Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (http://www.powys-lannion.net/Powys/America/Goldman.jpg)

When you think of the conventional hero, a certain image comes to mind. Maybe to you, it’s a handsome, charismatic young man, or maybe you visualize a peaceful religious icon. But my hero is anything but conventional. Her name is Emma Goldman, a scruffy feminist anarchist. Though she may not be an idealistic role model, she is courageous and intelligent. She played a key role in the anarchism revolution in England and the United States in the early 1900's. Through oppression, jailing, and deportation, Emma showed great determination in the face of persecution due to prejudice and ignorance.

Born in the small communist town of Kaunas, Lithuania in 1869, Emma has known oppression since she was just a child. At the age of seventeen, she immigrated to Rochester, New York to join her older sister. She worked in a textile factory for a few years until the hanging of anarchists in the Haymarket Riot drew her to the anarchy movement. A previously married Emma disengaged herself from her family and set off to join the revolution where she met Alexander Berkman. She loyally stood up for Berkman as he faced prosecution for the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, which made her unpopular with the authorities.

In 1893, Emma was imprisoned for inciting a riot, for telling workers without jobs, “Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread.” She served a one year sentence, but it was not long before she was back in trouble. This time it was for conspiring to assassinate President McKinley, based only on the premise that she discussed anarchism with the man who shot him days earlier. This incident stained the name of anarchism, slurring the meaning into violence. She was found innocent, though. Yet again she was arrested for distributing birth control literature. The practice of abortion disheartened her so much, that she didn’t mind being arrested this time. She was imprisoned again, during World War I, for conspiring to obstruct the draft. After two years of jailing, she was deported. J. Edgar Hoover himself called her, “one of the most dangerous anarchists in America.”

After being deported to Russia, she was now able to see the Russian Revolution firsthand. She at first supported the Bolsheviks, who believed in an anarchist state, but soon began to see their belief, that violence was necessary, as evil. After seeing the violence used in the punishment of innocent strikers in Russia, she checked her beliefs and rejected violence, which she formally accepted as a part of anarchism. She believed in non-violence except for in the occasion of self defense. She was allowed to reenter the United States for a ninety-day lecture tour in 1934. In late 1934, Emma migrated to Spain and became a prominent voice in the Spanish Revolution. She moved there mainly to support Buenaventura Durruti, the famed Spanish anarchist, but ended up having to write his obituary. Emma died in Toronto of a stroke in 1940. In death she was allowed again to cross back into the United States and rest in Chicago, near where the Haymarket Rioters who inspired her so long ago were interred.

Emma wrote many, many books and papers during her life, most famous of which are: My Disillusionment in Russia, My Further Disillusionment in Russia, and Living My Life. Her legacy lives on in her writings and in the hearts of the anarchists in future generations that follow her teachings. She was such a prominent figure, that her legacy in anarchism cannot be burned from the pages of our history books and blotted out of the past like too many others. And though some might not call her a hero, I do.