings his whole life into the attempt, often at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs of his fellow men, is a saint compared to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his protest destroy other lives besides his own."[xxxi]
In the war years Goldman did more than defend the violent acts of others. Indeed, despite her apparent resolution to avoid advocating violence, she reiterated her position of 1893. In March 1914, Frank Tannenbaum, an anarchist affiliated with Mother Earth and the IWW, led hunger marches of the unemployed through the streets of Manhattan. Until he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Tannenbaum led as many as 1,000 men to various churches and demanded food, money, and shelter. Goldman herself urged one crowd to "march down to the mayor, march down to the police. March down to the other city officials. Make them tell you what they are going to do to give you food and shelter. Go to the churches, go the the hotels and restaurants, go to the bakeshops, and tell them they must give you something to keep you from starving." Radical journalist Lincoln Steffens, a sympathetic observor, claimed that she encouraged "the looting of the stores." When The New York Times asked her why she was not arrested for such statements, as she had been in 1893, Goldman replied that in 1914 the unemployed were more conscious of their victimization, and the authorites were consequently more cautious in repressing them. "Even the courts would not send a person to jail for a year for such an utterance, if made today, as I served a year for making then," she said. Goldman implicitly threatened violence if the police interferred with or attacked the marchers.[xxxii]
A few years later, when wartime inflation had seriously eroded the purchasing power even of employed workers, Goldman attacked "the speculators in hunger, war, and death" who prolonged the war by selling food and other necessities to the belligerents, thus driving up prices--and profits--at home. "The very idea of peace creates a panic in Wall Street," she charged. Thirty million Americans went hungry even in normal times, and the war had vastly increased this number. Goldman said that speculators destroyed tons of food or allowed it to rot in the fields rather than sell it at affordable prices. When New York's Governor Whitman belittled reports of widespread hunger and cavalierly advised workers to live within their means, Goldman compared him to the grain hoarder during the French Revolution who told the people to eat hay. "The man got all the hay he wanted and a rope around his neck in the bargain," she proclaimed. When East Siders marched and rioted over the shortage of affordable food, Goldman credited them with reducing the price of food. The rioters "have indicated the steps the people will have to take in the future to achieve their aim. These steps do not lead to the mayor's office, nor yet to petitions for various reform.... The masses must unite, they must show a determined, solid front. I said twenty-five years ago necessity knows no law. Necessity is slowly but surely teaching the people that they are entitled not merely to potatoes and onions but to all the luxuries they have created; to the beauties of life, to art and music. No one can given them that. They must learn to take it themselves."[xxxiii]
Goldman advocated violence whenever she concluded that self-defense or retaliation against official violence was imperative, or whenever a revolutionary situation potentially existed. Events in 1917 kindled her hopes that the United States might soon undergo a great transformation. When the United States entered World War I and enacted conscription, Goldman called for massive resistance and a general strike, predicted antimilitarist agitation among the troops, and advocated (as did SP leader Eugene Debs) an internationalist revolutionary war against capitalism. Inspired by the Russian revolutions of 1917, Goldman hoped, and occasionally ventured to predict, that similar provocations--brutal repression, wartime shortages, and conscription--would topple the American government. At the right psychological moment, she said in June 1917, the people would revolt "and the Judges, Mayer [the judge who had sentenced the first two anti-draft protesters, and was soon to send Goldman and Berkman to jail] and the other judges, will fly off the bench." Ecstatic when the Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky, she praised their confiscation of the land and the factories, and advocated similar measures in the United States. She hoped that her life and agitation would help fosterthe coming transformation.[xxxiv]
IV
Goldman's discussions of violence arose out of a social mileau characterized by industrial violence and working-class resistance. Many strikes of the era resulted in pitched battles between heavily armed forces; when capitalists hired thugs (often deputized) and enlisted local police and state militias, armed workers responded with attacks on company police and property. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Homestead lockout and strike, the West Virginia miners strike, and the Ludlow massacre were only spectacular examples of a widespread phenomenum. In Europe and the United States, anarchists executed heads of state and other important figures. Goldman's revered Haymarket anarchists had advocated defensive violence in The Alarm, while many immigrant anarchist groups manufactured bombs, stockpiled weapons, and used violence against their class enemies. Even conservative socialists such as Victor Berger urged that an armed working-class was the only safeguard for liberty.[xxxv]
Many of these incidents reveal a pattern. Radicals more readily resort to extreme language and action when mainstream society concedes the justice of their complaints and provides a language suitable for radical protest. Such social legitimation of protest encourages militant rhetoric and action. Major acts of political violence by oppressed groups often occur when a society or a ruling class has blatantly violated its own professed standards or ideals, or when a particular act of oppression is egregious even by the standards of the time. Berkman's attentat was evoked by the Homestead outrages, acknowledged as such by a wide spectrum of mainstream opinion; the Lexington avenue explosion resulted from the Ludlow massacre combined with state and private terrorism against those who protested it. Other working-class violent resistance, such as that of the McNamaras and the Structural Iron Workers, represented desperate attempts to preserve a threatened way of life. Indeed, recent historians have emphasized the frequently defensive nature of working-class resistance and language. Even workers who regarded themselves as respectable, law-abiding, and patriotic citizens protected cherished values with violence. Indeed, their violent means were often motivated precisely by their desire to preserve their social status and respectability.
Insurgent groups often grow more strident, radical, uncompromising, and bitter as their claims and demands win a measure of acceptance. This is why African Americans grew angrier after the historic civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965, why radical feminism spread after some important women's demands were being addressed, and why opposition to the Vietnam war became more intransigent even as it entered mainstream society. As long as dissidents are a radical fringe, receiving no validation or support from mainstream society, they doubt, on some level, the justice of their cause and the accuracy of their perceptions. But when the mainstream culture concedes the justice of some of their complaints and the accuracy of some of their insights, the radicals expect action. This, however, is usually halting, half-hearted, and insufficient, and therefore generates increased frustration and anger. De Tocqueville said that the most precarious time for an unjust regime is when it attempts to reform itself; similarly, a society risks upheaval when it acknowledges, but does not significantly redress, the grievances of a large segment of the population.
Goldman's support for political violence was organically related to her theory of individual and social change. The anarchists, even more than the Wobblies, emphasized the rights and duties of the individual as opposed to Socialist focus on the collectivity. When the Socialists advocated legal, peaceful, and gradual change, anarchists and Wobblies asked a question the Socialists could not answer except by considering workers abstractly as a class with a preordained historical task, rather than as concrete individuals with pressing human needs. What methods could an individual person, urgently suffering from intolerable abuse, justly use while awaiting organization by the working-class majority? As one IWW member asked Socialists, "What are your political methods going to do for the unemployed who are actually suffering? They want food, not politics."[xxxvi] Even if an individual worker was willing to patiently convert his fellows, enduring utmost deprivation until the inauguration of the co-operative commonwealth, his employer might object. Activists faced discrimination on the job as well as frequent police brutality even when engaged in ostensibly legal activities. Corporate spies, the blacklist, and the yellow-dog contract supplemented injunctions, police, and militia as instruments of class control.
Socialists, Wobblies, and anarchists constantly proclaimed that capitalism was systematic, organized violence against workers. Spectacular use of armed violence against the workers was, according to their philosophies, no different in principle from the ordinary operation of the system, also upheld by violence or the threat of violence. The distinction between defensive and offensive violence was therefore irrelevant. Workers need not wait until they were clubbed or shot or set on fire to revolt; they could resist at any time and by any means.
Goldman, Berkman, and their comrades effectively and intelligently argued for working-class violence. Like black militants of the late 1960s, the anarchists clearly asserted the right of individual self-defense against naked aggression, especially if this aggression was socially sanctioned. "The government," they said, "has no more right to murder than the individual." Goldman asserted that "the spirit of rebellion is the spirit of progress," and that non-violent, Tolstoyean resistance would fail. The events of history validate her claim that ruling classes never voluntarily surrender power; individuals and groups must seize liberty by their own exertions.[xxxvii] The anarchists eventually concluded that revolutions, in addition to being substantive events in their own right, were, more significantly, benchmarks consolidating changes that had already occurred, and that anarchy would triumph only after many revolutions. This, however, was an argument for revolution rather than against it. The anarchists correctly perceived that revolutions are usually ignited by some specific incident that reflects endemic conditions. No one could predict which incident would foment revolution. The anarchists repudiated the idea that a small vanguard party could conjure up a revolution or lead it once it started; they desired a popular, spontaneous uprising, sparked but not controlled by a militant minority. Revolution, therefore, stemmed partly from individual action; those conscious that oppressions was systematic rather than isolated must channel inchoate rebellion into coherent action. Tactics appropriate and necessary in a revolutionary situation were usually futile or self-defeating under other circumstances; yet no one could predict whether a revolutionary situation truly existed unless they tried to foment revolution. Socialist and communist parties, castigating anarchist spontaneity, have often defused revolt and sided with the ruling class against radicals in their own ranks.
Anarchist violence, Goldman believed, could have salutary effects short of total revolution. Revolutionary violence could terrorize oppressors and moderate their ferocity, as well as eliminate individuals guilty of particularly atrocious conduct. It could therefore modify policy. Charles Robert Plunkett propounded this idea after the Lexington explosion. "The moral effect of the explosion," he claimed, "was as great as if our comrades had succeeded in their purpose." Plunkett declared that the explosion struck terror into the hearts of the capitalists; Berkman similarly claimed that it frightened exploiters. "The enemy has been taught to respect the power of our ideal backed by the willingness and determination to fight," he said.[xxxviii] Even if violence alarmed the middle class, it often spurred them to address, in however half-hearted a fashion, the underlying causes of industrial unrest. Violence could desanctify high officials by revealing them as vulnerable mortals responsible for their conduct. Although the anarchists did not confuse the individual oppressor with a system of oppression, they did hold heads of state, popularly considered above ordinary moral standards, individually responsible for their actions, much as the Nuremberg tribunal later did. However much capitalist and government officials may embody systems of power, the anarchists believed, they are in the end mortal and fragile beings who must answer for the harm they cause. Assassins motivated by genuine grievances that affect many people, they believed, could indicate the extent and seriousness of popular discontent. What explained, Goldman asked, the ferocious reaction to McKinley's assassination? Czolgosz's deed indicated that the United States, like Europe, was riven by class conflict; the fatal bullet therefore undermined national pride and identity. Had Czolgosz truly been a deranged individual who represented nobody but himself (like President Garfield's assassin), he would have not evoked the ferocity he did.
The Woman Rebel, Margaret Sanger's magazine, which had close ties to Goldman and her circle, adduced one final argument for subaltern violence. "Even if dynamite were to serve no other purpose than to call forth the spirit of revolutionary solidarity and loyalty," The Woman Rebel editorialized in the aftermath of the Lexington Avenue explosion, "it would prove its great value. For this expression of solidarity and loyalty and of complete defiance to the morality of the masters, in a time of distress and defeat and death, is the most certain sign of that strength and courage which are the first essentials [of] victory."[xxxix]
Goldman's arguments for political violence, however, far transcended the immediately practical. Goldman and Berkman generally insisted that persons must follow their consciences and foment justice regardless of consequences. "I bow to nothing except my concept of right," Goldman proclaimed. The anarchists detested consequentialist and pragmatist arguments as leading inexorably to compromise, demoralization, and defeat. Each individual, they insisted, must apply her values to her own life, rather than mouthing vapid theories. They repudiated "the ends justifies the means"--consequentialism--precisely because it rationalized acqueiscence in oppression rather than instigating rebellion. Reliance on the mechanisms of change legitimized by the oppressors was not only irrational and ineffectual but wrong. Resistance, however seemingly ineffective, would bolster confidence and harden resolve for further resistance, while submission only generated degradation and defeat. Various contributors to Mother Earth anticipated the sentiments of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" by asserting that if a worker faced death by starvation or disease, he should exit from life by means of his own chosing, and take some of his oppressors with him.[xl]
VI
Goldman's support for working-class violence evoked severe criticism from most Socialists, who condemned illegal or violent resistance to oppression. The Socialists asserted that violence alienated public opinion and evoked severe governmental repression; it therefore debilitated all leftist organizations, including those (such as the SP) that worked within the system. Any talk of violence, SP hierarch Morris Hillquit claimed, "is sure to be quoted against us forever and ever." Because violence and assassination could not be democratically discussed or planned, they remained the tactics of isolated individuals or small bands rather than a mass movement. The Socialists regarded violence as at best a threatrical gesture of despair--a tacit admission that the working class could not achieve its own liberation--and at worse the machinations of provocateurs.[xli]
These criticisms had some merit. In anarchist rhetoric, violence became increasingly detached from any conceivable practical purpose and became a mere gesture of revolt. This was not particularly Goldman's fault. Violence could indeed be productive in a revolutionary situation--and no one could say for sure when such a situation existed. Goldman and Berkman clearly, if sorrowfully, believed that violence would necessarily begin and accompany any genuine social revolution; when violence did erupt, they hoped it both indicated and strengthened the revolutionary impulse that would make it effective. It was only natural that anarchists would hedge their bets and assert the meaningfulness of violence even when it had no such consequences, just as they desperately sought meaning for their own lives and sacrifices in the absence of overt social change. Similarly, socialists and labor activists touted the supposedly beneficial effects of lost elections and strikes in raising working-class consciousness and preparing the masses for future triumphs.
Yet in her attempt to find meaning and purpose in failed efforts, Goldman too often emphasized the subjective motive of the attentateur rather than the objective consequences of his act. She stressed that violence resulted from the interaction of especially sensitive, socially-conscious natures and unendurable oppression. She subordinated and at times ignored the element of calculation and reason, the weighing of costs and benefits. Goldman and Berkman proved correct in their suspicion that the Socialists, in the United States and in Germany, had become conservatives with an undue reverence for law and legality. However, the anarchists justified or praised almost any assassination as long as the target was appropriate; and they defined this fitness by the moral quality, specific actions, and official position of the target, and by the motives of the assassin, rather than by the expected or actual consequences of the act. This was a new note in the discussion of violent working-class resistance, one mostly lacking in both SP and IWW literature. It consoled Berkman after the transparent failure of his attentat and became a leitmotif in Goldman's writings on the subject. But it served as both a rhetorical substitute for effective action and a mask for failure. Even when the anarchists considered objective consequences, their emotion sometimes overwhelmed their reason. Berkman's claim that the Lexington explosion struck terror into ruling-class hearts was mere bluster; his exultations falsely imply that his comrades had accomplished rather more than blowing themselves up. The moral effect of the explosion was entirely upon the anarchists, who could tell themselves that some workers rejected capitalist hegemony and had the backbone to resist. This was a significant effect, which lay at the heart of Franz Fanon's analysis of political violence, but it was not the primary result the anarchists sought. Berkman claimed he considered the objective consequences of an act. However, emotions stirred by reminiscences of his own heroic deed, not dispassionate analysis, governed his response to Lexington.
Goldman and Berkman supported working-class violence whenever it had a constructive, achieveable purpose--for self-defense, deterrence of official terrorism, and individual survival. These are rational motives. Yet Goldman and Berkman too often championed almost purposeless or counterproductive violence by others. Their philosophical defense of assassination conflated vengeance and retribution with substantive effects. Whenever Goldman spoke of prisons, she proclaimed that retribution solved nothing. Confronted with the contradiction between this and her approval of assassinations undertaken for reasons of vengeance, she would perhaps reply that forbearence by the strong has vastly different implications than submission by the weak. But random, ineffectual attentats do not educate the masses or intimidate the oppressors; on the contrary, they alienate the workers and embolden the rulers to yet more ferocious mayhem. Goldman, however, was not a consequentialist; she urged people to do what is right, regardless of consequences. For her, resistance and rebellion was always right.
The Mother Earth circle answered the Socialist critique. The capitalists and their state, anarchists declared, would use whatever violence was necessary to maintain control and throttle revolt, whatever tactics the workers used. Any effective resistance to oppression, however peaceable, evoked official terrorism. The use of massive violence against peaceful strikers validated this claim. The corporations and the government routinely encouraged vigilantee terrorism and themselves used mass terror against strikes and other forms of protest. Government forces often murdered workers and then indicted strike leaders for these murders; they accused unions and strikers of violence when none was committed; and the federal government violated the Constitution by despatching troops or the national guard when this was clearly illegal. The capitalist press routinely advocated extermination of Wobblies, anarchists, and restive workers (not to mention blacks); these respectable advocates of terrorism and violence were never punished because they were the government. Only quiescence, the anarchists properly declared, would avoid repression; any effective working-class organization or action would evoke savage repression. The workers, therefore, must mobilize and resist, individually and collectively. Those who could not survive repression were doomed. Repression could not succeed without the cooperation of the victims; workers composed the overwhelming majority of the police, the national guard, and the army. Radicals would transcend suppression not by obeying capitalist law, but by preaching antimilitarism and internationalism to the working class, including the army.
To the Socialist assertion that assassination and violence were undemocratic, the anarchists replied both that the United States was not a democracy, and that democracy was itself a form of oppression. The anarchists believed, far more sincerely than the Socialists, the Marxist doctrine that any government is a class instrument, "the executive committee of the ruling class." This is why the anarchists rejected all social welfare legislation, including that proposed by the SP, as undermining proletarian self-activity and disguising the true nature of the capitalist state. The anarchists could not regard the American government, with its ferocious antilabor animus and racist and patriarchal structures, as in any way representing the American people. They repeatedly asserted that "democracy" was no better than autocracy, and might even be worse because democratic forms lulled the workers into inactivity by giving them a false sense of freedom and participation.
The anarchists repudiated democracy even in the sense of genuine majority rule. For them, the individual's rights trumphed the majority's will; no majority could legitimately oppress a minority. An exploited minority (or individual), anarchists believed, could rightly resist by whatever means it chose, without obeying the laws or moral code of its oppressors. The Declaration of Independence demanded that government both protect "inalienable rights" and also derive "its just powers from the consent of the governed"; the anarchists, more forthrightly than the Socialists, recognized that these two imperatives could easily conflict even in a genuinely democratic society. If assassinations and attentats weakened the social fabric or undermined "democratic institutions" as Socialist theoreticians charged, this was an anarchist intent. Goldman thought that the most positive effect of Czolgosz's deed was its undermining of American claims to democracy, fairness, and class cooperation. The anarchists disdained public opinion; thralldom and obedience to it was itself submission to tyranny and complicity in evil. Believing in revolution rather than reform, anarchists viewed the increased repression evoked by their actions as revealing more clearly the essential nature of the capitalist and statist regime, and therefore hastening its collapse.[xlii] Every attentateur provided an inspiring example. Workers who emulated these heroes could free themselves; those who remained subservient could blame nobody but themselves. Although Goldman explicitly rejected actions that endangered innocent lives, she castigated people who acquiesced in their own oppression or that of others. Every individual who submited, she believed, helped enslave those who resisted.
In elaborating their philosophy of resistance, the anarchists confronted a perennial radical conundrum. Those who oppose inhuman treatment--slaves in the old South, rebels against Nazi rule, or workers in twentieth-century America--often find that their resistance provokes yet more savage murder and torture from their rulers. Ceasing opposition because of brutal retaliation rewards official murder and torture and allows the violence of the oppressors to determine the tactics of their victims; yet resistance in such cases generates more horror and more innocent victims. It is a genuine dilemma, and there is no easy way out. The anarchists resolved this problem by asserting that if enough individuals lived according to their own values, this in itself would precipitate the revolution. It might actually constitute the revolution. For the anarchists, expressive politics was prefigurative politics--living in the present the full, free life that the revolution would secure and universalize. This was true, however, only if the radicals won enough adherents to make their lifestyle plausible. Similarly, assassinations, mass action, and violent resistance could topple a regime, but only if enough individuals and organized groups employed such methods.
The Woman Rebel, a short-lived monthly edited by Margaret Sanger and distributed by Goldman, explicitly advocated assassination of public officials in its July, 1914 issue. Goldman greatly influenced and aided Sanger early in her career; Sanger borrowed many of Goldman's ideas and tactics in her crusade for birth control. The Woman Rebel was a "best-seller" at Goldman's meetings. Following the Lexington incident, Sanger published "A Defense of Assassination" by one Herbert A. Thorpe. This article reiterated Goldman's psychological defense of violence as proceeding from the interaction of as especially sensitive nature and outrageous oppression. Thorpe continued,
There is no difference, ethically, between killing a man instantly or slowly over-working or starving him to death, yet those are the conditions imposed upon millions of workers throughout the world today, owing to the brutality of the employing and official classes, and their ability to control large armies of ignorant police and soldiers.... Since the great mass of people are by force of circumstances unable to use the same weapons employed by the better educated and privileged class, this does not preclude the working class from using whatever other means of defense may be at its disposal, such as the strike, boycott, sabotage, or assassination. [grammar corrected]
Turning Social Darwinism against the capitalists, Thorpe declared that just as an individual could kill a savage or wild animal, so "those who, owing to the nature of our social fabric, are beyond the reach of correction.... should not be permitted to live upon or block the march of the many towards better conditions."[xliii]
The anarchists were correct in their assertions that Frick, McKinley, Rockefeller, and other lynchpins of the American system were directly and personally responsible for the torture and murder of millions of human beings. The owners of the American economy and political structure forcibly withheld the necessities of life from millions of Americans, dooming them to early and painful deaths. This was presented to the victims as the inevitable and natural operation of an impersonal system, but it was in fact the calculated, deliberate decision of those who profited from torture and death. American foreign policy directly exterminated millions of people in much the same way, by imposing regimes that forcibly deprive their populations of the necessities of life. McKinley's conquest of the Phillipines, with its massacres of civilians and destruction of villages, cost tens of thousands of innocent lives; millions more perished in the continuing slaughter imposed by the corporate economic structure the United States imposed on the Phillipines. (This carnage continues today.) Almost any prominent American politician or industrialist is as guilty of mass murder and torture as were the European monarchs of their day (or their totalitarian successors); only the precise motives and mechanisms of destruction differed, and this only in details. No individual, given the choice between suffering varieties of slow torture or death (inflicted by Czar, Kaisar, Stalinist, Nazi, or American) would care overmuch for the technical differences in motive and technique.
In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that we can determine the justice of a nation (or other institution) by asking ourselves what society we would construct for ourselves from behind a "veil of ignorance," where we knew nothing about our position in the society we designed. From this perspective, we would not care (for example) whether we were denied medical care because of our race, economic status, or some other criterion. We would judge a society on the basis of how many people were denied care, not the criterion used. Nor would the precise motive for denying us care much concern us, or whether the resultant deaths were deliberately sought as an end in their own right or inflicted as "collateral damage" in pursuit of other goals. In a racist society it seems perfectly natural (except to some of the victims) to deny medical care to individuals because of their race; a capitalist society denies care to those who cannot pay (even as other institutions ensure that many cannot pay). Both a racist and capitalist society, however, are deliberately constructed for the benefit of some people at the expense of others. Although Rawls is a deontologist, consequentialist philosophers have arrived at similar conclusions by applying their ethical standards to society.[xliv]
The extent of the American holocaust of Goldman's time can be guaged by reading the government's own statistics, published by the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1916 after years of hearings. The CIR concluded that between one-half and two-thirds of working-class families "were living below the standards of decent subsistence, while about one-third were living in a state which can be described only as abject poverty." The CIR concluded that "the babies of the poor died at three times the rate of those who were in fairly well-to-do families," 256 per thousand compared to 84 per thousand. Those who died were perhaps fortunate, because "the last of the family to go hungry are the children, yet statistics show that in six of our largest cities from 12 to 20 per cent of the children are noticeably underfed and ill nourished."[xlv] Their parents faced a daily "Sophie's Choice" of who would eat, and who go hungry; who would wear a warm coat, and who would shiver in the cold; who would die a lingering, painful death, and who would survive.[xlvi]
The Commission stated that these conditions were avoidable. The top 2% of the American people owned 60% of the wealth, the middle class of 33% owned 35% of the wealth, and the poorest 65% owned but 5%. (Today's figures are similar.) The Commission concluded that "with a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth, the entire population should occupy the position of comfort and security which we characterize as middle class."[xlvii] This being true, those who constructed the American economic system--and maintained it with terrorism and violence--were guilty of a Holocaust equalling others of the twentieth century.
Why did some 1910s radicals recognize the deliberate nature of these horrors, and the personal responsibility of those who profited, while their successors have mostly lost this insight? Bolton Hall, an associate of Goldman's, provided part of the answer when he commented that the horrors of poverty in the United States "are less striking, but just as real tortures" as those inflicted on prisoners in Czarist Russia, "only we are more used to them. Because these inflictions come in a less dramatic way and from less personal sources, they do not so violently stir most persons to revolt."[xlviii] The Russian atrocities, of course, did not stir most Russians to revolt; but Hall recognized that systematic, endemic abuses seem natural and impersonal, while people often recognize new or unexpected atrocities for what they are.
In Goldman's time, some American radicals perceived the realities of capitalist mass murder because fundamental economic and social changes made oppression obvious. New instruments of custom, hegemony, and class rule had not yet evolved to mystify and obscure the horrible truth. In Goldman's day, industrial, corporate capitalism was a recent development, and could not appear immutable, natural, and inevitable. The capitalists depended for their success on a wholesale rearrangement of work and society that many workers fervently resisted.[xlix]
In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, some workers owned their own skills, which they learned from other workers and sold to the capitalists on terms determined by the workers themselves. (Others remembered such days). They therefore regarded themselves as independent citizens engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship with their employers. The capitalists, however, were brazenly and relentlessly expropriating the workers' skills and subordinating workers to the machine and the capitalist reorganization of production. Most American workers today learn their skills under the supervision of their bosses, who mold and reshape their workforce in accordance with changing technology and the needs of the marketplace. The capitalists also own the machines. Under such circumstances, workers perceive themselves as properly subordinate to those who, it appears, provide them with machinery, training, and employment. Workers seem dependent on the capitalists for tools, skills, and jobs, while the objective dependence of the capitalists on the workers for profits is obscured. The capitalist's right to rearrange work according to his own whims and profits seems natural, because the capitalist has seemingly created, and definitely owns, the entire social mileau in which work is performed. Big Bill Haywood could clearly see that the manager's brains lay "under the workman's cap"; this insight eludes today's workers.[l]
The very meaning of property was palpably changing in Goldman's time. Proprietary capitalism, under which businesses were the personal possession of an individual entrepreneur or small group of partners, was overwhelmed by corporations whose stock was owned and traded by anonymous, distant individuals with no knowledge of or concern for the community or its workers. Stockholders were conerned only with profits, and, if dissatisfied with the performance of their company, sold their stock rather than improving conditions. The Commission on Industrial Relations decried "the impersonal, remote, and irresponsible status of stock ownership" and complained that the typical manager of a corporation was "totally ignorant of the actual operations of such corporations, whose properties he seldom, if ever, visits"; directors "know nothing and care nothing about the quality of the product, the condition and treatment of the workers from whose labor they derive their income, nor the general management of the business."[li]
This change from personal to impersonal ownership had enormous effects on workers, other citizens, local communites, and the social system. National (and soon enough international) markets and the decline of face-to-face relationships between employer and employee considerably worsened the wages, hours, and conditions of the workers even as it made rising from worker to owner virtually impossible. Workers who were once respected, personally known, and well-treated, and who had hopes of eventually becoming owners themselves, now became faceless "hands," relegated to permanent wage-earner status. The division between capitalist and worker, once relatively porous, became a social chasm--a change accentuted by massive immigration. Workers ferociously resisted those changes, although, because different workers were afflicted at different times and in different ways, they never forged a united front of opposition.
The rise of industrial, corporate capitalism initially threatened not only the workers but almost every social group. The established middle class, once firmly in control of their local "island communites," lost power and social status as distant, impersonal corporations increasingly decided their fate and that of their communities. Banks, railroads, and other vast corporations increasingly controlled the community, rather than being subject to its regulation. Farmers were similarly aggrieved by the railroads, storage companies, and other corporations upon whose slightest whims the lives of men and communities depended. Workers did not lack allies in their fight against the emergent corporate capitalism; they derived both moral and material support from other classes against a common enemy widely perceived as an alien intruder into local community affairs.[lii]
Under such circumstances, corporate rule seemed neither natural, inevitable, or just. The new capitalists ruled not by hegemony but by brute violence. They hired thugs to staff their vast company police forces, and enlisted the armed forces of local, state, and federal governments to murder dissident workers. The use of the United States Army to break strikes, pioneered by Andrew Jackson, became common after 1877. Against the opposition of organized labor, state police forces were modernized and strengthened in training, manpower, and equipment, and empolyed to crush labor unrest. Injunctions were also employed on an unprecedented and growing scale. The corporations employed vast numbers of spies, discharged workers for any or no reason, and enforced the blacklist and the yellow-dog contract. Many radicals in Goldman's day, therefore, clearly perceived the deliberate, socially-constructed nature of the new corporate order, whose changes seemed like naked aggression against workers, their families, and their communities. The new order clearly lacked the solidity and permanence required for hegemony. Today, the capitalists have long since completed their "revolution from above" and consolidated new mechanisms of social control and class rule that effectively disguise the nature of their regime. Today's radicals and rebels seldom penetrate the mystification and lies that surround their rulers, or regain the insights of their predecessors. For the most part, today's dissidents content themselves with criticizing specific aspects of the system, while implicitly accepting the legitimacy of U.S. institutions.
Goldman and her comrades perceived, more clearly even than most of their contemporaries, the nature of these new mechanisms of control, as yet imperfectly formed. They opposed those new tools of dominion when they were more overtly mechanisms of control, and not yet hegemonic. As we shall see, they opposed the paternalism of the welfare state, business unionism, welfare capitalism, "democratic" electioneering and political reforms, public education, mass production and consumerism, middle-class charitable and uplift institutions, and much of mass popular culture. Emphasizing a politics of class, they opposed ruling-class divisions of the proletariat on the basis of the working class on the basis of gendered, racial, national, religious, educational, occupational, and other artificial antagonisms and inequalities.
In opposing these new mechanisms of dominion, the anarchists broadened their vision beyond violence to a criticism of every institution. Because they rejected political action, conservative unionism, and other palliatives, they crafted other strategies for social transformation. The transparent failure of violent resistance by individuals or small groups did not cause the anarchists to repudiate "propaganda of the deed"--an integral part of anarchist history and ideology. But the events of the decades after Homestead did cause the anarchists to develop other aspects of their philosophy. Anarchists, therefore, propounded additional tactics and theories of social change appropriate for the long stretches between revolutionary situations. As early as 1908--in an article written for a mainstream newspaper--Goldman denigrated the attentat and expounded a wider vision of the processes of social change. "I do not believe that these acts can, or ever have been intended to, bring about the social reconstruction," she said, clearly exaggerating. "That can only be done, first, by a broad and wide education as to man's place in society and, second, through example. By example I mean the actual living of a truth once expressed, not the mere theorizing of its life element. Lastly, and the most powerful weapon, is the conscious, intelligent, organized, economic protest of the masses through direct action and the general strike."[liii]
[i]
CHAPTER ONE
5. Joll, 102-110; Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince, (New York, 1971), 156-157.
[ii] LML, 83-95; quotes are on 88. Drinnon's account is on 39-54, and Wexler's on 61-70.
[iii] LML, 84, 87.
[iv] LML, 87. Berkman's account of his attentat is in PMA, 1-88; quotes are on 58, 4, 59, 67.
[v] Wexler, 63; PMA, 7, 55.
[vi] PMA, 50-54; Drinnon, 52-53. Goldman claimed at the time that she horsewhipped Most, and, although she had long since been mortified at her act, repeater her account in LML, 105-6, 114. Her biographers accept her account, yet Most said that Goldman, seeking notoriety, merely brandished a toy whip. "Emma Goldman in Limbo," The New York World (September 1, 1893).
[vii] PMA, 67-8.
[viii] PMA, 136.
[ix] For Goldman's use of veiled language, see "Here is Oakey Hall," The New York World, October 8, 1893 and "Most and Emma Goldman," The World, August 20, 1893. "Take it by force" is in "Urging Men to Riot," The World, August 22, 1893. "Last convulsions" is in "My Year in Stripes," The World, August 18, 1894. "Pyramids of children's corpses" is in "The Law's Limit," The World, October 17, 1893. This article gives the entire speech EG was prevented from giving in court. "Parasites" is in "My Year in Stripes." The remaining quotes are from "Hailed EG," The World, August 20, 1894, which recounts the meeting welcoming EG upon her release from prison. All these articles are in EGP-GW. At the time, EG claimed that she had not directly urged the use of force; in LML (122-23) she proclaims that she did urge workers to take bread if the capitalists would not give it to them.
[x] Outsider, and I do not advise anyone, "Emma Goldman Here," (The Pittsburgh Leader, November 20, 1896). Reckoning, "The Law's Limit," (The World, October 17, 1893). If we were free, "Howls for EG," (The New York Times, August 20, 1894). All of these are in EGP-GW. At her trial, Goldman equivocated on her advocacy of violence. She claimed that she did not approve of Berkman's act, although she approved of his courage and idealism. Asked whether she approved of the use of bombs and dynamite, she said that they may be necessary in the distant future, at the time of the social revolution, and that she knew neither whether she would live until that day or what she would do. One reporter, in "Only the Moral Law," The New York World (October 7, 1893) was astounded that Goldman could wax eloquent on the Golden Rule one minute, only to immediately talk "of stuffing bombs with dynamite as a housewife talks of stuffing a turkey." GET EXACT QUOTE HERE. The EGP-GW has numerous clippings of Goldman's testimony, as well as the "transcript" (in reality a summary) of the trial; these differ in details but agree on most of the main points.
Although Goldman frequently approved of violent acts, she occasionally talked as if a united working class could overturn the the government and come into possession of society without any violence--an idea later propounded by many members of the IWW. In 1898, she told workers that "When you are educated, when you realize your power, you"ll need no bombs, and no dynamite or militia will hold you." "Emma Goldman, Anarchist," (The San Francisco Call, April 27, 1898). See also, "Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers," (The Cleveland Plain Dealers, May 6, 1901). As I explain below, Goldman explicitly repudiated this view at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1906.
[xi] Voltairine de Clyre, "In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation," a speech given on December 16, 1893 to protest EG's imprisonment, is reprinted in The Selected Works of Voltairine de Clyre, (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914), 204-219. The reference to Cardinal Manning is on 208. Charles Mowbray's speech is in "Hailed EG," (The World, August 20, 1894), EGP-GW.
[xii] EG to Ben Reitman, August 26, 1910, EGP-C.
[xiii] Berkman's attentat, and the principles, (The Firebrand, November 17, 1895, reprinted from The Torch, London). Violent acts, (The Detroit Sentinel, July 30, 1898). In France, (The Firebrand, May 24, 1896). Cannot stop the tide, (The Firebrand, May 24, 1896). Gallows on every streetcorner, (Pittsburgh Leader), November 23, 1896.
Goldman publicly extolled Berkman's act on numerous occasions. In 1892 she said that "we must make the most of this deed of Berkman's and follow it with other similar deeds until there are no more despots in America" and "The report of Berkman's shot will be heard all over the world and echo down through the ages. Other deeds like this will follow until capital is dead. His bullet did not kill, but others are being moulded and they will fly with surer aim." "Wild Anarchist Talk," (The New York Times, August 2, 1892) and "They Talked a Great Deal," (The New York Times, August 2, 1892). MAKE SURE THIS IS NOT THE SAME ARTICLE, DIFFERENTLY SUBTITLED. In 1895 she said that "the act was not altogether in vain; Plutocracy has never raised its head so proudly since." (The Firebrand, July 21, 1895).
Joll (113-117) and Woodcock (288-294) discuss the individuals mentioned by Goldman. Their accounts differ in minor details. Francois-Claudius Ravachol, a truly Dostoevskian character, murdered a rich hermit to obtain money for the anarchist cause, bombed the houses of prominent politicians, and "walked to the gallows singing an anti-clerical song. Ravachol was in the tradition of the heroic brigand." (Woodcock, 288-90).
Emile Henry placed a bomb in the offices of a company known for its brutal repression of strikes; the police took the bomb to their headquaters, where it exploded and killed four or five policemen. Henry, claiming that everyone was complicit in social crimes, then exploded a bomb at a crowded cafe to avenge the execution of Vaillant. In explanation of his act, he said, "I would like to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their insolent triumphs would be distrubed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast in down in mud and blood." (Joll, 117-118).
Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies, and at his execution predicted that "my death will be avenged." (Woodcock, 292).
Santo Jeronimo Caserio, an Italian, killed President Carnot of France to avenge Vaillant. (Joll 113-114).
[xiv] Acts of Berkman, (The Firebrand, July 21, 1895). Heroes like Golli, (The World, August 17, 1897). Goldman also said that King Humbert of Italy was justly executed (The New York Times, December 12, 1900). Gaetano Bresci, his assassin, was a member of an anarchist group in Paterson, New Jersy, who travelled to Europe explicily to assassinate Humbert. She justified the assassination of President Carnot in Free Society, July 30, 1899. She discussed many of these incidents in her essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence," AOE, 79-108, where she quotes many of the attentateurs at length.
Goldman was criticized by her comrades for extolling Golli. At a small gathering to evaluate the public meeting held about the Canovas affair, "other speakers expressed the belief that a better end would have been accomplished if the doctrine of Anarchy had been explained and the causes for CAnovas's removal through his tyranny made clear." "Her Comrades Rebuke Emma Goldman," (The New York Tribune, August 23, 1897.)
Pallas threw a bomb at a general in retaliation for the execution of four anarchists (Joll, 111).
[xv] "The Psychology of Political Violence," AOE, 102-3. LML (189-190) quotes Angiolillo somewhat differently.
[xvi] LML, 118-119.
[xvii] "An Open Letter," Free Society, February 17, 1901. Goldman made no distinctions between "democracies" and other forms of government in this regard.
[xviii] The Czolgosz incident is discussed in Drinnon, 68-77, and Wexler, 100-112.
Would have approved, "Anarchists in Spain and New York," (The World, August 17, 1897.) McKinley feared he would be next, (The World, August 17, 1897). Goldman's denunciations of McKinley appeared in "The Tragedy at Buffalo," Free Society, October 1901, reprinted, ME, October 1906. Mouthpice of Hanna, (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 17. 1897.)
One of the subheads in the above article read "She thinks all rulers should be removed, with the exception of President McKinley." The article reported the following dialgue between an unnamed questioner and EG.
Questioner: "Then you favor the execution of all heads of governments?"
Goldman: "Yes, if you please to put it that way."
Questioner: "Do you think that Mr. McKinley should be removed--or, as you call it, executed?"
Goldman: "McKinley--pooh! He is only a tool, a moputhpiece for Mark Hanna. I don't consider McKinley."
On another occasion Goldman said that McKinley was "not worth killing." FIND SOURCE FOR THIS
After McKinley was shot, Goldman said "I don't think they should make any more fuss about the President than over any other man." Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1901.
In 1900, Goldman had said that anarchists had more important tasks than "removal of the heads of a few rotten kings." "The Paris Congress," (Free Society, October 21, 1900: 1, 3.) She sometimes tried to convince the public of the respectability of her views; see Charles Thompson, "An Interview with Emma Goldman," (The New York Times, May 30, 1909). Her seemingly pacific sentiments here would not reassure anyone familiar with the nuances of Goldman's position.
[xix] The first three quotes are from "The Tragedy at Buffalo," Free Society, October 1901, reprinted in ME, October 1906. Berkman, outraged, PMA 413. Goldman and Berkman discuss their disagreement in LML 322-325 and PMA, 412-418. Goldman's willingness to nurse McKinley is recounted in LML 305-6. See HDT on JB for similar appraisal of earlier use of violence against oppression.
[xx] EG, "The Tragedy at Buffalo," (Free Society, October 1901, reprinted, ME, October 1906). Voltairine de Clyre's views are expressed in "McKinley's Assassination from an Anarchist Standpoint," ME, October 1907: 303-306. De Clyre called McKinley a "man who had ordered others killed without once jeopardizing his own life, and to whom death came more easily than to millions who die of long want and slow tortures of disease."
[xxi] four walls, and the incident with Abe Isaak, LML 321, 313; ME lost backers after its Czolgosz issue, EG, "The Situation in America," ME, November 1907. EG arrested for meeting, "Anarchists in Court," The New York Times, Nov 1, 1906, EGP-SW.
[xxii] PMA, 412-417.
[xxiii] note here sources for anti-anarchist laws: PO censorship, immigration tests on political beliefs, state laws.
[xxiv] LML, 324-25.
[xxv] EG, "Reply," ME, December 1906; EG, "The International Anarchist Congress," ME, October 1907, 316. Goldman's views were very similar to Kropotkin's in many regards. For his views on violence, see Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince (Schocken Books, 1971), 357, 360-1.
[xxvi] EG on Haywood, Free Society, November 1907, p. 68, EGP-GWS; Berkman, "The Source of Violence," (ME, December 1911); EG and Ben threaten retaliation, Ben Reitman, "The Respectable Mob," (ME: June 1912): 109-114, and EG, "The Outrage San Diego," (ME, June 1912): 115-122. See also, in the same issue, Berkman, Harry Kelly, and Hippolyte Havel, "A Protest and a Warning," (122-23). EG threatens the chief of police, Caroline Nelson, "Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman Tell of San Diego Experience, Industrial Worker, (June 6, 1912): 4-5. Goldman claimed that the chief "began to shake in his knees and declared that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping of Reitman."
Goldman similarly claimed that she was well-treated in prison because the matron knew that if she were mistreated her comrades would avenge her. EG, "My Year in Stripes," (The New York World, August 18, 1894).
[xxvii] For a brief account of the Ludlow Massacre and the response of the anarchists, see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement, (183-216, especially 191-196.)
[xxviii] Berkman's funeral speech is in ME, July 1914. Berkman, who could still be returned to prison to complete his sentence for attempting to assassinate Frick, pretended that he did not know the cause of the explosion, but said that he hoped it was caused by a bomb being prepared for Rockefeller.
Goldman (LML, 537-38) claimed that "with the exception of Sasha's own address and those of Leonard D. Abbot and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the harranges were of a most violent character." Berkman's, however, was among the most violent of them all.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was upset at the speeches, writing to her friend Mary Heaton Vorse, "Saturday made me decide never to speak with the anarchists again. They insisted on speaking one after the other until we were completely exhausted... shouting 'We believe in dynamite" until instead of a dignified memorial meeting it became hysterical proclamations of personal opinions... they had such a unique opportunity to fix the full responsibility on society as it is and give an inspiring and sympathetic presentation of their principles...." Flynn blamed Berkman for this fiasco. Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies, Penguin, 1988, 53.) Compare this with the criticisms of Goldman's extolling of Golli, above.
The issue of violence generated more overt disagreement in Mother Earth than any other subject. In the tenth anniversary issue of March, 1915, two contributors explicitly criticized ME's stance of violence. This, however, shows that even some people who supported EG recognized and dissented from her views on this subject.
[xxix] LML, 536-38; EG to Ben Reitman, September 16, 1914, EGP-C; telegram, ME, July 1914, 154. Goldman's letter to Reitman was written under circumstances opposite from those of her 1910 letter cited above; in the earlier letter, Goldman was responding to Reitman's advocacy of violence, in the second letter to his disapproval of it. Goldman's position, however, remained the same.
[xxx] Goldman quotes are from EG, "Stray Thoughts," (ME, August or September, 1916); Berkman's are in "Worshipping the God of Dynamite," (The Blast, August 15, 1916): 2. Berkman had long wanted his own anarchist journal, focusing on labor issues; on January 15, 1915, he began publication of The Blast.
[xxxi] The Blast (August 15, 1916): 5-7.
[xxxii] Charles Thompson, "So-Called IWW Raids Really Hatched by Schoolboys," (New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 29, 1914); Lincoln Steffens quote is from Kaplan, Steffens, 205.
[xxxiii] EG, "Speculators in Starvation," typescript, EGP-GW. This was written in 1917 or 1918. How often it was actually delivered--if at all--is uncertain. CHECK NEWSPAPERS, ESPECIALLY NEW YORK ONES.
[xxxiv] The judges, EG, Speech Against Conscription and War, June 14, 1917, EGP-GW. Judge Meyer was the judge who had savagely sentenced two anti-draft agitators and was soon to give EG and Berkman the longest possible sentences allowed by law. For Goldman's views during this period, see her speeches, "America and the Russian Revolution," January 11, 1918; "We Don't Believe in Conscription," May 18, 1917; Address of EG, Kate Richards O'Hare Testimonial Dinner, November 17, 1919. See also her pamphlet, "The Truth About the Boylsheviki," (Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1918) and her articles in Mother Earth Bulletin, which replaced Mother Earth until it too was suppressed. The speeches are in EGP-GW; Mother Earth Bulletin is in EGP-GD, although EG's own articles are in EGP-GW.
[xxxv] Arich, Sacco-Vanzetti, the Anarchist Background; Gallagher, All the Right Enemies; ---, John Most. For Victor Berger's attitudes, see my chapter on the IWW.
[xxxvi] Charles Thompson, "So-Called IWW Raids Were Hatched by Schoolboys," New York Times Sunday Magazine (March 29, 1914).
[xxxvii] Berkman and Goldman, "Down with the Anarchists," The Blast, (August 15, 1916): 5-7. SPIRIT OF PROGRESS; TOLSTOYEAN
[xxxviii] Charles Robert Plunkett, "Dynamite!," and Berkman, "A Guage of Change," (ME, July 1914). Theodore Schroder, "On Conscience," (ME, July 1907): 227, denounced the measurement of an act "by the intensity and kind of emotional states which we associate with it."
[xxxix] Editorial, "Tragedy," The Woman Rebel, (July, 1914): 1.
[xl] IF WE MUST DIE-TYPE CITATIONS
[xli] For the Socialist argument against sabotage, violence, and illegal action generally, see my chapter on the IWW.
[xlii] After Goldman and Berkmen were charged with obstructing the draft, Goldman wrote Agnes Inglis that "even if we are convicted if will be our gain. People will see what crimes and injustices are committed in the name of democracy." She also said that "it will be worth going to jail for the propaganda accomplished and that's the main thing after all." As late as April 1919 Goldman still believed that the jailing of so many political criminals helped "the advancement of Revolutionary ideas.... From now on no one will dare maintain in any public meeting that we have free speech and a free press. It will be ridiculed like that other famous boast that everyone can become a millionaire in our country." Wexler, 232, 235, 240. Goldman, of course, vastly underestimated the tenacity of both of those myths.
[xliii] Robert A. Thorpe, "In Defense of Assassination," The Woman Rebel, (July, 1914): 1-2.
[xliv] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; also books by Ted Honderich; utilitarianism for and against, anthologies on Rawls, MIll's anthology by Bobs-Merrill, book on killing v letting die. CLEAN THIS UP
[xlv] Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report, (Washington, 1916), 22-23.
[xlvi] CIR pages; also shivering Lawrence children; coal miners children, etc. quote these.
[xlvii] Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report (Washington, 1916), 33. This report is a gold mine of information on the condition of the American working class in 1916, and the mechanisms by which the capitalists imposed those conditions. Pages 17-68 provide a splendid overview. The volumes of testimony is also of great use to historians.
[xlviii] Bolton Hall, "Can the Kingdom of Heaven be Taken by Force," (ME, January 1917): 32.
[xlix] cite secondary sources on resistance: Montgomery's Fall of the House of Labor; Homestead book, etc etc, Salvatore on Debs, etc.
[l] William Haywood, Industrial Socialism, GET EXACT PAGE
[li] Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report, (Washington, 1916), 26-27.
[lii] The phrase is from Robert Wiebe's excellent The Search for Order.
[liii]EG, "What I Believe." This was originally published as an article in The New York World in 1908; it was later issued as a pamphlet, reprinted in RES, 34-46. The quote is on page 46.