CONCLUSION: THE FATE OF AN ANARCHIST
Although Goldman lectured widely on drama during her last years in the United States, and won the backing of iconoclasts within the elite, she did not tone down her militancy. If anything, she became even more incendiary. She encouraged hungry workers to help themselves to everything they needed, as recounted earlier, and served time in jail rather than pay a fine for her birth control activities. Her speech on those activities summarizes her attitude towards her other passionate causes as well. "I stand as one of the sponsors of a world-wide movement," she proclaimed. "I may be arrested... but I will never be silent; I will never acquiesce or submit to authority, nor will I make peace with a system with degrades women to a mere incubator and which fastens upon her innocent victims. I here and now declare war upon this system...."[i]
But Goldman and her Mother Earth enterprise met their doom when the United States entered World War I. Because imperialism and war are endemic to capitalism, it was only a matter of time before Goldman confronted such a crisis. Her opposition to the war was equally inevitable. The United States government had long plotted to deport her and had illegally revoked her ex-husband's citizenship as a step towards that goal. Branches of the United States secret political police had compiled long dossiers on her. Her opposition to American involvement in the war and to conscription merely provided a long-sought excuse to end her career in her adopted land.[ii]
The kind of cultural and moral changes demanded by the anarchists became apparent in August 1914, when the workers of Europe marched off to mutual slaughter at the behest of their capitalist masters. This vindicated the anarchist belief that the socialist parties had not sufficiently exorcised traditional morality from the minds of their members. The anarchists asserted that compromise with the political state, with bourgeois morality, and with militarism had borne its inevitable fruit. The patriotic socialists claimed that they were defending their national cultures, but Mother Earth reminded its readers that the one culture of Europe, predatory capitalism, was not worth a single human life. "There is no culture save that of human solidarity.... The only culture worth having is the culture of life and joy. The sole criterion of such culture is the degree of individual liberty and social opportunity of a country, reflected in the socio-economic well-being of the masses. It is toward this end that all true science, philosophy, and art works."[iii]
Mother Earth bemoaned the fact that most intellectuals from the belligerent nations, including some prominent anarchists, defended their governments. When Harry Kelly, a frequent contributor, said that the Belgian workers were right to defend their country, Mother Earth replied that the Belgian workers had no country. Belgium belonged to their capitalist masters, and the workers would gain nothing for their sacrifices. "Indeed, the sight of the Germans expropriating the property of the Belgian bourgeoisie might have served the Belgian workers as an example worthy of emulation." Meanwhile, "the war in our own midst"--the war of capitalists against workers--"is almost forgotten." The American worker outraged about alleged German depredations should examine his own plight. "It never enters his dull head that he himself is being invaded every hour, every moment of his life, invaded out of his home, his bread, his very life." Tens of thousands of New York workers were evicted into the snow every month, much as the French and Belgians victimized by the Germans; yet the victims passively acquiesced. The capitalists killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of American workers every year in unsafe factories and mines, yet there was no public outcry.[iv]
Goldman began protesting the preparedness campaign well before the U.S. entered the war. Like Max Eastman, she opposed American involvement both from fundamental principle and because she foresaw that the war would poison all of U.S. society and make agitation for any worthwhile cause impossible. War, she predicted, would mean the end of liberty in the United States as it had in Europe; it would provide a pretext for the throttling of labor, the persecution of radicals, and the militarization of education and all of life. Only the capitalists, "the international murder trust," would profit by the slaughter. The government cared only about those who speculated in mass murder; it protested the sinking of the Lusitania but not the Ludlow massacre. "If war is justified at all it is the war against economic dependence and political slavery," she said. Those who oppose militarism "must organize the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state."[v]
Goldman, unlike many opponents of war,[vi] maintained her opposition up to and beyond America's entry. The capitalists, she said in March 1917, "are ever ready that their misguided slaves should have the national and patriotic banner over burning cities, over devastated country-sides, over homeless and starving humanity, just as long as they can find enough unfortunate victims to be drilled into man-killers." She reminded her audiences that soldiers were mere automatons and killing machines who, once enlisted or conscripted, lacked the freedom to avoid murdering their fellow beings. "I for one will speak against war so long as my voice will last, now and during war" she said; the only war she approved was "the one war of all the peoples against their despots and exploiters."[vii]
The authorities were alarmed not only by Goldman's strident and bitter tone, but even more by her call for massive resistance. "It is folly to petition the President for peace," she said. "The workers, they alone, can avert the impending war; in fact, all wars, if they will be a party to them." She helped organize the No-Conscription League for the purpose of encouraging conscientious objectors to refuse to violate their consciences by killing. Although the United States eventually recognized the rights of some individuals who opposed all wars on religious grounds, Goldman's stance was sure to provoke the authorities. The United States, she said, "is on the way to one of the most unscrupolous imperialisms that the world has ever laid eyes upon. She told the workers that "war has been declared upon you" for profit, militarism, and the consolidation of class rule. "I defy your law!" she exclaimed. "The only Law that I recognize is the law which ministers to the needs of humanity, which makes men and women fonder and better and more human." The No-Conscription League announced its opposition "to all wars waged by capitalist governments. We will fight for what we choose to fight for: we will never fight simply because we are ordered to fight.... We will resist conscription by every means in our power, and we will sustain those who, for similar reasons, refuse to be conscripted." Ben Reitman urged that "if you think murder is wrong, refuse to join the army or any military body", even if the government jails or kills in retaliation. After asserting that colonial troops pressed into the British armed forces killed their officers and surrendered to the enemy, he said that "if war means that we must maintain our honor and take revenge upon our enemy, let us stop and consider who our real enemies are."[viii]
Goldman, as a woman not subject to conscription, carefully refrained from directly urging anyone to break the law. In line with her time-tested technique, she said that every individual had to act according to his own conscience. But she turned her reading of Thoreau to good account, taunting the authorities that "you haven't prisons enough to lock up all the people." The authorities could jail 500 resisters, but "what are you going to do if you have 500,000 people.... We are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen, and no power on earth will stop us." A general strike would settle the issues of war and peace; anti-militarists would agitate among the soldiers. Persecution, she maintained, could not destroy a movement that had its origins in the hearts and minds of the masses. The revolutionary spirit, she said, citing her own life, "can break through bars--it can go through safely, it can come out stronger and braver." Restating one of her motifs, she said that "the more people you lock up, the more idealists who will take their place, the more the human voice is suppressed, the greater and louder will be the human voice." Those who despair should look to Russia, which has thrown open the dungeons and set free the prisoners in Siberia. In the United States as well "the ruling class fight a losing game.... We represent the future."[ix] Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison for their anti-war activities, and were deported shortly after their release. Before serving her term, Goldman lectured to working-class audiences on the Bolshevik Revolution and was esctatic about her reception. Russia, she said, will "become the spiritual awakener of the American masses.... It was all very wonderful. Never again will I doubt the revolutionary possibilities of the American workers."[x] Yet in prison she did doubt, and confided to an intimate that "in moments of depression I look to Russia. She acts like a ray of sunshine working its way through the bleak clouds."[xi]
This infatuation passed soon enough; but it marked the end of an era, not merely for Emma Goldman, but for the entire American radical community. Life would never be the same. Battered American radicals, lacking any solid achievements or support at home, and harassed, persecuted, and splintered into acrimonious sects, increasingly looked abroad for inspiration, guidance, and a sense of purpose and community. Even those who avoided this pitfall had to spend most of their energies fighting those who succumbed. In the process, they often lost their idealism and critical thrust in a vehement anti-communism. Only after forty years would another generation of authentic American radicals arise who, ignorant of the prosecutions and acrimonies of bygone generations, propounded once again an indigenous American radicalism combining economics and culture.
Notes:
[i] EG, "The Social Aspects of Birth Control," (ME, April, 1916).
[ii] Drinnon and Wexler document this extensively. The Emma Goldman papers have drawers full of government documents compiled by various branches of the secret police in the United States and abroad.
[iii] "Observations and Comments, (ME, October 1914).
[iv] "Observations and Comments," (ME, October 1914)
[v] EG, "Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter," (ME, December 1915). This essay was also printed in The Little Review, December 1915.
[vi] Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform 1898-1918, passim, describes how many peace crusaders supported the war and tried to use their support to win other parts of their agenda. For example, suffragists who had argued that women in the voting booth would avert war, now argued that women's ardent contribution to the war effort should earn them the vote. Some prominent SP members, and the AFL, tried to use the war to advance their causes, although the SP as an organization remained truculently anti-war.
[vii] EG, "The Promoters of the War Mania," (ME, March 1917): 11.
[viii] Folly, EG, "The Promoters of the War Mania," (ME, March 1917); imperialisms, war, and defy your law, EG, (Speech, June 14, 1917): 10-11, EGP-GW; No-Conscription League, EG, "The No-Conscription League," (ME, June 1917); refuse, Ben Reitman, "Why You Shouldn't Go to War--Refuse to Kill or Be Killed," (ME, April 1917, also reprinted as a leaflet); colonial troops, Ben Reitman, "Conscription," (ME, June 1917). Reitman was not prosecuted for any of his incendiary utterances; instead, he dropped out the the anarchist movement, married, and fathered a child.
[ix] EG, (Speech, May 18, 1917): 5-, EP-GW.
[x] EG, "The Great Hope," (MEB, January 1918): 3.
[xi] EG to Stella, February 2, quoted in Wexler, 247.
But Goldman and her Mother Earth enterprise met their doom when the United States entered World War I. Because imperialism and war are endemic to capitalism, it was only a matter of time before Goldman confronted such a crisis. Her opposition to the war was equally inevitable. The United States government had long plotted to deport her and had illegally revoked her ex-husband's citizenship as a step towards that goal. Branches of the United States secret political police had compiled long dossiers on her. Her opposition to American involvement in the war and to conscription merely provided a long-sought excuse to end her career in her adopted land.[ii]
The kind of cultural and moral changes demanded by the anarchists became apparent in August 1914, when the workers of Europe marched off to mutual slaughter at the behest of their capitalist masters. This vindicated the anarchist belief that the socialist parties had not sufficiently exorcised traditional morality from the minds of their members. The anarchists asserted that compromise with the political state, with bourgeois morality, and with militarism had borne its inevitable fruit. The patriotic socialists claimed that they were defending their national cultures, but Mother Earth reminded its readers that the one culture of Europe, predatory capitalism, was not worth a single human life. "There is no culture save that of human solidarity.... The only culture worth having is the culture of life and joy. The sole criterion of such culture is the degree of individual liberty and social opportunity of a country, reflected in the socio-economic well-being of the masses. It is toward this end that all true science, philosophy, and art works."[iii]
Mother Earth bemoaned the fact that most intellectuals from the belligerent nations, including some prominent anarchists, defended their governments. When Harry Kelly, a frequent contributor, said that the Belgian workers were right to defend their country, Mother Earth replied that the Belgian workers had no country. Belgium belonged to their capitalist masters, and the workers would gain nothing for their sacrifices. "Indeed, the sight of the Germans expropriating the property of the Belgian bourgeoisie might have served the Belgian workers as an example worthy of emulation." Meanwhile, "the war in our own midst"--the war of capitalists against workers--"is almost forgotten." The American worker outraged about alleged German depredations should examine his own plight. "It never enters his dull head that he himself is being invaded every hour, every moment of his life, invaded out of his home, his bread, his very life." Tens of thousands of New York workers were evicted into the snow every month, much as the French and Belgians victimized by the Germans; yet the victims passively acquiesced. The capitalists killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of American workers every year in unsafe factories and mines, yet there was no public outcry.[iv]
Goldman began protesting the preparedness campaign well before the U.S. entered the war. Like Max Eastman, she opposed American involvement both from fundamental principle and because she foresaw that the war would poison all of U.S. society and make agitation for any worthwhile cause impossible. War, she predicted, would mean the end of liberty in the United States as it had in Europe; it would provide a pretext for the throttling of labor, the persecution of radicals, and the militarization of education and all of life. Only the capitalists, "the international murder trust," would profit by the slaughter. The government cared only about those who speculated in mass murder; it protested the sinking of the Lusitania but not the Ludlow massacre. "If war is justified at all it is the war against economic dependence and political slavery," she said. Those who oppose militarism "must organize the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state."[v]
Goldman, unlike many opponents of war,[vi] maintained her opposition up to and beyond America's entry. The capitalists, she said in March 1917, "are ever ready that their misguided slaves should have the national and patriotic banner over burning cities, over devastated country-sides, over homeless and starving humanity, just as long as they can find enough unfortunate victims to be drilled into man-killers." She reminded her audiences that soldiers were mere automatons and killing machines who, once enlisted or conscripted, lacked the freedom to avoid murdering their fellow beings. "I for one will speak against war so long as my voice will last, now and during war" she said; the only war she approved was "the one war of all the peoples against their despots and exploiters."[vii]
The authorities were alarmed not only by Goldman's strident and bitter tone, but even more by her call for massive resistance. "It is folly to petition the President for peace," she said. "The workers, they alone, can avert the impending war; in fact, all wars, if they will be a party to them." She helped organize the No-Conscription League for the purpose of encouraging conscientious objectors to refuse to violate their consciences by killing. Although the United States eventually recognized the rights of some individuals who opposed all wars on religious grounds, Goldman's stance was sure to provoke the authorities. The United States, she said, "is on the way to one of the most unscrupolous imperialisms that the world has ever laid eyes upon. She told the workers that "war has been declared upon you" for profit, militarism, and the consolidation of class rule. "I defy your law!" she exclaimed. "The only Law that I recognize is the law which ministers to the needs of humanity, which makes men and women fonder and better and more human." The No-Conscription League announced its opposition "to all wars waged by capitalist governments. We will fight for what we choose to fight for: we will never fight simply because we are ordered to fight.... We will resist conscription by every means in our power, and we will sustain those who, for similar reasons, refuse to be conscripted." Ben Reitman urged that "if you think murder is wrong, refuse to join the army or any military body", even if the government jails or kills in retaliation. After asserting that colonial troops pressed into the British armed forces killed their officers and surrendered to the enemy, he said that "if war means that we must maintain our honor and take revenge upon our enemy, let us stop and consider who our real enemies are."[viii]
Goldman, as a woman not subject to conscription, carefully refrained from directly urging anyone to break the law. In line with her time-tested technique, she said that every individual had to act according to his own conscience. But she turned her reading of Thoreau to good account, taunting the authorities that "you haven't prisons enough to lock up all the people." The authorities could jail 500 resisters, but "what are you going to do if you have 500,000 people.... We are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen, and no power on earth will stop us." A general strike would settle the issues of war and peace; anti-militarists would agitate among the soldiers. Persecution, she maintained, could not destroy a movement that had its origins in the hearts and minds of the masses. The revolutionary spirit, she said, citing her own life, "can break through bars--it can go through safely, it can come out stronger and braver." Restating one of her motifs, she said that "the more people you lock up, the more idealists who will take their place, the more the human voice is suppressed, the greater and louder will be the human voice." Those who despair should look to Russia, which has thrown open the dungeons and set free the prisoners in Siberia. In the United States as well "the ruling class fight a losing game.... We represent the future."[ix] Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison for their anti-war activities, and were deported shortly after their release. Before serving her term, Goldman lectured to working-class audiences on the Bolshevik Revolution and was esctatic about her reception. Russia, she said, will "become the spiritual awakener of the American masses.... It was all very wonderful. Never again will I doubt the revolutionary possibilities of the American workers."[x] Yet in prison she did doubt, and confided to an intimate that "in moments of depression I look to Russia. She acts like a ray of sunshine working its way through the bleak clouds."[xi]
This infatuation passed soon enough; but it marked the end of an era, not merely for Emma Goldman, but for the entire American radical community. Life would never be the same. Battered American radicals, lacking any solid achievements or support at home, and harassed, persecuted, and splintered into acrimonious sects, increasingly looked abroad for inspiration, guidance, and a sense of purpose and community. Even those who avoided this pitfall had to spend most of their energies fighting those who succumbed. In the process, they often lost their idealism and critical thrust in a vehement anti-communism. Only after forty years would another generation of authentic American radicals arise who, ignorant of the prosecutions and acrimonies of bygone generations, propounded once again an indigenous American radicalism combining economics and culture.
Notes:
[i] EG, "The Social Aspects of Birth Control," (ME, April, 1916).
[ii] Drinnon and Wexler document this extensively. The Emma Goldman papers have drawers full of government documents compiled by various branches of the secret police in the United States and abroad.
[iii] "Observations and Comments, (ME, October 1914).
[iv] "Observations and Comments," (ME, October 1914)
[v] EG, "Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter," (ME, December 1915). This essay was also printed in The Little Review, December 1915.
[vi] Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform 1898-1918, passim, describes how many peace crusaders supported the war and tried to use their support to win other parts of their agenda. For example, suffragists who had argued that women in the voting booth would avert war, now argued that women's ardent contribution to the war effort should earn them the vote. Some prominent SP members, and the AFL, tried to use the war to advance their causes, although the SP as an organization remained truculently anti-war.
[vii] EG, "The Promoters of the War Mania," (ME, March 1917): 11.
[viii] Folly, EG, "The Promoters of the War Mania," (ME, March 1917); imperialisms, war, and defy your law, EG, (Speech, June 14, 1917): 10-11, EGP-GW; No-Conscription League, EG, "The No-Conscription League," (ME, June 1917); refuse, Ben Reitman, "Why You Shouldn't Go to War--Refuse to Kill or Be Killed," (ME, April 1917, also reprinted as a leaflet); colonial troops, Ben Reitman, "Conscription," (ME, June 1917). Reitman was not prosecuted for any of his incendiary utterances; instead, he dropped out the the anarchist movement, married, and fathered a child.
[ix] EG, (Speech, May 18, 1917): 5-, EP-GW.
[x] EG, "The Great Hope," (MEB, January 1918): 3.
[xi] EG to Stella, February 2, quoted in Wexler, 247.