CHAPTER TWO: EMMA GOLDMAN AND THE WORKING-CLASS REVOLUTION
From the beginning of her career, Emma Goldman focused her efforts on the working class. Today's reader, familiar with the New Left's version of Goldman, may be surprised by the overwhelmingly class focus of her analysis. For years Goldman lectured, often in German or Yiddish, primarily to working-class audiences; even when she became popular in some mainstream circles, she never abandoned her roots or her original constituency. As late as 1916, long after she had won a certain cachet among a segment of the American elite, she almost apologized for addressing upscale audiences. "I never feel at ease anywhere except on my own platform, and talking to the working class," she told a reporter. After all, I do not believe that the wealthy class will play a dominant part in the reconstruction of society. It likes to cling to old ideas."[i]
Goldman viewed economic slavery as a main basis for every other kind of servitude, and recognized that liberty could have meaning only if capitalism were abolished. "There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development," she maintained, "as long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important role in the determination of personal conduct." Yet Goldman seldom discussed the ideal economic arrangements of anarchist society, believing that future generations would experiment with their own diverse forms. She was more interested in contemporary events. She supported militant labor struggles, regardless of the philosophy of any specific union or the tactics of a particular strike, in the columns of Mother Earth, in her speeches, and by raising funds.[ii]
The anarchists detested the AFL but sympathized with the IWW. Individual anarchists were active in the IWW, especially in the foreign language sections, and Wobblies were sometimes admitted free to Goldman's lectures. Anarchists admired the IWW's reliance on revolutionary elan rather than large strike funds and approved its rejection of contracts, union benefits, and strong leaders. Goldman imbibed the main ideas of syndicalism at the International Anarchist Congress in Paris in 1900 and introduced them to the United States five years before the foundation of the IWW. The French syndicalists particularly impressed her. The CGT, the largest French labor federation, sponsored employment agencies and aided traveling workers, thus mitigating some of the worst abuses afflicting migrant workers in the United States. It also provided workers with libraries, concerts, and schools which taught subjects such as craft skills and sex education. Goldman saw this voluntary cooperation for the public good as the epitome of anarchism and praised the CGT for preparing the workers in the present for "a full, free life when capitalism shall have been abolished."[iii]
Goldman endorsed the IWW's tactics of direct action, the general strike, and the expropriation of the capitalists. She called sabotage "ethical in the best sense" because it undermines capitalist property relations. Yet Mother Earth writers considered the IWW insufficiently revolutionary on some points of theory. Because anarchists viewed the state as a substantive evil rather than as a mere reflection of capitalism, they advocated insurrection in addition to the general strike. Various writers in Mother Earth criticized the IWW's concept of "one big union" as too centralized and advocated a federation of smaller, more autonomous craft and industrial unions directly responsive to the wishes of their members. The IWW favored centralized production and majority rule on the factory floor. The anarchists wanted decentralized, small-scale production and repudiated majority rule, in industry as in politics, because they feared that the majority of workers would oppress minorities. Everyone, they felt, should have guaranteed access to the means of production and share equally in the product, without asking leave of anyone--capitalists, managers, or fellow workers. Goldman attacked the whole system of mass production as degrading work, workers, and their products; stunted and spiritually deformed workers produced "gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence." Work, she felt, should be "the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force."[iv]
Goldman considered syndicalism "the economic expression of anarchism," but working-class economic revolution was only a part of the total social and cultural revolution she desired. At the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, she opposed a resolution proclaiming syndicalism and working-class economic interests the principle basis of revolutionary activity. Goldman's anarchism addressed individuals rather than any particular class and critiqued all of life, not merely economic arrangements. She endorsed Malatesta's statement that anarchism "goes beyond every class interest, its aim is the liberation of man in all phases of life." The general strike and insurrection, she believed, would inaugurate the social revolution rather than complete it. "The main evil today is an economic one," Goldman said, but "the solution of that evil can be brought about only through consideration of every phase of life."[v]
Goldman criticized working-class cultural values for interfering with the fight for workers' emancipation. She denounced religion, patriotism, political activity, and conventional morality for dampening class consciousness and class conflict. She denounced Christian ethical teachings as "a slave morality.... the destroyer of all things that make for strength and character" and as "irrevocably opposed" to "the great struggles for social and economic emancipation." She considered religion "a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness, and contentment"; like the state, it has a "paralyzing effect upon thought and action" because it teaches the workers that others would save them. "Religion and morality are a much better whip to keep the people in submission, than even the club and the gun.... The more poverty stricken the victim of Property Morality is, the greater his respect and awe for that master.... Until the workers lose respect for the instrument of their material enslavement, they need hope for no relief."[vi]
Goldman attacked religion in all its forms. There were, roughly speaking, three main religious sensibilities that concerned her, all of which cut across denominational lines. Traditionally, religion had been at the very center of personal and social life, structuring both private conduct and public endeavor. A focus on the afterlife had this-worldly effects. Christian morality, however, mainly concerned sins of the flesh and the petty venalities of life; it ignored, or even justified, exploitation and poverty, and taught submission to the victims. Most varieties of Christianity were mechanisms of class rule and elite hegemony. They proclaimed the superior virtue of the rich and inculcated resignation and acquiescence (or social climbing based on acculturation to elites values) in the poor. Traditional Christianity was prudish, against birth control and feminism, and hostile to radicalism in all of its varieties.
Protestantism, however, especially among the upper classes, had increasingly become a subjective, private affair, detached from social concerns, and more formal and decorative than real or intense. The new corporate world valued affability and "getting along"; business success became the central, motivating value among the middle class. Authentic faith could inject sectarian animosities into the business world, and was therefore avoided. Religion became emptied of content, a vacuous style of social display and empty professions of piety. Goldman attacked both the traditional and more recent forms of religion. Later in her career she grudgingly admitted that a modernized form of religion could perhaps focus on creating a decent life on earth, instead of in heaven; but she opposed the Social Gospel because she wanted the workers to find their own salvation, and not to rely upon God or His spokesmen.
Goldman similarly attacked patriotism as a distraction from the class war and as justifying large armies which are used to shoot strikers and repress radicals. Patriotic workers identified with institutions which "sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses." The American worker "is not only a fool, but a conceited fool" who "believes himself free, whereas the chains of slavery make his limbs bleed." She wanted "the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state." Goldman advocated birth control as one phase in "the larger social war.... a war for a seat at the table of life on the part of the people, the masses who create, who build the world and have nothing in return." The rich, she realized, could obtain contraceptive information from their private physicians; the capitalists oppose birth control for the poor because they need cannon fodder for the army and a large unemployed workforce to drive wages down and break unions. A man with a large family "cringes before his master, just to earn barely enough to feed the many little mouths. He dare not join a revolutionary organization; he dare not go on strike; he dare not express an opinion." She regarded feminism as a working-class issue because men could not achieve the social revolution without the cooperation of women.[vii]
Goldman opposed not only overt terrorism and violence, and old forms of bourgeois hegemony such as racism, patriotism, and patriarchy, but the relatively new instruments of dominion forged by liberal, democratic capitalism. She regarded elections as toys which distracted the workers giving them the illusion of participation, freedom, and equality, while undermining class organization and working-class insurgencies. She repeatedly stated that so-called democracy was no better than autocracy. Indeed, she felt it worse precisely because it falsified the nature of the state and of the workers' position within it, and won the loyalty of the oppressed. Democratic institutions also placated the middle class, and therefore divided it from the workers; in autocracies such as Russia, the two classes each recognized their common oppression and made common cause.[viii]
Goldman learned from her own experience that free speech and other bourgeois liberties were illusory and hegemonic. Goldman and her comrades were allowed more freedom of speech and assembly in monarchies such as England, Holland, Germany, and Canada than in the United States. The United States tolerated free expression only as long as it was a harmless venting of frustration; whenever it demonstrated a potential to generate real change, it was throttled. Yet Americans prided themselves UPON their ability to speak their minds. In particular, the United States obstructed working-class organization far more than most other countries, and shot down strikes with a callous impunity much less pronounced elsewhere. The anarchists rejected paternalistic government, the welfare state, and labor legislation as facilitating and legitimizing capitalist mass murder of the workers, undermining working-class activism, and further enslaving the workers.
Goldman criticized public education, another vaunted achievement of American democracy, as an instrument of class dominion not only for what it taught, but because it broke the wills and spirits of the children and cut them off from their own true natures and from any concept of genuine education. The public school "is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier." The process of breaking the will of the individual, and creating docile, compliant wage-slaves "must begin at a very early age." By claiming that what they dispense is education, the schools prevent the workers from ever realizing what true education means, "thereby enslaving the masses a great deal more than could an absolute ruler.... Our present system of economic and political dependence is maintained not so much by wealth and the courts as it is by an inert mass of humanity, drilled and pounded into an absolute uniformity... the school today represents the most efficient medium to accomplish that end." By inculcating false ideas about human sexuality, Goldman charged, the schools further warped and crippled their students, making them unfit for genuine liberty or social struggle.[ix] Goldman stressed that workers would be better off without any bogus facsimiles of real goods, such as democracy, freedom, and education; lacking these, they would fight for the genuine articles, and attain them in the process of struggle.
Goldman similarly opposed Americanization programs, in the schools, factories, or society at large, as bleaching out all that was beautiful, radiant, and authentic in the various cultures that composed the United States.[x] Her stance is particularly noticeable because she did not advocate Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism; she wanted a diversity of individuals rather than of groups. She wanted each person to eschew all prefabricated identities and sculpt their own personalities, and realized that every national and ethnic culture was permeated by religious, moral, and sexual superstitions. Although of Jewish origins herself, and understanding of the reasons that Jews adhered to their own culture as a refuge from oppression, she held anarchist meetings on Jewish holy days, in a direct affront to religious sensibilities. Nevertheless, she criticized Americanization programs as regimenting and conformist, reducing a rich diversity to a homogeneous mass. Many Progressive intellectuals, echoing stern old republican verities, demanded a unified nation composed of people unanimous in their basic culture and presupposition; Goldman's ideal world was the antithesis of that progressive ideal.
Goldman bitterly attacked charitable institutions as merely giving back to the workers a small part of what had been stolen from them. Capitalists, in dispensing their largess, meddled in the lives of their beneficiaries and reduced them to abject dependence and misplaced gratitude, thus undermining working-class self-respect, initiative, and responsibility. She was horrified at the common spectacle in London, of penniless vagrants scurrying for blocks after the carriages of the rich, and cringing for the privilege of opening the carriage door when its occupant alighted in hopes of receiving a coin. While acknowledging the altruism of settlement workers such as Jane Addams, she averred that they did more harm than good. "Teaching the poor to eat with a fork is all very well," she said, "but what does it do if they have not the food? Let them first become the masters of life; they will then know how to eat and how to live."[xi] The anarchists opposed welfare capitalism and conservative unionism, then relatively young, for similar reasons.
Goldman was scornful of mass consumerism, another new mechanism of elite hegemony, for two reasons. First, mass production, upon which consumerism rested, was a form of mutilation and mass murder of workers. "There can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives," she proclaimed; nothing that cost human lives was worth producing. Mass production turned "the producer into a mere particle of the machine"; the very conditions of work destroyed the joyful, authentic, autonomous individuals that any economic system should foster. The treasures of human personality are, Goldman passionately believed, the only riches worth possessing; mass production capitalism destroyed these and substituted "gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence." Goldman considered Leavensworth, much more comfortable but also more regimenting than traditional prisons, a "monster of modernity" that symbolized the worst tendencies of an emerging world of scientific efficiency and labor-saving machinery that provided for its residents at the cost of every "spark of humanity." Goldman herself, though no ascetic, disdained consumerism in favor of personal development. Interviewed in prison by Nellie Bly in 1893, she said that "I kept myself in poverty buying books.... So long as I had something to read, I did not mind hunger or shabby clothes."[xii]
Finally, Goldman attacked bourgeois high culture as saccharine and false. Goldman recognized that the bourgeoisie's pretense of being the creators, guardians and connoisseurs of high culture was itself hegemonic in that it obliquely justified and prettified capitalist rule over the "uncultured" masses. But Goldman criticized most high culture as mere escapism, a narcotic that falsified reality, dulled the intellects and moral sensibilities of its consumers, and detached them from the vital life and social struggles which surrounded them. Although Goldman only occasionally noticed the emerging mass, popular, commercial forms of amusement and culture, her attitude is implicit in her efforts to bring radical and critical forms of high culture, such as modern drama, to the masses, and her insistence that such culture stems from the common people. She visited Stieglitz's studio at "291" and encouraged the Ferrer Center's efforts to teach working-class children and adults the techniques of social realism in painting. She disdained the movies, presumably because she felt them merely a form of amusement incapable of communicating important ideas. While Goldman appreciated fun, frivolity, and entertainment--deeming them especially necessary for an agitator--she opposed all efforts to make them the center of life.
The anarchists clustered around Mother Earth were total revolutionaries who worked for the overthrow of all existing institutions and cultural values. This distinguished them from almost all other radicals of their day. The Socialist party asked for the vote of any worker or other citizen who agreed with its political and economic program; to the dismay of Debs and others it solicited the votes of non-Socialists who agreed only with some of the SP's immediate demands, or who simply disliked the mainstream parties. The IWW similarly demanded of its members only that they support the IWW during strikes, free speech fights, and other agitation; it recruited workers of any party or religion. Although intellectuals associated with the SP and the IWW attacked mainstream institutions and values, activists seeking political office or organizing ordinary workers were free to downplay, ignore, or even repudiate such cultural radicalism. Strident rejection of traditional values and institutions was not a prerequisite to membership in either the SP or the IWW, but constituted an essential ingredient in anarchism. Goldman recognized that the working class could not liberate itself without undergoing a fundamental change in cultural values. The anarchists believed that education and enlightenment must precede the revolution rather than following from it because they perceived revolution as not merely the overthrow of a specific government or the substitution of one ruling class for another, but the total destruction of all instruments of coercion--political, economic, and cultural. Goldman and the anarchists recognized that cultural evils such as racism, sexism, homophobia, prudery, and nationalism did not stem exclusively from economic causes, but required separate analysis and attack. They pointed to the manifold connections between capitalism and these evils, but did not reduce them to one primary cause, elimination of which would resolve all other problems. Cultural transformation was as necessary as economic revolution, both as a good in its own right and as an essential prequisite to the overthrow of capitalism. Workers in thrall to conventional moral, religious, and patriotic beliefs would not make a revolution, and even if they did it would avail them nothing. Goldman said that during the Paris Commune the starving workers "protected the warehouses filled to the brim with provisions" and guarded the bank deposits of their oppressors. Only changed individuals could create a changed society "because it is man who makes society, and not society that makes the man."[xiii]
This emphasis on education, enlightenment, and a transformed consciousness implied that the revolution must be a long process rather than a sudden irruption. Although people are shaped by their environment and would change in response to the new revolutionary society, no insurrection could miraculously change the personalities and values of the people. Anarchists, Mother Earth editorialized, seek "the destruction of all the false notions and conceptions at the basis of our whole civilization--the utter destruction of the very spirit on which it rests." Grafting new ideas and opinions on the surface of existing one is comparably easy. "But the true revaluation of dominant values necessitates the complete destruction of the latter.... To destroy, to root up must be the work of every pathfinder.... Such destruction is in the truest sense the most constructive effort." Goldman feared that only "centuries of enlightenment" would undo "the harm done by traditions and habits." When Francisco Ferrer, the Spanish libertarian educator, was executed in 1909 for allegedly participating in the uprising of that year, Goldman scoffed at the charges. Ferrer, Goldman said, "had his life-work mapped out; he had everything to lose and nothing to gain, except ruin and disaster, were he to lend assistance to the outbreak.... His work, his hope, his very nature was directed toward another goal." Goldman regarded Ferrer's educational work as more dangerous to the political and ecclesiastical authorities than bombs or insurrection.[xiv]
Alexander Berkman, while not repudiating the attentat or insurrection, eventually voiced a competing theory of social change always implicit in anarchism. In 1910 he averred that while Socialist "transformation of political and economic conditions" might happen quickly, the anarchist "complete transvaluation of individual and social conceptions" was "a gigantic task" that would take a long time. The anarchist goal was primarily "a condition of mind" which required long preparation, starting with the immediate construction of counter-cultural institutions such as libertarian schools. No revolution generated solely by material privation could succeed; only "the inspiration of the liberating idea" could generate "conscious, triumphant revolution." In March 1915 Berkman admitted that his youthful, impatient idea of immediate, cataclysmic social revolution, "beginning perhaps in some little incident" was false. If revolution "means a complete and lasting change, a fundamental reorganization of popular ideas and conceptions, then it necessitates the gradual--primarily individual--substitution of new values for old ones." Revolutions "are merely mileposts indicating the distance covered" rather than substantive events in their own right.[xv]
If mass insurrection would achieve economic change, cultural transformation could come only from a militant minority of intrepid, creative spirits who would wean the masses from their innate conservatism. This reconciles Goldman's belief in the necessity of popular revolution with her denunciations of the masses and extolling of the creative minority. The masses "will always be the annihilator of individuality, of free initiative, of originality" she exclaimed. "Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty emanates from the minority and not from the mass." The anarchists regarded themselves as an elite vanguard, always far ahead of the inert masses. Workers were, the anarchists felt, a logical source of social revolution because they are oppressed; they were essential because of their numbers. Yet only a self-created elite could dispel superstition, overcome conventional beliefs, and forge the majority into a force for positive change. "Ideas are the true liberators," Berkman said. "It is given only to the seerer and poet to conceive liberating ideas--impractical, wild thoughts that ultimately light the way for practical, blind men to better and higher endeavor."[xvi]
The anarchists believed in the continued necessity of cultural revolution because humanity would never arrive at a social state where all change and progress would cease. By the time the masses caught up with the anarchists, those visionaries would be yet further ahead, scanning as yet unimagined horizons. IWW activists, responding to their own experience, spoke of the "militant minority" whose agitation would help liberate the mass of workers; the anarchists agreed, but added that the creative minority needed liberation from the masses as well.[xvii] They did not believe that the abolition of capitalism would transform the masses or any other human group so that they could be trusted with power.
II
The anarchists attacked conventional practices, beliefs, and institutions not only verbally in publications and lecture halls, but in life and practice. The main difference between the anarchists and other revolutionary movements did not lie in their attitudes towards politics, the state, and acts of political violence. Rather, it resided in their moral and cultural values and the personal responses to the dilemmas as living as revolutionaries and feminists in a capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist society. "Propaganda of the deed," a term usually connotating the assassination of heads of state, industrial magnates, or other symbolic figures, was in truth a metaphor for the entire anarchist enterprise as Emma Goldman and her circle clustered around Mother Earth conceived and lived it. Similarly, she broadened the concept of direct action, the IWW's term for worker self-activity that bypassed the state, such as strikes, sabotage, and free speech fights. "Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual," she said. "There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free."[xviii]
Harry Kelly, a major contributor to Mother Earth, averred that "Propaganda by example is an unpopular subject with all classes of reformers.... If ideals are to become realities, some attempt at living those ideals is necessary, even though we may be forced to leave the beaten path, brave public opinion, and, if necessary, go to jail as a protest against injustice, thereby inspiring those who follow us to do likewise." Goldman reminded her fellow radicals that "social changes are made by man and not by theories" and that "example more than theory is the potent force." The bohemian radicals of Greenwich Village maintained their right to live according to their own values; the anarchists proclaimed this a duty. Compromise and hypocrisy were not only unnecessary but wrong. Anarchists could not exploit others or submit to exploitation, attend church, send their children to public schools, or observe the usual moral proprieties. According to Goldman, "the new forms of life rather consist in the attempt to practically apply the ideas of anarchism right now.... They will take the place of the old not by preaching or voting, but by living them."[xix]
Goldman believed that revolutionaries defeated their own purposes by compromising with beliefs, practices, and institutions they disdain; such hypocrisy alienated even their own children. "The radical parent arraigns God, priesthood, church, government, domestic authority, yet continues to adjust himself to the condition he abhors.... The child, being fed on one-sided, set and fixed ideas, soon grows weary of rehashing the beliefs of its parents, and it sets out in quest of new sensations, no matter how inferior or shallow the new experience may be.... They will vote for imperialism only to escape the drag of economic determinism and scientific socialism." Goldman complained that radicals indoctrinated their children and dragged them to meetings at times when they should be in school or asleep. She said that parents should wait until their children were old enough to understand politics, and then expose them to all points of view. She extolled the Isaaks, publishers of Free Society, as rare exemplars of anarchists who applied their principles in their domestic life. "The comradeship between the parents and the complete freedom of every member of the household were novel things to me.... Never once did I see the parents resort to the authority of superior age or wisdom. Their children were their equals; their right to disagree, to live their own lives and learn, was unquestioned."[xx]
Alexander Berkman similarly felt that compromise with conventional social norms was both personally and politically destructive. Berkman, like most anarchists, felt that the purpose of human life was "the individual's development to the utmost capacity of his being, the unfolding and free manifestation of all his powers.... complete self-expression." Yet radicals often defeated this purpose by conforming "first, to conditions of absolute wrong and harm of which we have long since realized; second, to usage, the authority of which we consider, in our hearts, preposterous; and third, to prejudices from which we have already emancipated ourselves." Such capitulation "is an inexhaustible source of inner strife, regrets, remorse, and self-dissatisfaction"; it also causes "deterioration of character and systematic weakening of will-power and resistance." Revolutionists who compromise for the sake of temporary gain therefore defeat the very purpose of their lives. Nor did Berkman admit that compromise with social usage was sometimes justified out of a sense of duty, to avoid offending the sensibilities of others. "As if one could owe anyone the duty of turning hypocrite! As if we could owe anyone a greater duty than being true to ourselves!" Revolutionaries must not compromise out of a convinction that the ends justify the means and that compromise will help the Cause. Only those means are justified which are compatible with the end we seek; "and then they are of the end, a part of the end itself. If not, then the means gradually master us, and finally master our end." For this reason Goldman asserted that anarchists would not work within intrinsically evil institutions such as political parties and conservative trade unions.[xxi]
Living the revolution, refusing to succumb to illegitimate power or opinion, was not only personally liberating; it also furthered the revolution as no other activity could. Each act of defiance or self-assertion strengthened the revolutionary for further resistance. Goldman said that anarchism "stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage." Successful defiance demonstrated the hollowness and weakness of established authorities and of received opinion and thus incited emulation. An individual who defied convention, the law, and respectable opinion dramatized her ideals and compelled attention and respect; those who lived according to their own ideals were beckons of light for the submissive masses, many of whom lacked the courage to resist or rebel. Individuals and small groups could, by disobedience, nonconformity, and symbolic action, discredit antiquated institutions which survived only because people who disapproved of them nevertheless tolerated them. Defiance of the law, Berkman believed, was the best way to undermine and destroy the law. "The force of its example is often more inspiring and effective than a lifetime of other propaganda.... Let us boldly proclaim that we do not recognize the slave morality imposed on us by the master class. Let us spurn the justice of class verdicts, defy their execution, and by every means at our command, however illegal or violent--as long as effective for our purpose--resist the continuation of the system of misery and slavery than parades under the name of Law and Order." Goldman said that "If liberty is ever to bless mankind, it is only when the example set by the few will be followed by the many." Leonard Abbott, a close associate of Goldman's, advocated massive civil disobedience of unjust laws. Changing the laws, he asserted, took too much time. If people simply violeated the law, they would either be acquitted (in which case the law would be a dead letter) or sent to jail (in which case popular indignation would rise). In either case, justice would prevail. If enough people violated the law, the legal system--jails and courts--would break down.[xxii]
Goldman herself was one of "those who not only think, but act, who practice Anarchism in their daily life, who are consistent, who defy the world, maintain their personal liberty and consider the liberty of others." She fearlessly proclaimed her beliefs regardless of the law, public opinion, and the ostracism of her own comrades. Mother Earth, she said, "caters to none, not even its own comrades." She defended Czolgosz at the risk of her freedom and even her life in 1901, and dedicated the October 1906 issue of Mother Earth to him despite the outcries of the timid and the loss of respectable backing. She aided IWW free speech fights and instigated many of her own, repeatedly defying local police, speaking in the face of official prohibitions, and returning again and again to localities where she had been banned until she was allowed to speak. On her lecture tours she never knew whether she she would spend the night with her comrades or in the custody of the police, so she carried a book to read in jail. She publicly discussed actual birth control methods and so baited the law until she was arrested and jailed. "My imprisonment has advanced our cause as nothing I could have done had I gone up and down the country for a whole year lecturing before large audiences" she said. Birth control, she said on another occasion, "was advanced at least ten years through the publicity given in by our [her and Reitman's] arrests and trials." She concluded that "direct action is the only action that counts. But for those of us who have defied the law, Birth Control would still be a parlor proposition."[xxiii]
Goldman repeatedly and lightheartedly sacrificed opportunities for respectability and wealth--closing successful businesses and forfeiting the opportunity to become a doctor--in favor of anarchist agitation. She was not an ascetic on principle--quite the contrary--and could enjoy flowers, concerts, and fine meals; but she often lived from hand to mouth in a noisy, crowded tenement which her friend Hutchins Hapgood called a "home of lost dogs." Her love life was sometimes flamboyant and public; she scandalized even many anarchist comrades by openingly travelling with her lover and manager Ben Reitman.[xxiv] Despite her love of children, she refused to become a mother, instead dedicating herself to all the people of the world. To a remarkable extent she achieved personal relationships based on mutual autonomy and respect, without obligations, jealousy, or rancour.[xxv] She helped found, many institutions to agitate for her ideals, including the Free Speech League, the Ferrer Modern School, and the Non-Conscription League. She defied and trampled underfoot every contemporary notion of a woman's role.
Goldman believed that those persecuted by the authorities won converts for the Anarchist cause as much as, or even more than, those who successfully defied society and constructed a life of their own choosing. She repeatedly exclaimed that persecution awakens sympathy, admiration, and new converts. "Every frail being slain by Church and State grows and grows into a mighty giant, who will some day free humanity from their perilous hold." The Haymarket martyrs and Alexander Berkman exemplified her belief that "ideas can never be killed.... martyrs of liberty grow in their grave." Her own response to the Haymarket anarchists inspired her belief that mighty deeds and noble sacrifices would win adherents to the Cause. These towering figures were "men I had never personally known, but who by their death had become the most decisive influence in my existence.... In times of ascent to heights, in days of faint-heartedness and doubt, in hours of prison isolation, of antagonism and censure from one's own kind, in failure of love, in friendships broken and betrayed--always their cause was mine, their sacrifice my support." From their deaths "new lives have emerged to take up the strains throttled on the scaffold. With a thousand voices they proclaim that our martyrs are not dead." Among those voices, of course, was Emma Goldman's. She spoke in similar terms about Berkman. At a banquet celebrating the publication of his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist she rhapsodized: "From time immemorial the wise and practical have denounced every heroic spirit. Yet it has not been they who have influenced our lives. The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardour and faith in some extreme deed, have advanced mankind and enriched the world."[xxvi] This belief makes her life comprehensible; the sacrificial act of the heroic martyr occupies a central place in her world-view.
Yet Goldman and Berkman lived as they did not only because they thought it efficacious, but because they believed it right and because they demanded the right of self-expression. They theorized that morals changed over time in response to circumstances, but in practice they believed that, in the world they inhabited, morals were inflexible, absolute, and very demanding. When Goldman proclaimed that "the history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause," the blood she referred to may well have been her own. When the United States prepared to enter World War I, Goldman counselled resistance whatever the consequences, consoling herself that "at least we shall be free from blame should the terrible avalanche overtake us in spite of our efforts." While some other radicals, including Max Eastman and Big Bill Haywood, argued that radicals should not needlessly sacrifice themselves but should fight the class struggle by the most effective means, even if this entailed muting their opposition to the war, Goldman did not agree. "We did not expect," she later said in depicting one of her contradictory moods of the time, "to stem the tidal wave of hatred and violence which conscription was bound to bring, but we felt that we had at least to make known at large that there were some in the United States who owned their souls and who meant to preserve their own integrity, no matter what the cost."[xxvii]
III
This anarchist demand that revolutionaries apply their values in the present, rather than merely working for future change, alarmed many leaders of the Socialist party. Goldman's anarchists epitomized every lifestyle and belief that the capitalist press ascribed to the Socialists. The anarchists advocated the destruction of family, religion, country, and every traditional moral precept, just as the capitalists accused the Socialists of doing. The Socialist party, seeking respectability and electoral victory, frantically distanced itself from these beliefs. The Party officially declared religion a private matter and drapped itself in the American flag, while many candidates declared that Socialism would uphold the family against the onslaughts of industrial capitalism by allowing women to stay in the home and raise children. The differences between the Socialists and the anarchists concerned not merely the shape of the future society, or even present tactics, but a whole way of life.
The Socialists variously labelled the anarchists as dynamiters, lunatics, disrupters, and petty-bourgeois reactionaries. The anarchists, in their turn, viewed SP politicking as a distraction from real change and considered politics the antithesis of action. "All politicians," Goldman said, "... are but petty reformers, hence the perpetuators of the present system." The government, the anarchists insisted, masks, legitimates, and facilitates capitalist mass murder of the workers. Max Baginski thought that the Triangle Shirtwaist fire exemplified the role of government. About 147 women were burned alive or jumped to their deaths because the anti-union Triangle Shirtwaist company had disregarded state safety laws. The government, Baginski said, was "capable of dooming [a] starving worker to a few years' prison for stealing fifteen cents," but could neither protect the workers nor punish the capitalists who condemned them to their fiery deaths. Government's "duty is to mask--by its laws, dignity, and authority--the plutocratic greed which is responsible for such holocausts... [it is] concerned mainly in removing the obstalces in the way or plutocratic exploitation and insuring its own position."[xxviii]
SP electioneering undermined worker self-activity and reinforced the belief that the United States was a free country. Social welfare legislation had the same effect. "The fundamental evil of authority is its use," Berkman declared. "The more paternal its character or the more humanistic its symbols and mottoes, the greater its danger." Any elected Socialist official would enforce capitalist law and protect private property, just as bourgeois politicians did. The workers could achieve any worthwhile goal directly, by their own efforts, without the need of political intermediaries, as did the Mexican peasant-revolutionaries who confiscated the land that properly belonged to them. Socialist politicians, however, opposed worker self-activity because it threatened the importance and power of the politicians. The Socialists, Goldman asserted, "have the most iron-clad programme" for "regulating life from its very conception till death"; but "if once economic dictatorship were added to the already supreme political power of the state, its iron heel would cut deeper into the flesh of labor than that of capitalism today." Laws ostensibly intended to help labor actually benefitted the capitalists. Socialists, in their lust for respectability and votes, had turned their back upon their pristine radicalism and accomodated themselves to racism, patriotism, religion, and even capitalism. Socialists enamoured of office "sink to the low level of their constituency" instead of educating it in the principles of socialism; they cater "to every superstition, every prejudice, every silly tradition." Goldman recalled the legendary evil spirits who abducted a new-born baby and substituted a monster in its place, and charged that socialism likewise had been replaced by "a deformity which is now stalking about under the name of Socialism."[xxix]
The abstract issue dividing the anarchists from the SP and the IWW concerned divergent interpretations of two key Marxist concepts, economic determinism and historical materialism. Both the SP and the IWW claimed that they correctly understood these ideas and properly deduced their implications for theory and strategy. The anarchists emphatically rejected both doctrines for reasons which illuminate the essence of the anarchist enterprise and symbolize its differences from both the political vision of the SP and the industrial philosophy of the IWW. Prominent contributors to Mother Earth maintained a drumbeat of criticism of both economic determinism and historical materialism.
Voltairine de Clyre criticized the notion that ideas are only a reflection of reality, powerless to determine a person's actions, as worse than the medieval idea of free will.[xxx] "The doctrine that men are nothing and circumstances all, has been and is the bane of our modern social reform movements." De Clyre did not specify the exact relationship of ideas to material circumstances, but she considered mind, or character, "an active, modifying agent, reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances." Materialism and determinism themselves, she said, show the impact of ideas on personality and character because they corrode revolutionary purpose. Materialists live according to the dominant idea of their age, rather than their own ideals and values, and then rationalize their subservience and cowardice by an appeal to circumstances and necessity. Materialism and determinism produce "shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters" who change with circumstances to fit any baking tin. "The immortal fire of the individual will" could surmount all obstacles of circumstance and environment. Only "men who will say a word to their souls and keep it" could change the world.[xxxi]
De Clyre described the disillusionment of youthful radicals aglow with the expectation that material conditions will inevitably generate the revolution they await. But "the few years pass away and nothing happens; enthusiasm cools." The erstwhile revolutionaries meanwhile adapt themselves to the society in which they live, accumulating property and "creeping into the social ranks they once despised.... behold them lying, cheating, tricking, flattering, buying and selling themselves for any frippery, any cheap little pretense.... and when you ask the reason why, they tell you that Circumstances compelled them so to do..... that flattering and duping do not matter, if the end to be attained is desirable; and that under existing 'Circumstances' life isn't possible without all this." After the revolution, they say, we can behave differently, "but till then a man must look out for himself, by all means." Had such a person "been dominated by a less material conception of life, had his will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of existence, by its acceptance of its own nothingness, the unselfish aspirations of his earlier years" would have been "strengthened by exercise and habit; and his protest against the time might have been enduringly written, and to some purpose." Alexander Berkman similarly believed that "the extremists of the materialistic conception discount character, and thus help to vitiate it." They underestimate "the factor of personality." Berkman asserted that the indomitable personality can rise above the ideas and institutions of her day and create authentic selfhood and moral personality. Circumstance is the inexorable master only of those who are "weak in spirit.... the really strong, even if they cannot change their environment, do not suffer the environment to change them."[xxxii]
Socialists, the anarchists asserted, rationalized acquiescence in shameful practices and participation in evil institutions on the grounds that individuals must reflect their environment. Individual socialists, they charged, invested money in exploitative, capitalist businesses and banks, attended church, sent their children to public schools, and in general conformed to existing social norms. Socialists justified inaction, passivity, and accommodation to capitalism, religion, and the state on the grounds that revolution could not occur until objective circumstances were ripe, at which point it would be inevitable. Human effort was seemingly not required, and compromise with existing society had no effects. The Social Democrats, Harry Kelly said, with special reference to Morris Hillquit,
have repeated the half-truth that man is the creature of circumstance and environment so often, that in the end their actions are molded to fit their theory; they lose all individuality and initiative, becoming mere creatures of the ideas they have mouthed, without will or desire to act differently from the people they despise.... When it is pointed out that every reform or revolutionary movement must, in order to have any real or lasting success, have an ethical basis, and the morals of the party be judged by its meanist member, we are informed that it is a utopian doctrine long since exploded or that we do not understand Socialism; further, that Socialism will come, not because it is just or demanded by the people, but because it is necessary.... Socialism is inevitable, and man is the creature of circumstance and environment; the fact that I, who advocate the abolition of exploitation and point out its evil effects, am myself an exploiter, does not affect the sum total of human happiness or misery, or the ultimate realization of Socialism. The individual counts for nothing; Socialism is inevitable.[xxxiii]
Max Baginski similarly criticized "the reactionary view that the fate and destiny of man is determined by environment, and is not to be changed by his own initiative and effort." State socialists preach patience and passivity, claiming that we cannot achieve revolutionary change until conditions are ripe for it, at which time it will inevitably occur. Baginski thought the problem was not in objective conditions but in subjective will; "it is much rather the lack of revolutionary initiative and insurrectionary courage that supports the continued existence of conditions long since decayed and ready to make place for something new." Mother Earth criticized those who conformed to practices they detested, or participated in institutions they thought immoral, as "revolutionists in theory, reactionists in practice." As Goldman said, "the theory that man is a product of conditions has led only to indifference and to a sluggish acquiescence in those conditions." She lived her own life according to the principle "that an ideal backed by determination will overcome all obstacles, that the ideal alone is worth living and dying for."[xxxiv]
These anarchist criticisms of the official Socialist establishment and its ideology foreshadowed those of recent historians, who have also noticed the passive, fatalistic quality of Second International Marxism. Max Nettl has labelled the SPD, the organizational and ideological model for the SPA, an "inheritor party" because it confidently awaited the inexorable processes of history to deposit victory in its lap. Another historian calls the SPD's belief that it must prepare for but not wage the revolution, "revolutionary waiting." In his early work Marx expressed confidence that human intelligence and will could transform as well as understand the world; but his later work, and especially Engels's explication of it, emphasized determinism. Marx predicted that capitalist development would inevitably push the overwhelming majority of the population into an impoverished proletariat which would revolt and establish socialism. Revolution, however, was impossible until the relations of production interfered with the forces of production and capitalism had exhausted its creative, dynamic potential.[xxxv]
Dick Geary and other historians have explained how the SPD's predicament caused it to emphasize the deterministic elements in Marxism. The German state allowed the Socialists enough freedom to lure them into participation in the electoral system, but was repressive enough to make the Socialists fearful of any words or acts that might elicit state terrorism. For example, the Socialists elected a growing number of deputies to the Reichstag, becoming the largest single party in 1912, yet the Reichstag was relatively powerless. It did not appoint the government, much less the head of state. It is difficult to imagine how any electoral victories could have enabled the SPD to take actual power without major constitutional changes for which there was no feasible and legal mechanism. The Socialists confronted a seemingly unbreakable alliance between the the landed aristocracy (the Junkers) and the bourgeoisie. The Junkers intransigently opposed Socialism and reform, and would yield only to superior force; but violent or radical tactics would alienate the bourgeoisie as well as inviting repression. The tactics necessary to overawe the Junkers would frighten the bourgeoisie. The Socialists therefore confronted a semi-feudal political structure without allies. This is what Peter Gay called "the dilemma of democratic socialism": neither revolution nor reform were viable options in Wilhilmite Germany.[xxxvi]
Under such circumstances, the SPD utilized the legal possibilities that were open to them. They campaigned for the Reichstag, organized workers into unions, and awaited the revolution while carefully repudiating any action which would actually lead to it. They made a theoretical virtue of this necessity with an interpretation of Marxism that emphasized determinism and the inevitable victory of socialism through the operation of impersonal historic forces. The SPD would not cause or even lead the revolution, but rather organize the workers electorally and economically and prepare them for their inevitable victory. As the SPD created large and stable institutions with a measure of influence--local party organizations, unions, a vibrant press, and sports, cultural, and artistic groups--it became even more suspicious of precipitate action which could at one stoke destroy all its institutions. Almost the only action which SPD theory acknowledged could decisively affect the ultimate course of events was actual revolutionary activity; by evoking governmental repression, this could actually delay the revolution long after objective conditions would otherwise have made it possible or inevitable.
Historians have pointed to more specific causes of SPD conservatism. The party's organizational structure greatly underrepresented radical urban areas. The working class was divided along religious lines, with Catholics proving difficult to recruit. The trade unions, which rejected the general strike and other revolutionary tactics in favor of incremental changes won through collective bargaining, gained more influence in the party after the Mannheim agreement of 1905. The emphasis on electoral activity similarly tempted the SPD to a more accommodating stance as its Reichstag delegation sought actual influence on legislation, which required negotiation and compromise instead of intransigent opposition. For these and other reasons, the SPD increasingly chose to work within the framework of existing society while patiently awaiting its inevitable victory. The anarchists, like the IWW, noticed the SPD's growing belief that it could secure benefits for the working class within the structures of capitalism, and its consequent accomodation to German patriotism and militarism. SPD theorists rejected the possibility that only decisive action could incite and win the revolution, or that history might present a never-recurring opportunity created by temporary conditions. Socialists throughout much of the world were reduced to anxiously looking for portents of approaching capitalist collapse rather than actively seeking to bring about that collapse. The SPD's behavior in 1914, 1919, and the early 1930s was foreshadowed by the time of the SPD's electoral triumph in 1912.
The ideology and tactics of the SP paralleled those of the SPD not only because the SPD ideology, tactics, and organization greatly influenced the SP, but, more fundamentally, because the SPA confronted a political and economic structure similar in fundamental ways to that in Germany. The American political structure was designed to thwart majority rule and protect property against confiscation or regulation by democratic majorities. The presidential and two-party systems make victory by an insurgent party almost impossible. The working class was a minority, and largely of foreign extraction. Judicial decisions and injunctions, presidential use of the army to break strikes, and Congressional legislation all favored corporations and made union activity precarious. The federal, state, county, and local governments, often backed by officially-sanctioned vigilantes, repressed workers with terrorism and violence. In response, the SP, much weaker than the SPD in membership, voters, and unionized workers, concentrated on garnering votes and winning elections; and even when victorious Socialist candidates were debarred from taking office, the SP responded legally and peacefully, through established channels. Like the SPD, it had no realistic or even considered idea of how it would actually take power.[xxxvii] The SP, ignoring its own Marxist theory of the state and its own experience, placed far too much faith in the claims of American democracy. The anarchist critique of SP conservatism, passivity, and tactical blindness was well-grounded in reality, even if that reality was conditioned by forces and circumstances which the anarchists vastly underestimated.
The anarchists, in addition to alleging that Socialist economic determinists and historical materialists were opportunistic in personal life and political practice, also accused them of dogmatism and repression. Emma Goldman often complained about the narrow-minded ignorance of SP members, many of whom combined fanaticism with their complacent assurance of ultimate victory. Debating western socialists, she said, was "cruelty to animals." Socialist papers, more often than capitalist ones, refused ads for anarchist meetings and ignored such meetings in their news columns. Goldman noted that the Socialists expelled anyone who doubted materialist doctrine and predicted that socialists would, after taking power, kill their own dissidents and inaugurate a reign of terror. The Socialists typically would "denounce us as dynamiters when we venture to suggest some [non-political] method" of achieving social revolution. She noticed the ferment in the SP in the year and a half before Haywood's recall from the National Executive Committtee and accurately predicted the split between the revolutionaries and the reformists. Alexander Berkman similarly claimed that the materialistic conception of history not only justified Socialist acquiescence in the supersititions of the masses, but also generated Socialist persecution of those whose questioning of such popular superstitions alienated potential voters. Berkman, noting that the Socialists slandered anarchists even now, when the Socialists are weak, wondered "will there be found sufficient jailers in the world to supply the needs of a triumphant socialism?" Max Baginski, commenting on the SP's recall of Big Bill Haywood from the National Executive Committee, said that Socialist parties always defined themselves by expelling true revolutionaries. The SP was merely following the SPD model in "its deadening discipline, its dogmas, intolerance, and machine politics." Goldman similarly castigated the SP for aping the SPD.[xxxviii]
These criticisms were prescient. The doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism, enshrined within the official ideology of the Soviet state, eventually helped justify massive suppression of ideas for at least two important reasons. First, if all culture and politics is a part of the superstructure which stems directly from the economic base, no democratic safeguards for personal liberty are required. Socialism becomes reduced to, in Stalin's phrase, "correct economic relations." Merely changing the economic base through revolutionary action would itself ensure that the political structure reflected proletarian consciousness; no safeguards for free expression would be necessary. The political system would take care of itself, naturally and inevitably.[xxxix] Second, the idea that all ideas stem from and reflect class interests, taken to its logical conclusion, denies the possibility of legitimate dissent or disagreement. Economic determinism implies that there is only one correct attitude towards any problem, that which reflects the interests of the working class; all other ideas stem from hostile classes. Divergent views cannot possibly represent real disagreement, but only masked class aggression. Workers could not legitimately disagree over any substantive issue of economics, politics, or philosophy; their position as workers dictates, or should dictate, all of their ideas on every subject. In the Soviet Union this undercut Trotsky and other opponents of the Stalinist regime by generating self-doubt. If the Communist Party represented the ideology and interests of the working class, Trotsky asked himself, whose class interests could he other dissenters represent?[xl]
Economic determinism also implied that revolutionaries need not pay special attention to cultural matters; culture, like the political structure, would automatically change after the revolution in accordance with the revolutionized economic base. This attitude underlay Eugene Debs's statements that "there is no 'Negro problem' apart from the general labor problem" and that the Socialist party had "nothing specific to offer the negro, and we cannot make special appeals to all the races."[xli] Emma Goldman and the anarchists, however, emphasized cultural change as a prerequisite to revolution. Cultural change had to be wilful, conscious, and individual; it would not automatically follow from economic change but must precede or accompany it. If unchanged persons did succeed in toppling the economic and political structure, they would only re-create renewed forms of dominion and coercion. The anarchists viewed the culture of the workers--including their most cherished sources of personal identity--as a chief obstacle to human liberation.
The orthodox Marxist concepts of economic determinism and historical materialism also encouraged most Socialist parties to consign entire groups of humanity to misery and oblivion on the grounds that they were doomed by impersonal historical processes. Marx himself defended British imperialism, despite its brutality, on the grounds that it was ultimately progressive and beneficial. A similar argument almost justified capitalism, which orthodox Marxists regarded as a progressive and historically necessary stage in the evolution of human society which revolutionaries could not bypass. Goldman indignantly rejected this fatalistic view that an historical epoch of capitalist mass murder and degradation was an inevitable prelude to a just and humane society; she insisted that people of all classes could construct such a society now.[xlii] Many Socialist parties refused to address the needs of peasants, even when they were the overwhelming majority of the population, because they were allegedly a doomed, reactionary, and petty-bourgeois class. They similarly eschewed--in theory if not in practice--appeals to middle-class values or interests; the only role for the middle class was in support of proletarian demands as defined by the Socialists. This Marxist tendency to view people solely as abstract members of a class was anathema to the anarchists, who exalted individual personality. The anarchists usually referred to their constituency as "humanity," "mankind," or "the people" rather than the working class.
Emma Goldman and the anarchists rejected economic determinism and historical materialism partly because, unlike most Socialists, they did not believe in any ultimate solution to human ills, any final equilibrium in which utopia would be achieved and all change cease. Although they sometimes claimed that their cause would inevitably triumph, they usually lacked faith in a chosen class, the inevitable processes of history, and a preordained, static, and final resolution of human ills. They substituted spontaneity, consciousness, and will, and therefore individuality, contingency, and uncertainty, for socialist belief in a historically privileged class, inevitable victory, and certain knowledge. This was a major disadvantage in the competition for adherents.
IV
Although Goldman was a working-class revolutionary who directed her appeal largely to her fellow workers, her philosophy had scant appeal for the working class. The white native-born working class did not enlist in any radical crusades, for reasons familiar to historians.[xliii] Class divisions were less apparent in the United States than elsewhere. Native-born white males considered themselves respectable citizens, whereas European workers were born outcasts with slight change of winning respectability in the eyes of society. American workers, therefore, had more to lose by adopting a radical stance; their personal identity focused on the classes immediately above them, which they hoped to join, and on an idealized vision of the worker-citizen. Many native-born white males were relatively well-paid, skilled workers, and they disdained unskilled workers, blacks, immigrants, and working women; as these groups moved into lower-paid jobs, native-born white males often moved up into supervisory or more skilled positions. Such workers had the vote, and their children were educated in public schools; although rising out of the the working class was becoming increasingly difficult, rising within it, to a white-collar job, was relatively easy, especially from one generation to the next.Many were relatively well-paid, skilled workers who disdained unskilled workers, women, blacks, and immigrants; as these groups moved into lower-paid jobs, white native-born whites often moved up. The American revolutionary tradition regarded the state, rather than private property, the great evil, and in fact virtually sacralized private property. State and employer terrorism, along with a unique judicial system, cowed many workers and drove them into conservatism. Many immigrant workers cleaved to their insular ethnic cultures; those who risked change sought integration into the larger mainstream American culture, which seemed liberating to many immigrants, especially women. Throughout the twenties, ethnic leaders waged a rear-guard battle to preserve their traditional cultures from the onslaught of Americanization.[xliv] Very few ethnic workers were receptive to a call to unconditionally reject both their traditional ethnic cultures and mainstream American society; yet the anarchist attacks on religion, patriotism, the family, and traditional sexual mores demanded the total repudiation of all received cultures. Only the supremely confident (or completely demoralized and deracinated) will venture this. Ironically, many ethnic, working-class anarchist groups--Italian, German, Russian, and Jewish--belied the internationalism of anarchist philosophers and functioned largely as self-segregated communities which helped preserve threatened ethic cultures.
Goldman's concrete proposals were weakest in the area of labor relations. In many areas of lifestyle and culture the anarchists had a program for the hour which individuals or small groups could implement immediately, but their economic program was vague and utopian. Goldman de-emphasized it, and at any rate its most likely practical result would have been unionism along the lines of a more decentralized IWW. The cultural demands of the anarchists seemed largely irrelevant to most workers, who were hungry, overworked, and culturally as well as economically insecure. Goldman early recognized the difficulty of appealing to most workers. "Men with empty stomachs do not fight for freedom" she said. "They fight for bread, and as soon as they get the crust, gnawing on it they forget their good intentions to fight for more.... It is useless to appeal to the overfed, but still of less use to appeal to the underfed. To be successful we must reach that class whose brains have not yet been destroyed by starvation." Workers were exhausted and had little education or leisure, so "the pioneers of every new thought rarely come from the workers.... Those who have but their chains to lose cling tenaciously to them. The men and women who first take up the banner of a new, liberating idea generally emanate from the so-called privileged classes."[xlv] Much of Goldman's cultural radicalism was worse than irrelevant, as she herself recognized, and was in fact positively alienating, for many workers. Even changes of clear benefit, such as birth control, met hostility or indifference from many workers.
The cultural component of the anarchists--their opposition to religion, patriotism, racism, male supremacy, and prudishness--clearly alienated most workers. Yet American anarchists, as Harry Kelly and others noted, devoted far more time to cultural issues such as censorship and sexuality, and far less proportional energy to labor issues, than their comrades in Europe. Indeed, Goldman insisted that "anarchism has nothing to do with future governments or economic arrangements.... Anarchism deals merely with social arrangements and not with economic arrangements." Volatirine de Clyre agreed that "anarchism is not an economic system" and that it deals "almost entirely with the relations of men in their thoughts and feelings, and not with the positive organization of production and distribution."[xlvi] Goldman, de Clyre, and other cultural anarchists did supplement their anarchist beliefs with one economic program or another, usually communism, but these were always subordinate to their cultural insurgency, more an addition to than an essential aspect of their anarchist philosophy.
The reasons for this are deeply rooted in U.S. history. American workers were far less organized and less militant than their European counterparts, and the anarchists could not create a labor movement ex nihilo. American workers perceived themselves as politically free; the "free gift" of the franchise and the relative absence of clear class boundaries meant that workers did not consider themselves as a distinct class or see the state as their enemy. American rhetorical traditions stressing inalienable rights and individual liberty made many educated people receptive to arguments for cultural freedom and individualism in lifestyle choices. A long American reform tradition had debated issues of sexuality and personal conduct as well as issues of community organization and legislation; many American reformers were marked by a perfectionist, moralistic individualism and an insistence that individuals could change the world by first changing themselves. Moses Harmon and the Lucifer group, and Abe Issak and Free Society, both early influences on Goldmann, continued this tradition. Yet the United States was in many ways more repressive than many other countries, and progressives of all kinds had to fight for freedoms already secured elsewhere. State, corporate, and vigilantee terrorism against labor unions was far more ferocious in the United States than in many European countries, while Goldman frequently remarked that many monarchies allowed far more free speech than did the United States. The Comstock law banned public discussion of birth control at a time when other countries permitted or even encouraged such discussion. Judicial injunctions and nullification of labor laws made the United States far less democratic than many European nations. This discrepancy between official ideology and historical claims and reality has long been a major source of American radicalism, influencing its tactics and rhetoric in the direction of accommodation to traditional rhetorical values. Finally, the fact that women were very prominent in American English-language anarchist movements virtually assured that cultural issues surrounding feminism, female sexuality, and the family, would be addressed.[xlvii] Goldman was continually frustrated by the cultural conservatism of her male colleagues, whose lives did not reflect their professed commitment to human equality. Berkman's public activism, like that of more traditional anarchists, was almost exclusively focused on labor and economic issues.
For all these reasons the anarchists had few organic relationships with any autonomous working-class movement. They repudiated the AFL and had strained relations even with the IWW. The anarchists wanted economic transformation but had many other goals of equal importance; cultural revolution, crucial to the anarchists, was for the IWW a subordinate concern. The anarchists would help out from a distance with strikes started by others, but had little presence within any unions that would enable them to genuinely lead workers or sustain meaningful shop floor battles. (Indeed, Voltairine de Clyre complained that the anarchists were so widely hated that they had to distance themselves from most strikes, for fear that their support would jeopardize the workers.) The anarchists could not organize workers, but only appeal to isolated workers as individuals on abstract and cultural grounds. The Progressive Era saw strikes started by the AFL, the IWW, independent unions, and by unorganized workers, but none by anarchists as an organized force. The anarchists were suspicious of collective action, including the disciplined, coercive action needed to win a strike.
The anarchists, therefore, lacked a social base. Indeed, they disdained a social base rather than seeking it; they eschewed mass converts, and wanted only conscious individuals who were anarchists from conviction, not from mere self-interest or out of group identification. Anarchism demanded far more personal commitment than did membership in the SP or the IWW because the anarchists applied their principles in their personal lives, which not even the SP or the IWW demanded. The anarchists were by definition a sect. Unlike the SP or the IWW, they would not have been delighted by mass accessions. In fact, mass joining would have had no meaning because there was no marker, such as voting, attending meetings, or paying dues, to define membership in the anarchist community. Although anarchists did have local organizations, people who passively claimed to believe in anarchist principles would count merely as sympathizers. The anarchists lacked obvious recuriting occasions such as elections or strikes. They considered themselves a militant minority, a leaven, but would hold in contempt any masses whom they could actually lead and organize. Their creed was an intransigent application of Debs's proclamation that he would not lead the workers into the promised land if he could, because if he could lead them into it, someone else could lead them out of it.
V
The anarchists hoped that their lives would be practical demonstrations of lives based on freedom, mutuality, and self-development. Adeline Champney, congratulating Mother Earth on its tenth anniversary, asserted hopefully that "the vision of clean, healthy, sane and happy lives outside the pale is a revelation of salvation to many." And Goldman did inspire and transform many lives. Candace Falk has identified the great strength of her approach, saying that Goldman "tried to reach people who were yearning for love and commitment in their lives, and to expand their vision of the individual's need for love into that of a social need. By making people aware of the conventions that limited their expectations, she was able to connect their inner need for a sense of belonging with their feelings of deprivation at the absence of a larger community. In order to live fully, each person would have to confront societal norms, the hypocrisy and injustices that inhibit freedom. Similarly, by showing the barrenness of the socially approved forms of love, she hoped to inspire people to change the conditions that blocked them from living out their vision of love.... Emma's brilliance and originality lay in her ability to bring issues that were ostensibly private into the public sphere.... Her approach affirmed the rights of the individual in a way that everyone could identify with, without retreating from politics."[xlviii]
But the anarchists' distinctive idea of living the revolution, relating the personal and the political, and making of all of life "propaganda of the deed," alienated far more people than it converted for many important reasons. First, before the general proscription of radicals after 1916, mainstream society persecuted anarchists much more virulently than the SP. Goldman embodied everything that the guardians of official culture feared from feminism, birth control, free speech, and other reforms. As one example, conservatives claimed, and most feminists vehemently denied, that the liberation of women would mean the end of the family; Goldman advocated the total abolition of the family as traditionally conceived. The press portrayed Goldman as a licentious free lover with a bomb in her hand, an assassin who intended to destroy everything the American people held dear. Press hysteria prevented most people from obtaining an accurate idea of what the anarchists believed, so the popular view of Goldman was a caricature of her genuine self. While Goldman's idea of free love stressed individual choice, mutuality, and total honesty, she was disgusted with men who interpreted it as justification for clandestine affairs. Most of her ideas seem sensible, even tame, today; yet she was widely regarded at the time as a lunatic. The message she delivered was not that received by the public. During even a successful lecture tour lasting six months she reached a mere 40,000 people, a pittance compared to those influenced by press reports.[xlix] Even when the press accurately reported the substance of her remarks, the articles were often accompanied by sinister drawings or sensational headlines that distorted her message.
Government violence against her also delivered a potent message to most of the public, especially culturally insecure workers who craved respectability and feared government repression. Radicals have often found, from the Haymarket and Tompkins Square incidents to the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 and beyond, that when the government brutalizes protesters, most of the public blames the victims and perceives them as lawbreakers and advocates of violence. Emma Goldman and the anarchists may have inadvertently strengthened the existing order by providing a convenient negative reference group and role model, used by the authorities to frighten and stampede the masses. Mothers sometimes substituted her image for the traditional witch in an effort to frighten and discipline their children.[l] Indeed, if Emma Goldman had not existed, the capitalist press and the government would have invented her--as, insofar as her public image was concerned, they largely did.
A second reason for the failure of "propaganda of the deed" as a way of life stems partly from the nature of any counterculture, and partly from the specific anarchist version. Counter-cultural lifestyles usually seem artificial and contrived to members of the mainstream culture because the social supports for such lifestyles and the sanctions against deviance are very visible and consciously created, whereas those that buttress mainstream society are pervasive, and therefore invisible and seemingly natural. Most countercultures necessarily evolve their own forms of coercion, rules, standards, and means of signifying membership in the community; these rules of a counterculture, not being enforced by the law, custom, or public opinion of the larger society, must be backed by mechanisms of force or authority that have meaning only within the counterculture. They therefore seem contrived, weird or silly to those to whom they do not apply; and even to members of the counterculture they are often overt, deliberate, and conscious, and therefore lose some of the force that attends sanctions that seem written into the very nature of the universe. The only way to avoid this weakness is to create a hermetically sealed counterculture, with its own institutions, press, schools, and economic life--an entire world that replicates the mainstream culture, serving all of its functions and providing all of its support, while interacting with it as little as possible. Groups as diverse as the Amish and the Communist party approximate this in their own ways. Life within such obvious perameters will appear constrained, regimented, and exotic by outsiders, however natural, moral, or liberated it may seem to inhabitants of the counterculture. No social system can be genuinely neutral as between various forms of life. Only a pervasive mainstream culture can pretend to such neutrality, by disguising its forms of coercion.
The anarchists' distinctiveness, however, lay in their principled refusal to erect any such web of sanctions, institutions, and constraints on individual conduct. Goldman's ten-year love affair with Ben Reitman, and her habit of openly traveling with him, offended and outraged many anarchists, even those in her intimate circle; she bitterly claimed that the anarchists would have excommunicated her if they could.[li] But the anarchists had little formal organizational structure; they did not recognize decrees from leaders or submit to majority rule. They could only apply moral pressure, as individuals rather than as a united community; and anarchists on principle refused to bow to social pressure, which they viewed as a form of coercion. To those outside the movement, therefore, the lives of the anarchists seemed mere chaos, a whirl that lacked not only the familiar ordering structures of mainstream life, but any stability or pattern at all. Goldman had many lovers, and her personal life was a constant chaos which wearied even her. This was not intrinsic to anarchism--some anarchists led less flamboyant lives, and some even approximated domestic tranquility--but the anarchists did stress constant growth, excitement, exploring new horizons, continual reforging of one's personality, a kind of "permanent revolution" in private life. Their emphasis on personal growth almost equated tranquility and repose with boredom. Goldman herself said that "security means stagnation" and valued intense experience even at the price of unhappiness.[lii] Their lives, even depicted accurately, must have seemed one continuous uproar to many conventional people. Goldman's life was as tumultuous and thrilling as a novel, which many people would rather read about than experience.
Goldman considered herself a transitional figure, caught between an old, disintegrating and unsatisfactory world and a new world that had not yet been born. "It is inevitable that the advance guards should become alien to the very ones they wish to serve, that they should be isolated, shunned and repudiated by the nearest and dearest of kin" she lamented. More tragic than this lack of understanding is that "having seen new possibilities for human advancement the pioneers cannot take root in the old and with the new still far off they become outcasts, roamers of the earth, restless seekers for the things they will never find.... They are consumed by the fires of compassion and sympathy for all suffering and with all their fellows, yet they are compelled to stand apart from their surroundings; nor need they ever hope to receive the love their great souls crave.... Every great soul must be alone."[liii]
Another disadvantage of life within a counterculture resides in its fragility and susceptibility to self-doubt. Goldman extolled the examined life, one constructed on the basis of considered principles and values. But as Falk remarks, "Emma and Ben, like others who choose to live unconventionally, were forced into a self-consciousness about their way of life, which was always subject to reassessment and always seemed to require explicit justification." Denizens of the mainstream can ascribe their disappointments to the limitations of human life and human nature; socialists and others who defer living their principles until after the revolution can conveniently blame society for their ills. But Goldman's ideology implied that her every failure reflected upon her principles or her ability to embody them in her own life. "Attempting to live out her vision," Falk says, "she thought that she could transcend the destructive forces that plagued the world. In her relationship with Ben, she labored under the illusion that she could live and love freely in an unfree society." She often blamed herself for the tramaus of her relationship with Ben, and doubted both her philosophy and her own worth. "I have no right to speak of Freedom when I myself have become an abject slave in my love" she said. "I have no right to bring a message to people, when there is no message in my soul." Her relationship with Ben violated her theoretical notions about love and made her popular lecture on love and marriage "hateful because my faith in the power of love has been shattered."[liv] Goldman believed that love should transform people, but Ben remained the same old irresponsible philanderer he had always been.
Yet Goldman simultaneously recognized that any attempt to create a free and just enclave in a slave and unjust society was perilous. Just as communes often fail because those who can gain unfair advantages in mainstream society have little incentive to adhere to a cooperative scheme which deprives them of those advantages, so Goldman was plagued in her relationships by the fact that anarchist men could at any time opt for a traditional, subservient mate. Goldman was plagued by men who claimed adherence to egalitarian principles and yet refused to "share" her with any other man or interest, including the anarchist movement. John Most set the tone when he sneered that women in the movement were only seeking husbands, and then demanded that Goldman sacrifice her every interest and activity to minister to his needs. When government persecution of the anarchists assumed renewed virulence during World War I, Goldman's lover of ten years, Ben Reitman, could easily jettison her for a safer and more conventional relationship. "I had been seduced by the ordinary man's desire for a home, a wife, and a child" he later said.[lv]
Goldman recognized that the oppressive structures of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy deform all members of society, the seeming beneficiaries as well as the obvious victims, and that this warping affects our innermost personalities. Speaking of Mary Wollstonecraft's relationship with Gilbert Imlay--a relationship with striking parallels to the Goldman-Reitman tempest--Goldman said that Wollstonecraft's tragic alienation from her own times "created the discord in her being which alone accounts for her terrible tragedy with Imlay." Yet she often slighted the impact of gender roles on her prospects for love. "A personal love is not for one who dedicates himself to an ideal" she wrote a friend. "Somehow it is like serving two Gods. Of course one longs for a personal love.... But no man could be satisfied to give all of himself nd receive in return only a small part of the woman he loves, and how is she to give all when every nerve of her pulls towards the impersonal, the universal love? She need not expect to have both, the man and the universe. And so she must forswear the one for the other. When one is young, one is easily content to go without a personal love. But when the years begin to pile up, one finds it rather cold and lonely in the universe. No, there can be no personal life for me."[lvi]
What is striking about this meditation is its neglect of the impact that stereotyped gender roles had on her own prospects for love. Almost every man, of course, considered it his right to demand complete devotion from a woman, even while he himself had many outside interests, which often enough included other lovers. Goldman herself did not demand that a man "give all of himself" to her; she wanted men with their own lives, interests, and ideas, and viewed the ideal relationship as the fulfillment of two diverse personalities who enriched each other. Furthermore, her lament ignores the fact--which she noticed on other occasions--that society decreed that older men could marry younger women, but that older women were forbidden younger men. This had a crippling effect on Goldman's later years, as on the lives of many other women whose husbands were killed or mutilated in the industrial maelstrom. In general, Goldman's experience convinced her that personal love and dedication to a transcendent ideal were incompatible, whereas her philosophy held them as necessarily complementary.
Social factors, as well as her own personal qualities (themselves shaped by social structures) therefore rendered Goldman's life often unsatisfactory to her as well as a cautionary example to others. Goldman valued camaraderie, love, and friendship, and solidarity, and yet frequently complained of the petty bickering, sordidness, and acrimony that defaced the radical community. She apotheosized friendship, comradeship and solidarity, and preached the symbiosis of public and private commitments, of individuality and social consciousness. Yet she could nonchalantly remark that "he is most free who stands alone; but it is a very lonely and difficult position, which few can endure." She proclaimed that "to know how to give is to my mind a greater art, than to know how to paint or write.... it is as inspiring to sensitive people as a painting or good music is to the art lover." Yet she often felt used and abused by her comrades, and at times considered even Mother Earth, usually considered her precious child, as "an incurable disease, eating your life away." Goldman found that an individual can inconspicuously deviate from social norms without suffering horrendous penalties, especially if she proclaims her allegiance to the norms she transgresses; she can also dissent in theory if she obeys in practice. The combination of theoretical dissent and practical nonconformity, however, usually evokes hostile attention. Conceiving of oneself as a role model and an exemplar of an ideal adds greatly to the burdens of any unconventional--or even conformist--life. Every personal feeling and act becomes of ultimate, social significance; it is like living in a glass house, on a hill, and inviting everyone to throw rocks. Ulcers and hypertension, Nathan Huggins remarks, are "common ailments of exemplars."[lvii]
Goldman's tumultuous life, filled with disappointment and bitterness as well as exultation and fulfillment, often failed to console her, much less inspire the wider public with the health, sanity, and happiness Champney visualized in countercultural lives. Her letters to Ben Reitman and other friends contain every opinion about the relationship of her life to her love, and their opposites. She worried that her work was merely an escape from her unhappy love affair, but also that her love absorbed her and distracted her from her greater work. She complained that her love for Ben exhausted her and undermined her work for her chosen Ideal even while recognizing that Ben energized her and contributed in many practical ways to her successes. She worried that if her private life were known, she would be revealed as a flawed example of her principles; and yet as Falk says, "the effort to universalize her own inner struggle provided the force behind her speeches."[lviii] She found in Ben a man who valued her both for her ideals and her sex, and who, in a manner very uncommon for men, devoted himself to her career and public life. She felt that love relationships should be free and unequal, but that she was in thrall to Ben. She bemoaned the tempestuousness of their affair even while admitting that she disdained a compliant, yielding love. Always questing for perfection, she savaged not only her love with Ben but Mother Earth, her comrades, and herself, whom she proclaimed unfit for either public or private life. Her public confidence and courage was counterparted by private doubts and insecurities. In love as in the other aspects of her ideal, she viewed the pursuit more valuable than the attainment. This version of the strenuous life, however, was scarcely a beckon of light to the majority of bewildered and frightened workers. It did appeal to a minority of individuals in her own situation, some of the restless, dissatisfied middle class, people who shared her "weightlessness," her sense of suspension between two worlds, but possessed the education, self-confidence, and resources to experiment.
VI
Goldman's lack of appeal to the working class is evidenced not only by frequent remarks in Mother Earth and in her correspondence, but in her attitudes towards the workers, which were scarcely the feelings of a person for those who appreciated her. Goldman had extensive contact with actual workers in prison, in her capacity as a midwife, in factories, and in her travels as an anarchist agitator. She was not heartened by what she saw. Max Eastman could idealize workers in The Masses because his experience with workers was limited to insurgents who turned out for his lectures and radical leaders such as Big Bill Haywood; he lived in a social sphere entirely separate from most workers. Goldman charged that the SP idealized and pandered to the workers because it depended on the force of the majority for power. The IWW had a more realistic view of the working class; its publications and its Mr. Block cartoons skewered the ignorance, complacency, and conservatism of the masses. Yet the IWW was convinced that the majority of workers could be redeemed and induced to take action in their own interest; Goldman, who "hated the slaves as well as their drivers," was not so sure.[lix]
Goldman's writings are replete with fervent denunciations of the masses--not just the masses cowed and demoralized by capitalist tyranny, but any and all masses. Speaking of the appalling industrial conditions of capitalist society, Goldman said that "the mass itself is responsible for this horrible state of affairs. It clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to call Crucify! the moment a protesting voice is raised against the sacredness of capitalist authority or any other decayed institution." The capitalists succeeded not because of their own qualities but because of "the inertia, the cravenenss, the utter submission of the mass" who want "to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced." The mass "will always be the annihilator of individuality, of free initiative, of orginality" said Goldman. "The majority cannot reason; it has no judgment. Lacking utterly in originality and moral courage, the majority has always placed its destiny in the hdands of others... Without ambition or initiative, the compact mass hates nothing so much as innovation.... Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority and not the mass."[lx]
Goldman's strictures were an anarchist tradition. The Haymarket martrys and other anarchists excoriated their audiences rather than flattering them in an effort to awaken them to a sense of shame and indignation at their plight. In part her criticisms stemmed from the same impulses motivating black militants who hector the majority of blacks, or other militants who criticzed those they would liberate. It is partly a matter of scorned love; activists who devote their lives to the welfare of a group of people are embittered by that people's indifference and hostility. Goldman expressed hurt when, as at Ludlow, the workers to whom she devoted her life repudiated her and her efforts and asked her to stay away. Even locals of the IWW sometimes refused to carry her publications, announce her public meetings, or allow her to speak at their halls.[lxi]
Goldman was well aware of the blind, ignorant hatred with which ordinary workers often viewed her, her comrades, and her work. The steelworkers of Homestead refused to believe that Berkman had tried to kill Frick out of idealistic and humanitarian motives. They at first thought he was motivated by a business dispute, and later that he was hired by Frick to generate sympathy for Frick and animosity towards the striking workers. They regarded themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens whose use of force was a defensive and legal resistance of armed invasion. "Sasha had given his life to bring joy to these slaves, but they had remained blind and continued in the hell of their own forging," Goldman concluded. She used similar language when remarking on the popular response to Czolgosz's assassination of President McKinley almost a decade later. "The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs." When Voltairine de Clyre demanded that the anarchists propagandize exclusively among the workers, Goldman reminded her that "I know [the workers] from years of contact in and out of the factory. And just because of that knowledge I do not believe that our work should be only among them." She reminded de Clyre that the Knights of Labor had abandoned Parsons, Spies, and the other Haymarket martrys to their fates and asserted that the majority of the AFL "would hesitate not a moment to relegate Voltairine or myself to the fate of our martyred comrades."[lxii]
Radicals also become angry out of their recognition that every person who submits to oppression helps fasten the chains upon every other member of the group. People such as Emma Goldman who have liberated themselves by dint of their own effort from ignorance and superstition are often critical of those from similar backgrounds who acquiesce in their own degradation, much as the poor man who has succeeded economically sometimes scorns those he left behind. "Anarchism does not exclude the poor, the dirty or the tramp any more than the sun excludes them," she said sadly, "but it does not make a virtue of filth.... So long as people remain satisfied with their present conditions, absolutely indifferent to cleanliness, air, and beauty, they cannot possibly feel the burning shame of their lives, nor will they strive for anything that might lift them out of the ugliness of their existence. I do not censor anyone... yet I am grieved that they should be satisfied with so little."[lxiii] Goldman's stridency was not motivated by a lack of compassion or understanding; she felt intensely for the victims of oppression. Their sufferings were real to her, not abstract. The intensity of her suffering might partly explain the depth of her resentment. Her love for humanity brought her pain, yet her efforts to alleviate her own suffering as well as that of the victims of capitalism were futile largely because of the attitudes and conduct of those she would help.
Socialists and Wobblies sometimes excused the passivity and stupidity of the workers as the understandable result of oppression; Socialists even extenuated the crimes of the capitalists on similar grounds, saying that the capitalists were merely products of a system that warped and deformed everyone. Most people, they claimed, would act as the most rapacious capitalists if they had the opportunity. The anarchists disdained such arguments (which smacked of economic determinism) as self-serving; they judged everyone according to moral criteria. They did not ignore the force of circumstance in shaping human personality and actions, but did not allow pleading of circumstance or environment as an excuse for exploitation or acquiesence in oppression. Goldman avoided the tendency of radicals to view the retrograde aspects of the workers as pure epiphenomena which will magically vanish once the cooperative commonwealth is inaugurated. She also rejected any imagined innate virtue or historically privileged role for the working class. This was prescient. Whatever the ultimate origins of racism, patriotism, religious zealotry, sexual repression, Comstockery, literary censorship, sexism, and homophobia, they have been real and solid aspects of working-class consciousness. They are not imaginary, but are far more deeply rooted than class consciousness or ethical concern for the public good. Overcoming these cultural legacies is radicalism's most daunting task.
Goldman's vision of working-class revolution, and of social change in general, harbored a fatal contradiction at its root. If the masses are culturally retrograde, requiring an advance guard of creative spirits to drag them into the future, how can anarchism be achieved? Anarchists, in this scanario, will always remain heroic yet isolated beings. Anarchists, of all movements, could not erect their society by means of the rare, exceptional individuals. Nor could they rely on the impersonal processes of history. Reliance on the militant minority leads to use of the state and to dictatorship; impersonal evolution allows no room for even the special individual, much less the masses, and takes centuries. For all this, cultural revolution, uncongenial as it is to the working class and incompatible in practice with working-class economic revolution, is nonetheless a prequisite of such revolution. The fight against racism, sexism, and conventional morality is not a distraction from the class struggle, but its necessary preliminary and accompaniment. The American working class has almost always been economically and politically as well as culturally conservative; groups that eschewed cultural insurgency in favor of "more basic" economic change have achieved little. Goldman's contradictions, here as elsewhere, stemmed not from inadequate reflection or research, or any alleged refusal to face reality. Rather, they reflected an intractible American society where important prerequisites for revolution were necessary but impossible.
Notes
[i]"Some Civitas Members Wanted to be 'Thrilled'," Brooklyn Eagle, January 16, 1916.
[ii]"What I Believe," RES, 36.
[iii]EG, "Syndicalism in Theory and Practice," (ME, January 1913). Hippolyte Havel convincingly argued that anarchists were very influential in the syndicalist movement in Europe, both in theory and organization. "The New Unionism," (ME, September 1913).
[iv] "Sabotage, EG, "Syndicalism, Its Theory and Practice," (ME, February 1913). Gray and hideous things, and Intense longing, EG, "Anarchism, What It Really Stands For," AOE, 55-56. For criticism of the IWW, see Harry Kelly, "A Syndicalism League," (ME, September 1912); Alexander Berkman, "The IWW Convention," (ME, October 1913); Ben Reitman, "Impressions of the Chicago Convention," (ME, October 1913). See also "Observations and Comments," (ME, October 1914).
[v] EG, "The International Anarchist Congress," (ME, October 1907). Main evil, EG, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For," AOE, 50. Goldman did tend to give primacy to whatever aspect of society she was discussing at the moment; she can be quoted as saying that economics, education, sex, or other aspects of society are the most basic and important. This makes her appear superficial to people who are confident of a single, underlying cause of all problems. Goldman's considered view was that it is "impossible to decide just what is the most important force." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 1, 1908.)
[vi] EG on religion, EG, "The Failure of Christianity," (ME, April 1913): 41-48 and "The Philosophy of Atheism," (ME February 1916). Religion and Morality, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913).
[vii] Sustain, and preparedness, EG, "Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter," (ME, December 1915), 331-38. Conceited fool EARLY ARCHIVES, I THINK; FIND THIS. Larger Social War, "EG Before the Bar," (excerpts from EG's testimony in court, ME, May 1916); cringes, and feminism, EG, "The Social Aspects of Birth Control, (ME, April 1916).
[viii] EG very early repudiated democracy, and never wavered in this view. For some early statements see EG, excerpts from "Authority and Liberty," FS March 3, 1899; EG in "Rented by EG," The New York Times (December 12, 1900); St. Loius Times, February 28, 1908 CHECK THIS CITATION. Her views on autocracy as uniting the middle and working classes are in her lectures ON DRAMA, FIND EXACT PAGE.
[ix] EG, "The Social Importance of the Modern School," RES 116-132. The quotes are on pp. 116-119.
[x] FIND AMERICANIZATION QUOTE
[xi] RUNNING AFTER CARRIAGES IN LONDON; SETTLEMENT HOUSES FROM LML
[xii] EG, "What I Believe," RES, 36; EG, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For," RES, 53; on Leavensworth, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, July 1911): 154-155; "Nellie Bly Again: She Interviews Emma Goldman and Other Anarchists," The World (September 17, 1893).
[xiii] Paris Commune, EG, "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School," AOE, 160; man makes society, EARLY ARCHIVES, FIND THIS. or oct 1915?
[xiv] Destruction, "Observations and Comments," (ME, May 1914); Revaluation, "To Our Eighth Birthday," (ME, March 1913); centuries, FIND THIS QUOTE. PUT IN QUOTE CITATION ON FERRER FROM ESSAYS
[xv] Berkman, "The Need of Translating Ideals into Life," (ME, November 1910); Berkman, "Anniversary Musings," (ME, March 1915).
[xvi] EG, "Minorities versus Majorities," AOE, 78, 74; Berkman, "The Awakening Starvelings," (ME, December 1913.)
[xvii] This note COULD BE ELIMINATED. IF KEPT, NOTE WORKERS NEEDED CAUSE OF THEIR NUMBERS, OPPRESSION
[xviii] EG, "Anarchism, What It Really Stands For," AOE, 66.
[xix] Harry Kelly, "Apropos of Women's Suffrage," (ME, December 1906); EG, "The Joys of Touring," (ME, March 1908); EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, July 1912); EG, "Reply," (ME December 1907).
[xx] EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, April 1906). Isaaks, LML 224; "Close Doors to Anarchism," The Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1902, EGP-GW.
[xxi] Berkman, "The Failure of Compromise," (ME, June 1910); They are of the end, Berkman, Voltairine de Clyre: A Tribute," (ME, July 1912): 52-53. It is interesting that Berkman and Goldman seldom, if ever, explicitly said that violence was not a suitable means, even though they repeatedly stated that violence and anarchism were antithetical. CHECK POSSIBLE AB STATEMENT
[xxii] EG, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For," AOE, 65; Berkman [writing under the pseudonym Thomas Breckenridge], "Defiance of the Law," (ME, April 1914). For Berkman's use of this pseudonym, see "Stray Thoughts by the Roadside," (ME, May 1915). EG, ----- NEED SOURCE. FIND SOURCE FOR LEONARD ABBOTT ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
[xxiii] Not only think but act, EG, NEED SOURCE; "caters," EG, "Our Seventh Birthday," (ME, March 1912; a similar phrase later appears in Max Eastman's editorial statement for The Masses); birth control advanced, EG, "To My Friends," (ME, May, 1916) and EG, "The Petty Discrimination of the Law," (ME, December, 1916): 701-703
[xxiv] EG and AB closed their ice-cream parlor to support of the Homestead workers; EG later closed her Viennese scalp and facial massage parlor to manage the Orlenoff Threatre Troupe; and EG forfeited the opportunity to become a doctor by continuing with her anarchist activities, thus inducing her backers to withdraw their support. "Lost dogs," LML 517. Anarchist criticism of Rietman, EG, "The End of the Odyssey," (ME, July 1910).
[xxv] As Drinnon remarks (149-59), Goldman remained in touch with almost all her former lovers, with the exception of John Most. Her relationship with Ben Reitman certainly was tempestuous, and cannot be said to have been "without rancour," yet EG was very honest with Ben, he was (eventually) honest with her, and they did love and respect each other for ten years despite chasms between them in personalities and values. EG admitted that she was not fulfilled or excited by a quiet, undemanding love. "Fedya's love was too yielding for my turbulent nature, which could find expression only in the clashing of wills, in resistance and the surmounting of obstacles." (LML, 183.) Candace Falk's Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman is an exhaustive and judicious account of their long relationship.
[xxvi] Frail being, EG, "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School," AOE, 146; martyrs, EG, "The Crime of the 11th of November," (ME, November 1911); impact of Haymarket and Berkman, LML 507-9.
[xxvii] Blood, EG, "What I Believe," RES, 35; avalanche, EG, "Promoters of the War Mania," (ME, March 1917); tidal wave, LML, 598.
[xxviii] EG, "Caught in the Political Trap," RES, 78-81; Max Baginski, "Everlasting Murder," (ME, April 1911): 34-5.
[xxix] Berkman, MEB, October 1917; iron-clad program, EG, "The Joys of Touring," (ME, January 1909); all other quotes, EG, "Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap," RES, 78-81. Speaking of the SP, Goldman complained, "Witness how tenderly religion is treated, how prohibition is patted on the back, how the anti-Asiatic and Negro question is met with, in short how every spook prejudice is treated with kid gloves so as not to hurt its sensitive souls." RES, 85. As early as 1900 Goldman perceived the Socialists as another form of despotism, and decried "the narrowness, discipline, and intolerance of parliamentary socialists." Free Society, April 22, 1900.
[xxx] For De Clyre's vacillations on the relative importance of impersonal social forces and individual will, see (for a hopeful view of individual initiative) "Those who Marry Do Ill," (ME, January 1908) and (for a disillusioned reliance on "blind development,") "Anarchism and American Traditions," (ME, January, 1909). See also "The Dominant Idea," ME May and June, 1910).
[xxxi] Voltairine de Clyre, "The Dominant Idea," (ME May 1910, and ME June 1910).
[xxxii] Voltairine de Clyre, "The Dominant Idea," (ME, June 1910); Berkman, PMA, 464; Berkman, "Voltairine de Clyre," (ME, July 1912): 153.
[xxxiii] Harry Kelly, "Socialism and Fatalism," (ME, May 1907).
[xxxiv] Max Baginski, "Mistaken Aspects of Socialism," (ME November 1907); Mother Earth quote, "Observations and Comments," (ME, April 1906); Goldman quotes, EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 174; EG, "Agitation En Voyage," (ME, August 1915).
[xxxv] Max Nettl, inheritor party; rev waiting; Marx on determinism and freedom. THIS NOTE NEEDS WORK
[xxxvi] Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism. LIST OTHER BOOKS ON THIS TOPIC
[xxxvii] Libraries have been written on the question "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" a question first broached by Werner Sombart in a book of that title published in 1906. Many books about seemingly disparate topics confront this issue. For an overview, see Seymour Martin Lipset, "Why No Socialism in the United States?" in Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, volume I, 30-149 and 346-363; Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism, ed. John Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1974); Sean Wilenz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement," 1790-1920, (International Labor and Working Class History, Number 26, Fall 1984): 1-24; Eric Foner, "Why is There No Socialism in the United States," (History Workshop, #17, Spring 1984); John Laslett, "The American Tradition of Labor Theory and Its Relevance to the Contemporary Working Class," in The American Working Class: Prospects for the 1980s, edited by Irving Horowitz, John Leggett, and Martin Oppenheimer (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersy), 3-30; D. H. Leon, "Whatever Happened to an American Socialist Party?", (American Quarterly GOD KNOWS WHEN); John Laslett, "Socialism and the American Labor Movement: Some New Reflections," (Labor History, Spring 1967): 136-155; Erik Olssen, "The Case of the Socialist Party that Failed," (Labor History, Fall 1988).
Anyone reading these essays will find many more cited in the notes; but historians have ranged far afield in their efforts to analyze this problem. For a brilliant discussion focusing on the peculiarities of the American judicial system, see William Forbath, Law and the Shaping of American Unions.
[xxxviii] Cruelty, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, July 1912). Goldman also severely criticized middle-western socialists, but exempted those on the west coast from her strictures. (See her tour accounts in ME for June 1907 and February 1910). Dissidents, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, March 1912): 25-26; materialism, EG, "On the Road," (ME, May 1907): 130; ferment in SP, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, April 1911); EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, May 1912 and June 1912); Berkman, "Violence and Anarchism," (ME, April 1908): 70; Baginski, "The Troubles of Socialist Politicians," (ME, March 1913).
[xxxix] Max Eastman made this point in Love and Revolution.
[xl] Isaac Deutcher, The Prophet Unarmed
[xli] Eugene Debs, "The Negro in the Class Struggle," and "The Negro and his Nemesis," originally in International Socialist Review for November 1903 and January 1904, as reprinted in Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, ed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., (Heritage Press, New York, 1948), 63-73. The quotes are from the first article, on pp. 65-66. These articles are both blistering attacks on racism. Debs acknowledged that the blacks are "doubly enslaved" by race and class, while the SP's "Negro Resolution" (also a forceful condemnation of racism) spoke of the "peculiar position in the working class and in society at large" of Negroes. It is therefore surprising that both Debs and his party should believe that racism required no separate analysis or attack. Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist, 225-228 quotes Debs slightly differently, and offers a cogent analysis of his evolving position on race.
[xlii] Goldman noted the irony that the Bolsheviks, while claiming Marxism, nevertheless felt that they could inaugurate socialism without going through a state of capitalism, as the anarchists had always claimed. EG, The Truth About the Boylsheviki (Mother Earth Publishing Assocation, 1918), 4.
[xliii] See note 78. NOTE NUMBER MUST CHANGE FOR FINAL VERSION.
[xliv] This struggle is excellently described in Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal.
[xlv] Empty stomachs, EG, "A Short Account of My Recent Tour," (Solidarity, June 15, 1898); chains, EG, "A Rejoinder [to Voltairine de Clyre]," (ME, December 1910).
[xlvi] Harry Kelly, "A Plea for the Impersonal," (ME, February 1908); EG, in "Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers, (The Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 6, 1901); de Clyre, "Anarchism," Selected Works of Voltairine de Clyre (originally in Free Society, October 13, 1901).
[xlvii] In addition to Goldman, prominent American female anarchists included Voltairine de Clyre, Lucy Parsons, Mollie Stirmer, and Mary Austin. QUOTE EG ON US MORE REPRESSIVE THAN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, BECOMING RUSSIANIZED.
[xlviii] Adeline Champney, "Congratulations--Plus," (ME, March 1915); Falk, 114-15.
[xlix] EG, "End of an Odyssey," (ME, July 1910); EG, "The Propaganda and the Congress," (Free Society, April 8, 1900).
[l] Drinnon, 89. See also EG, "What I Believe," RES, 34.
[li] EG, "End of the Odyssey," (ME, July 1910).
[lii] Security, Wexler, 219; experience, Falk, 279.
[liii] EG, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Stance for Freedom," typescript, November, 1911, 2, 19, (EGP-GW). See also EG and Berkman, "Our Sixth Anniversary," (ME, March 1911) and EG, "Our Seventh Birthday," (ME, March 1912).
[liv] Falk, 217, 117.
[lv] Falk, 277. For a trenchant analysis of how other radical men opted out of liberated relationships for a more traditional, caregiving wife, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village," 1900-1925, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, (Monthly Review Press, New York), 131-152.
[lvi] EG, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Stance for Freedom," typescript, November, 1911, 17, (EGP-GW); Falk, 287. Falk wisely observes that EG overpoliticized her relationships, ascribing all of their turbulence and failures to the incompatibility of pursuit of an Ideal and love, rather than to more personal causes. Falk, 382. IS THIS AN ACCURATE STATEMENT OF WHAT FALK WAS SAYING, OR INTERPRETATION OF IT?
[lvii] Most free, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, June 1912); give, EG, "The Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist," (ME, September 1913); disease, Falk, 98, see also Falk, 150; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford, 1974), 214.
[lviii] Falk, 237.
[lix] LML, 135.
[lx] EG, "Minorities versus Majorities," AOE, 69-78. EG, echoing George Bernard Shaw, sometimes rhetorically blamed poverty, rather than oppression, for all the ills of the world. See EG, "The Drama, the Strongest Disseminator of Radical Thought," in, Alden Freemen, ed. The Suppression of Free Speech (1909).
[lxi] SP and IWW speakers also hectored their audiences, insulting them in an effort to rouse them to a sense of their dignity. About Ludlow, EG said "It was painful to know that I was not wanted by the very people for whom I had worked all my life." LML, 533. Voltairine de Clyre complained, in a letter to Berkman in 1910, that "if a direct struggle between capitalist and worker takes place, we must keep out of it because of our sympathy with the strikers.... Our name is such a prejudice that we must save our friends from its contamination!" (Marsh, 145) This may go a long way towards explaining anarchist attitudes towards the working class.
[lxii] Put him up to it, Drinnon, 52; Sasha, LML, 113-114; Czolgosz, LML, 304; EG, "A Rejoinder," (ME, December 1910).
[lxiii] EG, "On the Road," (ME, May 1907).
Goldman viewed economic slavery as a main basis for every other kind of servitude, and recognized that liberty could have meaning only if capitalism were abolished. "There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development," she maintained, "as long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important role in the determination of personal conduct." Yet Goldman seldom discussed the ideal economic arrangements of anarchist society, believing that future generations would experiment with their own diverse forms. She was more interested in contemporary events. She supported militant labor struggles, regardless of the philosophy of any specific union or the tactics of a particular strike, in the columns of Mother Earth, in her speeches, and by raising funds.[ii]
The anarchists detested the AFL but sympathized with the IWW. Individual anarchists were active in the IWW, especially in the foreign language sections, and Wobblies were sometimes admitted free to Goldman's lectures. Anarchists admired the IWW's reliance on revolutionary elan rather than large strike funds and approved its rejection of contracts, union benefits, and strong leaders. Goldman imbibed the main ideas of syndicalism at the International Anarchist Congress in Paris in 1900 and introduced them to the United States five years before the foundation of the IWW. The French syndicalists particularly impressed her. The CGT, the largest French labor federation, sponsored employment agencies and aided traveling workers, thus mitigating some of the worst abuses afflicting migrant workers in the United States. It also provided workers with libraries, concerts, and schools which taught subjects such as craft skills and sex education. Goldman saw this voluntary cooperation for the public good as the epitome of anarchism and praised the CGT for preparing the workers in the present for "a full, free life when capitalism shall have been abolished."[iii]
Goldman endorsed the IWW's tactics of direct action, the general strike, and the expropriation of the capitalists. She called sabotage "ethical in the best sense" because it undermines capitalist property relations. Yet Mother Earth writers considered the IWW insufficiently revolutionary on some points of theory. Because anarchists viewed the state as a substantive evil rather than as a mere reflection of capitalism, they advocated insurrection in addition to the general strike. Various writers in Mother Earth criticized the IWW's concept of "one big union" as too centralized and advocated a federation of smaller, more autonomous craft and industrial unions directly responsive to the wishes of their members. The IWW favored centralized production and majority rule on the factory floor. The anarchists wanted decentralized, small-scale production and repudiated majority rule, in industry as in politics, because they feared that the majority of workers would oppress minorities. Everyone, they felt, should have guaranteed access to the means of production and share equally in the product, without asking leave of anyone--capitalists, managers, or fellow workers. Goldman attacked the whole system of mass production as degrading work, workers, and their products; stunted and spiritually deformed workers produced "gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence." Work, she felt, should be "the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force."[iv]
Goldman considered syndicalism "the economic expression of anarchism," but working-class economic revolution was only a part of the total social and cultural revolution she desired. At the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, she opposed a resolution proclaiming syndicalism and working-class economic interests the principle basis of revolutionary activity. Goldman's anarchism addressed individuals rather than any particular class and critiqued all of life, not merely economic arrangements. She endorsed Malatesta's statement that anarchism "goes beyond every class interest, its aim is the liberation of man in all phases of life." The general strike and insurrection, she believed, would inaugurate the social revolution rather than complete it. "The main evil today is an economic one," Goldman said, but "the solution of that evil can be brought about only through consideration of every phase of life."[v]
Goldman criticized working-class cultural values for interfering with the fight for workers' emancipation. She denounced religion, patriotism, political activity, and conventional morality for dampening class consciousness and class conflict. She denounced Christian ethical teachings as "a slave morality.... the destroyer of all things that make for strength and character" and as "irrevocably opposed" to "the great struggles for social and economic emancipation." She considered religion "a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness, and contentment"; like the state, it has a "paralyzing effect upon thought and action" because it teaches the workers that others would save them. "Religion and morality are a much better whip to keep the people in submission, than even the club and the gun.... The more poverty stricken the victim of Property Morality is, the greater his respect and awe for that master.... Until the workers lose respect for the instrument of their material enslavement, they need hope for no relief."[vi]
Goldman attacked religion in all its forms. There were, roughly speaking, three main religious sensibilities that concerned her, all of which cut across denominational lines. Traditionally, religion had been at the very center of personal and social life, structuring both private conduct and public endeavor. A focus on the afterlife had this-worldly effects. Christian morality, however, mainly concerned sins of the flesh and the petty venalities of life; it ignored, or even justified, exploitation and poverty, and taught submission to the victims. Most varieties of Christianity were mechanisms of class rule and elite hegemony. They proclaimed the superior virtue of the rich and inculcated resignation and acquiescence (or social climbing based on acculturation to elites values) in the poor. Traditional Christianity was prudish, against birth control and feminism, and hostile to radicalism in all of its varieties.
Protestantism, however, especially among the upper classes, had increasingly become a subjective, private affair, detached from social concerns, and more formal and decorative than real or intense. The new corporate world valued affability and "getting along"; business success became the central, motivating value among the middle class. Authentic faith could inject sectarian animosities into the business world, and was therefore avoided. Religion became emptied of content, a vacuous style of social display and empty professions of piety. Goldman attacked both the traditional and more recent forms of religion. Later in her career she grudgingly admitted that a modernized form of religion could perhaps focus on creating a decent life on earth, instead of in heaven; but she opposed the Social Gospel because she wanted the workers to find their own salvation, and not to rely upon God or His spokesmen.
Goldman similarly attacked patriotism as a distraction from the class war and as justifying large armies which are used to shoot strikers and repress radicals. Patriotic workers identified with institutions which "sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses." The American worker "is not only a fool, but a conceited fool" who "believes himself free, whereas the chains of slavery make his limbs bleed." She wanted "the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state." Goldman advocated birth control as one phase in "the larger social war.... a war for a seat at the table of life on the part of the people, the masses who create, who build the world and have nothing in return." The rich, she realized, could obtain contraceptive information from their private physicians; the capitalists oppose birth control for the poor because they need cannon fodder for the army and a large unemployed workforce to drive wages down and break unions. A man with a large family "cringes before his master, just to earn barely enough to feed the many little mouths. He dare not join a revolutionary organization; he dare not go on strike; he dare not express an opinion." She regarded feminism as a working-class issue because men could not achieve the social revolution without the cooperation of women.[vii]
Goldman opposed not only overt terrorism and violence, and old forms of bourgeois hegemony such as racism, patriotism, and patriarchy, but the relatively new instruments of dominion forged by liberal, democratic capitalism. She regarded elections as toys which distracted the workers giving them the illusion of participation, freedom, and equality, while undermining class organization and working-class insurgencies. She repeatedly stated that so-called democracy was no better than autocracy. Indeed, she felt it worse precisely because it falsified the nature of the state and of the workers' position within it, and won the loyalty of the oppressed. Democratic institutions also placated the middle class, and therefore divided it from the workers; in autocracies such as Russia, the two classes each recognized their common oppression and made common cause.[viii]
Goldman learned from her own experience that free speech and other bourgeois liberties were illusory and hegemonic. Goldman and her comrades were allowed more freedom of speech and assembly in monarchies such as England, Holland, Germany, and Canada than in the United States. The United States tolerated free expression only as long as it was a harmless venting of frustration; whenever it demonstrated a potential to generate real change, it was throttled. Yet Americans prided themselves UPON their ability to speak their minds. In particular, the United States obstructed working-class organization far more than most other countries, and shot down strikes with a callous impunity much less pronounced elsewhere. The anarchists rejected paternalistic government, the welfare state, and labor legislation as facilitating and legitimizing capitalist mass murder of the workers, undermining working-class activism, and further enslaving the workers.
Goldman criticized public education, another vaunted achievement of American democracy, as an instrument of class dominion not only for what it taught, but because it broke the wills and spirits of the children and cut them off from their own true natures and from any concept of genuine education. The public school "is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier." The process of breaking the will of the individual, and creating docile, compliant wage-slaves "must begin at a very early age." By claiming that what they dispense is education, the schools prevent the workers from ever realizing what true education means, "thereby enslaving the masses a great deal more than could an absolute ruler.... Our present system of economic and political dependence is maintained not so much by wealth and the courts as it is by an inert mass of humanity, drilled and pounded into an absolute uniformity... the school today represents the most efficient medium to accomplish that end." By inculcating false ideas about human sexuality, Goldman charged, the schools further warped and crippled their students, making them unfit for genuine liberty or social struggle.[ix] Goldman stressed that workers would be better off without any bogus facsimiles of real goods, such as democracy, freedom, and education; lacking these, they would fight for the genuine articles, and attain them in the process of struggle.
Goldman similarly opposed Americanization programs, in the schools, factories, or society at large, as bleaching out all that was beautiful, radiant, and authentic in the various cultures that composed the United States.[x] Her stance is particularly noticeable because she did not advocate Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism; she wanted a diversity of individuals rather than of groups. She wanted each person to eschew all prefabricated identities and sculpt their own personalities, and realized that every national and ethnic culture was permeated by religious, moral, and sexual superstitions. Although of Jewish origins herself, and understanding of the reasons that Jews adhered to their own culture as a refuge from oppression, she held anarchist meetings on Jewish holy days, in a direct affront to religious sensibilities. Nevertheless, she criticized Americanization programs as regimenting and conformist, reducing a rich diversity to a homogeneous mass. Many Progressive intellectuals, echoing stern old republican verities, demanded a unified nation composed of people unanimous in their basic culture and presupposition; Goldman's ideal world was the antithesis of that progressive ideal.
Goldman bitterly attacked charitable institutions as merely giving back to the workers a small part of what had been stolen from them. Capitalists, in dispensing their largess, meddled in the lives of their beneficiaries and reduced them to abject dependence and misplaced gratitude, thus undermining working-class self-respect, initiative, and responsibility. She was horrified at the common spectacle in London, of penniless vagrants scurrying for blocks after the carriages of the rich, and cringing for the privilege of opening the carriage door when its occupant alighted in hopes of receiving a coin. While acknowledging the altruism of settlement workers such as Jane Addams, she averred that they did more harm than good. "Teaching the poor to eat with a fork is all very well," she said, "but what does it do if they have not the food? Let them first become the masters of life; they will then know how to eat and how to live."[xi] The anarchists opposed welfare capitalism and conservative unionism, then relatively young, for similar reasons.
Goldman was scornful of mass consumerism, another new mechanism of elite hegemony, for two reasons. First, mass production, upon which consumerism rested, was a form of mutilation and mass murder of workers. "There can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives," she proclaimed; nothing that cost human lives was worth producing. Mass production turned "the producer into a mere particle of the machine"; the very conditions of work destroyed the joyful, authentic, autonomous individuals that any economic system should foster. The treasures of human personality are, Goldman passionately believed, the only riches worth possessing; mass production capitalism destroyed these and substituted "gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence." Goldman considered Leavensworth, much more comfortable but also more regimenting than traditional prisons, a "monster of modernity" that symbolized the worst tendencies of an emerging world of scientific efficiency and labor-saving machinery that provided for its residents at the cost of every "spark of humanity." Goldman herself, though no ascetic, disdained consumerism in favor of personal development. Interviewed in prison by Nellie Bly in 1893, she said that "I kept myself in poverty buying books.... So long as I had something to read, I did not mind hunger or shabby clothes."[xii]
Finally, Goldman attacked bourgeois high culture as saccharine and false. Goldman recognized that the bourgeoisie's pretense of being the creators, guardians and connoisseurs of high culture was itself hegemonic in that it obliquely justified and prettified capitalist rule over the "uncultured" masses. But Goldman criticized most high culture as mere escapism, a narcotic that falsified reality, dulled the intellects and moral sensibilities of its consumers, and detached them from the vital life and social struggles which surrounded them. Although Goldman only occasionally noticed the emerging mass, popular, commercial forms of amusement and culture, her attitude is implicit in her efforts to bring radical and critical forms of high culture, such as modern drama, to the masses, and her insistence that such culture stems from the common people. She visited Stieglitz's studio at "291" and encouraged the Ferrer Center's efforts to teach working-class children and adults the techniques of social realism in painting. She disdained the movies, presumably because she felt them merely a form of amusement incapable of communicating important ideas. While Goldman appreciated fun, frivolity, and entertainment--deeming them especially necessary for an agitator--she opposed all efforts to make them the center of life.
The anarchists clustered around Mother Earth were total revolutionaries who worked for the overthrow of all existing institutions and cultural values. This distinguished them from almost all other radicals of their day. The Socialist party asked for the vote of any worker or other citizen who agreed with its political and economic program; to the dismay of Debs and others it solicited the votes of non-Socialists who agreed only with some of the SP's immediate demands, or who simply disliked the mainstream parties. The IWW similarly demanded of its members only that they support the IWW during strikes, free speech fights, and other agitation; it recruited workers of any party or religion. Although intellectuals associated with the SP and the IWW attacked mainstream institutions and values, activists seeking political office or organizing ordinary workers were free to downplay, ignore, or even repudiate such cultural radicalism. Strident rejection of traditional values and institutions was not a prerequisite to membership in either the SP or the IWW, but constituted an essential ingredient in anarchism. Goldman recognized that the working class could not liberate itself without undergoing a fundamental change in cultural values. The anarchists believed that education and enlightenment must precede the revolution rather than following from it because they perceived revolution as not merely the overthrow of a specific government or the substitution of one ruling class for another, but the total destruction of all instruments of coercion--political, economic, and cultural. Goldman and the anarchists recognized that cultural evils such as racism, sexism, homophobia, prudery, and nationalism did not stem exclusively from economic causes, but required separate analysis and attack. They pointed to the manifold connections between capitalism and these evils, but did not reduce them to one primary cause, elimination of which would resolve all other problems. Cultural transformation was as necessary as economic revolution, both as a good in its own right and as an essential prequisite to the overthrow of capitalism. Workers in thrall to conventional moral, religious, and patriotic beliefs would not make a revolution, and even if they did it would avail them nothing. Goldman said that during the Paris Commune the starving workers "protected the warehouses filled to the brim with provisions" and guarded the bank deposits of their oppressors. Only changed individuals could create a changed society "because it is man who makes society, and not society that makes the man."[xiii]
This emphasis on education, enlightenment, and a transformed consciousness implied that the revolution must be a long process rather than a sudden irruption. Although people are shaped by their environment and would change in response to the new revolutionary society, no insurrection could miraculously change the personalities and values of the people. Anarchists, Mother Earth editorialized, seek "the destruction of all the false notions and conceptions at the basis of our whole civilization--the utter destruction of the very spirit on which it rests." Grafting new ideas and opinions on the surface of existing one is comparably easy. "But the true revaluation of dominant values necessitates the complete destruction of the latter.... To destroy, to root up must be the work of every pathfinder.... Such destruction is in the truest sense the most constructive effort." Goldman feared that only "centuries of enlightenment" would undo "the harm done by traditions and habits." When Francisco Ferrer, the Spanish libertarian educator, was executed in 1909 for allegedly participating in the uprising of that year, Goldman scoffed at the charges. Ferrer, Goldman said, "had his life-work mapped out; he had everything to lose and nothing to gain, except ruin and disaster, were he to lend assistance to the outbreak.... His work, his hope, his very nature was directed toward another goal." Goldman regarded Ferrer's educational work as more dangerous to the political and ecclesiastical authorities than bombs or insurrection.[xiv]
Alexander Berkman, while not repudiating the attentat or insurrection, eventually voiced a competing theory of social change always implicit in anarchism. In 1910 he averred that while Socialist "transformation of political and economic conditions" might happen quickly, the anarchist "complete transvaluation of individual and social conceptions" was "a gigantic task" that would take a long time. The anarchist goal was primarily "a condition of mind" which required long preparation, starting with the immediate construction of counter-cultural institutions such as libertarian schools. No revolution generated solely by material privation could succeed; only "the inspiration of the liberating idea" could generate "conscious, triumphant revolution." In March 1915 Berkman admitted that his youthful, impatient idea of immediate, cataclysmic social revolution, "beginning perhaps in some little incident" was false. If revolution "means a complete and lasting change, a fundamental reorganization of popular ideas and conceptions, then it necessitates the gradual--primarily individual--substitution of new values for old ones." Revolutions "are merely mileposts indicating the distance covered" rather than substantive events in their own right.[xv]
If mass insurrection would achieve economic change, cultural transformation could come only from a militant minority of intrepid, creative spirits who would wean the masses from their innate conservatism. This reconciles Goldman's belief in the necessity of popular revolution with her denunciations of the masses and extolling of the creative minority. The masses "will always be the annihilator of individuality, of free initiative, of originality" she exclaimed. "Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty emanates from the minority and not from the mass." The anarchists regarded themselves as an elite vanguard, always far ahead of the inert masses. Workers were, the anarchists felt, a logical source of social revolution because they are oppressed; they were essential because of their numbers. Yet only a self-created elite could dispel superstition, overcome conventional beliefs, and forge the majority into a force for positive change. "Ideas are the true liberators," Berkman said. "It is given only to the seerer and poet to conceive liberating ideas--impractical, wild thoughts that ultimately light the way for practical, blind men to better and higher endeavor."[xvi]
The anarchists believed in the continued necessity of cultural revolution because humanity would never arrive at a social state where all change and progress would cease. By the time the masses caught up with the anarchists, those visionaries would be yet further ahead, scanning as yet unimagined horizons. IWW activists, responding to their own experience, spoke of the "militant minority" whose agitation would help liberate the mass of workers; the anarchists agreed, but added that the creative minority needed liberation from the masses as well.[xvii] They did not believe that the abolition of capitalism would transform the masses or any other human group so that they could be trusted with power.
II
The anarchists attacked conventional practices, beliefs, and institutions not only verbally in publications and lecture halls, but in life and practice. The main difference between the anarchists and other revolutionary movements did not lie in their attitudes towards politics, the state, and acts of political violence. Rather, it resided in their moral and cultural values and the personal responses to the dilemmas as living as revolutionaries and feminists in a capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist society. "Propaganda of the deed," a term usually connotating the assassination of heads of state, industrial magnates, or other symbolic figures, was in truth a metaphor for the entire anarchist enterprise as Emma Goldman and her circle clustered around Mother Earth conceived and lived it. Similarly, she broadened the concept of direct action, the IWW's term for worker self-activity that bypassed the state, such as strikes, sabotage, and free speech fights. "Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual," she said. "There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free."[xviii]
Harry Kelly, a major contributor to Mother Earth, averred that "Propaganda by example is an unpopular subject with all classes of reformers.... If ideals are to become realities, some attempt at living those ideals is necessary, even though we may be forced to leave the beaten path, brave public opinion, and, if necessary, go to jail as a protest against injustice, thereby inspiring those who follow us to do likewise." Goldman reminded her fellow radicals that "social changes are made by man and not by theories" and that "example more than theory is the potent force." The bohemian radicals of Greenwich Village maintained their right to live according to their own values; the anarchists proclaimed this a duty. Compromise and hypocrisy were not only unnecessary but wrong. Anarchists could not exploit others or submit to exploitation, attend church, send their children to public schools, or observe the usual moral proprieties. According to Goldman, "the new forms of life rather consist in the attempt to practically apply the ideas of anarchism right now.... They will take the place of the old not by preaching or voting, but by living them."[xix]
Goldman believed that revolutionaries defeated their own purposes by compromising with beliefs, practices, and institutions they disdain; such hypocrisy alienated even their own children. "The radical parent arraigns God, priesthood, church, government, domestic authority, yet continues to adjust himself to the condition he abhors.... The child, being fed on one-sided, set and fixed ideas, soon grows weary of rehashing the beliefs of its parents, and it sets out in quest of new sensations, no matter how inferior or shallow the new experience may be.... They will vote for imperialism only to escape the drag of economic determinism and scientific socialism." Goldman complained that radicals indoctrinated their children and dragged them to meetings at times when they should be in school or asleep. She said that parents should wait until their children were old enough to understand politics, and then expose them to all points of view. She extolled the Isaaks, publishers of Free Society, as rare exemplars of anarchists who applied their principles in their domestic life. "The comradeship between the parents and the complete freedom of every member of the household were novel things to me.... Never once did I see the parents resort to the authority of superior age or wisdom. Their children were their equals; their right to disagree, to live their own lives and learn, was unquestioned."[xx]
Alexander Berkman similarly felt that compromise with conventional social norms was both personally and politically destructive. Berkman, like most anarchists, felt that the purpose of human life was "the individual's development to the utmost capacity of his being, the unfolding and free manifestation of all his powers.... complete self-expression." Yet radicals often defeated this purpose by conforming "first, to conditions of absolute wrong and harm of which we have long since realized; second, to usage, the authority of which we consider, in our hearts, preposterous; and third, to prejudices from which we have already emancipated ourselves." Such capitulation "is an inexhaustible source of inner strife, regrets, remorse, and self-dissatisfaction"; it also causes "deterioration of character and systematic weakening of will-power and resistance." Revolutionists who compromise for the sake of temporary gain therefore defeat the very purpose of their lives. Nor did Berkman admit that compromise with social usage was sometimes justified out of a sense of duty, to avoid offending the sensibilities of others. "As if one could owe anyone the duty of turning hypocrite! As if we could owe anyone a greater duty than being true to ourselves!" Revolutionaries must not compromise out of a convinction that the ends justify the means and that compromise will help the Cause. Only those means are justified which are compatible with the end we seek; "and then they are of the end, a part of the end itself. If not, then the means gradually master us, and finally master our end." For this reason Goldman asserted that anarchists would not work within intrinsically evil institutions such as political parties and conservative trade unions.[xxi]
Living the revolution, refusing to succumb to illegitimate power or opinion, was not only personally liberating; it also furthered the revolution as no other activity could. Each act of defiance or self-assertion strengthened the revolutionary for further resistance. Goldman said that anarchism "stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage." Successful defiance demonstrated the hollowness and weakness of established authorities and of received opinion and thus incited emulation. An individual who defied convention, the law, and respectable opinion dramatized her ideals and compelled attention and respect; those who lived according to their own ideals were beckons of light for the submissive masses, many of whom lacked the courage to resist or rebel. Individuals and small groups could, by disobedience, nonconformity, and symbolic action, discredit antiquated institutions which survived only because people who disapproved of them nevertheless tolerated them. Defiance of the law, Berkman believed, was the best way to undermine and destroy the law. "The force of its example is often more inspiring and effective than a lifetime of other propaganda.... Let us boldly proclaim that we do not recognize the slave morality imposed on us by the master class. Let us spurn the justice of class verdicts, defy their execution, and by every means at our command, however illegal or violent--as long as effective for our purpose--resist the continuation of the system of misery and slavery than parades under the name of Law and Order." Goldman said that "If liberty is ever to bless mankind, it is only when the example set by the few will be followed by the many." Leonard Abbott, a close associate of Goldman's, advocated massive civil disobedience of unjust laws. Changing the laws, he asserted, took too much time. If people simply violeated the law, they would either be acquitted (in which case the law would be a dead letter) or sent to jail (in which case popular indignation would rise). In either case, justice would prevail. If enough people violated the law, the legal system--jails and courts--would break down.[xxii]
Goldman herself was one of "those who not only think, but act, who practice Anarchism in their daily life, who are consistent, who defy the world, maintain their personal liberty and consider the liberty of others." She fearlessly proclaimed her beliefs regardless of the law, public opinion, and the ostracism of her own comrades. Mother Earth, she said, "caters to none, not even its own comrades." She defended Czolgosz at the risk of her freedom and even her life in 1901, and dedicated the October 1906 issue of Mother Earth to him despite the outcries of the timid and the loss of respectable backing. She aided IWW free speech fights and instigated many of her own, repeatedly defying local police, speaking in the face of official prohibitions, and returning again and again to localities where she had been banned until she was allowed to speak. On her lecture tours she never knew whether she she would spend the night with her comrades or in the custody of the police, so she carried a book to read in jail. She publicly discussed actual birth control methods and so baited the law until she was arrested and jailed. "My imprisonment has advanced our cause as nothing I could have done had I gone up and down the country for a whole year lecturing before large audiences" she said. Birth control, she said on another occasion, "was advanced at least ten years through the publicity given in by our [her and Reitman's] arrests and trials." She concluded that "direct action is the only action that counts. But for those of us who have defied the law, Birth Control would still be a parlor proposition."[xxiii]
Goldman repeatedly and lightheartedly sacrificed opportunities for respectability and wealth--closing successful businesses and forfeiting the opportunity to become a doctor--in favor of anarchist agitation. She was not an ascetic on principle--quite the contrary--and could enjoy flowers, concerts, and fine meals; but she often lived from hand to mouth in a noisy, crowded tenement which her friend Hutchins Hapgood called a "home of lost dogs." Her love life was sometimes flamboyant and public; she scandalized even many anarchist comrades by openingly travelling with her lover and manager Ben Reitman.[xxiv] Despite her love of children, she refused to become a mother, instead dedicating herself to all the people of the world. To a remarkable extent she achieved personal relationships based on mutual autonomy and respect, without obligations, jealousy, or rancour.[xxv] She helped found, many institutions to agitate for her ideals, including the Free Speech League, the Ferrer Modern School, and the Non-Conscription League. She defied and trampled underfoot every contemporary notion of a woman's role.
Goldman believed that those persecuted by the authorities won converts for the Anarchist cause as much as, or even more than, those who successfully defied society and constructed a life of their own choosing. She repeatedly exclaimed that persecution awakens sympathy, admiration, and new converts. "Every frail being slain by Church and State grows and grows into a mighty giant, who will some day free humanity from their perilous hold." The Haymarket martyrs and Alexander Berkman exemplified her belief that "ideas can never be killed.... martyrs of liberty grow in their grave." Her own response to the Haymarket anarchists inspired her belief that mighty deeds and noble sacrifices would win adherents to the Cause. These towering figures were "men I had never personally known, but who by their death had become the most decisive influence in my existence.... In times of ascent to heights, in days of faint-heartedness and doubt, in hours of prison isolation, of antagonism and censure from one's own kind, in failure of love, in friendships broken and betrayed--always their cause was mine, their sacrifice my support." From their deaths "new lives have emerged to take up the strains throttled on the scaffold. With a thousand voices they proclaim that our martyrs are not dead." Among those voices, of course, was Emma Goldman's. She spoke in similar terms about Berkman. At a banquet celebrating the publication of his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist she rhapsodized: "From time immemorial the wise and practical have denounced every heroic spirit. Yet it has not been they who have influenced our lives. The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardour and faith in some extreme deed, have advanced mankind and enriched the world."[xxvi] This belief makes her life comprehensible; the sacrificial act of the heroic martyr occupies a central place in her world-view.
Yet Goldman and Berkman lived as they did not only because they thought it efficacious, but because they believed it right and because they demanded the right of self-expression. They theorized that morals changed over time in response to circumstances, but in practice they believed that, in the world they inhabited, morals were inflexible, absolute, and very demanding. When Goldman proclaimed that "the history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause," the blood she referred to may well have been her own. When the United States prepared to enter World War I, Goldman counselled resistance whatever the consequences, consoling herself that "at least we shall be free from blame should the terrible avalanche overtake us in spite of our efforts." While some other radicals, including Max Eastman and Big Bill Haywood, argued that radicals should not needlessly sacrifice themselves but should fight the class struggle by the most effective means, even if this entailed muting their opposition to the war, Goldman did not agree. "We did not expect," she later said in depicting one of her contradictory moods of the time, "to stem the tidal wave of hatred and violence which conscription was bound to bring, but we felt that we had at least to make known at large that there were some in the United States who owned their souls and who meant to preserve their own integrity, no matter what the cost."[xxvii]
III
This anarchist demand that revolutionaries apply their values in the present, rather than merely working for future change, alarmed many leaders of the Socialist party. Goldman's anarchists epitomized every lifestyle and belief that the capitalist press ascribed to the Socialists. The anarchists advocated the destruction of family, religion, country, and every traditional moral precept, just as the capitalists accused the Socialists of doing. The Socialist party, seeking respectability and electoral victory, frantically distanced itself from these beliefs. The Party officially declared religion a private matter and drapped itself in the American flag, while many candidates declared that Socialism would uphold the family against the onslaughts of industrial capitalism by allowing women to stay in the home and raise children. The differences between the Socialists and the anarchists concerned not merely the shape of the future society, or even present tactics, but a whole way of life.
The Socialists variously labelled the anarchists as dynamiters, lunatics, disrupters, and petty-bourgeois reactionaries. The anarchists, in their turn, viewed SP politicking as a distraction from real change and considered politics the antithesis of action. "All politicians," Goldman said, "... are but petty reformers, hence the perpetuators of the present system." The government, the anarchists insisted, masks, legitimates, and facilitates capitalist mass murder of the workers. Max Baginski thought that the Triangle Shirtwaist fire exemplified the role of government. About 147 women were burned alive or jumped to their deaths because the anti-union Triangle Shirtwaist company had disregarded state safety laws. The government, Baginski said, was "capable of dooming [a] starving worker to a few years' prison for stealing fifteen cents," but could neither protect the workers nor punish the capitalists who condemned them to their fiery deaths. Government's "duty is to mask--by its laws, dignity, and authority--the plutocratic greed which is responsible for such holocausts... [it is] concerned mainly in removing the obstalces in the way or plutocratic exploitation and insuring its own position."[xxviii]
SP electioneering undermined worker self-activity and reinforced the belief that the United States was a free country. Social welfare legislation had the same effect. "The fundamental evil of authority is its use," Berkman declared. "The more paternal its character or the more humanistic its symbols and mottoes, the greater its danger." Any elected Socialist official would enforce capitalist law and protect private property, just as bourgeois politicians did. The workers could achieve any worthwhile goal directly, by their own efforts, without the need of political intermediaries, as did the Mexican peasant-revolutionaries who confiscated the land that properly belonged to them. Socialist politicians, however, opposed worker self-activity because it threatened the importance and power of the politicians. The Socialists, Goldman asserted, "have the most iron-clad programme" for "regulating life from its very conception till death"; but "if once economic dictatorship were added to the already supreme political power of the state, its iron heel would cut deeper into the flesh of labor than that of capitalism today." Laws ostensibly intended to help labor actually benefitted the capitalists. Socialists, in their lust for respectability and votes, had turned their back upon their pristine radicalism and accomodated themselves to racism, patriotism, religion, and even capitalism. Socialists enamoured of office "sink to the low level of their constituency" instead of educating it in the principles of socialism; they cater "to every superstition, every prejudice, every silly tradition." Goldman recalled the legendary evil spirits who abducted a new-born baby and substituted a monster in its place, and charged that socialism likewise had been replaced by "a deformity which is now stalking about under the name of Socialism."[xxix]
The abstract issue dividing the anarchists from the SP and the IWW concerned divergent interpretations of two key Marxist concepts, economic determinism and historical materialism. Both the SP and the IWW claimed that they correctly understood these ideas and properly deduced their implications for theory and strategy. The anarchists emphatically rejected both doctrines for reasons which illuminate the essence of the anarchist enterprise and symbolize its differences from both the political vision of the SP and the industrial philosophy of the IWW. Prominent contributors to Mother Earth maintained a drumbeat of criticism of both economic determinism and historical materialism.
Voltairine de Clyre criticized the notion that ideas are only a reflection of reality, powerless to determine a person's actions, as worse than the medieval idea of free will.[xxx] "The doctrine that men are nothing and circumstances all, has been and is the bane of our modern social reform movements." De Clyre did not specify the exact relationship of ideas to material circumstances, but she considered mind, or character, "an active, modifying agent, reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances." Materialism and determinism themselves, she said, show the impact of ideas on personality and character because they corrode revolutionary purpose. Materialists live according to the dominant idea of their age, rather than their own ideals and values, and then rationalize their subservience and cowardice by an appeal to circumstances and necessity. Materialism and determinism produce "shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters" who change with circumstances to fit any baking tin. "The immortal fire of the individual will" could surmount all obstacles of circumstance and environment. Only "men who will say a word to their souls and keep it" could change the world.[xxxi]
De Clyre described the disillusionment of youthful radicals aglow with the expectation that material conditions will inevitably generate the revolution they await. But "the few years pass away and nothing happens; enthusiasm cools." The erstwhile revolutionaries meanwhile adapt themselves to the society in which they live, accumulating property and "creeping into the social ranks they once despised.... behold them lying, cheating, tricking, flattering, buying and selling themselves for any frippery, any cheap little pretense.... and when you ask the reason why, they tell you that Circumstances compelled them so to do..... that flattering and duping do not matter, if the end to be attained is desirable; and that under existing 'Circumstances' life isn't possible without all this." After the revolution, they say, we can behave differently, "but till then a man must look out for himself, by all means." Had such a person "been dominated by a less material conception of life, had his will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of existence, by its acceptance of its own nothingness, the unselfish aspirations of his earlier years" would have been "strengthened by exercise and habit; and his protest against the time might have been enduringly written, and to some purpose." Alexander Berkman similarly believed that "the extremists of the materialistic conception discount character, and thus help to vitiate it." They underestimate "the factor of personality." Berkman asserted that the indomitable personality can rise above the ideas and institutions of her day and create authentic selfhood and moral personality. Circumstance is the inexorable master only of those who are "weak in spirit.... the really strong, even if they cannot change their environment, do not suffer the environment to change them."[xxxii]
Socialists, the anarchists asserted, rationalized acquiescence in shameful practices and participation in evil institutions on the grounds that individuals must reflect their environment. Individual socialists, they charged, invested money in exploitative, capitalist businesses and banks, attended church, sent their children to public schools, and in general conformed to existing social norms. Socialists justified inaction, passivity, and accommodation to capitalism, religion, and the state on the grounds that revolution could not occur until objective circumstances were ripe, at which point it would be inevitable. Human effort was seemingly not required, and compromise with existing society had no effects. The Social Democrats, Harry Kelly said, with special reference to Morris Hillquit,
have repeated the half-truth that man is the creature of circumstance and environment so often, that in the end their actions are molded to fit their theory; they lose all individuality and initiative, becoming mere creatures of the ideas they have mouthed, without will or desire to act differently from the people they despise.... When it is pointed out that every reform or revolutionary movement must, in order to have any real or lasting success, have an ethical basis, and the morals of the party be judged by its meanist member, we are informed that it is a utopian doctrine long since exploded or that we do not understand Socialism; further, that Socialism will come, not because it is just or demanded by the people, but because it is necessary.... Socialism is inevitable, and man is the creature of circumstance and environment; the fact that I, who advocate the abolition of exploitation and point out its evil effects, am myself an exploiter, does not affect the sum total of human happiness or misery, or the ultimate realization of Socialism. The individual counts for nothing; Socialism is inevitable.[xxxiii]
Max Baginski similarly criticized "the reactionary view that the fate and destiny of man is determined by environment, and is not to be changed by his own initiative and effort." State socialists preach patience and passivity, claiming that we cannot achieve revolutionary change until conditions are ripe for it, at which time it will inevitably occur. Baginski thought the problem was not in objective conditions but in subjective will; "it is much rather the lack of revolutionary initiative and insurrectionary courage that supports the continued existence of conditions long since decayed and ready to make place for something new." Mother Earth criticized those who conformed to practices they detested, or participated in institutions they thought immoral, as "revolutionists in theory, reactionists in practice." As Goldman said, "the theory that man is a product of conditions has led only to indifference and to a sluggish acquiescence in those conditions." She lived her own life according to the principle "that an ideal backed by determination will overcome all obstacles, that the ideal alone is worth living and dying for."[xxxiv]
These anarchist criticisms of the official Socialist establishment and its ideology foreshadowed those of recent historians, who have also noticed the passive, fatalistic quality of Second International Marxism. Max Nettl has labelled the SPD, the organizational and ideological model for the SPA, an "inheritor party" because it confidently awaited the inexorable processes of history to deposit victory in its lap. Another historian calls the SPD's belief that it must prepare for but not wage the revolution, "revolutionary waiting." In his early work Marx expressed confidence that human intelligence and will could transform as well as understand the world; but his later work, and especially Engels's explication of it, emphasized determinism. Marx predicted that capitalist development would inevitably push the overwhelming majority of the population into an impoverished proletariat which would revolt and establish socialism. Revolution, however, was impossible until the relations of production interfered with the forces of production and capitalism had exhausted its creative, dynamic potential.[xxxv]
Dick Geary and other historians have explained how the SPD's predicament caused it to emphasize the deterministic elements in Marxism. The German state allowed the Socialists enough freedom to lure them into participation in the electoral system, but was repressive enough to make the Socialists fearful of any words or acts that might elicit state terrorism. For example, the Socialists elected a growing number of deputies to the Reichstag, becoming the largest single party in 1912, yet the Reichstag was relatively powerless. It did not appoint the government, much less the head of state. It is difficult to imagine how any electoral victories could have enabled the SPD to take actual power without major constitutional changes for which there was no feasible and legal mechanism. The Socialists confronted a seemingly unbreakable alliance between the the landed aristocracy (the Junkers) and the bourgeoisie. The Junkers intransigently opposed Socialism and reform, and would yield only to superior force; but violent or radical tactics would alienate the bourgeoisie as well as inviting repression. The tactics necessary to overawe the Junkers would frighten the bourgeoisie. The Socialists therefore confronted a semi-feudal political structure without allies. This is what Peter Gay called "the dilemma of democratic socialism": neither revolution nor reform were viable options in Wilhilmite Germany.[xxxvi]
Under such circumstances, the SPD utilized the legal possibilities that were open to them. They campaigned for the Reichstag, organized workers into unions, and awaited the revolution while carefully repudiating any action which would actually lead to it. They made a theoretical virtue of this necessity with an interpretation of Marxism that emphasized determinism and the inevitable victory of socialism through the operation of impersonal historic forces. The SPD would not cause or even lead the revolution, but rather organize the workers electorally and economically and prepare them for their inevitable victory. As the SPD created large and stable institutions with a measure of influence--local party organizations, unions, a vibrant press, and sports, cultural, and artistic groups--it became even more suspicious of precipitate action which could at one stoke destroy all its institutions. Almost the only action which SPD theory acknowledged could decisively affect the ultimate course of events was actual revolutionary activity; by evoking governmental repression, this could actually delay the revolution long after objective conditions would otherwise have made it possible or inevitable.
Historians have pointed to more specific causes of SPD conservatism. The party's organizational structure greatly underrepresented radical urban areas. The working class was divided along religious lines, with Catholics proving difficult to recruit. The trade unions, which rejected the general strike and other revolutionary tactics in favor of incremental changes won through collective bargaining, gained more influence in the party after the Mannheim agreement of 1905. The emphasis on electoral activity similarly tempted the SPD to a more accommodating stance as its Reichstag delegation sought actual influence on legislation, which required negotiation and compromise instead of intransigent opposition. For these and other reasons, the SPD increasingly chose to work within the framework of existing society while patiently awaiting its inevitable victory. The anarchists, like the IWW, noticed the SPD's growing belief that it could secure benefits for the working class within the structures of capitalism, and its consequent accomodation to German patriotism and militarism. SPD theorists rejected the possibility that only decisive action could incite and win the revolution, or that history might present a never-recurring opportunity created by temporary conditions. Socialists throughout much of the world were reduced to anxiously looking for portents of approaching capitalist collapse rather than actively seeking to bring about that collapse. The SPD's behavior in 1914, 1919, and the early 1930s was foreshadowed by the time of the SPD's electoral triumph in 1912.
The ideology and tactics of the SP paralleled those of the SPD not only because the SPD ideology, tactics, and organization greatly influenced the SP, but, more fundamentally, because the SPA confronted a political and economic structure similar in fundamental ways to that in Germany. The American political structure was designed to thwart majority rule and protect property against confiscation or regulation by democratic majorities. The presidential and two-party systems make victory by an insurgent party almost impossible. The working class was a minority, and largely of foreign extraction. Judicial decisions and injunctions, presidential use of the army to break strikes, and Congressional legislation all favored corporations and made union activity precarious. The federal, state, county, and local governments, often backed by officially-sanctioned vigilantes, repressed workers with terrorism and violence. In response, the SP, much weaker than the SPD in membership, voters, and unionized workers, concentrated on garnering votes and winning elections; and even when victorious Socialist candidates were debarred from taking office, the SP responded legally and peacefully, through established channels. Like the SPD, it had no realistic or even considered idea of how it would actually take power.[xxxvii] The SP, ignoring its own Marxist theory of the state and its own experience, placed far too much faith in the claims of American democracy. The anarchist critique of SP conservatism, passivity, and tactical blindness was well-grounded in reality, even if that reality was conditioned by forces and circumstances which the anarchists vastly underestimated.
The anarchists, in addition to alleging that Socialist economic determinists and historical materialists were opportunistic in personal life and political practice, also accused them of dogmatism and repression. Emma Goldman often complained about the narrow-minded ignorance of SP members, many of whom combined fanaticism with their complacent assurance of ultimate victory. Debating western socialists, she said, was "cruelty to animals." Socialist papers, more often than capitalist ones, refused ads for anarchist meetings and ignored such meetings in their news columns. Goldman noted that the Socialists expelled anyone who doubted materialist doctrine and predicted that socialists would, after taking power, kill their own dissidents and inaugurate a reign of terror. The Socialists typically would "denounce us as dynamiters when we venture to suggest some [non-political] method" of achieving social revolution. She noticed the ferment in the SP in the year and a half before Haywood's recall from the National Executive Committtee and accurately predicted the split between the revolutionaries and the reformists. Alexander Berkman similarly claimed that the materialistic conception of history not only justified Socialist acquiescence in the supersititions of the masses, but also generated Socialist persecution of those whose questioning of such popular superstitions alienated potential voters. Berkman, noting that the Socialists slandered anarchists even now, when the Socialists are weak, wondered "will there be found sufficient jailers in the world to supply the needs of a triumphant socialism?" Max Baginski, commenting on the SP's recall of Big Bill Haywood from the National Executive Committee, said that Socialist parties always defined themselves by expelling true revolutionaries. The SP was merely following the SPD model in "its deadening discipline, its dogmas, intolerance, and machine politics." Goldman similarly castigated the SP for aping the SPD.[xxxviii]
These criticisms were prescient. The doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism, enshrined within the official ideology of the Soviet state, eventually helped justify massive suppression of ideas for at least two important reasons. First, if all culture and politics is a part of the superstructure which stems directly from the economic base, no democratic safeguards for personal liberty are required. Socialism becomes reduced to, in Stalin's phrase, "correct economic relations." Merely changing the economic base through revolutionary action would itself ensure that the political structure reflected proletarian consciousness; no safeguards for free expression would be necessary. The political system would take care of itself, naturally and inevitably.[xxxix] Second, the idea that all ideas stem from and reflect class interests, taken to its logical conclusion, denies the possibility of legitimate dissent or disagreement. Economic determinism implies that there is only one correct attitude towards any problem, that which reflects the interests of the working class; all other ideas stem from hostile classes. Divergent views cannot possibly represent real disagreement, but only masked class aggression. Workers could not legitimately disagree over any substantive issue of economics, politics, or philosophy; their position as workers dictates, or should dictate, all of their ideas on every subject. In the Soviet Union this undercut Trotsky and other opponents of the Stalinist regime by generating self-doubt. If the Communist Party represented the ideology and interests of the working class, Trotsky asked himself, whose class interests could he other dissenters represent?[xl]
Economic determinism also implied that revolutionaries need not pay special attention to cultural matters; culture, like the political structure, would automatically change after the revolution in accordance with the revolutionized economic base. This attitude underlay Eugene Debs's statements that "there is no 'Negro problem' apart from the general labor problem" and that the Socialist party had "nothing specific to offer the negro, and we cannot make special appeals to all the races."[xli] Emma Goldman and the anarchists, however, emphasized cultural change as a prerequisite to revolution. Cultural change had to be wilful, conscious, and individual; it would not automatically follow from economic change but must precede or accompany it. If unchanged persons did succeed in toppling the economic and political structure, they would only re-create renewed forms of dominion and coercion. The anarchists viewed the culture of the workers--including their most cherished sources of personal identity--as a chief obstacle to human liberation.
The orthodox Marxist concepts of economic determinism and historical materialism also encouraged most Socialist parties to consign entire groups of humanity to misery and oblivion on the grounds that they were doomed by impersonal historical processes. Marx himself defended British imperialism, despite its brutality, on the grounds that it was ultimately progressive and beneficial. A similar argument almost justified capitalism, which orthodox Marxists regarded as a progressive and historically necessary stage in the evolution of human society which revolutionaries could not bypass. Goldman indignantly rejected this fatalistic view that an historical epoch of capitalist mass murder and degradation was an inevitable prelude to a just and humane society; she insisted that people of all classes could construct such a society now.[xlii] Many Socialist parties refused to address the needs of peasants, even when they were the overwhelming majority of the population, because they were allegedly a doomed, reactionary, and petty-bourgeois class. They similarly eschewed--in theory if not in practice--appeals to middle-class values or interests; the only role for the middle class was in support of proletarian demands as defined by the Socialists. This Marxist tendency to view people solely as abstract members of a class was anathema to the anarchists, who exalted individual personality. The anarchists usually referred to their constituency as "humanity," "mankind," or "the people" rather than the working class.
Emma Goldman and the anarchists rejected economic determinism and historical materialism partly because, unlike most Socialists, they did not believe in any ultimate solution to human ills, any final equilibrium in which utopia would be achieved and all change cease. Although they sometimes claimed that their cause would inevitably triumph, they usually lacked faith in a chosen class, the inevitable processes of history, and a preordained, static, and final resolution of human ills. They substituted spontaneity, consciousness, and will, and therefore individuality, contingency, and uncertainty, for socialist belief in a historically privileged class, inevitable victory, and certain knowledge. This was a major disadvantage in the competition for adherents.
IV
Although Goldman was a working-class revolutionary who directed her appeal largely to her fellow workers, her philosophy had scant appeal for the working class. The white native-born working class did not enlist in any radical crusades, for reasons familiar to historians.[xliii] Class divisions were less apparent in the United States than elsewhere. Native-born white males considered themselves respectable citizens, whereas European workers were born outcasts with slight change of winning respectability in the eyes of society. American workers, therefore, had more to lose by adopting a radical stance; their personal identity focused on the classes immediately above them, which they hoped to join, and on an idealized vision of the worker-citizen. Many native-born white males were relatively well-paid, skilled workers, and they disdained unskilled workers, blacks, immigrants, and working women; as these groups moved into lower-paid jobs, native-born white males often moved up into supervisory or more skilled positions. Such workers had the vote, and their children were educated in public schools; although rising out of the the working class was becoming increasingly difficult, rising within it, to a white-collar job, was relatively easy, especially from one generation to the next.Many were relatively well-paid, skilled workers who disdained unskilled workers, women, blacks, and immigrants; as these groups moved into lower-paid jobs, white native-born whites often moved up. The American revolutionary tradition regarded the state, rather than private property, the great evil, and in fact virtually sacralized private property. State and employer terrorism, along with a unique judicial system, cowed many workers and drove them into conservatism. Many immigrant workers cleaved to their insular ethnic cultures; those who risked change sought integration into the larger mainstream American culture, which seemed liberating to many immigrants, especially women. Throughout the twenties, ethnic leaders waged a rear-guard battle to preserve their traditional cultures from the onslaught of Americanization.[xliv] Very few ethnic workers were receptive to a call to unconditionally reject both their traditional ethnic cultures and mainstream American society; yet the anarchist attacks on religion, patriotism, the family, and traditional sexual mores demanded the total repudiation of all received cultures. Only the supremely confident (or completely demoralized and deracinated) will venture this. Ironically, many ethnic, working-class anarchist groups--Italian, German, Russian, and Jewish--belied the internationalism of anarchist philosophers and functioned largely as self-segregated communities which helped preserve threatened ethic cultures.
Goldman's concrete proposals were weakest in the area of labor relations. In many areas of lifestyle and culture the anarchists had a program for the hour which individuals or small groups could implement immediately, but their economic program was vague and utopian. Goldman de-emphasized it, and at any rate its most likely practical result would have been unionism along the lines of a more decentralized IWW. The cultural demands of the anarchists seemed largely irrelevant to most workers, who were hungry, overworked, and culturally as well as economically insecure. Goldman early recognized the difficulty of appealing to most workers. "Men with empty stomachs do not fight for freedom" she said. "They fight for bread, and as soon as they get the crust, gnawing on it they forget their good intentions to fight for more.... It is useless to appeal to the overfed, but still of less use to appeal to the underfed. To be successful we must reach that class whose brains have not yet been destroyed by starvation." Workers were exhausted and had little education or leisure, so "the pioneers of every new thought rarely come from the workers.... Those who have but their chains to lose cling tenaciously to them. The men and women who first take up the banner of a new, liberating idea generally emanate from the so-called privileged classes."[xlv] Much of Goldman's cultural radicalism was worse than irrelevant, as she herself recognized, and was in fact positively alienating, for many workers. Even changes of clear benefit, such as birth control, met hostility or indifference from many workers.
The cultural component of the anarchists--their opposition to religion, patriotism, racism, male supremacy, and prudishness--clearly alienated most workers. Yet American anarchists, as Harry Kelly and others noted, devoted far more time to cultural issues such as censorship and sexuality, and far less proportional energy to labor issues, than their comrades in Europe. Indeed, Goldman insisted that "anarchism has nothing to do with future governments or economic arrangements.... Anarchism deals merely with social arrangements and not with economic arrangements." Volatirine de Clyre agreed that "anarchism is not an economic system" and that it deals "almost entirely with the relations of men in their thoughts and feelings, and not with the positive organization of production and distribution."[xlvi] Goldman, de Clyre, and other cultural anarchists did supplement their anarchist beliefs with one economic program or another, usually communism, but these were always subordinate to their cultural insurgency, more an addition to than an essential aspect of their anarchist philosophy.
The reasons for this are deeply rooted in U.S. history. American workers were far less organized and less militant than their European counterparts, and the anarchists could not create a labor movement ex nihilo. American workers perceived themselves as politically free; the "free gift" of the franchise and the relative absence of clear class boundaries meant that workers did not consider themselves as a distinct class or see the state as their enemy. American rhetorical traditions stressing inalienable rights and individual liberty made many educated people receptive to arguments for cultural freedom and individualism in lifestyle choices. A long American reform tradition had debated issues of sexuality and personal conduct as well as issues of community organization and legislation; many American reformers were marked by a perfectionist, moralistic individualism and an insistence that individuals could change the world by first changing themselves. Moses Harmon and the Lucifer group, and Abe Issak and Free Society, both early influences on Goldmann, continued this tradition. Yet the United States was in many ways more repressive than many other countries, and progressives of all kinds had to fight for freedoms already secured elsewhere. State, corporate, and vigilantee terrorism against labor unions was far more ferocious in the United States than in many European countries, while Goldman frequently remarked that many monarchies allowed far more free speech than did the United States. The Comstock law banned public discussion of birth control at a time when other countries permitted or even encouraged such discussion. Judicial injunctions and nullification of labor laws made the United States far less democratic than many European nations. This discrepancy between official ideology and historical claims and reality has long been a major source of American radicalism, influencing its tactics and rhetoric in the direction of accommodation to traditional rhetorical values. Finally, the fact that women were very prominent in American English-language anarchist movements virtually assured that cultural issues surrounding feminism, female sexuality, and the family, would be addressed.[xlvii] Goldman was continually frustrated by the cultural conservatism of her male colleagues, whose lives did not reflect their professed commitment to human equality. Berkman's public activism, like that of more traditional anarchists, was almost exclusively focused on labor and economic issues.
For all these reasons the anarchists had few organic relationships with any autonomous working-class movement. They repudiated the AFL and had strained relations even with the IWW. The anarchists wanted economic transformation but had many other goals of equal importance; cultural revolution, crucial to the anarchists, was for the IWW a subordinate concern. The anarchists would help out from a distance with strikes started by others, but had little presence within any unions that would enable them to genuinely lead workers or sustain meaningful shop floor battles. (Indeed, Voltairine de Clyre complained that the anarchists were so widely hated that they had to distance themselves from most strikes, for fear that their support would jeopardize the workers.) The anarchists could not organize workers, but only appeal to isolated workers as individuals on abstract and cultural grounds. The Progressive Era saw strikes started by the AFL, the IWW, independent unions, and by unorganized workers, but none by anarchists as an organized force. The anarchists were suspicious of collective action, including the disciplined, coercive action needed to win a strike.
The anarchists, therefore, lacked a social base. Indeed, they disdained a social base rather than seeking it; they eschewed mass converts, and wanted only conscious individuals who were anarchists from conviction, not from mere self-interest or out of group identification. Anarchism demanded far more personal commitment than did membership in the SP or the IWW because the anarchists applied their principles in their personal lives, which not even the SP or the IWW demanded. The anarchists were by definition a sect. Unlike the SP or the IWW, they would not have been delighted by mass accessions. In fact, mass joining would have had no meaning because there was no marker, such as voting, attending meetings, or paying dues, to define membership in the anarchist community. Although anarchists did have local organizations, people who passively claimed to believe in anarchist principles would count merely as sympathizers. The anarchists lacked obvious recuriting occasions such as elections or strikes. They considered themselves a militant minority, a leaven, but would hold in contempt any masses whom they could actually lead and organize. Their creed was an intransigent application of Debs's proclamation that he would not lead the workers into the promised land if he could, because if he could lead them into it, someone else could lead them out of it.
V
The anarchists hoped that their lives would be practical demonstrations of lives based on freedom, mutuality, and self-development. Adeline Champney, congratulating Mother Earth on its tenth anniversary, asserted hopefully that "the vision of clean, healthy, sane and happy lives outside the pale is a revelation of salvation to many." And Goldman did inspire and transform many lives. Candace Falk has identified the great strength of her approach, saying that Goldman "tried to reach people who were yearning for love and commitment in their lives, and to expand their vision of the individual's need for love into that of a social need. By making people aware of the conventions that limited their expectations, she was able to connect their inner need for a sense of belonging with their feelings of deprivation at the absence of a larger community. In order to live fully, each person would have to confront societal norms, the hypocrisy and injustices that inhibit freedom. Similarly, by showing the barrenness of the socially approved forms of love, she hoped to inspire people to change the conditions that blocked them from living out their vision of love.... Emma's brilliance and originality lay in her ability to bring issues that were ostensibly private into the public sphere.... Her approach affirmed the rights of the individual in a way that everyone could identify with, without retreating from politics."[xlviii]
But the anarchists' distinctive idea of living the revolution, relating the personal and the political, and making of all of life "propaganda of the deed," alienated far more people than it converted for many important reasons. First, before the general proscription of radicals after 1916, mainstream society persecuted anarchists much more virulently than the SP. Goldman embodied everything that the guardians of official culture feared from feminism, birth control, free speech, and other reforms. As one example, conservatives claimed, and most feminists vehemently denied, that the liberation of women would mean the end of the family; Goldman advocated the total abolition of the family as traditionally conceived. The press portrayed Goldman as a licentious free lover with a bomb in her hand, an assassin who intended to destroy everything the American people held dear. Press hysteria prevented most people from obtaining an accurate idea of what the anarchists believed, so the popular view of Goldman was a caricature of her genuine self. While Goldman's idea of free love stressed individual choice, mutuality, and total honesty, she was disgusted with men who interpreted it as justification for clandestine affairs. Most of her ideas seem sensible, even tame, today; yet she was widely regarded at the time as a lunatic. The message she delivered was not that received by the public. During even a successful lecture tour lasting six months she reached a mere 40,000 people, a pittance compared to those influenced by press reports.[xlix] Even when the press accurately reported the substance of her remarks, the articles were often accompanied by sinister drawings or sensational headlines that distorted her message.
Government violence against her also delivered a potent message to most of the public, especially culturally insecure workers who craved respectability and feared government repression. Radicals have often found, from the Haymarket and Tompkins Square incidents to the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 and beyond, that when the government brutalizes protesters, most of the public blames the victims and perceives them as lawbreakers and advocates of violence. Emma Goldman and the anarchists may have inadvertently strengthened the existing order by providing a convenient negative reference group and role model, used by the authorities to frighten and stampede the masses. Mothers sometimes substituted her image for the traditional witch in an effort to frighten and discipline their children.[l] Indeed, if Emma Goldman had not existed, the capitalist press and the government would have invented her--as, insofar as her public image was concerned, they largely did.
A second reason for the failure of "propaganda of the deed" as a way of life stems partly from the nature of any counterculture, and partly from the specific anarchist version. Counter-cultural lifestyles usually seem artificial and contrived to members of the mainstream culture because the social supports for such lifestyles and the sanctions against deviance are very visible and consciously created, whereas those that buttress mainstream society are pervasive, and therefore invisible and seemingly natural. Most countercultures necessarily evolve their own forms of coercion, rules, standards, and means of signifying membership in the community; these rules of a counterculture, not being enforced by the law, custom, or public opinion of the larger society, must be backed by mechanisms of force or authority that have meaning only within the counterculture. They therefore seem contrived, weird or silly to those to whom they do not apply; and even to members of the counterculture they are often overt, deliberate, and conscious, and therefore lose some of the force that attends sanctions that seem written into the very nature of the universe. The only way to avoid this weakness is to create a hermetically sealed counterculture, with its own institutions, press, schools, and economic life--an entire world that replicates the mainstream culture, serving all of its functions and providing all of its support, while interacting with it as little as possible. Groups as diverse as the Amish and the Communist party approximate this in their own ways. Life within such obvious perameters will appear constrained, regimented, and exotic by outsiders, however natural, moral, or liberated it may seem to inhabitants of the counterculture. No social system can be genuinely neutral as between various forms of life. Only a pervasive mainstream culture can pretend to such neutrality, by disguising its forms of coercion.
The anarchists' distinctiveness, however, lay in their principled refusal to erect any such web of sanctions, institutions, and constraints on individual conduct. Goldman's ten-year love affair with Ben Reitman, and her habit of openly traveling with him, offended and outraged many anarchists, even those in her intimate circle; she bitterly claimed that the anarchists would have excommunicated her if they could.[li] But the anarchists had little formal organizational structure; they did not recognize decrees from leaders or submit to majority rule. They could only apply moral pressure, as individuals rather than as a united community; and anarchists on principle refused to bow to social pressure, which they viewed as a form of coercion. To those outside the movement, therefore, the lives of the anarchists seemed mere chaos, a whirl that lacked not only the familiar ordering structures of mainstream life, but any stability or pattern at all. Goldman had many lovers, and her personal life was a constant chaos which wearied even her. This was not intrinsic to anarchism--some anarchists led less flamboyant lives, and some even approximated domestic tranquility--but the anarchists did stress constant growth, excitement, exploring new horizons, continual reforging of one's personality, a kind of "permanent revolution" in private life. Their emphasis on personal growth almost equated tranquility and repose with boredom. Goldman herself said that "security means stagnation" and valued intense experience even at the price of unhappiness.[lii] Their lives, even depicted accurately, must have seemed one continuous uproar to many conventional people. Goldman's life was as tumultuous and thrilling as a novel, which many people would rather read about than experience.
Goldman considered herself a transitional figure, caught between an old, disintegrating and unsatisfactory world and a new world that had not yet been born. "It is inevitable that the advance guards should become alien to the very ones they wish to serve, that they should be isolated, shunned and repudiated by the nearest and dearest of kin" she lamented. More tragic than this lack of understanding is that "having seen new possibilities for human advancement the pioneers cannot take root in the old and with the new still far off they become outcasts, roamers of the earth, restless seekers for the things they will never find.... They are consumed by the fires of compassion and sympathy for all suffering and with all their fellows, yet they are compelled to stand apart from their surroundings; nor need they ever hope to receive the love their great souls crave.... Every great soul must be alone."[liii]
Another disadvantage of life within a counterculture resides in its fragility and susceptibility to self-doubt. Goldman extolled the examined life, one constructed on the basis of considered principles and values. But as Falk remarks, "Emma and Ben, like others who choose to live unconventionally, were forced into a self-consciousness about their way of life, which was always subject to reassessment and always seemed to require explicit justification." Denizens of the mainstream can ascribe their disappointments to the limitations of human life and human nature; socialists and others who defer living their principles until after the revolution can conveniently blame society for their ills. But Goldman's ideology implied that her every failure reflected upon her principles or her ability to embody them in her own life. "Attempting to live out her vision," Falk says, "she thought that she could transcend the destructive forces that plagued the world. In her relationship with Ben, she labored under the illusion that she could live and love freely in an unfree society." She often blamed herself for the tramaus of her relationship with Ben, and doubted both her philosophy and her own worth. "I have no right to speak of Freedom when I myself have become an abject slave in my love" she said. "I have no right to bring a message to people, when there is no message in my soul." Her relationship with Ben violated her theoretical notions about love and made her popular lecture on love and marriage "hateful because my faith in the power of love has been shattered."[liv] Goldman believed that love should transform people, but Ben remained the same old irresponsible philanderer he had always been.
Yet Goldman simultaneously recognized that any attempt to create a free and just enclave in a slave and unjust society was perilous. Just as communes often fail because those who can gain unfair advantages in mainstream society have little incentive to adhere to a cooperative scheme which deprives them of those advantages, so Goldman was plagued in her relationships by the fact that anarchist men could at any time opt for a traditional, subservient mate. Goldman was plagued by men who claimed adherence to egalitarian principles and yet refused to "share" her with any other man or interest, including the anarchist movement. John Most set the tone when he sneered that women in the movement were only seeking husbands, and then demanded that Goldman sacrifice her every interest and activity to minister to his needs. When government persecution of the anarchists assumed renewed virulence during World War I, Goldman's lover of ten years, Ben Reitman, could easily jettison her for a safer and more conventional relationship. "I had been seduced by the ordinary man's desire for a home, a wife, and a child" he later said.[lv]
Goldman recognized that the oppressive structures of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy deform all members of society, the seeming beneficiaries as well as the obvious victims, and that this warping affects our innermost personalities. Speaking of Mary Wollstonecraft's relationship with Gilbert Imlay--a relationship with striking parallels to the Goldman-Reitman tempest--Goldman said that Wollstonecraft's tragic alienation from her own times "created the discord in her being which alone accounts for her terrible tragedy with Imlay." Yet she often slighted the impact of gender roles on her prospects for love. "A personal love is not for one who dedicates himself to an ideal" she wrote a friend. "Somehow it is like serving two Gods. Of course one longs for a personal love.... But no man could be satisfied to give all of himself nd receive in return only a small part of the woman he loves, and how is she to give all when every nerve of her pulls towards the impersonal, the universal love? She need not expect to have both, the man and the universe. And so she must forswear the one for the other. When one is young, one is easily content to go without a personal love. But when the years begin to pile up, one finds it rather cold and lonely in the universe. No, there can be no personal life for me."[lvi]
What is striking about this meditation is its neglect of the impact that stereotyped gender roles had on her own prospects for love. Almost every man, of course, considered it his right to demand complete devotion from a woman, even while he himself had many outside interests, which often enough included other lovers. Goldman herself did not demand that a man "give all of himself" to her; she wanted men with their own lives, interests, and ideas, and viewed the ideal relationship as the fulfillment of two diverse personalities who enriched each other. Furthermore, her lament ignores the fact--which she noticed on other occasions--that society decreed that older men could marry younger women, but that older women were forbidden younger men. This had a crippling effect on Goldman's later years, as on the lives of many other women whose husbands were killed or mutilated in the industrial maelstrom. In general, Goldman's experience convinced her that personal love and dedication to a transcendent ideal were incompatible, whereas her philosophy held them as necessarily complementary.
Social factors, as well as her own personal qualities (themselves shaped by social structures) therefore rendered Goldman's life often unsatisfactory to her as well as a cautionary example to others. Goldman valued camaraderie, love, and friendship, and solidarity, and yet frequently complained of the petty bickering, sordidness, and acrimony that defaced the radical community. She apotheosized friendship, comradeship and solidarity, and preached the symbiosis of public and private commitments, of individuality and social consciousness. Yet she could nonchalantly remark that "he is most free who stands alone; but it is a very lonely and difficult position, which few can endure." She proclaimed that "to know how to give is to my mind a greater art, than to know how to paint or write.... it is as inspiring to sensitive people as a painting or good music is to the art lover." Yet she often felt used and abused by her comrades, and at times considered even Mother Earth, usually considered her precious child, as "an incurable disease, eating your life away." Goldman found that an individual can inconspicuously deviate from social norms without suffering horrendous penalties, especially if she proclaims her allegiance to the norms she transgresses; she can also dissent in theory if she obeys in practice. The combination of theoretical dissent and practical nonconformity, however, usually evokes hostile attention. Conceiving of oneself as a role model and an exemplar of an ideal adds greatly to the burdens of any unconventional--or even conformist--life. Every personal feeling and act becomes of ultimate, social significance; it is like living in a glass house, on a hill, and inviting everyone to throw rocks. Ulcers and hypertension, Nathan Huggins remarks, are "common ailments of exemplars."[lvii]
Goldman's tumultuous life, filled with disappointment and bitterness as well as exultation and fulfillment, often failed to console her, much less inspire the wider public with the health, sanity, and happiness Champney visualized in countercultural lives. Her letters to Ben Reitman and other friends contain every opinion about the relationship of her life to her love, and their opposites. She worried that her work was merely an escape from her unhappy love affair, but also that her love absorbed her and distracted her from her greater work. She complained that her love for Ben exhausted her and undermined her work for her chosen Ideal even while recognizing that Ben energized her and contributed in many practical ways to her successes. She worried that if her private life were known, she would be revealed as a flawed example of her principles; and yet as Falk says, "the effort to universalize her own inner struggle provided the force behind her speeches."[lviii] She found in Ben a man who valued her both for her ideals and her sex, and who, in a manner very uncommon for men, devoted himself to her career and public life. She felt that love relationships should be free and unequal, but that she was in thrall to Ben. She bemoaned the tempestuousness of their affair even while admitting that she disdained a compliant, yielding love. Always questing for perfection, she savaged not only her love with Ben but Mother Earth, her comrades, and herself, whom she proclaimed unfit for either public or private life. Her public confidence and courage was counterparted by private doubts and insecurities. In love as in the other aspects of her ideal, she viewed the pursuit more valuable than the attainment. This version of the strenuous life, however, was scarcely a beckon of light to the majority of bewildered and frightened workers. It did appeal to a minority of individuals in her own situation, some of the restless, dissatisfied middle class, people who shared her "weightlessness," her sense of suspension between two worlds, but possessed the education, self-confidence, and resources to experiment.
VI
Goldman's lack of appeal to the working class is evidenced not only by frequent remarks in Mother Earth and in her correspondence, but in her attitudes towards the workers, which were scarcely the feelings of a person for those who appreciated her. Goldman had extensive contact with actual workers in prison, in her capacity as a midwife, in factories, and in her travels as an anarchist agitator. She was not heartened by what she saw. Max Eastman could idealize workers in The Masses because his experience with workers was limited to insurgents who turned out for his lectures and radical leaders such as Big Bill Haywood; he lived in a social sphere entirely separate from most workers. Goldman charged that the SP idealized and pandered to the workers because it depended on the force of the majority for power. The IWW had a more realistic view of the working class; its publications and its Mr. Block cartoons skewered the ignorance, complacency, and conservatism of the masses. Yet the IWW was convinced that the majority of workers could be redeemed and induced to take action in their own interest; Goldman, who "hated the slaves as well as their drivers," was not so sure.[lix]
Goldman's writings are replete with fervent denunciations of the masses--not just the masses cowed and demoralized by capitalist tyranny, but any and all masses. Speaking of the appalling industrial conditions of capitalist society, Goldman said that "the mass itself is responsible for this horrible state of affairs. It clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to call Crucify! the moment a protesting voice is raised against the sacredness of capitalist authority or any other decayed institution." The capitalists succeeded not because of their own qualities but because of "the inertia, the cravenenss, the utter submission of the mass" who want "to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced." The mass "will always be the annihilator of individuality, of free initiative, of orginality" said Goldman. "The majority cannot reason; it has no judgment. Lacking utterly in originality and moral courage, the majority has always placed its destiny in the hdands of others... Without ambition or initiative, the compact mass hates nothing so much as innovation.... Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority and not the mass."[lx]
Goldman's strictures were an anarchist tradition. The Haymarket martrys and other anarchists excoriated their audiences rather than flattering them in an effort to awaken them to a sense of shame and indignation at their plight. In part her criticisms stemmed from the same impulses motivating black militants who hector the majority of blacks, or other militants who criticzed those they would liberate. It is partly a matter of scorned love; activists who devote their lives to the welfare of a group of people are embittered by that people's indifference and hostility. Goldman expressed hurt when, as at Ludlow, the workers to whom she devoted her life repudiated her and her efforts and asked her to stay away. Even locals of the IWW sometimes refused to carry her publications, announce her public meetings, or allow her to speak at their halls.[lxi]
Goldman was well aware of the blind, ignorant hatred with which ordinary workers often viewed her, her comrades, and her work. The steelworkers of Homestead refused to believe that Berkman had tried to kill Frick out of idealistic and humanitarian motives. They at first thought he was motivated by a business dispute, and later that he was hired by Frick to generate sympathy for Frick and animosity towards the striking workers. They regarded themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens whose use of force was a defensive and legal resistance of armed invasion. "Sasha had given his life to bring joy to these slaves, but they had remained blind and continued in the hell of their own forging," Goldman concluded. She used similar language when remarking on the popular response to Czolgosz's assassination of President McKinley almost a decade later. "The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs." When Voltairine de Clyre demanded that the anarchists propagandize exclusively among the workers, Goldman reminded her that "I know [the workers] from years of contact in and out of the factory. And just because of that knowledge I do not believe that our work should be only among them." She reminded de Clyre that the Knights of Labor had abandoned Parsons, Spies, and the other Haymarket martrys to their fates and asserted that the majority of the AFL "would hesitate not a moment to relegate Voltairine or myself to the fate of our martyred comrades."[lxii]
Radicals also become angry out of their recognition that every person who submits to oppression helps fasten the chains upon every other member of the group. People such as Emma Goldman who have liberated themselves by dint of their own effort from ignorance and superstition are often critical of those from similar backgrounds who acquiesce in their own degradation, much as the poor man who has succeeded economically sometimes scorns those he left behind. "Anarchism does not exclude the poor, the dirty or the tramp any more than the sun excludes them," she said sadly, "but it does not make a virtue of filth.... So long as people remain satisfied with their present conditions, absolutely indifferent to cleanliness, air, and beauty, they cannot possibly feel the burning shame of their lives, nor will they strive for anything that might lift them out of the ugliness of their existence. I do not censor anyone... yet I am grieved that they should be satisfied with so little."[lxiii] Goldman's stridency was not motivated by a lack of compassion or understanding; she felt intensely for the victims of oppression. Their sufferings were real to her, not abstract. The intensity of her suffering might partly explain the depth of her resentment. Her love for humanity brought her pain, yet her efforts to alleviate her own suffering as well as that of the victims of capitalism were futile largely because of the attitudes and conduct of those she would help.
Socialists and Wobblies sometimes excused the passivity and stupidity of the workers as the understandable result of oppression; Socialists even extenuated the crimes of the capitalists on similar grounds, saying that the capitalists were merely products of a system that warped and deformed everyone. Most people, they claimed, would act as the most rapacious capitalists if they had the opportunity. The anarchists disdained such arguments (which smacked of economic determinism) as self-serving; they judged everyone according to moral criteria. They did not ignore the force of circumstance in shaping human personality and actions, but did not allow pleading of circumstance or environment as an excuse for exploitation or acquiesence in oppression. Goldman avoided the tendency of radicals to view the retrograde aspects of the workers as pure epiphenomena which will magically vanish once the cooperative commonwealth is inaugurated. She also rejected any imagined innate virtue or historically privileged role for the working class. This was prescient. Whatever the ultimate origins of racism, patriotism, religious zealotry, sexual repression, Comstockery, literary censorship, sexism, and homophobia, they have been real and solid aspects of working-class consciousness. They are not imaginary, but are far more deeply rooted than class consciousness or ethical concern for the public good. Overcoming these cultural legacies is radicalism's most daunting task.
Goldman's vision of working-class revolution, and of social change in general, harbored a fatal contradiction at its root. If the masses are culturally retrograde, requiring an advance guard of creative spirits to drag them into the future, how can anarchism be achieved? Anarchists, in this scanario, will always remain heroic yet isolated beings. Anarchists, of all movements, could not erect their society by means of the rare, exceptional individuals. Nor could they rely on the impersonal processes of history. Reliance on the militant minority leads to use of the state and to dictatorship; impersonal evolution allows no room for even the special individual, much less the masses, and takes centuries. For all this, cultural revolution, uncongenial as it is to the working class and incompatible in practice with working-class economic revolution, is nonetheless a prequisite of such revolution. The fight against racism, sexism, and conventional morality is not a distraction from the class struggle, but its necessary preliminary and accompaniment. The American working class has almost always been economically and politically as well as culturally conservative; groups that eschewed cultural insurgency in favor of "more basic" economic change have achieved little. Goldman's contradictions, here as elsewhere, stemmed not from inadequate reflection or research, or any alleged refusal to face reality. Rather, they reflected an intractible American society where important prerequisites for revolution were necessary but impossible.
Notes
[i]"Some Civitas Members Wanted to be 'Thrilled'," Brooklyn Eagle, January 16, 1916.
[ii]"What I Believe," RES, 36.
[iii]EG, "Syndicalism in Theory and Practice," (ME, January 1913). Hippolyte Havel convincingly argued that anarchists were very influential in the syndicalist movement in Europe, both in theory and organization. "The New Unionism," (ME, September 1913).
[iv] "Sabotage, EG, "Syndicalism, Its Theory and Practice," (ME, February 1913). Gray and hideous things, and Intense longing, EG, "Anarchism, What It Really Stands For," AOE, 55-56. For criticism of the IWW, see Harry Kelly, "A Syndicalism League," (ME, September 1912); Alexander Berkman, "The IWW Convention," (ME, October 1913); Ben Reitman, "Impressions of the Chicago Convention," (ME, October 1913). See also "Observations and Comments," (ME, October 1914).
[v] EG, "The International Anarchist Congress," (ME, October 1907). Main evil, EG, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For," AOE, 50. Goldman did tend to give primacy to whatever aspect of society she was discussing at the moment; she can be quoted as saying that economics, education, sex, or other aspects of society are the most basic and important. This makes her appear superficial to people who are confident of a single, underlying cause of all problems. Goldman's considered view was that it is "impossible to decide just what is the most important force." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 1, 1908.)
[vi] EG on religion, EG, "The Failure of Christianity," (ME, April 1913): 41-48 and "The Philosophy of Atheism," (ME February 1916). Religion and Morality, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913).
[vii] Sustain, and preparedness, EG, "Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter," (ME, December 1915), 331-38. Conceited fool EARLY ARCHIVES, I THINK; FIND THIS. Larger Social War, "EG Before the Bar," (excerpts from EG's testimony in court, ME, May 1916); cringes, and feminism, EG, "The Social Aspects of Birth Control, (ME, April 1916).
[viii] EG very early repudiated democracy, and never wavered in this view. For some early statements see EG, excerpts from "Authority and Liberty," FS March 3, 1899; EG in "Rented by EG," The New York Times (December 12, 1900); St. Loius Times, February 28, 1908 CHECK THIS CITATION. Her views on autocracy as uniting the middle and working classes are in her lectures ON DRAMA, FIND EXACT PAGE.
[ix] EG, "The Social Importance of the Modern School," RES 116-132. The quotes are on pp. 116-119.
[x] FIND AMERICANIZATION QUOTE
[xi] RUNNING AFTER CARRIAGES IN LONDON; SETTLEMENT HOUSES FROM LML
[xii] EG, "What I Believe," RES, 36; EG, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For," RES, 53; on Leavensworth, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, July 1911): 154-155; "Nellie Bly Again: She Interviews Emma Goldman and Other Anarchists," The World (September 17, 1893).
[xiii] Paris Commune, EG, "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School," AOE, 160; man makes society, EARLY ARCHIVES, FIND THIS. or oct 1915?
[xiv] Destruction, "Observations and Comments," (ME, May 1914); Revaluation, "To Our Eighth Birthday," (ME, March 1913); centuries, FIND THIS QUOTE. PUT IN QUOTE CITATION ON FERRER FROM ESSAYS
[xv] Berkman, "The Need of Translating Ideals into Life," (ME, November 1910); Berkman, "Anniversary Musings," (ME, March 1915).
[xvi] EG, "Minorities versus Majorities," AOE, 78, 74; Berkman, "The Awakening Starvelings," (ME, December 1913.)
[xvii] This note COULD BE ELIMINATED. IF KEPT, NOTE WORKERS NEEDED CAUSE OF THEIR NUMBERS, OPPRESSION
[xviii] EG, "Anarchism, What It Really Stands For," AOE, 66.
[xix] Harry Kelly, "Apropos of Women's Suffrage," (ME, December 1906); EG, "The Joys of Touring," (ME, March 1908); EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, July 1912); EG, "Reply," (ME December 1907).
[xx] EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, April 1906). Isaaks, LML 224; "Close Doors to Anarchism," The Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1902, EGP-GW.
[xxi] Berkman, "The Failure of Compromise," (ME, June 1910); They are of the end, Berkman, Voltairine de Clyre: A Tribute," (ME, July 1912): 52-53. It is interesting that Berkman and Goldman seldom, if ever, explicitly said that violence was not a suitable means, even though they repeatedly stated that violence and anarchism were antithetical. CHECK POSSIBLE AB STATEMENT
[xxii] EG, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For," AOE, 65; Berkman [writing under the pseudonym Thomas Breckenridge], "Defiance of the Law," (ME, April 1914). For Berkman's use of this pseudonym, see "Stray Thoughts by the Roadside," (ME, May 1915). EG, ----- NEED SOURCE. FIND SOURCE FOR LEONARD ABBOTT ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
[xxiii] Not only think but act, EG, NEED SOURCE; "caters," EG, "Our Seventh Birthday," (ME, March 1912; a similar phrase later appears in Max Eastman's editorial statement for The Masses); birth control advanced, EG, "To My Friends," (ME, May, 1916) and EG, "The Petty Discrimination of the Law," (ME, December, 1916): 701-703
[xxiv] EG and AB closed their ice-cream parlor to support of the Homestead workers; EG later closed her Viennese scalp and facial massage parlor to manage the Orlenoff Threatre Troupe; and EG forfeited the opportunity to become a doctor by continuing with her anarchist activities, thus inducing her backers to withdraw their support. "Lost dogs," LML 517. Anarchist criticism of Rietman, EG, "The End of the Odyssey," (ME, July 1910).
[xxv] As Drinnon remarks (149-59), Goldman remained in touch with almost all her former lovers, with the exception of John Most. Her relationship with Ben Reitman certainly was tempestuous, and cannot be said to have been "without rancour," yet EG was very honest with Ben, he was (eventually) honest with her, and they did love and respect each other for ten years despite chasms between them in personalities and values. EG admitted that she was not fulfilled or excited by a quiet, undemanding love. "Fedya's love was too yielding for my turbulent nature, which could find expression only in the clashing of wills, in resistance and the surmounting of obstacles." (LML, 183.) Candace Falk's Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman is an exhaustive and judicious account of their long relationship.
[xxvi] Frail being, EG, "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School," AOE, 146; martyrs, EG, "The Crime of the 11th of November," (ME, November 1911); impact of Haymarket and Berkman, LML 507-9.
[xxvii] Blood, EG, "What I Believe," RES, 35; avalanche, EG, "Promoters of the War Mania," (ME, March 1917); tidal wave, LML, 598.
[xxviii] EG, "Caught in the Political Trap," RES, 78-81; Max Baginski, "Everlasting Murder," (ME, April 1911): 34-5.
[xxix] Berkman, MEB, October 1917; iron-clad program, EG, "The Joys of Touring," (ME, January 1909); all other quotes, EG, "Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap," RES, 78-81. Speaking of the SP, Goldman complained, "Witness how tenderly religion is treated, how prohibition is patted on the back, how the anti-Asiatic and Negro question is met with, in short how every spook prejudice is treated with kid gloves so as not to hurt its sensitive souls." RES, 85. As early as 1900 Goldman perceived the Socialists as another form of despotism, and decried "the narrowness, discipline, and intolerance of parliamentary socialists." Free Society, April 22, 1900.
[xxx] For De Clyre's vacillations on the relative importance of impersonal social forces and individual will, see (for a hopeful view of individual initiative) "Those who Marry Do Ill," (ME, January 1908) and (for a disillusioned reliance on "blind development,") "Anarchism and American Traditions," (ME, January, 1909). See also "The Dominant Idea," ME May and June, 1910).
[xxxi] Voltairine de Clyre, "The Dominant Idea," (ME May 1910, and ME June 1910).
[xxxii] Voltairine de Clyre, "The Dominant Idea," (ME, June 1910); Berkman, PMA, 464; Berkman, "Voltairine de Clyre," (ME, July 1912): 153.
[xxxiii] Harry Kelly, "Socialism and Fatalism," (ME, May 1907).
[xxxiv] Max Baginski, "Mistaken Aspects of Socialism," (ME November 1907); Mother Earth quote, "Observations and Comments," (ME, April 1906); Goldman quotes, EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 174; EG, "Agitation En Voyage," (ME, August 1915).
[xxxv] Max Nettl, inheritor party; rev waiting; Marx on determinism and freedom. THIS NOTE NEEDS WORK
[xxxvi] Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism. LIST OTHER BOOKS ON THIS TOPIC
[xxxvii] Libraries have been written on the question "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" a question first broached by Werner Sombart in a book of that title published in 1906. Many books about seemingly disparate topics confront this issue. For an overview, see Seymour Martin Lipset, "Why No Socialism in the United States?" in Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, volume I, 30-149 and 346-363; Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism, ed. John Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1974); Sean Wilenz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement," 1790-1920, (International Labor and Working Class History, Number 26, Fall 1984): 1-24; Eric Foner, "Why is There No Socialism in the United States," (History Workshop, #17, Spring 1984); John Laslett, "The American Tradition of Labor Theory and Its Relevance to the Contemporary Working Class," in The American Working Class: Prospects for the 1980s, edited by Irving Horowitz, John Leggett, and Martin Oppenheimer (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersy), 3-30; D. H. Leon, "Whatever Happened to an American Socialist Party?", (American Quarterly GOD KNOWS WHEN); John Laslett, "Socialism and the American Labor Movement: Some New Reflections," (Labor History, Spring 1967): 136-155; Erik Olssen, "The Case of the Socialist Party that Failed," (Labor History, Fall 1988).
Anyone reading these essays will find many more cited in the notes; but historians have ranged far afield in their efforts to analyze this problem. For a brilliant discussion focusing on the peculiarities of the American judicial system, see William Forbath, Law and the Shaping of American Unions.
[xxxviii] Cruelty, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, July 1912). Goldman also severely criticized middle-western socialists, but exempted those on the west coast from her strictures. (See her tour accounts in ME for June 1907 and February 1910). Dissidents, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, March 1912): 25-26; materialism, EG, "On the Road," (ME, May 1907): 130; ferment in SP, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, April 1911); EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, May 1912 and June 1912); Berkman, "Violence and Anarchism," (ME, April 1908): 70; Baginski, "The Troubles of Socialist Politicians," (ME, March 1913).
[xxxix] Max Eastman made this point in Love and Revolution.
[xl] Isaac Deutcher, The Prophet Unarmed
[xli] Eugene Debs, "The Negro in the Class Struggle," and "The Negro and his Nemesis," originally in International Socialist Review for November 1903 and January 1904, as reprinted in Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, ed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., (Heritage Press, New York, 1948), 63-73. The quotes are from the first article, on pp. 65-66. These articles are both blistering attacks on racism. Debs acknowledged that the blacks are "doubly enslaved" by race and class, while the SP's "Negro Resolution" (also a forceful condemnation of racism) spoke of the "peculiar position in the working class and in society at large" of Negroes. It is therefore surprising that both Debs and his party should believe that racism required no separate analysis or attack. Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist, 225-228 quotes Debs slightly differently, and offers a cogent analysis of his evolving position on race.
[xlii] Goldman noted the irony that the Bolsheviks, while claiming Marxism, nevertheless felt that they could inaugurate socialism without going through a state of capitalism, as the anarchists had always claimed. EG, The Truth About the Boylsheviki (Mother Earth Publishing Assocation, 1918), 4.
[xliii] See note 78. NOTE NUMBER MUST CHANGE FOR FINAL VERSION.
[xliv] This struggle is excellently described in Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal.
[xlv] Empty stomachs, EG, "A Short Account of My Recent Tour," (Solidarity, June 15, 1898); chains, EG, "A Rejoinder [to Voltairine de Clyre]," (ME, December 1910).
[xlvi] Harry Kelly, "A Plea for the Impersonal," (ME, February 1908); EG, in "Defends Acts of Bomb Throwers, (The Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 6, 1901); de Clyre, "Anarchism," Selected Works of Voltairine de Clyre (originally in Free Society, October 13, 1901).
[xlvii] In addition to Goldman, prominent American female anarchists included Voltairine de Clyre, Lucy Parsons, Mollie Stirmer, and Mary Austin. QUOTE EG ON US MORE REPRESSIVE THAN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, BECOMING RUSSIANIZED.
[xlviii] Adeline Champney, "Congratulations--Plus," (ME, March 1915); Falk, 114-15.
[xlix] EG, "End of an Odyssey," (ME, July 1910); EG, "The Propaganda and the Congress," (Free Society, April 8, 1900).
[l] Drinnon, 89. See also EG, "What I Believe," RES, 34.
[li] EG, "End of the Odyssey," (ME, July 1910).
[lii] Security, Wexler, 219; experience, Falk, 279.
[liii] EG, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Stance for Freedom," typescript, November, 1911, 2, 19, (EGP-GW). See also EG and Berkman, "Our Sixth Anniversary," (ME, March 1911) and EG, "Our Seventh Birthday," (ME, March 1912).
[liv] Falk, 217, 117.
[lv] Falk, 277. For a trenchant analysis of how other radical men opted out of liberated relationships for a more traditional, caregiving wife, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village," 1900-1925, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, (Monthly Review Press, New York), 131-152.
[lvi] EG, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Stance for Freedom," typescript, November, 1911, 17, (EGP-GW); Falk, 287. Falk wisely observes that EG overpoliticized her relationships, ascribing all of their turbulence and failures to the incompatibility of pursuit of an Ideal and love, rather than to more personal causes. Falk, 382. IS THIS AN ACCURATE STATEMENT OF WHAT FALK WAS SAYING, OR INTERPRETATION OF IT?
[lvii] Most free, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, June 1912); give, EG, "The Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist," (ME, September 1913); disease, Falk, 98, see also Falk, 150; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford, 1974), 214.
[lviii] Falk, 237.
[lix] LML, 135.
[lx] EG, "Minorities versus Majorities," AOE, 69-78. EG, echoing George Bernard Shaw, sometimes rhetorically blamed poverty, rather than oppression, for all the ills of the world. See EG, "The Drama, the Strongest Disseminator of Radical Thought," in, Alden Freemen, ed. The Suppression of Free Speech (1909).
[lxi] SP and IWW speakers also hectored their audiences, insulting them in an effort to rouse them to a sense of their dignity. About Ludlow, EG said "It was painful to know that I was not wanted by the very people for whom I had worked all my life." LML, 533. Voltairine de Clyre complained, in a letter to Berkman in 1910, that "if a direct struggle between capitalist and worker takes place, we must keep out of it because of our sympathy with the strikers.... Our name is such a prejudice that we must save our friends from its contamination!" (Marsh, 145) This may go a long way towards explaining anarchist attitudes towards the working class.
[lxii] Put him up to it, Drinnon, 52; Sasha, LML, 113-114; Czolgosz, LML, 304; EG, "A Rejoinder," (ME, December 1910).
[lxiii] EG, "On the Road," (ME, May 1907).