Edited version of a speech given at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass., January 29, 2002.
I can never stay with history; I can never just stay with the past. I became a historian, and went into the past, for the purpose of trying to understand and do something about what is going on in the present. I never wanted to be the kind of historian who goes into the archives and you never hear from him again.
My work on Emma Goldman has always been connected to the things in the world with which I am active and involved. But I had only been vaguely been aware of her before the 1960s. It was interesting—there I was, a Ph.D. in history, and what could be higher than that? Who could be better informed than a Ph.D. in history? So there I was with a doctorate from Columbia University—and Emma Goldman had never been mentioned in any of my classes, none of her writings had ever appeared on my reading lists, and I only vaguely remembered reading a chapter about her in an old book called Critics and Crusaders.
Not long after receiving my doctorate, I attended a conference in Pennsylvania. Sometimes at conferences you run into interesting people, and this time I ran into Richard Drinnon, a remarkable historian. Drinnon told me he had written a biography of Emma Goldman: Rebel in Paradise. So I went to find it and read it, and it just astonished me. It made me angry about the fact that I had not been told anything about Emma Goldman in my long education. Here was this magnificent woman—this anarchist, this feminist, this fierce, life-loving person. Of course, that led me to her autobiography, Living My Life, which, if you have not read, you should read. At a certain point, I decided to require it for a class of 400 students. At first I thought, Living My Life is a big book. And I asked myself, will they really connect with this early twentieth-century woman, while here we are in the 1960s?
My students loved it. And they found in her what I found: a free spirit, boldness, a woman who spoke out against all authority, unafraid, and, as the title of her book suggests, living her life as she wanted to live it, not as the rules and regulations and authorities were telling her how to live it. That got me interested in Emma Goldman: in reading her and using her stuff in my classes.
It wasn’t until around 1975, however, the year the war in Vietnam ended, that I had a breathing spell and could actually address Emma Goldman at length. I had always been interested in theater: My wife had acted, my daughter had acted, my son was in the theater and still is—and I had always been interested in the theater and never done anything with it, because I was always too involved in the civil rights movement, and in the Vietnam War movement. So I wrote a play about Emma Goldman and I had to make a decision. Her life was so long and full, and in any work of art—I like to call what I do art—there’s always a problem of what to leave in and what to leave out. There’s so much to her life, so I started with her as an immigrant girl, a teenager living in Rochester, New York, and working in a factory.
Her political awareness takes a leap in 1886 at the time of the Haymarket affair, which occurs all over the country in the midst of labor struggles for the eight-hour day. There’s a strike against the International Harvester Company in Chicago. The police come. It’s the usual scene, police versus strikers. But the police fire into the crowd of strikers and kill a number of them. At that time, Chicago was a great center for radical activity and anarchist groups. The anarchists call a protest meeting in Haymarket Square. It’s a peaceful meeting, but the police barge into the meeting and a bomb explodes in the midst of the police—a terrorist attack. Nobody knows who threw the bomb. But, you know, when a terrorist attack occurs, it doesn’t matter whether you know or don’t know. You’ve got to go after somebody. The police have to find somebody. The FBI has to find somebody. The army has to find somebody. So they find eight leading anarchists in Chicago. Nobody can tie them to the throwing of the bomb, but they’re anarchists. We have conspiracy laws. Conspiracy laws are very interesting. With a conspiracy law, you can tie anybody to anything. You don’t have to do anything to become the defender in a political conspiracy trial. So they quickly find these eight anarchists guilty of conspiring to murder, and they are sentenced to death.
Emma Goldman is aware of this. It goes up through the courts. The American judicial system is a wonderful system. Once errors have been made at a lower level, they are very often hard to overcome because the higher courts will limit themselves in what they can review. They’ll say, “Well, the jury and the judge considered the facts in this case, so all we have to deal with are the legal niceties, and we can’t go over the facts.” In any case, the Illinois Supreme Judicial Court approved the sentences.
The Haymarket affair became an international issue. It was one of those cases that capture the imagination of caring people who see injustices. In our time, we’ve had so many such cases: the Rosenbergs and Mumia Abu-Jamal, for example, became international causes. That was true of the Haymarket affair. George Bernard Shaw sent a telegram to the Illinois Supreme Court saying, “If the state of Illinois needs to lose eight of its citizens, it could better afford to lose the 8 members of the Illinois Supreme Court.” It didn’t help. Four of them were hanged, and when the news came out and Emma Goldman heard about it, it excited her to the point of fury. She soon left Rochester, left her family, left a husband from what was really an arranged marriage when she was very young. She went to New York and joined a little anarchist group. In New York she met Alexander Berkman, who became a comrade and then her lover. This little group of anarchists living in a collective in New York began putting out literature, handing it out, doing what these little left-wing groups do. Anybody who walks through Park Square or Harvard Square will encounter these people. It’s important to pick up their information, to pick up those leaflets, because they will tell you things—these crazy, radical people—that you will never hear anywhere else.
Anyway, Emma Goldman is part of this little group. In 1892, a strike takes place in Homestead, Pennsylvania, against the Carnegie Steel Works. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which is a euphemism for strikebreakers, is hired by the Carnegie Corporation. They are hired by Henry Clay Frick, whom you may know as an art patron, but who was also a manager of the steel works and the employer of the Pinkerton strikebreakers. There’s a gun battle and strikers are killed. As a result, this little anarchist group in New York gets fired up. They decide that they are going to do what has not been done in the United States but has been done a number of times in Europe: They will show that the perpetrators of violence can also be the victims of violence. They decide to kill Henry Clay Frick.
They argue about it. You can imagine this little group; they are not very experienced at this sort of stuff. They discuss it all night. How will we do this? Where will we get a gun? Berkman volunteers to do it, but they’ll have to get him a new suit of clothes. If you’re going to kill someone, you have to look respectable. And so he goes with his new clothes and his gun to Pittsburgh, and barges into Frick’s office, and he’s a very poor shot. He’s an anarchist. What do you expect? He hadn’t practiced this stuff. He knows how to hand out leaflets. So he only wounds Frick.
Berkman is arrested, quickly tried, and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. He’s been Emma Goldman’s lover, and while he’s in prison she becomes a nationally known figure, writer, lecturer, fierce woman. By the way, one of the great books about prison conditions and the whole issue of prisons is Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. It’s a wonderful book. Berkman spent fourteen years in prison, and by the time he came out things had changed. He and Goldman were no longer lovers. But they soon founded an anarchist magazine together, Mother Earth, and were publishing things that nobody else would publish.
They had by this time changed their minds about the necessity for occasional acts of political violence. They had pretty much decided, after rethinking, that violence is the kind of thing you have to avoid. They were organizers, and Goldman was an organizer of garment workers in New York while she was speaking all over the country.
Sometime around 1908, Emma Goldman took up with a fascinating character named Ben Reitman. Reitman was a doctor, sort of. Then again, he was everything, sort of. Somehow he made his way through medical school by reading things on his own, listening to lectures, even taking over for the lecturer, a famous physician, one day when the physician wasn’t there. Ben Reitman just went up to the podium and delivered a lecture on the same subject.
He was a swashbuckling character, always wearing a cowboy hat. He ran a street clinic for women who needed help, gynecological advice, abortions. He was a risk taker, a devilish person—and a very handsome devil who absolutely captivated Emma Goldman, this independent woman who wasn’t not supposed to be captivated by anybody. This is one of the interesting things about her life: She was a strong woman, she insisted on the independence of women—but when she fell in with Ben Reitman, she became absolutely swallowed up in this very, very passionate ten-year-long affair.
Reitman was an anarchist among anarchists. But he had courage, too. He and Goldman went out to San Diego where there was a ferocious attack on them by all sorts of people who saw anarchists as the devil. Reitman was kidnapped and taken out into the countryside, where he was tarred, feathered, and branded on his backside with the letters “IWW”—Industrial Workers of the World. He was the kind of guy who later, when he appeared on a platform, would suddenly turn his back to the audience and pull down his pants to show them what had been done to him, which horrified Goldman. A lot of things about Reitman horrified her, but it didn’t stop their relationship. What stopped it was politics, and World War I.
By then Emma Goldman had spent considerable time in prison. She had been imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island in New York for speaking out during the economic crisis in 1893. There was a fierce economic situation in New York, and all over the country, in that year. Huge numbers of people were unemployed. They did not have enough food to take care of their families. Emma Goldman got up in front of a huge crowd in Union Square and said, “If you don’t have food enough for your kids, go into the stores and take the food.” It’s called direct action. That’s what anarchists believe in. You don’t sign petitions. You don’t lobby. You don’t visit your legislator. You take direct action against the source of your problem. That’s what workers do when they go on strike; it’s what women do when they take direct action against men, or against the source of their oppression. Goldman was jailed for making that suggestion. Her jail record was a very long one. The FBI always had people following her, and the police reported on her speeches. They couldn’t record one of her speeches because, as the agent reported to his superiors, “Well, she spoke to this group of Jewish women on the Lower East Side, and I’m sorry I couldn’t take down what she said because she spoke in Yiddish.”
By the time World War I came on, both Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had spent quite a bit of time in prison. By now she was a famous speaker and lecturer, and she began to speak out against the war and the draft. World War I was the occasion for a kind of hysteria that happens again and again in wartime. People who speak out against the war are looked on as a kind of traitor; the government induces an atmosphere of fear and makes examples of a small number of people in order to intimidate everybody else. In this case, in World War I, they imprisoned about one thousand people for speaking out against the war. When Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman spoke at a big rally against the conscription act, they were arrested, sent to prison, and not released until the war ended.
In a situation not far off from the current post–9-11 treatment of immigrants and noncitizens in the United States, when the war ended the government launched into a wholesale roundup of people who were noncitizens. There was no due process, no trial, no hearing—you just put them on a boat and deported them. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported, ironically enough, back to Russia where they had been born—though at that time it was czarist Russia, and by the time of their deportation, in 1919, it had become Soviet Russia.
But they were both still anarchists. Even though they had first welcomed the overthrow of the czarist regime, they soon found themselves at odds with the new Bolshevik regime precisely because they were anarchists. They were antiauthoritarian and antistate. At the time, Maxim Gorky was putting out a little dissident newspaper, but it didn’t last long because the Bolsheviks were rounding up dissidents. As opponents of the regime, Goldman and Berkman soon left the Soviet Union and settled in Western Europe. They picked a warm spot, the Mediterranean coast of France, and lived in very modest way there, separately, but still friends and still involved in things happening here. Alexander Berkman became sick and died in 1936. Emma Goldman died in 1940 in Canada when she was making a rare visit to North America.
Wherever I go now, I have to talk about the current war—that’s what’s happening, what people are thinking about. People are talking about terrorism, people are talking about war, and I have to talk about it or I’m not doing my duty to myself: to move from the past into the present. Emma Goldman was an absolutely incorrigible fighter against war who spoke out against the Spanish-American War, against World War I. Anarchists in general, being antiauthoritarian and not trusting governments (I can’t imagine why they don’t trust governments), are instinctively antiwar.
I always want to know what people are thinking. I spoke this morning to Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School, an assembly of about 300 students. There, too, I spoke about the war. It’s clear that people all over the country have been bombarded with the notion that we must support the war, support the president; we must have unity, we mustn’t dissent; you’re either for us or against us. If you raise questions about U.S. foreign policy, the retort is “Oh, you’re justifying the attacks on the Twin Towers.” Or if you say that there are alternatives to war, people are equally wary. Plenty of people already have been visited by the FBI for criticizing the war and the president. The incidents have multiplied around the country. A retired worker out in the West who made a remark critical of President Bush at his sports club was visited by the FBI and asked, “Are you a member of the sports club? Did you make this remark about the president?” A young woman was visited by the FBI, who said, “We hear you have a poster on your wall with a picture of Bush in a very unflattering way,” meaning: We must flatter Bush.
This is scary. This is totalitarian. Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in which terrorism is defined in such a way to enable government officials to pick up a person just for something they say. We’re living at a time when it becomes even more important to dissent from the establishment and the president, when everybody’s crying, “We must unite behind the president.” It’s exactly at such a time when we need dissenting voices. The irony is that it’s exactly in times of war—when you’re dealing with life-and-death matters—that you’re not supposed to speak. So you have freedom of speech for trivial matters, but not for life-and-death matters. That’s a nice working definition of democracy, isn’t it? But it shouldn’t be that way. This is exactly when we need the most lively discussion, so wherever I go these days I try to contribute to that discussion.
I spoke recently at Newton North High School, just outside Boston. I spoke to about 500 students about the war, and afterwards about four or five parents reacted angrily. They showed up at a school committee in Newton, saying, “Why did you invite him? Why would you let him speak?” Then the Newton newspapers (not a lot happens in Newton) were full of letters and columns for weeks all about … me. I have to say this as modestly as I can. I say this only to indicate that apparently to raise questions about the war is to engender a kind of ferocity that goes against democracy. So yes, I speak out and write regularly against the war—I write a column for The Progressive.
On both pragmatic and moral grounds, I’m opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pragmatically, I wonder if these wars are very effective in reducing terrorism. Despite the billions of dollars extra going to military and homeland security budgets, people are still worried about terrorism. Have you noticed that people’s fears about terrorism have diminished because of the war? Since the war? I don’t see that. If anything, anxiety is growing. We set out to say, “Well, here are these terrorists. We’re going to find Osama bin Laden.” We didn’t—and even if we did, would that be dealing with terrorism? Well, we found this group, that group; we bombed the caves in Afghanistan. They said there were thousands of fighters in the caves. They came up with a handful of people. Where are the others? As we learn from the government itself, there are terrorist networks in many parts of the world—maybe forty or fifty countries—but it changes from day to day, just like the numbers of Communists in Joseph McCarthy’s State Department used to change. The truth is that no one knows how many there are.
If you don’t know where the terrorists are, I ask, what are you doing bombing Afghanistan and Iraq? There may be a network in the Philippines, in Syria, in Somalia—who knows where? Clearly, by bombing and bombing we haven’t done anything about terrorism. It’s as if a crime had been committed, a mass murder, and you’re looking for the perpetrators, and you hear that they are hiding out in Cambridge. Bomb Cambridge! Or to get rid of the criminals in this neighborhood—you bomb the neighborhood! You can do so just on the chance that this might result in killing the criminal. This is what we’ve been doing in Afghanistan—and it’s absurd, from a pragmatic point of view.
Then on the moral point of view. How many innocent civilians have we killed with our bombing? That’s what an article I recently wrote for The Nation is about. I was reading the New York Times, which had a page every day with photos of the victims from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—little photos and biographical sketches—that was very moving. The page would describe who these people were, what they did, what they cared about, what their hobbies were, and who their families were. Suddenly the numbers—3,000 or whatever it is—becomes not numbers but human beings. And I thought, well, we haven’t done the same thing to our victims in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are still just numbers, just as the victims in the Twin Towers were just numbers to whoever planned those attacks in New York and Washington. And I like to think, not specifically of the perpetrators of the attacks, but about a significant number of people around the world who were just sad about the attacks, well that’s too bad, but they weren’t repelled by it. I wonder if those people who didn’t feel repelled by the attacks were deluded by the fact that they only knew about numbers—the people in the Twin Towers were just numbers to them. If they had encountered them, seen their faces, talked to their families, a lot of these people would begin for the first time to recognize what had been done here in New York. Conversely, if the American people could know, really know up close—and see the pictures, meet the families, and visit the hospitals of the victims of our bombing in Afghanistan—then would they continue to support the bombing? I suspect that the reason the American people support the bombing is because they believe Donald Rumsfeld, because we have no one else talking to us. You turn on the TV, and there he is. You turn off the TV, and there he is. You can’t escape him. He is very calm and blithe. If there are questions about civilian casualties he says, “Oh, well, we try our best. We don’t really mean to kill any civilians. These things happen. Collateral damage, right?”
Remember Timothy McVeigh, when he was asked about the Oklahoma City bombing? Timothy McVeigh said of the children who died: “Collateral damage.” He’d learned this during the first Gulf War, when this phrase was used by the United States to describe Iraqi civilians dying under U.S. bombs. And so this is Rumsfeld: collateral damage, an accident, unintentional. Or: “They’re deliberately putting civilians in military targets.” That always gets to me. A village is destroyed. You mean they populated this village with ordinary people so that then it would become a propaganda weapon against the United States—they created a Hollywood set? No, there’s something wrong with that. History is important here. When you’re dealing with an event like this, what’s happening in Afghanistan or Iraq, if you don’t have any history about American wars or American foreign policy, it’s as if you were born yesterday. Then whatever people tell you, you have no way of checking up on it.
It’s important to remember the lies that were told to the people of this country during past wars. Lies about, “Oh, we’re only bombing military targets”—and a million civilians died in Vietnam. I was in North Vietnam in 1968 and 1972. I saw villages a hundred miles away from a military target (as if there are that many military targets in Vietnam) totally destroyed by attacking jet planes. With some of that history, you know that the government lies all the time. These things are not accidents. When I say that, I don’t mean that the government goes out to deliberately kill someone. I mean that they don’t care, because it’s inevitable. When something is neither deliberate nor an accident, and there’s something in between, the something in between is inevitable. And so when you do the bombing on this scale, it’s inevitable that you’ll kill large numbers of civilians. As for the numbers of civilians killed in Afghanistan, nobody knows. The Pentagon doesn’t know, or won’t tell, and some of their responses are: “Well, we’re not there on the ground; we don’t know.” You can’t believe the Taliban; you can’t believe the Pentagon. But if you put together the dispatches in American newspapers, those scattered on the back pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune; and you read Reuters and Agence France-Presse; and you read in the Guardian and the Times of London; and you put all those scattered pieces together, you come up with a horrifying picture of the human damage that we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is a moral disaster. We’ve met terrorism with terrorism. So I’m arguing, from both a pragmatic and a moral point of view, that war is indefensible. People ought to speak out and defy the admonitions to keep patriotic, which use a very distorted definition of patriotism, and instead create a discussion about what is going on. Or else we become victims, as people all over the world have become victims to their governments, and have allowed wars to go on endlessly, one after the other.
Those of us who speak and act against war are part of a noble historical tradition—of Henry David Thoreau committing civil disobedience to protest the Mexican War, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman and Helen Keller criticizing U.S. entrance into World War I, the G.I.s who came back from Vietnam and insisted that the war come to an end, the young men and women in the military who have risked court martial to speak against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.