Charles Allan Madison

“ As the battered Buford plowed its billowy way to the shores of Finland they reflected on the ironic turn of events which had transformed Czarist Russia into a land of revolution and converted the free United States into a citadel of reaction. While still in jail they had approved the Bolshevik coup as a necessary safeguard of the revolution. They believed that Lenin and his fellow leaders, while Marxists and therefore advocates of a strong centralized government, were devoted to the principles of freedom and equality and therefore deserved the support of all workers and libertarians. ”

“ It is organized violence on top [Emma asserted] which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to his act.... We are but the atoms in the incessant human struggle towards the light that shines in the darkness—the ideal of economic, political, and spiritual liberation of mankind! ”

“ It will appeal to those who strive for something higher, weary of the commonplace; to those who feel that stagnation is a deadweight on the firm and elastic step of progress; to those who breathe freely only in limitless space; to those who long for the tender shade of a new dawn for a humanity free from the dread of want, the dread of starvation in the face of mountains of riches. The Earth free for the free individual.
Emma Goldman edited the monthly throughout its eleven years of existence. ”

“ To the end of her life Emma avowed the soundness and practicality of her doctrine. As late as 1934 she declared in Harper's Magazine: "I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated." It was her belief that sooner or later the mass of mankind would perceive the futility of begging for crumbs and would take power into its own hands. ”

“ She has a legitimate social function—that of holding before our eyes the ideals of freedom. She is licenced to taunt us with our moral cowardice, to plant in our souls the nettles of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely in the brutal artifice of present-day society. ”

“ Emma, Berkman, and numerous other radicals resisted this martial hysteria with all the force at their command. Mother Earth blasted the proponents of preparedness in issue after issue and denounced the government for trampling upon the Bill of Rights in its hypocritical pretence of making the world safe for democracy. Emma denounced the capitalist basis of war before crowds of enthusiastic sympathizers. As late as March 1917 she wrote:
I for one will speak against war so long as my voice will last, now and during the war. ”

“ Though in no sense a pacifist, Emma Goldman was intensely opposed to wars between nations. The very idea of human slaughter on the battlefield appeared to her as barbaric and criminal. And to her the culprit was the state. Without governments to lead their subjects to battle wars would be as unthinkable as duels are now. "No war is justified unless it be for the purpose of overthrowing the Capitalist system and establishing industrial control for the working class."
Her first contact with war occurred in 1898, when the United States attacked Spain. ”

“ The faithful disciple of Bakunin and Kropotkin, Emma perceived civilization as "a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against 'society,' that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship." ”

“ Anarchism assumed definite meaning; the struggle by the many in want against the few in power, then so pathetically feeble, became to her a war unto death; the goal of social freedom appeared tangible and alluringly near. ”

“ And one who has observed the results of modern dictatorship cannot but sympathize with a vision of the future in which the individual is the prime beneficiary of all social activity. Yet life often makes mock of man's noblest dreams. Emma may have been "the daughter of the dream"; her doctrine remains as utopian as it is alluring. There is no gainsaying the fact that modern conditions still favor national and industrial centralization. The philosophy of anarchism appears less tenable today than ever. ”

“ Emma's strong personality stamps every page. She was as dynamic in her numerous amours as in her work for human freedom, and she discusses both with equal zest. Her unrepressed egotism prompts her to relate personal incidents which have little bearing on her own development and none on that of anarchism—incidents that sometimes reveal petty malice and that might better have been left unrecorded. ”

“ President Theodore Roosevelt expressed the attitude of many persons of privilege and respectability when he blustered: "The Anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is the deeper degree of criminality than any other." When William Buwalda, a soldier in the United States Army and the recipient of a medal for bravery, shook hands with Emma Goldman at one of her lectures in 1908, he was courtmartialed and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. ”

“ He gloried in this opportunity to serve the American workers in the manner of the Russian nihilists. It pained him therefore to think that he owed his failure to kill Frick to the interference of the very workers for whom he was ready to die. The attack upon him by John Most was distressing enough, but the scornful repudiation by the strikers and the coolness of labor everywhere cut him to the heart. Suffering the anguish of a living death in one of the worst prisons in the United States, he sought comfort in the thought that he was a revolutionist and not a would-be murderer. ”

“ They agreed it was their duty to go to the aid of the brutally maltreated workers. Berkman insisted that their great moment was at hand, that they must give up the lunchroom and leave at once for the scene of the fighting. "Being internationalists," he argued, "it mattered not to us where the blow was struck by the workers; we must be with them. We must bring them our great message and help them see that it was not only for the moment that they must strike, but for all time, for a free life, for anarchism. Russia had many heroic men and women, but who was there in America? ”

“ It must be said that the lawbreakers and defilers of liberty were not Emma Goldman and her harassed followers but the sworn [Pg 16] guardians of the law and leading local citizens. The latter and not the anarchists were guilty of violating the rights of free speech and free assembly, of beating their victims without cause and of jailing them without warrant. It was after one such instance of unprovoked brutality that Emma wrote:
In no country, Russia not exempt, would the police dare to exercise such brutal power over the lives of men and women. ”

“ Emma, Alexander Berkman, and a youthful artist were living together in congenial intimacy. They worked at their menial tasks during the day and devoted their evenings to agitation. Because the progress of anarchism in this country was too slow for them, the news of increased revolutionary activity in Russia filled them with a romantic nostalgia for their native land. ”

“ And while it is in the very nature of an ideal to fail of achievement, its mere existence gives life its impetus and its reward. Emma's quotation from Ibsen, made while waiting for deportation in 1919—"that it is the struggle for the ideal that counts, rather than the attainment of it"—may well be her epitaph. ”

“ In January 1934 she was granted permission to visit the United States for ninety days. Friends arranged for a two-month lecture tour. Her audiences were large, though a good percentage came more out of curiosity than to pay homage to her anarchist leadership. Some hotels refused to admit her, and detectives and policemen were as conspicuous within the halls as in former times. Communists heckled her, but there was comparatively little of the excitement and defiance of her previous "tours of agitation." In truth neither Emma nor her hearers bothered much about the doctrine of anarchism. ”

“ It must be stressed that although the wording is common to all forms of communism, that of Marx and Lenin implies strict centralized authority, while that of Kropotkin and Emma Goldman envisions complete decentralization and the supremacy of the individual.
No man who has pondered the concept of the good life will fail [Pg 21] to appreciate the ideal propounded by the anarchists. ”

“ The masses were millions, yet how weak! To awaken them from their stupor, to make them conscious of their power—that is the great need! Soon, I told myself, I should be able to reach them throughout America. ”

“ To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people." Some years afterwards he came to believe that even such shedding of blood "must be resorted to only as a last extremity." ”

“ The newspapers abetted the police in the lawless treatment of Emma and her fellow rebels. They sometimes perverted a grain of truth into columns of muck and made "Red Emma" a symbol of all that was dangerous and despicable. The rank injustice of this abuse caused the staid New York Sun to protest on September 30, 1909: "The popular belief is that she preaches bombs and murder, but she certainly does nothing of the kind. Bombs are very definite things, and one of the peculiarities of her doctrine is its vagueness. ”

“ In no country would the people stand for such beastliness and vulgarity. Nor do I know of any people who have so little regard for their own manhood and self-respect as the average American citizen, with all his boasted independence. ”

“ She expounded the doctrine of anarchism whenever possible, but her lectures dealt mainly with current social problems and the modern European drama. Shortly before World War I she discussed birth control with a frankness that sent her to jail for a fortnight. She usually keyed her talks to the intelligence of her auditors, and always she spoke with clarity and enthusiasm.
Throughout her years of agitation she exercised extraordinary tact and exceptional physical courage. No other woman in America ever had to suffer such persistent persecution. ”

“ The hanging of several anarchists in 1887 as a consequence of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago caused many Americans to sympathize with the gibbeted radicals. Youths swathed in bright idealism, men and women rooted in equalitarian democracy, workers trusting in the rectitude of their government—all doubted the guilt of the condemned prisoners and were deeply perturbed by the egregious miscarriage of justice. ”

“ If this ugly chapter in recent American history was the work of men of property and of public officers, there were numerous other Americans, less powerful but of greater probity, who cherished the fundamental freedoms of our Founding Fathers. ”

“ With Cassandra-like foresight she argued that England and Germany's neighbors were blind to the danger confronting them and that if the Nazis were not ousted from power they would destroy civilization. ”

“ Berkman's The Bolshevik Myth and Emma's My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (the book was published in two separate volumes as a result of an inadvertent misunderstanding) are charged with fanatic hatred. Both insisted that Lenin and his monstrous crew were perverting the Russian Revolution to their own sinister purposes and must be destroyed at all costs. ”

“ Her fellow editors at one time or another were Max Baginski, Hippolyte Havel, and Alexander Berkman, but the character of the periodical underwent no change as a consequence. Each issue contained at least one poem, brief editorials on the events of the month, articles on current aspects of anarchism, comments on labor strikes and radical activities the world over, reports by Emma on topics of interest to her or on her frequent lecture tours, and finally appeals for money. Many prominent libertarians contributed essays of a philosophical or hortatory nature. ”

“ Along with her work in sweatshops, which she had to do to earn her living, she found time to familiarize herself with the latest libertarian literature and to spend hours on end in intellectual discussion. ”

“ They [Pg 14] will go on robbing you, your children, and your children's children, unless you wake up, unless you become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. ”

“ This method she defined as the "conscious individual or collective effort to protest against, or remedy, social conditions through the systematic assertion of the economic power of the workers." Once the state and capitalism were destroyed, anarchism would assume the form of free communism, which she described as "a social arrangement based on the principle: To each according to his needs ”

“ I hope it will be widely read in all those countries in which disinterested thinking is not yet illegal."—Bertrand Russell
"In my opinion the work Nationalism and Culture is deserving of the highest respect. ”