CREDIT: Associated Press
EMMA GOLDMAN did not say the famous line that is often attributed to her: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” But those words do express her sentiments. She was a serious radical, an anarchist, and she believed that she was fighting for people’s right to enjoy themselves, free of unjust and inhumane restrictions.
“I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things,” Goldman said. “Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”
How did Goldman expect her ideal society to come about? Another quotation accurately summarizes her view: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Goldman liked to party, but she did not believe in political parties or in achieving change through the slow, incremental process of elections, reforms, and policy debates. She did not have a blueprint or a roadmap to change the world, but she nevertheless encouraged Americans to join the revolutionary movement, not only to dance but to challenge arbitrary authority, even through violence if necessary.
Goldman was an eloquent and dazzling speaker and writer who advocated anarchism, free speech, women’s suffrage, birth control, workers’ rights, the eight-hour workday, and free universal education without regard to race, gender, or class. She preached a brand of uncompromising revolutionism and absolute personal freedom that won many converts but alienated many more radicals and reformers—and provoked the opposition of the political establishment, who frequently sought to silence, jail, or deport her.
Born in Lithuania to a family of Russian-Jewish shopkeepers, Goldman moved with her family in 1881 to St. Petersburg. There, she embraced Russia’s revolutionary movement but lived in an atmosphere of fear, as the czar’s secret police crushed any dissent. Her father put her to work in a corset factory and began pressuring her into an arranged marriage. She resisted, and in 1885 the sixteen-year-old Goldman set sail for America in the company of her older half sister, Helena. As they sailed into New York Harbor, Goldman rejoiced at “the free country, the asylum for the oppressed of all lands.” “We, too,” she thought, “would find a place in the generous heart of America.”
Goldman ended up in Rochester, New York, where she worked in a clothing factory and had a brief, unhappy marriage to another worker. Conditions in America were better than they had been in Russia, but the pace of work was faster, the discipline was harsher, and the pay ($2.50 for a ten-and-a-half-hour day) made it nearly impossible to make ends meet.
Already a radical, Goldman was inspired by the events surrounding the Haymarket bombing in 1886. During a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square protesting police brutality against workers striking for the eight-hour workday, someone threw a bomb and killed a police officer. Eight anarchists were tried and convicted of murder, triggering an international protest movement. Outraged by what she viewed as a travesty of justice, Goldman began to read everything she could about anarchism and soon embraced the cause.
She moved to New York City in 1889 and quickly became part of that city’s bohemian and anarchist worlds. There she met her lifetime partner, Alexander Berkman, a fellow anarchist. In 1892 she was an accessory to Berkman’s failed attempt to assassinate steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick in revenge for Frick’s brutal treatment of workers during the Homestead Steel strike. Berkman spent fourteen years in prison for this crime, but Goldman escaped indictment because of insufficient evidence. She became a prominent public figure, promoting revolutionary anarchism in speeches, pamphlets, and books.
In 1893 she was arrested and tried again for urging a crowd of hungry unemployed workers in New York’s Union Square to rely on street protest rather than voting to obtain relief. In court, Goldman based her defense on the right of free speech. She lost and spent ten months in jail on Blackwell’s Island, where she apprenticed as a nurse to the inmates.
When President William McKinley was shot in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, the police quickly sought to implicate Goldman, because Czolgosz had recently attended one of her lectures in Cleveland, Ohio. Goldman and other anarchists were arrested, but she was released, again for lack of evidence.
In 1903 Goldman helped found the Free Speech League in New York City in response to a new federal law that barred anarchists from entering the country. The group was one of several that laid the groundwork for what eventually, more than a decade later, became the American Civil Liberties Union.
Goldman claimed that she opposed violence in theory, but she often defended it in practice by blaming government and business leaders for instigating violence against dissidents. “As an anarchist, I am opposed to violence,” Goldman said. “But if the people want to do away with assassins, they must do away with the conditions which produce murderers.”
While working as a nurse and midwife among poor immigrant workers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, Goldman became convinced that birth control was essential to women’s sexual and economic freedom. She influenced the young Margaret Sanger, encouraging her campaign against the Comstock Law, which prohibited the distribution of birth control literature. Goldman was arrested at least twice for violating the anti–birth control law—and saw her arrests as yet more evidence that freedom of speech was linked to other causes.
Indeed, Goldman was frequently arrested and jailed while lecturing on such topics as birth control and opposition to the draft, and sometimes her talks were banned outright. Goldman edited an anarchist literary and political magazine, Mother Earth, from 1906 to 1917. Starting in 1917, Goldman spent two years in prison in Missouri for her opposition to the draft during World War I. She was often called “Red Emma.”
In December 1919 the US government stripped Goldman of her citizenship and deported her, Berkman, and other radicals to Russia. Goldman and Berkman grew quickly disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, which they viewed as corrupt and authoritarian. After two years, they left Russia, moved to Europe, and determined to expose the persecution, terrorism, and harsh economic conditions they had witnessed. Goldman wrote a series of articles for the New York World that became part of her 1923 book My Disillusionment in Russia.
She and Berkman eventually settled in France, where she wrote her autobiography, Living My Life (1931). Except for a brief visit in 1934, she was denied entry into the United States for the rest of her life, but upon her death in May 1940 she was allowed burial in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of the Haymarket martyrs.