Red Emma (1869–1940): Idealistic Revolutionary

Abstract

WHEN EMMA GOLDMAN WAS deported from the United States in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover called her “one of the most dangerous women in America.” Goldman retorted that “I consider it an honor to be the first political agitator to be deported from the United States.”1(p31) Goldman was probably the most accomplished, magnetic speaker of her time in the United States. A labor organizer and anarchist leader, she crisscrossed the county lecturing on anarchism, economics, drama, birth control, free love, and women's emancipation. Everywhere she attracted enormous crowds who became spellbound by her rhetoric. In 1893, a terrible year of economic crisis during which urban children were dying of hunger, she addressed an enormous demonstration in New York City's Union Square, urging her listeners to invade food stores and take what they needed to feed their families2(pxiii) in a vivid example of the anarchist principle of direct action. The police dragged Goldman off the protest stage and sent her to the prison on Blackwell's Island for two years. While in jail, she worked as a practical nurse and upon her release in 1895, she went to Vienna, Austria, where she studied midwifery and nursing. Goldman was arrested again and again for her dangerous ideas and even more dangerous speeches and upon every one of her releases she returned to the speaking circuit, firing the passions of her eager audiences. In 1901, when a young anarchist shot President William McKinley, Goldman startled her admirers by offering—from jail—to nurse the dying president. Born in Lithuania in 1869, Goldman came from a Jewish family who lived in a ghetto and, at the age of 13, took a factory job to help support her family. Her tyrannical father began trying to marry her off at the age of 15, a fate Goldman strongly resented and resisted. The Goldmans immigrated to Rochester, New York, and lived in an area of Jewish immigrants. Goldman was abruptly married off to a young man whom she did not love and who was unable to consummate the marriage. At the age of 17, she learned about the labor struggles in Chicago, Illinois, where workers were demanding an eight-hour day. During a strike against the International Harvesting Company, the police killed several of the strikers, and anarchists called a protest meeting in Haymarket Square. The meeting began peacefully but when the police broke it up, someone tossed a bomb and wounded 66 policemen. The police then fired into the crowd, killing several people, and wounding hundreds. They arrested the anarchist leaders and hanged four of them, who are now known as the “Haymarket Martyrs.”1(p23) These events had a profound influence on Goldman's life: soon afterward she left her job, her family, and her husband and moved to New York City. There she met anarchist Alexander “Sasha” Berkman and they became lovers. They were outraged when Henry Clay Frick, the manager of one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills, set the Pinkerton Detective Agency on striking workers, killing seven of them. Berkman decided to assassinate Frick and burst into Frick's office, shooting at him multiple times, but merely wounding him. Berkman went to jail for 22 years. Although Goldman loved and admired Berkman, she also had many other lovers; when he was released from jail, they remained friends and comrades and together published the anarchist journal, Mother Earth.3 In 1917, they were arrested for leading the opposition to WWI and conscription, sentenced to prison, and then deported to the new Soviet Union. The new socialist state was not the revolutionary ideal Goldman and Berkman had imagined; disillusioned, they soon left the country and spent their time traveling and giving lectures. In 1931, Emma published her autobiography, Living My Life.4 In 1936, Berkman, who was seriously ill, committed suicide. After Berkman's death, Goldman went to London to campaign for understanding and support for those fighting against General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.5 On a fundraising trip to Canada, she suffered a stroke and three months later died in Toronto at the age of 71. Her body was returned to Chicago, where she was buried near the graves of the Haymarket Martyrs.