From the archives of The Memory Hole

More Anti-Statism: Mother Russia

The following article on Emma Goldman was one of several entries in the 1967 edition of the Encyclopædia of Social Sciences contributed by James J. Martin. Despite the volume of literature on the renowned anarchist, this piece remains a singular summary of her life.


GOLDMAN, EMMA (June 27, 1869-May 14, 1940), anarchist editor and propagandist, public lecturer, literary and dramatic critic, was born in Kovno, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, the daughter of Jewish parents, Abraham and Taube Goldman. She had two younger brothers and two older half-sisters children of her mother by a previous marriage. Her home, according to her own later account, was “stifling,” her mother never showing much warmth, her father’s presence “terrifying.” After spending her early childhood in Popelan, Kurland Province, where her father was reportedly manager of the government theatre, she was sent at the age of eight to live with her maternal grandmother in Konigsberg, Prussia. There she received her principal education, three and a half years in the Realschule. In 1882 the family moved to St. Petersburg, where her father opened a grocery store. To help in their support Emma went to work in a glove factory. But though the family circumstances were poor, she read a great deal, attended the opera, and came into contact with a circle of young students. This was at the height of the stormy era in Russian internal affairs featured by the sensational exploits of the Nihilists, and the actions of these revolutionaries made a deep impression upon her.

In December 1885 Emma emigrated with her half-sister Helena to the United States, settling in Rochester, N. Y., where the older of her two half-sisters already lived. While working in a local clothing factory she began to attend meetings of a German socialist group. In February 1887 she married a fellow worker, Jacob Kershner, but the marriage proved unhappy and ended in divorce. For a time she worked in a corset factory in New Haven, Conn. On her return to Rochester, Kershner, by threatening suicide, prevailed upon her to remarry him, but once again they separated. In New Haven she had met a group of young Russians, many of them socialists and anarchists; and in Rochester, profoundly stirred by the celebrated Haymarket trial in Chicago, she had begun to read the New York anarchist paper Die Freiheit, edited by Johann Most [q.v.]. By 1889 she had determined to join the anarchist movement.

In August 1889 Emma Goldman moved to New York City and began a collaboration with Most and the young Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman [q.v.]. Working in sweatshops to support herself, she threw herself into radical activities. An attractive young girl, strongly emotional, with what she herself later called a “turbulent nature,” she soon developed a marked talent for public speaking. Her intimate friendship with Berkman was interrupted in 1892 when the latter was sentenced to prison after his sensational attempt on the life of Henry C. Frick [q.v.], an attempt which, by her own account, she had helped to plan. When, in October 1893, she told a mass meeting of unemployed workers in New York to demand bread and if it was not given them, to take it, she was arrested on the charge of inciting to riot and sentenced to a year in Blackwell’s Island prison.

Upon her early release in August 1894 Emma resumed her radical activities but soon added others. While in prison she had done some nursing. The work appealed to her compassionate nature and, deciding to take professional training, she arranged a European lecture tour (1895) that took her to England and Scotland and to Vienna, where she studied nursing at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. Her European tour also brought her into contact with the contemporary social theatre, and she began the cultivation of literary and dramatic tastes. On her return to America she once more plunged into radical activity and began a series of nation-wide speaking engagements. In 1899 she made a second European tour, during which she met several famous anarchist leaders, including Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Louise Michel. Returning to the United States in November 1900, she took employment in nursing. In the following year she managed the lecture tour of Kropotkin on his visit to America. A few years later she served as manager and interpreter for the Bussian actors Paul Orleneff and Alla Nazimova on their theatrical appearances in the United States. For this, however, she masked her identity from the public under a pseudonym. Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President McKinley in 1901 claimed to have been inspired by her speeches and though no evidence was found to link her to the case, the harsh treatment she suffered while in police custody and the harassment that followed her defense of the act led her to seek temporary seclusion.

By 1906 Emma Goldman was back in the public eye, and from then until 1917 she followed essentially a double career. A dedicated revolutionary, she preached the abolition of government and its replacement by voluntary cooperation among men; she founded an anarchist monthly journal, Mother Earth, which she edited from 1906 until it was suppressed in 1917; she published tracts and a few books, among them her own Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) and Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Ararchist (1912); and she lent her support to a variety of radical causes. She also resumed her association with Berkman on his release from prison in May 1906. At the same time she became a successful public lecturer, subject to frequent police interference because of her anarchist views, but nevertheless winning substantial audiences in an era receptive to progressive thought. To be sure, she spoke mainly on current social problems and the modern European drama, rather than on anarchism, but this did not prevent her meetings from being broken up or suppressed. The rank disregard of civil liberties in her case aroused the defenders of free speech, though to littie avail. By 1916 she had become an early advocate of birth control, one such lecture that spring brought her a fifteen-day jail sentence in New York City. Her least controversial lectures�those on the theatre�were perhaps the most influential. She was a pioneer in bringing Ibsen to American audiences. In the words of Van Wyck Brooks, “No one did more to spread the new ideas of literary Europe that influenced so many young people in the West....”

With the outbreak of World War I, Emma Goldman attacked the preparedness program of the Wilson administration. After American entry she organized an anti-conscription campaign, which she and Berkman pushed vigorously in their publications and in street addresses. They were arrested in June 1917 on charges of conspiracy to obstruct the operation of the selective service law and on July 9 were convicted and sentenced to two years’imprisonment and fined $10,000 each. Emma served her sentence at the Missouri state prison in Jefferson City. Shortly after her release, in September 1919, a federal court ruled that she had lost her American citizenship, acquired through marriage, and ordered her deported to Russia. On Dec. 21 she was placed aboard the transport Buford, along with Berkman and 247 others, she reached the Fimnish-Russian border in January 1920.

Although she had been a vigorous supporter of the Russian revolution, her opinion of the Soviet experiment changed within less than a year to one of intense dislike. For a time, along with Berkman, she stayed in Russia and persistently fought the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the Soviet bureaucracy and the suppression of dissent; but on Dec. 1, 1921, she left Russia for Riga, Latvia. A woman without a country, she found temporary refuge in Esthonia, Sweden, Germany, and finally, for two years (I924-26), in England. Meanwhile she had written her famous My Disillusionment in Russia (I923). While in England, in order to obtain citizenship, she married James Colton, a Welsh miner. After lecturing in Canada, she took up residence at St. Tropez, France, where she wrote her vigorous autobiography, Living My Life (193I). Her only visit to the United States following her deportation occurred in I934, when she received permission to enter on a ninety-day visa. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War found her once more deeply involved in revolutionary politics, living in Spain and traveling frequently to England and Canada on behalf of the anti-Franco cause. On one such trip, in 1940, she was stricken ill, and three months later, after apparent recovery, she suffered a fatal paralytic stroke in Toronto. She was buried in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, near the graves of the Haymarket victims whose fate had primarily inspired her long career of radical activity.

Once called “Red Emma,” “the mother of anarchy in America,” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” in her later years Emma Goldman hardly looked the part. Short and stocky, dressed in nondescript clothes, with bobbed gray hair and thick, severe glasses, she seemed, in the words of a Toronto journalist in 1939, “like anyone’s kindly grandmother.” But even in her declining years her grim smile, glowing eyes, and deep, throaty voice could galvanize audiences unsympathetic to her ideas. The intensity of her convictions was recognized and respected even by her bitter critics; her poise as a plafform antagonist was unsurpassed. A woman of great vitality, who lived life fully and frankly, she established herself as one of the memorable figures of the twentieth century.

[Other writings by Emma Goldman include: What I Believe (1908), The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914), My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924); and “Was My Life Worth Living?” Harper’s Mag., Dec. 1934. Other sources include: biog. introduction by Hippolyte Havel in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (1910); files of Mother Earth, Mar. 1906-Aug. 1917 Emma Goldman 70th Birthday Commemorative Edition (pamphlet, 1939); E. M. Schuster, Native Am. Anarchism (1932); C. A. Madison, Critics & Crusaders (1947), Rudolf Rocker, Pioneers of Am. Freedom (1949), MS. and pamphlet files, Labadie Collection Univ. of Mich. Lib.; scrapbooks and other MS. material N. Y. Pub. Lib.. biog. references compiled by Ruth Spalding, Univ. of Ill. Lib. School. See also Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years (1952); N. Y. Times, May 14, 1940.]

JAMES J. MARTIN

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